Axel Honneth, Columbia University and University of Frankfurt, “Three, not Two, Concepts of Liberty: A Proposal to Enlarge our Moral Self-Understanding”; Thursday, September 17, 2015 @ 4:30pm, Room 5409
The New School for Social Research for presents “little magazines & The Conversation of Culture in America,” Thursday November 12 – Friday November 13, 2015. This two day conference ignites the conversation between contemporary journalisms and politics for a celebration of NSSR’s newly launched M.A. in Creative Publishing & Critical Journalism concurrent with the 50th anniversary of the legendary Salmagundi Magazine.
Friday
9:30–11:00 a.m.
Panel discussion “The Little Magazine Today” with:
Chair: Robert Boyers, editor of Salmagundi and Tisch Professor of Arts and Letters at Skidmore College
Jon Baskin, editor of The Point
Uzumaka Maduka, founding editor of The American Reader
Rachel Rosenfelt, founder of The New Inquiry
11:15 a.m.–1:00 p.m.
Panel discussion “Left Politics & the Little Magazine” with:
Chair: James Miller, The New School for Social Research
Sarah Leonard, The Nation, Dissent
Bhaskar Sunkara, editor of The Jacobin
Robert Kuttner, co-founder and editor of The American Prospect
See Thursday, November 12 for additional discussion in Wollman Hall, and the late afternoon of Friday, November 13 for additional discussion in Theresa Lang Student Center.
In this paper I draw attention to Sophie de Grouchy’s 1798 distinction between negative and positive right, which, upon examination, prefigures the famous distinction between positive and negative liberty. I analyse her treatment, and I argue that she should be accorded a significant place in the discussions of the tradition(s) of reflection on the famous distinction.
First, I frame my discussion by revisiting Isaiah Berlin’s famous lecture and a recent editorial by Jason Stanley and Vesla Weaver; I note the presence of a paternal liberal tradition going back to Constant which gets invoked alongside the famous distinction between the two concepts of liberty. Insofar as a tradition can be conceived as a lineage or an offspring, it is striking that the matriarchs are absent from it.
Second, I discuss De Grouchy’s neo-Lockean analyses of justice and property rights, which form the context in which she introduces her distinction between positive and negative right. I illuminate her views by way of comparison with the writings of Rousseau and Adam Smith.
Third, I offer evidence and analysis of De Grouchy’s version of the distinction and show how it can be mapped onto the more famous distinction. Fourth, I close by arguing that if there is a liberal tradition worth reviving and extending, De Grouchy ought to have an honoured place in it.
Eric Schliesser (PhD, Philosophy, The University of Chicago 2002) is Professor of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam. He publishes widely on early modern philosophy (especially Spinoza and Hume) and science (including political economy, especially Newton and Smith), philosophy economics, the history of feminism, and so-called meta-philosophy. He has just published Adam Smith: Systematic Philosopher and Public Thinker (OUP) and edited numerous volumes, including most recently Sympathy: A History of a Concept and Ten Neglected Classics of Philosophy (both with OUP).
Presented by The New School for Social Research (NSSR) Philosophy Department.
2023 marks the 50th anniversary of the birth of hip-hop, and the beginning of a sonic, cultural and socio-political revolution that changed the U.S. and the world. To commemorate the anniversary, Brooklyn Public Library will present NIGHT IN THE LIBRARY: THE PHILOSOPHY OF HIP-HOP on Saturday, June 17th, from 7 pm – 2 am at Central Library.
Join us for this FREE event that will take over the entire Central Library building to celebrate hip-hop culture past, present and future, with keynote addresses, live DJs, film screenings, discussions, debates and contemplative engagements. BPL invites you to celebrate hip-hop and spend a NIGHT IN THE LIBRARY.
Co-curated by LeBrandon Smith and Kelly Harrison. The Dilemma Series is curated by April R. Silver, founder of AKILA WORKSONGS.
Serving as a response to Aimé Césaire’s call for a universal filled with particularity from his infamous resignation from the French Communist Party in 1956, I focus on the role of culture for a project of universal emancipation. To do so, I follow Sylvia Wynter’s statement that the Négritude movement is an example of a universal and cultural project. Recalling Césaire’s words in “Return to My Native Land,” culture that serves universal emancipation must be “free of the desire to tame but familiar with the play of the world.” To this end, I develop a conception of culture that is both local and universal, that centers on the importance of what it means to be human, as life, as being, and as experience by reading culture as necessarily local, collective, disenchanted, and related to play.
Bio:
Elisabeth Paquette is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. Her book, titled Universal Emancipation: Race beyond Badiou (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), engages French political theorist Alain Badiou’s discussion of Négritude and the Haitian Revolution to develop a nuanced critique of his theory of emancipation. Currently, she is working on a monograph on the writings of decolonial theorist Sylvia Wynter. She is also the Founder of the Feminist Decolonial Politics Workshop, which takes place annually during the summer.