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| Neither Capitalist nor American: The Democracy as Social Movement |
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| Neither Capitalist nor American: The Democracy as Social Movement |
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| American Democracy and the Origins of the Biomedical Revolution |
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The Democratic Soul |
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9 & 11 January 2001
DeVane Lecture: Anthony Kronman, Dean of the Yale Law School. (Discussion on the 11th to be moderated by Cynthia Farrar, Adjunct Associate Professor, Political Science and Director of Urban Academic Initiatives.)
One of the wisest and most searching explorations of political order ever written, Plato's Republic, contains a harsh attack on democracy. This critique of democratic man and the regime he inhabits is not incidental to Plato's argument. For Plato as for us, democracy is characterized by the free pursuit of individual desires. But in Plato's view, the resulting society is simply chaotic. According to Plato, psychic and political order share the same structure and are mutually reinforcing. The possibility of order in both domains depends on the existence of an unchanging formal reality, ruled by and accessible to the exercise of reason. Democracy, by this standard, is no order at all, because it privileges the singular and self-inventing individual.
The modern appreciation of democracy is based on a very different understanding of political order - as a framework for human actions and individual fulfillment, not the cause and consequence of an ordered soul. Our defense of democracy starts from different premises: most importantly, the Judeo-Christian belief in creation from nothing, ex nihilo. In this tradition, the absolute distinctness of every individual is something real and valuable in its own right.
A comparison between the Republic and the American republic reveals many of the themes that will reverberate throughout this course. Plato's critique not only highlights the peculiarities of our beliefs, but also poses an instructive and compelling challenge. How is radical individualism compatible with the need to offer a reasoned judgment about the relative worth of different forms of life? And on what basis are we to forge an account of the relationship between individual fulfillment and the good of the community as a whole?
Readings:
Copies of the assigned readings are available to the public at the New Haven Free Public Library on the Green or may be purchased online with a credit card through Yale's RIS Department (at http://www.yale.edu/ris/cpl.htm). To order reading materials for Democratic Vistas, please visit the Web site listed above. Once on the site: read the instructions, scroll down the page and look for "click here to begin ordering". Once on the ordering page, scroll down and look for the packets DEVN 194b_ wk 01 through wk 13. You can choose any of the DEVN 194b readings by clicking the checkbox to the right of each reading. After selecting one or more readings, scroll up and click "continue." This will take you to an order form. Please fill this out to complete your order.
Readings may be purchased in a packet that includes the whole course, or by the week. Starred items will not be included in the packet, but will be available for purchase at the Yale Bookstore/Barnes and Noble.
Abraham Lincoln & Walt Whitman as Representative Americans |
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16 & 18 January 2001
DeVane Lecture: David Bromwich, Bird White Housum Professor of English
Lincoln and Whitman were contemporaries. The great articulations of their genius began almost at the same moment--Lincoln in 1854 in the Speech on the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Whitman in 1855 in the first edition of Leaves of Grass. Looked at from a distance, their materials are vastly different. Lincoln is concerned with the survival of the nation and its system of freedom, Whitman with the imaginative experience open to "oneself" and open uniquely in democratic America. Yet both the great poet and the great politician write also as moral psychologists. To a surprising extent they share a vision of the democratic character. It is something new in the world, they think, and in their writings we find beautifully adequate descriptions of that newness. The character sketched by Lincoln and by Whitman is rooted in an experience of labor whose tendency is to become progressively more free--both in the individual workplace and in the geography of the nation. It is endlessly modified and shaped by exposure to human and social influences, not all of them agreeable. "Oneself" is by definition not a slave and not a master.
Readings:
Copies of the assigned readings are available to the public at the New Haven Free Public Library on the Green or may be purchased online with a credit card through Yale's RIS Department (at http://www.yale.edu/ris/cpl.htm). To order reading materials for Democratic Vistas, please visit the Web site listed above. Once on the site: read the instructions, scroll down the page and look for "click here to begin ordering". Once on the ordering page, scroll down and look for the packets DEVN 194b_ wk 01 through wk 13. You can choose any of the DEVN 194b readings by clicking the checkbox to the right of each reading. After selecting one or more readings, scroll up and click "continue." This will take you to an order form. Please fill this out to complete your order.
