Seyla Benhabib presents a talk entitled "The Changing Futures of Cosmopolitanism: The Globe as World, Earth, and Planet."
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Cosmopolitanism is often identified with the right to travel across borders and boundaries in a globalizing world. The climate crisis as well as the emerging earth sciences and studies of the Anthropocene, change the meanings of globe and global in our times. This lecture will analyze Chakrabarty's and Latour's contributions and then focus on Arendt's critique of world citizenship in order to tease out the different meanings of world, earth, and planet. The final part of the lecture will examine recent constitutional court decisions (Germany, Colombia) regarding the rights of nature and obligations to future generations.
This event will take place in person in Wolff Conference Room and also be simultaneously broadcast here.
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Seyla Benhabib is the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy Emerita at Yale University where she taught from 2001 to 2020. She is currently Senior Research Fellow and Professor of Law Adjunct at Columbia University, and Affiliate Faculty in the Department of Philosophy. She is also a Senior Fellow at Columbia University’s Center for Contemporary Critical Thought.
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Seyla Benhabib is the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy Emerita at Yale University where she taught from 2001 to 2020. She is currently Senior Research Fellow and Professor of Law Adjunct at Columbia University, and Affiliate Faculty in the Department of Philosophy. She is also a Senior Fellow at Columbia University’s Center for Contemporary Critical Thought. She has previously taught at the New School for Social Research (1991-1993) and Harvard Universities, where she was Professor of Government from 1993-2000 and Chair of Harvard’s Program on Social Studies from 1996-2000.
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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). 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.
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 University of Louvain (jointly awarded) (2024).
Her work has been translated into 15 languages (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. 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); Exile, Statelessness and Migration. Playing Chess with History form Hannah Arendt to Isaiah Berlin (Princeton 2018); Kosmopolitismus im Wandel. Zwischen Demos, Kosmos und Globus (Mandelbaum Verlag 2024); and with Ayelet Shachar on migration and refugees, Lawless Zones, Rightless Subjects: Migration and Asylum New Border Regimes. (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming, 2024)
