Rahel Jaeggi will be joined by Michele Moody-Adams (Columbia University), Jay Bernstein (NSSR), and Jeff Flynn (Fordham University), for a panel discussion to celebrate the English translation of Jaeggi’s award-winning book Progress and Regression (Harvard University Press, 2025, translated, Robert Savage).

Progress and Regression: “argues that we are lost without a shared idea of progress. In the tradition of critical theory, Rahel Jaeggi defends a vision of progress that avoids Eurocentric and teleological distortions. Progress here is not an inevitable developmental trend but a kind of compass directing society’s never-ending journey toward emancipation. A nimble practitioner of dialectical reasoning, Jaeggi revitalizes progress by confronting its opposite: regression. Her analysis—sober and thoughtful, but urgent—reckons with the myriad signs of regression today, including growing inequality, ecological destruction, and above all the assault on educational institutions, critical thinking, and reason itself.”

Bios:

Rahel Jaeggi is a distinguished philosopher and professor Social and Political Philosophy at the Humboldt University in Berlin. She is also the founding director of the Berlin-based Center for Social Critique. Her research focuses on social philosophy, political philosophy, ethics, philosophical anthropology, social ontology, and critical theory. She has held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and taught as a visiting Professor at the New School for Social Research in New York, Fudan University in Shanghai and Yale University. She is the author of Alienation (Columbia University Press 2015), Critique of Forms of Life (Harvard University Press 2017), and Progress and Regression (Harvard University Press 2025). In Fall 2026, Rahel Jaeggi will join the Philosophy Department at the New School for Social Research.

Michele Moody-Adams is Straus Professor of Political Philosophy and Legal Theory at Columbia University. She has published on a broad range of topics in moral and political philosophy and is the author of Making Space for Justice: Social Movements, Collective Imagination and Political Hope (2022), and a widely cited book on moral relativism, Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture and Philosophy (1997) She is also a co-author on the multi-author work Against Happiness (2023). She is currently working on two book projects: Renewing Democracy and Reclaiming the Idea of the Human. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Lifetime Honorary Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford.

Jay Bernstein is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. He has worked on Adorno’s critical theory. Bernstein’s books include Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2001), Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting (Stanford University Press, 2006), and Torture and Dignity: An Essay on Moral Injury (University of Chicago Press, 2015).  Bernstein is finishing a book on climate change.

Jeff Flynn is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at Fordham University. He is the author of Reframing the Intercultural Dialogue on Human Rights (2014) and co-author of "Critical Theory (Frankfurt School)," in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2023). In 2013-14, he was a Member in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton, NJ).