Readings may be purchased in a packet that includes the whole course, or by the week. Starred items will not be included in the packet, but will be available for purchase at the Yale Bookstore/Barnes and Noble.
Paradoxes of Mind and Society: The Bounded Nature of Cognition and the Unbounded Possibilities for American Democracy |
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23 & 25January - 2001
DeVane Lecture: Mahzarin Banaji, Professor of Psychology
All human beings are prone to systematic errors of thinking and feeling. We will participate in demonstrations of such errors, especially as they occur when humans assess, evaluate, and judge the most important stimulus in their environment other humans. From first impressions to enduring ones, from decisions about the qualities a person or group possesses to decisions about the worth of a person or social group, unconscious constraints on thinking and feeling create parallel constraints on social justice.
How deep are the bounds on human thinking and feeling and how do they shape social judgment? The focus of my research has been on the mechanics of unconscious mental processes, with attention to those that operate without conscious awareness, intention, or control. On the basis of dozens of experiments we ask: How should we conceive of equality in light of evidence about unconscious preferences, desires, and beliefs among those who are consciously unprejudiced? How should the impact of unintended harm be determined? In the obvious absence of simple solutions, new approaches to ensuring equality can gain by looking to discoveries in the mind sciences about the bounds on social thought and feeling. Based on the evidence, we may enter into a discussion of new forms of justice within democratic societies. To do so will require coming face-to-face with the paradox of the ordinary yet powerful mental threats to fairness and equality on the one hand and the democratic ideal of a just society on the other.
Readings:
Copies of the assigned readings are available to the public at the New Haven Free Public Library on the Green or may be purchased online with a credit card through Yale's RIS Department (at http://www.yale.edu/ris/cpl.htm). To order reading materials for Democratic Vistas, please visit the Web site listed above. Once on the site: read the instructions, scroll down the page and look for "click here to begin ordering". Once on the ordering page, scroll down and look for the packets DEVN 194b_ wk 01 through wk 13. You can choose any of the DEVN 194b readings by clicking the checkbox to the right of each reading. After selecting one or more readings, scroll up and click "continue." This will take you to an order form. Please fill this out to complete your order.
Readings may be purchased in a packet that includes the whole course, or by the week. Starred items will not be included in the packet, but will be available for purchase at the Yale Bookstore/Barnes and Noble.
Democracy and Distribution |
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30 January & 1 February 2001
DeVane Lecture: Ian Shapiro, Professor and Chairman, Political Science
My lecture addresses two questions: why has American democracy done so little to improve the condition of the poor and near poor, and what can be done about it? These questions are motivated by a practical concern and a theoretical conundrum. The practical concern is the persistence of comparatively high proportions of the population living in or close to poverty, and the widening income gap between them and better-off Americans. The theoretical conundrum is that this state of affairs is surprising, given standard expectations about the effects of democracy on distribution. Nineteenth century elites who resisted expansion of the franchise and socialists who endorsed the "parliamentary road to socialism" agreed that if majority rule is imposed on a massively unequal status quo, then most voters would favor taxing the rich and transferring the proceeds downward. This was formalized in political science via the median voter theorem. It predicts majority support for downward redistribution, given a distributive status-quo like that in the advanced capitalist democracies. In the lecture I explore a number of reasons why the theorem does not hold in practice, and discuss the implications for democratic reforms that might improve the absolute relative and absolute condition of those in the bottom quintile of the population.
Readings:
Copies of the assigned readings are available to the public at the New Haven Free Public Library on the Green or may be purchased online with a credit card through Yale's RIS Department (at http://www.yale.edu/ris/cpl.htm). To order reading materials for Democratic Vistas, please visit the Web site listed above. Once on the site: read the instructions, scroll down the page and look for "click here to begin ordering". Once on the ordering page, scroll down and look for the packets DEVN 194b_ wk 01 through wk 13. You can choose any of the DEVN 194b readings by clicking the checkbox to the right of each reading. After selecting one or more readings, scroll up and click "continue." This will take you to an order form. Please fill this out to complete your order.
Readings may be purchased in a packet that includes the whole course, or by the week. Starred items will not be included in the packet, but will be available for purchase at the Yale Bookstore/Barnes and Noble.
