The Reactionary Mind

Conservatism’s Legacies in the American Present.  

The 11th public lecture in our Fall 2016 Proseminar Speaker Series, "Who the People: Punctuating Politics in the USA, Being America in the World."

Speaker: Prof. Corey Robin, City University of New York

Corey Robin is a professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of Fear: The History of a Political Idea and The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin. His articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, the London Review of Books, Harper's, The New York Times and The Nation. His writings have been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Greek, Korean, Polish, Portuguese and Romanian. Robin has received many grants and awards, including the Best First Book in Political Theory Award from the American Political Science Association, and fellowships from the Russell Sage Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies and Princeton University's Center for Human Values. He is currently writing a book on the political theory of capitalism, from the French Revolution to neoliberalism. Robin is an active blogger, both at his eponymous blog and at Crooked Timber.

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The Division of Social Studies presents the Fall 2016 Proseminar in Humanistic and Social Scientific Inquiry on the theme of "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?