OSUN, Hannah Arendt Center, and Center for Civic Engagement present:
Tribalism and Cosmopolitanism: How Can We Imagine a Pluralist Politics?
Thursday, October 17, 2024 – Friday, October 18, 2024
Olin Hall
Schedule
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 1710:00 am- 6:00 pm
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 18
9:30 am - 5:30 pm
Speakers
Sebastian Junger
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"Restrepo," which chronicled the deployment of a platoon of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley, is widely considered to have broken new ground in war reporting. Junger has since produced and directed three additional documentaries about war and its aftermath. "Which Way Is The Front Line From Here?", which premiered on HBO, chronicles the life and career of his friend and colleague, photojournalist Tim Hetherington, who was killed while covering the civil war in Libya in 2011. "Korengal" returns to the subject of combat and tries to answer the eternal question of why young men miss war. "The Last Patrol", which also premiered on HBO, examines the complexities of returning from war by following Junger and three friends--all of whom had experienced combat, either as soldiers or reporters--as they travel up the East Coast railroad lines on foot as "high-speed vagrants."
Sebastian Junger is the founder and director of Vets Town Hall.
Junger has also written for magazines including Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic Adventure, Outside and Men's Journal. His reporting on Afghanistan in 2000, profiling Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud, who was assassinated just days before 9/11, became the subject of the National Geographic documentary "Into the Forbidden Zone," and introduced America to the Afghan resistance fighting the Taliban.
He lives in New York City and Cape Cod.
Seyla Benhabib
She was the President of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in 2006-07 and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1995, and an Honorary Fellow of the British Academy since 2018. She has previously taught at the New School for Social Research and Harvard Universities, where she was Professor of Government from 1993-2000 and Chair of Harvard’s Program on Social Studies from 1996-2000.
Professor Benhabib is the recipient of the Ernst Bloch prize for 2009, the Leopold Lucas Prize from the Theological Faculty of the University of Tubingen (2012), and the Meister Eckhart Prize (2014; one of Germany’s most prestigious philosophical prizes). A Guggenheim Fellowship recipient (2011-12), she has been research affiliate and senior scholar in many institutions in the US and in Europe including Berlin’s Wissenschaftskolleg (2009), NYU Strauss Center for the Study of Law and Justice (2012), the European University Institute in Florence (Summer 2015), Center for Gender Studies at Cambridge University ( Spring 2017), Columbia University Law School (Spring 2016; Spring 2018) and Center for Humanities and Critical Theory, Humboldt University Berlin (Summer 2018). She was Albert Hirschman Fellow at the Institute for the Human Sciences in Vienna in November 2023.
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Professor Benhabib holds Honorary Degrees from the Universities of Utrecht (2004), Valencia (2010), Bogazici University in Istanbul (2012), Georgetown University (2014), the University of Geneva (Fall 2018), the Center of Latin American Studies in Chile (Summer 2021) and the Université Catholique de Louvain and KULeuven (jointly awarded). (2024)
Her work has been translated into 13 languages (German, Spanish, French, Italian, Brazilian, Turkish, Swedish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Hebrew, Polish, Japanese, Chinese and Korean) and she has also edited and coedited 10 volumes on topics ranging from democracy and difference to the rights of migrant women and children; the communicative ethics controversy and Hannah Arendt. The volume, Migrations and Mobilities: Gender, Borders and Citizenship (NYU Press, 2009), co-edited with Judith Resnik from the Yale Law School was named by Choice one of the outstanding academic books of the year.
Her most recent books include: The Claims of Culture. Equality and Diversity in the Global Era, (2002); The Rights of Others. Aliens, Citizens and Residents (2004), winner of the Ralph Bunche award of the American Political Science Association (2005) and the North American Society for Social Philosophy award (2004); Another Cosmopolitanism: Hospitality, Sovereignty and Democratic Iterations, with responses by Jeremy Waldron, Bonnie Honig and Will Kymlicka (Oxford University Press, 2006); Dignity in Adversity. Human Rights in Troubled Times (UK and USA: Polity Press, 2011); Gleichheit und Differenz. Die Würde des Menschen und die Souveränitätsansprüche der Vőlker ( Equality and Difference. Human Dignity and Popular Sovereignty. Bilingual edition in English and German: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), and edited together with Volker Kaul, Toward New Democratic Imaginaries. Istanbul Seminars on Islam, Culture, and Politics (Springer 2016). Her latest book has appeared in 2018 from Princeton University Press, Exile, Statelessness and Migration. Playing Chess with History form Hannah Arendt to Isaiah Berlin.