Democracy and the Market |
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6 & 8 February 2001
DeVane Lecture: Richard C. Levin, President of Yale and Frederick William Beinecke Professor of Economics
Readings:
Copies of the assigned readings are available to the public at the New Haven Free Public Library on the Green or may be purchased online with a credit card through Yale's RIS Department (at http://www.yale.edu/ris/cpl.htm). To order reading materials for Democratic Vistas, please visit the Web site listed above. Once on the site: read the instructions, scroll down the page and look for "click here to begin ordering". Once on the ordering page, scroll down and look for the packets DEVN 194b_ wk 01 through wk 13. You can choose any of the DEVN 194b readings by clicking the checkbox to the right of each reading. After selecting one or more readings, scroll up and click "continue." This will take you to an order form. Please fill this out to complete your order.
Readings may be purchased in a packet that includes the whole course, or by the week. Starred items will not be included in the packet, but will be available for purchase at the Yale Bookstore/Barnes and Noble.
Neither Capitalist nor American: The Democracy as Social Movement |
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13 & 15 February 2001
DeVane Lecture: Professor of American Studies and Chair of the Program in Ethnicity, Race and Migration Michael Denning
In the decades when the modern social movements - the labor movement, the women's movement, the abolitionist movement, and the anti-colonial movement, were invented, a new definition of "the democracy" was recorded. "The portion of the people whose injury is the most manifest, have gotten or taken the title of the democracy." At a moment when historic breakthroughs to political democracy are accompanied by the wholesale destruction of social democracy, when the concept of "democracy" has been redefined by the opponents of the democracy, Professor Denning's lecture will return to the notion of "the democracy" as a social movement, reconsidering the democracy's relation to capitalism and to the American state, and taking up the lack of democracy in civil society - particularly in the workplace - by reflecting on the recently published Human Rights Watch report, Unfair Advantage: Workers' Freedom of Association in the United States under International Human Rights Standards.
Readings:
Copies of the assigned readings are available to the public at the New Haven Free Public Library on the Green or may be purchased online with a credit card through Yale's RIS Department (at http://www.yale.edu/ris/cpl.htm). To order reading materials for Democratic Vistas, please visit the Web site listed above. Once on the site: read the instructions, scroll down the page and look for "click here to begin ordering". Once on the ordering page, scroll down and look for the packets DEVN 194b_ wk 01 through wk 13. You can choose any of the DEVN 194b readings by clicking the checkbox to the right of each reading. After selecting one or more readings, scroll up and click "continue." This will take you to an order form. Please fill this out to complete your order.
Readings may be purchased in a packet that includes the whole course, or by the week. Starred items will not be included in the packet, but will be available for purchase at the Yale Bookstore/Barnes and Noble.
The Death of Citizenship? |
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20 & 22 February 2001
DeVane Lecture: Bruce Ackerman, Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science
While philosophers debate the nature of democratic citizenship, the practice of citizenship is disintegrating before our eyes. Vietnam killed the citizen army. Television killed the political party as a popular institution. The citizen jury is on the fringe of everyday life -- while jury duty has not yet completely disintegrated in manner of service in the citizen militia, it is nothing more than a momentary nuisance. The only significant institution that still invites involvement by ordinary people is the public school, and it too is under attack.
The rituals of citizenship have been stripped down to a precious few -- besides the formal act of voting, perhaps the most significant ordinary act of citizenship is to show one's passport at the border, and thereby gain admission to this land of peace and plenty. But it is quite possible to live life in America today without ever dealing with others as fellow citizens - fellow workers or professionals, yes; fellow religionists or union members, yes; but fellow citizens, focusing on our common predicament as Americans, no -- that's for TV pundits.
Within this setting, the disagreements between so-called communitarians like Mike Walzer and so-called liberals like myself pale into insignificance. For both of us, the foundation of legitimate politics is an ongoing conversation among citizens; and such a conversation presupposes that people recognize each other as the sorts of creatures who meaningfully engage in such conversations. This recognition does not emerge magically from a state of nature. While it might have evolved spontaneously under the conditions of the Greek polis or the Italian city-state, this is definitely not true today. It is perfectly possible for us to live in mass market society without ever taking citizenship seriously.
Rather than engaging in meta-speculation about the foundations of such a project, I will summarize three initiatives of mine that exemplify it. Each is a book I am writing in collaboration with a different co-author, and each gets on with the business of making a practical proposal which, if adopted, would create a new and meaningful context in which ordinary Americans would think of themselves as citizens, as opposed to mothers and fathers, workers or bosses, Catholics or Jews.
