American Democracy & Economic Rights

This is the first public talk in our "Who the People: Punctuating Politics in the USA, Being America in the World" Fall speaker series hosted by the Proseminar in Humanistic and Social Scientific Inquiry. 

Speaker: Prof. Gerald Friedman, University of Massachusetts at Amherst

Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts, Gerald Friedman was born in New York City in 1955 to parents who believed that anyone who said they lived elsewhere was “only kidding.” After graduation from Columbia College in 1977 he worked on the research staff of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union before moving to Cambridge, Massachusetts to attend graduate school at Harvard, where he earned a Ph.D. in Economics in 1986, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he has taught Economics since 1984. In addition to his 1998 book, State-Making and Labor Movements. The United States and France, 1876-1914, Professor Friedman is the author of numerous articles on topics in the labor history of the United States and Europe, as well as the evolution of economic thought, labor economics, economic theory, and the history of slavery in the Americas. He has edited the Economic Crisis Reader (2009), Reigniting the Labor Movement: Restoring means to ends in a democratic labor movement (2008), and Microeconomics: Individual Choice in Communities (2nd edition, 2015). He is a contributor to La grève en exil ? Syndicalisme et démocratie aux Etats-Unis et en Europe de l'ouest (XIXe-XXIes) (2014), a collection of essays inspired by his Reigniting book. He is currently working on an intellectual biography of Richard Ely, an early American economist, as part of a larger study of the decline of liberalism in the United States. He has been a regular correspondent on the economics to television and other media outlets, a consultant to labor unions, to state legislatures, and to campaigns for single-payer health insurance in Colorado, Massachusetts, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Oregon, and New York, and to Physicians for a National Health Plan.  

Professor Friedman lives in Amherst with his wife and his dog, Beowulf. He wishes that his two daughters would move back.

***

About the Fall 2016 Proseminar, "Who the People: Punctuating Politics in the USA, Being “America" in the World." This Fall, we engage with questions of the vitality, legitimacy, promise, im/possibility of democratic life that haunt one of the largest democracies in the world, which is also, indeed, one of the largest global imperial powers. How do the frames of polis, nation-state, colony, and postcolony intersect in the United States of America, and how are we to understand the people that fill out or outline these enclosures? What are the self-conceptions and proclamations, indeed also sighs and laments, of “the people” enclosed within these frames, and how do they impact the claims the people are able to make with regard to the meaning of politics, the political process, participation, and possibility--and indeed the very possibility of life within and without the polity. What must a transdisciplinary and decolonial inquiry into these matters of life and death look like, where does and must it happen, who does and must undertake it--and what affects and actions must it seek to enable and disable in us?