Democracy

As part of a three episode series which aims to help improve understanding of liberalism, host Justin Kempf speaks with Michael Walzer, Professor Emeritus in the School of Social Science. The podcast touches on Walzer's newest book, The Struggle for a Decent Politics: On Liberal as an Adjective.

Yale Law School Professor Amy Kapczynski and Wendy Brown, UPS Foundation Professor in the School of Social Science, discuss the value of democracy, the role of the courts, and strategies for democratizing our political economy.

"The halls of academia may appear to be overrun by battles over academic freedom, free speech, identity politics, cancel culture and overreaching wokeness. But why does it look that way? And what are the real causes? The influential political theorist Wendy Brown has spent her career studying the very ideas — those of identity, freedom and tolerance — that are central to current debates about what’s happening on college campuses across the country, as well as to the attacks they’re undergoing from within and without."

By Didier Fassin, James D. Wolfensohn Professor in the School of Social Science:

The French president’s first term, with his neoliberal and authoritarian policies, has situated him on the right of the political spectrum rather than in the center as he had announced prior to being elected. But his shift has progressively gone even further with the decision to put immigration control and hardline secularism on the agenda.

On November 30, the far-right pundit Éric Zemmour announced that he would be candidate to the French presidential election. A journalist and polemicist, he was mostly known for his Islamophobic, xenophobic, racist, and sexist public statements.

"Civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer loved young people. She loved to be around them and loved to work with them, emphasizing their vitality, vision, and ability to lead. Her approach to working with younger activists was grounded in the belief that age, education, and experience were not prerequisites to political leadership."

In an article for Law & Liberty published on the thirtieth anniversary of Tiananmen Square, Teng Biao, a rights lawyer who left China in 2014 and a former Visitor (2016–17) in the School of Social Science, explains how the extinguishment of the...

"China’s rising threat to international freedom and democracy has become a hot topic,” said Teng Biao, a Chinese human rights lawyer and former Visitor in the School of Social Science, in an interview about the country's influence in the West.

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Free speech makes no distinctions as to quality; academic freedom does. Are all opinions equally valid in a university classroom? Are professors being "ideological" when they refuse to accept the Bible as scientific evidence? What, then, becomes of...

Jonathan Israel, Professor Emeritus in the School of Historical Studies, discusses his book The Expanding Blaze: How the American Revolution Ignited the World, 1775–1848 with Gilad Halpern and Dalia Scheindlin of the Tel Aviv Review.

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