All three books adopt a stance that I will playfully call realistic utopian. Beginning with the realistic side of this oxymoron, each works out its particular proposal with all the tools of modern public policy analysis and aspires to the (undoubtedly unattainable) ideals of rigorous empirical demonstration prized in the Kennedy School and like institutions throughout the land. The task, in short, is to establish -- as well as such things can be established-- that the proposal will actually operate effectively as a functioning part of contemporary American society. But unlike most policy work, my focus is not on relatively minor modifications of the status quo, as defined by existing political forces and understandings. Instead, my aim is unabashedly driven by philosophical concerns: How might we change the world so as to create meaningful contexts for liberal citizenship? If something is doable, and pushes us in the right direction, then it should be added to the next liberal agenda. For God knows, we need a new liberal agenda, one more inspiring than subsidized prescriptions for the elderly and the elimination of the national debt by 2012.
I will end by taking a step back to the meta-level : suppose, heroically, that my three proposals seem both practical and desirable, what does that teach us about the daunting question I left dangling about the art of political invention: Is there anything generalizable to be learned from these three particular exercises in citizenship construction?
Readings:
Copies of the assigned readings are available to the public at the New Haven Free Public Library on the Green or may be purchased online with a credit card through Yale's RIS Department (at http://www.yale.edu/ris/cpl.htm). To order reading materials for Democratic Vistas, please visit the Web site listed above. Once on the site: read the instructions, scroll down the page and look for "click here to begin ordering". Once on the ordering page, scroll down and look for the packets DEVN 194b_ wk 01 through wk 13. You can choose any of the DEVN 194b readings by clicking the checkbox to the right of each reading. After selecting one or more readings, scroll up and click "continue." This will take you to an order form. Please fill this out to complete your order.
Readings may be purchased in a packet that includes the whole course, or by the week. Starred items will not be included in the packet, but will be available for purchase at the Yale Bookstore/Barnes and Noble.
Institution for Social & Policy Studies: Sponsored by the Program on Non-Profit Organizations at ISPS, with William L. Sachs, Director of Research, Episcopal Church Foundation, Visiting Fellow, PONPO, Yale University
American Democracy and the Origins of the Biomedical Revolution |
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27 February & 1 March 2001
DeVane Lecture: Joan A. Steitz, Sterling Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry
The biomedical revolution started in 1953 with the discovery of the structure of DNA, the genetic material, by Watson and Crick. This led to the growth of a new discipline called molecular biology. The resulting development in the mid-1970s of recombinant DNA spawned the biotechnology industry, advances in the prevention and treatment of disease (diagnostic tests, monitoring the blood supply), genetically modified foods and now the human genome. Why has this spectacular revolution in understanding and application occurred primarily in the US rather than in other nations equally competent in science?
We will discuss how diversity both in the structure of higher education in the US and in the funding of basic biomedical research has contributed. The decision of the American government after World War II to invest in basic research, leading to the founding of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and expansion of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), was important. However, the non-hierarchical structure of faculties at research universities (both public and private) and the disproportionate representation of graduates of liberal arts colleges (which do not exist elsewhere in the world) in science are also major factors. Likewise, the plurality of funding sources that have supported pursuit-of-knowledge rather than strategic research goals has been critical. Both governmental agencies (NIH and NSF) and private foundations, such as the American Cancer Society (ACS) and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), have relied on peer review, markedly increasing the probability of funding truly innovative ideas. Finally, the American scientist is not a passive recipient, but much more of an activist engaged in shaping research policy than scientists elsewhere.
Readings:
Copies of the assigned readings are available to the public at the New Haven Free Public Library on the Green or may be purchased online with a credit card through Yale's RIS Department (at http://www.yale.edu/ris/cpl.htm). To order reading materials for Democratic Vistas, please visit the Web site listed above. Once on the site: read the instructions, scroll down the page and look for "click here to begin ordering". Once on the ordering page, scroll down and look for the packets DEVN 194b_ wk 01 through wk 13. You can choose any of the DEVN 194b readings by clicking the checkbox to the right of each reading. After selecting one or more readings, scroll up and click "continue." This will take you to an order form. Please fill this out to complete your order.
