Yehuda Elkana Fellowship

Uday Mehta's forthcoming book, A Different Vision: Gandhi’s Critique of Political Rationality, will be the focus of the 2022 Fellowship & Text Seminar

Uday Singh Mehta is the 2022 Yehuda Elkana Fellow

HAHN and Central European University (CEU) are pleased to announce that the recipient of the Second Annual Yehuda Elkana Fellowship is Uday Singh Mehta. The Fellowship is given in honor of Yehuda Elkana, the President and Rector of Central European University from 1999-2009. As part of the fellowship, Uday Singh Mehta will be in residence for one month at the Central European University. He will give two public lectures and participate in a week-long manuscript workshop from June 13th to 15th, 2022 with faculty and students from OSUN institutions. In this workshop, faculty selected from OSUN institutions will read and prepare
presentations on a book manuscript or series of essays by Uday Mehta. This workshop will be an opportunity for OSUN scholars to interact intensively with each other and with a major scholar in the humanities. It will be open to faculty and students.

Read more and apply here!

"In a sense for Gandhi courage and fearlessness were portals for a sort of spiritual truancy, which he sought to plant in the very midst of the mundane patterns of everyday life."
—Uday Singh Mehta

Uday Mehta is one of the most important and original political thinkers of our times, someone who engages the fullness of the liberal arts tradition of thinking critically about our world, very much in the spirit of Yehuda Elkana. For several decades he has been one of the most influential thinkers and critics of the liberal tradition of political thought. With both rigor and creativity, Mehta explores the hidden ambitions for imperial domination that underlie the supposedly tolerant foundations of liberalism. He is, in other words, a guide to a subterranean illiberal stream within liberalism.

Apply here!

Uday Singh Mehta is the 2022 Yehuda Elkana Fellow

The Hannah Arendt Humanities Network (HAHN) is pleased to announce that the recipient of its Second Annual Yehuda Elkana fellowship is Uday Singh Mehta. HAHN is a project of the Open Society University Network (OSUN), initiated and coordinated by the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College.

A Career of Critical Thought about Liberalism and Empire

Mehta's first book The Anxiety of Freedom argued that John Locke's theory of liberal education balances freedom and order by disciplining subjects through education. Locke assumed liberalism required an educated citizen; but education means the complex interdictions that discipline and make orderly the liberal subject. Liberal freedoms, Mehta sees, demand properly formed citizens, thus insinuating a deep disciplinary foundation within the freedoms of liberal political life.

In Liberalism and Empire, which won the J. David Greenstone Book Award from the American Political Science Association in 2002 for the best book in history and theory, Mehta showed that when confronted with the reality of empire in India, liberal thinkers in England justified imperial rule by arguing that Indians were not yet educated into liberal citizens capable of freedoms.

There is, Mehta argues, a universalist and imperialist drive at the heart of liberalism, a drive to educate and civilize all peoples so that they share the rationalist attachments of liberal citizens. Alongside the desire to spread liberal freedom rises the liberal urge to dominate the world. Against liberal imperialism, Mehta elevates the conservatism of Edmund Burke—the willingness to "take seriously the sentiments, feelings, and attachments" of non-liberal peoples who aspire to live according to their own customs.

Mehta furthers his radical inquiry into non-liberal political thinking in his forthcoming book A Different Vision: Gandhi’s Critique of Political Rationality—which will be the topic of the 2022 Yehuda Elkana Fellowship text seminar. Turning to Gandhi's thinking, Mehta unearths a non-liberal politics that rejects both imperialism and nationalism. If liberalism seeks freedom by elevating a state to discipline obedient citizens, Gandhi's political theory explicitly links politics to spiritualism and self-realization. Thus Gandhi is opposed to the power of the state as a mediating institution. He thinks in civilizational terms based in family and religion. And he values individual courage because it allows freedom and maturity. Mehta finds in Gandhi a political theory fundamentally at odds with the liberal-nation-state project.
Uday Singh Mehta has lived the life of an engaged scholar very much in the spirit of Yehuda Elkana. He is a man of the highest courage and integrity who brings seriousness of purpose and thought to seminars, friendships, and dinner parties. At a time when universities have become platforms for self-promotion rather than scholarly purpose, Mehta stands for the ideal of the engaged scholar that the Hannah Arendt Humanities Network aims to recognize in granting the Yehuda Elkana Award.

Mehta received his undergraduate education at Swarthmore College, where he studied mathematics and philosophy, and holds a Ph.D. in political philosophy from Princeton University. He has held teaching positions at a number of universities, including Princeton, Cornell, MIT, University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, and Hull. He is presently Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the Graduate Center, CUNY. In 2002, he was one of ten recipients of the “Carnegie Scholars” prize awarded to “scholars of exceptional creativity.”

At the heart of our trust in AI lies a paradox: we leverage AI to increase our control over the future and uncertainty, while at the same time the performativity of AI, the power it has to make us act in the ways it predicts, reduces our agency over the future. This happens when we forget that we humans have created the digital technologies to which we attribute agency. These developments also challenge the narrative of progress, which played such a central role in modernity and is based on the hubris of total control. We are now moving into an era where this control is limited as AI monitors our actions, posing the threat of surveillance, but also offering the opportunity to reappropriate control and transform it into care.

2021 Fellow: Helga Nowotny

In AI We Trust: Power, Illusion and Control of Predictive Algorithms

Helga Nowotny is one of the most prominent scholars in science studies worldwide, an area that counted Yehuda Elkana as one of its pioneers and promoters. For several decades she has been one of the most influential institution builders in European higher education and research. At times, she partnered with Yehuda Elkana in daring new academic and institutional endeavors. Throughout her long and distinguished academic career at institutions in the US, Europe and Asia, Helga Nowotny has embraced and helped establish an interdisciplinary and engaged approach to the study of science. Her highly consequential research and publications focus on matters such as dealing with technological risks, coping with uncertainty, time and social theory, organization of science, gender relations in science and “the place of people in our knowledge” (the title of one of her studies). She has launched or helped establish influential new concepts and theories, such as “Mode 2” of scientific research.

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