She is currently at work on a monograph for Polity Press called “At the Margins of the Modern State” and has edited a collection of articles with Ayelet Shachar on Migration and Refugee topics called, Lawless Zones, Rightless Subjects: Migration and Asylum New Border Regimes. (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)
Her work has been translated into 13 languages (German, Spanish, French, Italian, Brazilian, Turkish, Swedish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Hebrew, Polish, Japanese, Chinese and Korean) and she has also edited and coedited 10 volumes on topics ranging from democracy and difference to the rights of migrant women and children; the communicative ethics controversy and Hannah Arendt. The volume, Migrations and Mobilities: Gender, Borders and Citizenship (NYU Press, 2009), co-edited with Judith Resnik from the Yale Law School was named by Choice one of the outstanding academic books of the year.
Her most recent books include: The Claims of Culture. Equality and Diversity in the Global Era, (2002); The Rights of Others. Aliens, Citizens and Residents (2004), winner of the Ralph Bunche award of the American Political Science Association (2005) and the North American Society for Social Philosophy award (2004); Another Cosmopolitanism: Hospitality, Sovereignty and Democratic Iterations, with responses by Jeremy Waldron, Bonnie Honig and Will Kymlicka (Oxford University Press, 2006); Dignity in Adversity. Human Rights in Troubled Times (UK and USA: Polity Press, 2011); Gleichheit und Differenz. Die Würde des Menschen und die Souveränitätsansprüche der Vőlker ( Equality and Difference. Human Dignity and Popular Sovereignty. Bilingual edition in English and German: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), and edited together with Volker Kaul, Toward New Democratic Imaginaries. Istanbul Seminars on Islam, Culture, and Politics (Springer 2016). Her latest book has appeared in 2018 from Princeton University Press, Exile, Statelessness and Migration. Playing Chess with History form Hannah Arendt to Isaiah Berlin.
She is currently at work on a monograph for Polity Press called “At the Margins of the Modern State” and has edited a collection of articles with Ayelet Shachar on Migration and Refugee topics called, Lawless Zones, Rightless Subjects: Migration and Asylum New Border Regimes. (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)
Roger Berkowitz
His essay "Reconciling Oneself to the Impossibility of Reconciliation: Judgment and Worldliness in Hannah Arendt's Politics," has helped bring attention to the centrality of reconciliation in Hannah Arendt's work. The Arendt Center organizes an annual conference every October. Professor Berkowitz edits the Hannah Arendt Center's weekly newsletter, Amor Mundi. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Bookforum, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Paris Review Online, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, The American Interest, and many other publications. Berkowitz is the 2019 recipient of the Hannah Arendt Award for Political Thought given by the Heinrich Böll Stiftung in Bremen, Germany.
Leon Botstein
He is also music director and principal conductor of The Orchestra Now (TŌN) and the American Symphony Orchestra, artistic co-director of the Bard Music Festival. Botstein is editor of The Musical Quarterly and writes on music and culture. VIEW MORE >>
Leon Botstein has been the President of Bard College since 1975, where he is also the Leon Levy Professor in the Arts and Humanities. He is chairperson of the board of the Central European University and chancellor of the Open Society University Network (OSUN), as well as a member of the Global Board of the Open Society Foundation.
He is also music director and principal conductor of The Orchestra Now (TŌN) and the American Symphony Orchestra, artistic co-director of the Bard Music Festival. Botstein is editor of The Musical Quarterly and writes on music and culture.
He is also music director and principal conductor of The Orchestra Now (TŌN) and the American Symphony Orchestra, artistic co-director of the Bard Music Festival. Botstein is editor of The Musical Quarterly and writes on music and culture.
Uday Mehta
Lyndsey Stonebridge
Jana Mader
Thomas Chatterton Williams
Joseph O'Neill
Fintan O'Toole
Born in Dublin in 1958, he is a member of the Royal Irish Academy and an honorary international member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He taught at Princeton where was Professor of Irish Letters.
His many books include A Traitor’s Kiss: The Life of Richard Brinsley Sheridan; White Savage: William Johnson and the Invention of America; A History of Ireland in 100 Objects; and Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain.
His most recent book, We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958 was named Book of the Year in the An Post Irish Book Awards and as one of the ten best books of 2022 by the New York Times.
Niobe Way
Location
Getting Here
Accomodations
Local hotel offering a Bard Rate during the conference:
The Best Western Plus in Kingston, NY. To make reservations using the Bard discount, you must call the hotel direct at 845-338-0400 and ask for the “Bard College Discount.” (20% off) We recommend booking your accommodations as early as possible.