Readings may be purchased in a packet that includes the whole course, or by the week. Starred items will not be included in the packet, but will be available for purchase at the Yale Bookstore/Barnes and Noble.
Democracy and Computers -- Pitfalls, Possibilities |
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20 & 22 March 2001
DeVane Lecture: David Gelernter, Professor of Computer Science. Are computers good or bad for democracy? (Or are they just irrelevant?) We need to ask first: what's good for democracy in general? Citizens who are well-informed, thoughtful, and feel responsible for the community. On that basis we might easily guess that computers are no good for democracy. They are said to make people well informed, but ARE Americans well informed? (About what? We aren't even well-informed about computers.) It seems unlikely that computers make us thoughtful. (The kind of thoughtfulness that is most useful to a democracy centers, presumably, on experience, knowledge -- especially of history -- and common sense. Computers haven't contributed much in any of these departments.) And it seems possible that, in the long run, computers and the internet diminish our sense of responsibility to the community, insofar as they tend to connect us directly to the things we want instead of requiring that we work through human intermediaries.
We might even guess that computers are not merely no good for democracy, that they are actively bad for it. Computers and the internet, we might guess, have become American society's Big Theme (having lucked into the role when the Cold War retired). This topic more than any other is covered relentlessly in the press, fretted-over in the schools and discussed endlessly by everyone everywhere.
American society shows alarming signs of being molded around computers like limp plastic around a metal form. And we might easily guess that, as Big Themes go, this is a bad one -- because it is morally, spiritually and intellectually empty. Not that computers are intrinsically a vacuous topic, not at all; it's just that we like to treat them as if they were.
But this story doesn't have to be wholly negative. There are many things computers might do for democracy, in principle. They might diminish our sense of responsibility to the community, but they might also reconnect the community. Eventually they might in fact make citizens better informed. They might help us recover from the plague of passive reliance on professionals and experts that has afflicted us for so long. They might improve our schools. We make such developments more likely when we refuse to take the goodness of computers for granted, and insist on approaching them with the critical skepticism for which we are so highly celebrated. Free and open to the public.
Readings:
Copies of the assigned readings are available to the public at the New Haven Free Public Library on the Green or may be purchased online with a credit card through Yale's RIS Department (at http://www.yale.edu/ris/cpl.htm). To order reading materials for Democratic Vistas, please visit the Web site listed above. Once on the site: read the instructions, scroll down the page and look for "click here to begin ordering". Once on the ordering page, scroll down and look for the packets DEVN 194b_ wk 01 through wk 13. You can choose any of the DEVN 194b readings by clicking the checkbox to the right of each reading. After selecting one or more readings, scroll up and click "continue." This will take you to an order form. Please fill this out to complete your order.
Readings may be purchased in a packet that includes the whole course, or by the week. Starred items will not be included in the packet, but will be available for purchase at the Yale Bookstore/Barnes and Noble.
Democracy and Education |
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27 & 29 March 2001
DeVane Lecture: Richard Brodhead, Dean of Yale College and A.Bartlett Giamatti Professor of English and Professor of American Studies
This lecture takes note of the fact that, while our political democracy has long looked to the schools as a training ground for citizens, the relation between democracy and schooling has been complex and tension-ridden throughout this country's history. In almost every generation, American schools have found inspiring new missions as they have been asked to make new dreams of democratic community come true. At the same time, in giving them institutionalized form, schools have also displayed the limitations of these visions and highlighted their unforeseen social implications-with the result that the school has also been a special site of controversy in America, the home at once of democracy's special hopes, fears, frustrations, and inner struggles. The lecture will explore the complexities of this relation by looking at three notable chapters in the history of American education: Thomas Jefferson's plan for schools for post-revolutionary Virginia; the movement, associated with Horace Mann, that pressed for compulsory universal public education in the antebellum era; and the democratization of college and university admissions-at Yale and elsewhere-in the century just closed. Free and open to the public.
Readings:
Copies of the assigned readings are available to the public at the New Haven Free Public Library on the Green or may be purchased online with a credit card through Yale's RIS Department (at http://www.yale.edu/ris/cpl.htm). To order reading materials for Democratic Vistas, please visit the Web site listed above. Once on the site: read the instructions, scroll down the page and look for "click here to begin ordering". Once on the ordering page, scroll down and look for the packets DEVN 194b_ wk 01 through wk 13. You can choose any of the DEVN 194b readings by clicking the checkbox to the right of each reading. After selecting one or more readings, scroll up and click "continue." This will take you to an order form. Please fill this out to complete your order.
