Social Change Archives - Public Seminar

Democracy

The Blob and the Mob: On Grand Strategy and Social Change

In an excerpt from Rethinking American Grand Strategy, Beverly Gage examines how statecraft and social movements intersect

December 8, 2021 • by Beverly Gage

Means and Ends As other essays in this collection demonstrate, the idea of “grand strategy” emerged out of the world of military affairs. Under the famous rubric identified by British historian B. H. Liddell Hart, “strategy” was what generals did, while “grand strategy” fell to politicians and statesmen, charged not only with winning ...

The Blob and the Mob: On Grand Strategy and Social Change

Activism

Georgia On My Mind

The Democratic Party in Georgia has come a long way since the 1965 Voting Rights Act

January 28, 2021 • by Jo Freeman

“The concept of political equality...can mean only one thing—one person, one vote." ...

Feature

The Armenian Violence Question

A Conversation on Means and Social Change

December 13, 2016 • by Tamar Shirinian and Nelli Sargsyan

How do we make sense of a general population's acceptance of militarization? We see the following conversation as an attempt to entangle and disentangle some of the complexities of this particular historical juncture in post-Soviet Armenia. In reflecting on the Armenian experience and on the larger process of postsocialism and ...

Feature

2016 Heuss Lecture: The Dialectics of Progress

Rahel Jaeggi

March 30, 2016 • by Silje Kristine Anderson

How should we conceive of social change and moral progress? How do they come about? How are the two phenomena related to each other and how can they be evaluated—as change for the better? These are questions which have repeatedly preoccupied contemporary philosophical discussion and which seem to be indispensable for a critical ...