Parking is Free
Facebook Group
This event occurs on:
Thu. October 17 – Fri. October 18
Conference takes place in Olin Hall.
Hannah Arendt was suspicious of cosmopolitanism, world government, and the loss of the common sense connections that are part of living with and amidst one's tribe. Wary of assimilation and universalism, Arendt understood the need for a tribe, whether that tribe be her “tribe” of good friends or living amongst people with whom one shares cultural and social prejudices. At the same time, Arendt was also deeply suspicious of tribalism in politics. Politics always involves a plurality of peoples. Thus tribal nationalism—what she called the pseudo-mystical consciousness—is anti-political and leads to political programs aimed at ethnic homogeneity.
Arendt believed that the aspiration of politics is to bind together a plurality of persons in ways that do justice to their uniqueness and yet find what is common to them as members of a defined political community. Wary of the nation-state that would privilege the national community of the state over "foreigners" and "minorities," Arendt nevertheless opposed assimilation into a cosmopolitan sameness. Instead, she held onto a vision of politics centered around plurality and federalism, one in which homelands and regions of like-minded peoples would also live together in federalist republics that both respected the particularity of local identities and sought to build meaningful political bonds that transcend tribal sensibilities. Her plan for a federation in Israel and Palestine imagined Jewish and Palestinian homelands as part of a larger federal structure.
The rise of tribalist and populist political movements today is in part a response to the failure of cosmopolitan rule by elites around the world. As understandable as tribalism may be, the challenge today is to think of new political possibilities that allow for the meaningful commitments of tribal identities while also respecting the fact of human plurality. The Hannah Arendt Center Conference Tribalism and Cosmopolitanism responds to the undeniable fact that tribalism is real, appealing, and dangerous. We ask:
• If humans are tribal beings, how can they live in multicultural liberal societies?
• Are experts and elites themselves simply one tribe defending their self-interests?
• Must social media contribute to the fracturing of society into raging tribes?
• Is there a common interest in society knowable through reason?
•What is a tribe and is it a useful word in our political vocabulary?
•Is there an alternative to the cosmopolitan tribalism of global elites?
Above all, we ask, how can make a space for tribal loyalty and tribal meaning while at the same time maintain our commitment to pluralist politics?
Conference takes place in Olin Hall.
Hannah Arendt was suspicious of cosmopolitanism, world government, and the loss of the common sense connections that are part of living with and amidst one's tribe. Wary of assimilation and universalism, Arendt understood the need for a tribe, whether that tribe be her “tribe” of good friends or living amongst people with whom one shares cultural and social prejudices. At the same time, Arendt was also deeply suspicious of tribalism in politics. Politics always involves a plurality of peoples. Thus tribal nationalism—what she called the pseudo-mystical consciousness—is anti-political and leads to political programs aimed at ethnic homogeneity.
Arendt believed that the aspiration of politics is to bind together a plurality of persons in ways that do justice to their uniqueness and yet find what is common to them as members of a defined political community. Wary of the nation-state that would privilege the national community of the state over "foreigners" and "minorities," Arendt nevertheless opposed assimilation into a cosmopolitan sameness. Instead, she held onto a vision of politics centered around plurality and federalism, one in which homelands and regions of like-minded peoples would also live together in federalist republics that both respected the particularity of local identities and sought to build meaningful political bonds that transcend tribal sensibilities. Her plan for a federation in Israel and Palestine imagined Jewish and Palestinian homelands as part of a larger federal structure.
The rise of tribalist and populist political movements today is in part a response to the failure of cosmopolitan rule by elites around the world. As understandable as tribalism may be, the challenge today is to think of new political possibilities that allow for the meaningful commitments of tribal identities while also respecting the fact of human plurality. The Hannah Arendt Center Conference Tribalism and Cosmopolitanism responds to the undeniable fact that tribalism is real, appealing, and dangerous. We ask:
• If humans are tribal beings, how can they live in multicultural liberal societies?
• Are experts and elites themselves simply one tribe defending their self-interests?
• Must social media contribute to the fracturing of society into raging tribes?
• Is there a common interest in society knowable through reason?
•What is a tribe and is it a useful word in our political vocabulary?
•Is there an alternative to the cosmopolitan tribalism of global elites?
Above all, we ask, how can make a space for tribal loyalty and tribal meaning while at the same time maintain our commitment to pluralist politics?