Readings may be purchased in a packet that includes the whole course, or by the week. Starred items will not be included in the packet, but will be available for purchase at the Yale Bookstore/Barnes and Noble.
Democracy and the Family |
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3 & 5 April 2001
DeVane Lecture: Nancy F. Cott, Stanley Woodward Professor of History and American Studies
The lecture on Democracy and the Family will focus on the national public values associated with private families in the twentieth-century United States. This linkage rose to a new level of emphasis during World War II, when political discourse embraced liberty, privacy, and consent as hallmarks of American families. The U.S Supreme Court set these linkages into constitutional interpretation at mid-century, fusing the protection of marital intimacy to the political principles of American democracy, and thus underpinning contemporary constitutional doctrine on privacy rights. The emotional and material comforts of home have continued to be seen as personally-chosen private freedoms and at the same time as public emblems of the nation, essential to its existence and defense. My lecture will pursue the shifting but persistent invocation of these themes through the second half of the twentieth century, in which, it could be said, American political discourse invokes a particular family form as democracy,s most appealing common denominator. Free and open to the public.
Readings:
Copies of the assigned readings are available to the public at the New Haven Free Public Library on the Green or may be purchased online with a credit card through Yale's RIS Department (at http://www.yale.edu/ris/cpl.htm). To order reading materials for Democratic Vistas, please visit the Web site listed above. Once on the site: read the instructions, scroll down the page and look for "click here to begin ordering". Once on the ordering page, scroll down and look for the packets DEVN 194b_ wk 01 through wk 13. You can choose any of the DEVN 194b readings by clicking the checkbox to the right of each reading. After selecting one or more readings, scroll up and click "continue." This will take you to an order form. Please fill this out to complete your order.
Readings may be purchased in a packet that includes the whole course, or by the week. Starred items will not be included in the packet, but will be available for purchase at the Yale Bookstore/Barnes and Noble.
Can Religion Tolerate Democracy (and Vice Versa)? |
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10 & 12 April 2001
DeVane Lecture: Stephen L. Carter, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law
As we look toward the future of religion in America, we can note three intersecting trends. First, the American people are, and seem likely to remain, by far the most deeply religious people in the Western world, and religious people tend to see their world in religious terms. Second, both political philosophy and elite opinion insist on the view that religious sentiment is a contaminant in politics, and in the public conversation that should characterize liberal democracy. Third, the Supreme Court, often relied upon as the referee, has more or less quit the field.
This lecture will examine strong religious devotion from the point of view of liberal democracy, and liberal democracy from the point of view of strong religious devotion. Some of it will be history, some of it will be theory, and some of it will be constitutional law - but most of it will be practical reality, less what should be than what is, for accurately recognizing the features of the world we inhabit is necessarily prior to deciding whether to try to change them.
The basic thesis is this: As liberal democracy grows increasingly scientistic, its structures of authority will necessarily become less populist, as well as less attuned to modes of belief and of living that depart from scientistic norms. At the same time, religious will find themselves under pressure to accede to the norms of liberal culture. Each will struggle to change the other. But democracy without religion is empty of meaning, and religion without democracy is empty of faith. We fought those battles once already in America, at the dawn of the twentieth century. How appropriate to find ourselves revisiting them at the dawn of the twenty-first. Free and open to the public.
Readings:
Copies of the assigned readings are available to the public at the New Haven Free Public Library on the Green or may be purchased online with a credit card through Yale's RIS Department (at http://www.yale.edu/ris/cpl.htm). To order reading materials for Democratic Vistas, please visit the Web site listed above. Once on the site: read the instructions, scroll down the page and look for "click here to begin ordering". Once on the ordering page, scroll down and look for the packets DEVN 194b_ wk 01 through wk 13. You can choose any of the DEVN 194b readings by clicking the checkbox to the right of each reading. After selecting one or more readings, scroll up and click "continue." This will take you to an order form. Please fill this out to complete your order.
Readings may be purchased in a packet that includes the whole course, or by the week. Starred items will not be included in the packet, but will be available for purchase at the Yale Bookstore/Barnes and Noble.
