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The aim of this webinar is to discuss the relationship between populism and democracy, starting from Nadia Urbinati’s new book, Me, the People: How Populism Transforms Democracy (2019). The panelists will look at how populism, as a mode of representation, thinks of and operates with the political dimension -- as consisting of a dual power, the power of will and the power of judgment.
Populism erodes democracy in Europe, North America and South America. It is a complex phenomenon that has mobilized many philosophers and political thinkers for some time now. For the most part, and not without reason, thinkers see populism as more than a threat to democracy; they see the consummation of its collapse, often caused by reasons outside the democratic regime. Hence the temptation to bring populism and fascism closer together.
In Me, the People, Nadia Urbinati, while highlighting the danger of populist governments for democracy, considers that populism is an internal pathology of the democratic regime itself, a pathology that does not mean the necessary death of democracy, and that has its vaccine in democracy itself. Nadia focuses her analysis on the kind of political representation populism works with, to allow her a different reading of this widely invoked concept.
This event is FREE and open to the PUBLIC. You will receive a link to the online event after you register.
* Please note that the initial announcement of this event listed Andrew Arato, Dorothy Hart Hirshon Professor of Political and Social Theory, New School for Social Research, USA, as a panelist. He will no longer be able to attend this event.
Presented by Democracy Seminar, the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies at The New School for Social Research and the graduate programs of Philosophy and Political Science at the Federal University of Bahia, Brazil.
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Jeffrey Goldfarb is the Michael E. Gellert Professor of Sociology at the New School for Social Research. He is also the Co-Executive Editor of Public Seminar and Special Advisor to the Provost for The New School Publishing Initiative. His work primarily focuses on the sociology of media, culture and politics.
The Democracy Seminar is a project convened by publisher and founding editor Jeffrey Goldfarb and senior editors Elzbieta Matynia and Jeffrey C. Isaac. This world-wide discussion among pro-democracy intellectuals and activists addresses the political, social and cultural obstacles to democratic governance; investigates the rise and appeal of illiberal philosophies and practices; and explores ways for rolling back autocratic politics. Read here about the first international meeting of the DS project.
The Transregional Center for Democratic Studies - TCDS’s transregional and cross-departmental research and study programs, conducted both at home and abroad, bring together civic-minded students, junior and senior scholars, and civil society actors from various regional contexts. Our activities — region-based institutes, workshops, conferences, talks, and fellowships — are designed to further strengthen social and human capital, i.e., individuals and organizations concerned with the promise and sustainability of democracy. Our flagship projects have been the annual Democracy & Diversity Graduate Summer Institutes (held in Poland since 1991 and also in South Africa from 1999 to 2015), aimed at a rigorous quest for a more textured understanding of the precariousness of democracy as it arises almost everywhere.
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Andrew Arato is the Dorothy Hart Hirshon Professor in Political and Social Theory in the Sociology Department at the New School for Social Research. He has taught at L'École des hautes études and Sciences Po in Paris, as well as at the Central European University in Budapest. He had a Fulbright teaching grant to Montevideo in 1991, and was Distinguished Fulbright Professor at the Goethe University in Frankfurt/M,Germany. Professor Arato has served as a consultant for the Hungarian Parliament on constitutional issues (1996-1997), and as U.S. State Department Democracy Lecturer and Consultant (on Constitutional issues) on Nepal (2007). He was re-appointed by the State Department in the same capacity for Zimbabwe (November of 2010), where he had discussions with civil society activists and political leaders in charge of the constitution-making process. He was invited Professor at the College de France (Spring 2012).
Professor Arato's scholarly research is widely recognized, and conferences and sessions have been organized around his work at University of Glasgow Law School (Spring 2009) and Koc University, Istanbul (December 2009), as well as at the Faculty of Law, Witwaterstrand University, Johannesburg, South Africa (August 2010). Arato was appointed Honorary Professor and Bram Fischer Visiting Scholar at the School of Law, University of Witwatersrand Johannesburg (June 2010-June 2011).
Nadia Urbinati (Ph.D., European University Institute, Florence, 1989) is a political theorist who specializes in modern and contemporary political thought and the democratic and anti-democratic traditions. She co-chaired the Columbia University Faculty Seminar on Political and Social Thought and was a co-editor with Andrew Arato of the academic journal Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory. She is a member of the Executive Committee of the Foundation Reset Dialogues on Civilization. She has been a member of the School of Social Sciences of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University, and a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Fellowship in the University Center for Human Values, Princeton University. She is permanent visiting professor at the Scuola Superiore de Studi Universitari e Perfezionamento Sant'Anna of Pisa (Italy), and taught at Bocconi University (Milan), SciencesPo (Paris) and the University UNICAMP (Brazil).
Wendel Antunes Cintra is Professor in the Department of Political Science at Federal University of Bahia (UFBA) and member of Centre of Studies in Humanities (CRH-UFBA), in Salvador, Brazil. PhD degree in Political Science at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (IESP-UERJ). Currently visiting fellow at Universidad del País Vasco, Bilbao, Spain, where he develops the research project “History and political theory: a comparative study of linguistic contextualism approach and conceptual history of the political.”
Jeffrey Goldfarb is the Michael E. Gellert Professor of Sociology at the New School for Social Research. He is also the Co-Executive Editor of Public Seminar and Special Advisor to the Provost for The New School Publishing Initiative. His work primarily focuses on the sociology of media, culture and politics.
Daniel Tourinho Peres teaches undergraduate and graduates courses on Political Philosophy at the Philosophy Department, Federal University of Bahia (UFBA). He is also a member of the Centre of Studies in Humanities (CRH-UFBA) and a research fellow at the Brazilian National Council of Scientific Research (CNPq). He works mostly on modern political thought.
Paulo Fábio Dantas Neto is Associate Professor of the Department of Political Science of the Philosophy and Human Science School at Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), teacher of the Post-Graduation Program of Social Sciences (PPGCS/UFBA) and a researcher at the Center of Studies and Research on Humanities (CRH/FFCH/UFBA). Leads the research group “Ecos do Subsolo” (Echoes from Underground) on the thematic area of Brazilian Political Thought. He has prior trajectory of research on elite and political parties with emphasis on Brazilian and Bahian politics. He was a councilman in Salvador (1983-1988), state deputy in Bahia (1989) and Secretary of Education in Salvador (1994).
Debora Rezende de Almeida is a Professor in the Institute of Political Science at the University of Brasília (Brazil). Her PhD dissertation, from Federal University of Minas Gerais, received the Honorable Mention from Capes in 2012 (Coordenação e Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior). She is the recipient of the 2016 Best Book Prize, awarded by the Brazilian Political Science Association, for her book Representação Além das Eleições. She has published articles on political representation theory and civil society participation in Critical Policy Studies, Representation, and Politics and Governance, among others.
Alessandro Pinzani is professor for ethics and political philosophy at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Florianópolis (Brazil) and since 2006 he is a fellow researcher of CNPq (Brazilian Research Council). He writes on Critical Theory, social philosophy, poverty, and democracy. He got his PhD and Habilitation in Philosophy at the University of Tübingen. He was a visiting professor at the universities of Dresden (2013), Bochum (2016 and 2020) and Graz (2019) as well as at the Czech Academy of Sciences (2019), and a visiting scholar at Columbia University, NY (2001/02), at the Humboldt University, Berlin (2010) and at the University of Florence (2015/16). Among his books: Jürgen Habermas (München: Beck, 2007), An den Wurzeln moderner Demokratie (Berlin: Akademie, 2009), Money, Autonomy, and Citizenship with W. Leão Rego, Dordrecht: Springer, 2018).
