Global Dialogues Series: Liberalism and Its Global Trajectories
Even in the earliest days of its conception during the Enlightenment, liberalism has centered around core commitments to human dignity, individual freedoms, and human equality. And yet, liberalism as both a mode of political imagination and as practice in our world can often seem curiously elastic, shifting in the translation from political theory to lived experience under democratic and representative institutions. Indeed, liberalism’s vicissitudes seem intrinsic within the concept itself: while liberal thinkers decried Britain and France’s growing colonial ambitions in the late 18th century, merely 50 years later would see liberal figures become the most prominent supporters of imperial expansion, whose vestiges of violence continue to resurface in global politics today. In our current moment, the liberal political imagination is at another critical inflection point as we witness the emergence of populist regimes around the world. The concept of “liberalism” and its global trajectories thus call for renewed attention to the friction between liberalism as theory and practice, liberalism’s long entanglement with empire and settler colonialism, and its challenges in an increasingly polarized world.
Dwelling in this juncture between liberalism’s many practices, Liberalism and Its Global Trajectories explores the history and the current global political climate to consider the stakes of liberalism and its legacies in our world today.
Speakers:
Duncan Bell
Professor of Political Thought and International Relations, University of Cambridge
Duncan Bell is a Professor of Political Thought and International Relations in POLIS at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Christ’s College. His research and teaching stand at the intersection of political theory, intellectual history, and international relations. Over the last couple of decades, he has focused principally on tracing ideas about empire – and in particular settler colonialism – in the history of modern British political thought. He has written three books on the subject, as well as assorted articles and book chapters, including Dreamworlds of Race: Empire and the Utopian Destiny of Anglo-America (Princeton, 2020), Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire (Princeton, 2016), and The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order 1860-1900 (Princeton, 2017). He has also worked on various topics in contemporary political theory and IR. His current research explores how the future of humanity has been imagined – by philosophers, scientists, and fiction writers – in Britain and the United States since the late nineteenth century. He is working on two books, a general history of ideas about the future from Darwin to Artificial Intelligence, and a monograph on the social and political thought of H. G. Wells.
Uday Mehta
Distinguished Professor of Political Science, City University of New York
Uday Mehta is a Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York. His research interests include liberalism, post-colonial theory, and globalization. Professor Mehta has taught at several universities, including Princeton, Cornell, MIT, University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, Hull, and Amherst College. He is the author of The Anxiety of Freedom: Imagination and Individuality in the Political Thought of John Locke (Cornell University Press, 1992) and Liberalism and Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2000). Liberalism and Empire was awarded the J. David Greenstone prize for the best book in Political Theory by the American Political Science Association in 2002. In 2003, Mehta was one of ten recipients of the prestigious “Carnegie Scholars” prize given to “scholars of exceptional creativity.” He has a forthcoming book titled A Different Vision: Gandhi’s Critique of Political Rationality.
Jennifer Pitts
Professor of Political Science and the Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago
Jennifer Pitts is Professor of Political Science and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Boundaries of the International (Harvard 2018), which explores European debates over legal relations with extra-European societies during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the co-editor, with Adom Getachew, of W.E.B. Du Bois, International Thought, a collection of essays and speeches spanning the years 1900-1956 (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). She is also author of A Turn to Empire: the rise of imperial liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton, 2005); co-editor of The Law of Nations in Global History (Oxford, 2017); and editor and translator of Alexis de Tocqueville: writings on empire and slavery (Johns Hopkins, 2001). Her research interests lie in the fields of modern political and international thought, particularly British and French thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; empire; the history of international law; and global justice.
Moderator:
Leif Wenar
Olive H. Palmer Professor of the Humanities, Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment, and Professor, by courtesy, of Law and of Political Science
Leif Wenar is the Olive H. Palmer Professor of the Humanities, Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment, and Professor, by courtesy, of Law and of Political Science at Stanford University. He is currently developing unity theory, a new theory of what makes for more valuable lives, relationships, and societies. He is the author of Blood Oil: Tyrants, Violence, and the Rules that Run the World and the author-meets-critics volume Beyond Blood Oil: Philosophy, Policy, and the Future. He is also the author of the entries ‘John Rawls’ and ‘Rights’ in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
He has been a Visiting Professor at the Stanford Center on Ethics and Society, a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, the William H. Bonsall Visiting Professor in the Stanford Philosophy Department, a Laurance S. Rockefeller Fellow and a Visiting Professor at Princeton’s University Center for Human Values, a Visiting Professor at the Princeton Department of Politics, a Fellow of the Program on Justice and the World Economy at the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Ethics and Public Affairs at The Murphy Institute of Political Economy, and a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University School of Philosophy.
His public writing has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, Foreign Affairs, and the playbill for the White Light Festival at Lincoln Center. In London, he served for several years on the Mayor’s Policing Ethics Panel, which advises the Mayor and the Metropolitan Police on issues such as digital surveillance and the use of force.