Democracy and Foreign Policy |
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17 & 19 April 2001
DeVane Lecture: John Lewis Gaddis, Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History
This lecture will begin with a short history of American thinking on the issue of whether the United States should try to spread democracy elsewhere, focusing especially on the tension between the idea that people should determine their own forms of government, on the one hand, and belief in the superiority of American institutions, on the other. It will then examine the actual expansion of democracy throughout the world during the 20th century, with a view to determining the extent to which American actions - deliberate or otherwise - helped to bring about this result. The lecture will conclude with an assessment of prospects for this trend toward global democratisation in the 21st century, and with an evaluation of arguments for and against the proposition that sustaining it is or should be a vital national interest for the United States.
Readings:
Copies of the assigned readings are available to the public at the New Haven Free Public Library on the Green or may be purchased online with a credit card through Yale's RIS Department (at http://www.yale.edu/ris/cpl.htm). To order reading materials for Democratic Vistas, please visit the Web site listed above. Once on the site: read the instructions, scroll down the page and look for "click here to begin ordering". Once on the ordering page, scroll down and look for the packets DEVN 194b_ wk 01 through wk 13. You can choose any of the DEVN 194b readings by clicking the checkbox to the right of each reading. After selecting one or more readings, scroll up and click "continue." This will take you to an order form. Please fill this out to complete your order.
Readings may be purchased in a packet that includes the whole course, or by the week. Starred items will not be included in the packet, but will be available for purchase at the Yale Bookstore/Barnes and Noble.
Meritocracy and Democracy: The Temptations of Mechanical, "Objective," and Impersonal Measures of Quality |
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24 & 26 April 2001
DeVane Lecture: James C. Scott, Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Professor of Anthropology
"Why are nearly all modern democracies, as well as large bureaucracies, inclined to devise impersonal, mechanical, 'objective' measures for what most of us would agree are qualitative judgments? Thus, although we now understand that there are many kinds of intelligence (analytical, aesthetic, imaginative, mechanical, spatial, etc), intelligence is, for the purpose of college admissions, gauged by the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). Many of the benefits and burdens of large projects (dams, agricultural colonization, roads) defy measurement. And yet, a single metric called 'cost-benefit analysis' which assumes that all outcomes are commensurable, is typically used to evaluate them, whether by the World Bank, Ministries of Public Works, or development consultants. Why are professors increasingly evaluated by the number of articles, books, and their "social science citation index' scores? Why are school teachers judges by the mean scores of their pupils? What are the consequences of judging the quality of people and their work in this fashion? Why, in other words, do political systems designed to peaceably resolve differences in values actually end up removing so much of the stuff of politics to the realm of technical calculation? Free and open to the public.
Readings:
Copies of the assigned readings are available to the public at the New Haven Free Public Library on the Green or may be purchased online with a credit card through Yale's RIS Department (at http://www.yale.edu/ris/cpl.htm). To order reading materials for Democratic Vistas, please visit the Web site listed above. Once on the site: read the instructions, scroll down the page and look for "click here to begin ordering". Once on the ordering page, scroll down and look for the packets DEVN 194b_ wk 01 through wk 13. You can choose any of the DEVN 194b readings by clicking the checkbox to the right of each reading. After selecting one or more readings, scroll up and click "continue." This will take you to an order form. Please fill this out to complete your order.
Readings may be purchased in a packet that includes the whole course, or by the week. Starred items will not be included in the packet, but will be available for purchase at the Yale Bookstore/Barnes and Noble.
Pictures of the People: Visual Multiples and their Role as Supporting Tools for the Democratic Process |
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1 & 3 May 2001
DeVane Lecture: Richard Benson, Dean of the School of Art, Professor of Photography
The question underlying the lecture will be of the chicken and egg variety did technological innovation precede social developments, and make them possible, or did desire and need drive the development of technology.
This point can be nicely illustrated by examining the origin of printing from moveable type. The development of this invention had nothing to do with a philosophical ideal, such as disseminating knowledge broadly to a previously un-empowered audience; rather printing was invented simply to make cheaper books. Only after its establishment did the possibility of widespread education, through the production of identical multiple copies, become a possibility. Free and open to the public.
I will show pictures that illuminate 5 major technical aspects of pictures:
1 The nature of pictures as representational, symbolic or decorative.
2 The development of pictures that can move (not moving pictures, but rather ones that can travel to widespread audiences)
3 The revolutionary possibilities of identical multiple images.
4 The invention and implications of photography.
5 The steadily decreasing mass of printing matrices and multiple picture forms.
All of this is about the dissemination of knowledge through the power of pictures, and the manner in which systems such as democracy can grow to previously unheard of scales through the efficient spread of identical blocks of information through visual forms that exist in multiple copies. Free and open to the public.
Readings:
Copies of the assigned readings are available to the public at the New Haven Free Public Library on the Green or may be purchased online with a credit card through Yale's RIS Department (at http://www.yale.edu/ris/cpl.htm). To order reading materials for Democratic Vistas, please visit the Web site listed above. Once on the site: read the instructions, scroll down the page and look for "click here to begin ordering". Once on the ordering page, scroll down and look for the packets DEVN 194b_ wk 01 through wk 13. You can choose any of the DEVN 194b readings by clicking the checkbox to the right of each reading. After selecting one or more readings, scroll up and click "continue." This will take you to an order form. Please fill this out to complete your order.
Readings may be purchased in a packet that includes the whole course, or by the week. Starred items will not be included in the packet, but will be available for purchase at the Yale Bookstore/Barnes and Noble.
Exhibition will be on display through June 1st, at the Yale University Visitor Information Center.
Yale Center for British Art: This exhibition draws from the Yale Center for British Art's collection and includes works by William Blake, Thomas Gainsborough, and others. Free and open to the public.
Democracy and the Family |
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3 & 5 April 2001
DeVane Lecture: Nancy F. Cott, Stanley Woodward Professor of History and American Studies
The lecture on Democracy and the Family will focus on the national public values associated with private families in the twentieth-century United States. This linkage rose to a new level of emphasis during World War II, when political discourse embraced liberty, privacy, and consent as hallmarks of American families. The U.S Supreme Court set these linkages into constitutional interpretation at mid-century, fusing the protection of marital intimacy to the political principles of American democracy, and thus underpinning contemporary constitutional doctrine on privacy rights. The emotional and material comforts of home have continued to be seen as personally-chosen private freedoms and at the same time as public emblems of the nation, essential to its existence and defense. My lecture will pursue the shifting but persistent invocation of these themes through the second half of the twentieth century, in which, it could be said, American political discourse invokes a particular family form as democracy,s most appealing common denominator. Free and open to the public.
Readings:
Copies of the assigned readings are available to the public at the New Haven Free Public Library on the Green or may be purchased online with a credit card through Yale's RIS Department (at http://www.yale.edu/ris/cpl.htm). To order reading materials for Democratic Vistas, please visit the Web site listed above. Once on the site: read the instructions, scroll down the page and look for "click here to begin ordering". Once on the ordering page, scroll down and look for the packets DEVN 194b_ wk 01 through wk 13. You can choose any of the DEVN 194b readings by clicking the checkbox to the right of each reading. After selecting one or more readings, scroll up and click "continue." This will take you to an order form. Please fill this out to complete your order.
Readings may be purchased in a packet that includes the whole course, or by the week. Starred items will not be included in the packet, but will be available for purchase at the Yale Bookstore/Barnes and Noble.
Can Religion Tolerate Democracy (and Vice Versa)? |
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10 & 12 April 2001
DeVane Lecture: Stephen L. Carter, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law
As we look toward the future of religion in America, we can note three intersecting trends. First, the American people are, and seem likely to remain, by far the most deeply religious people in the Western world, and religious people tend to see their world in religious terms. Second, both political philosophy and elite opinion insist on the view that religious sentiment is a contaminant in politics, and in the public conversation that should characterize liberal democracy. Third, the Supreme Court, often relied upon as the referee, has more or less quit the field.
This lecture will examine strong religious devotion from the point of view of liberal democracy, and liberal democracy from the point of view of strong religious devotion. Some of it will be history, some of it will be theory, and some of it will be constitutional law - but most of it will be practical reality, less what should be than what is, for accurately recognizing the features of the world we inhabit is necessarily prior to deciding whether to try to change them.
The basic thesis is this: As liberal democracy grows increasingly scientistic, its structures of authority will necessarily become less populist, as well as less attuned to modes of belief and of living that depart from scientistic norms. At the same time, religious will find themselves under pressure to accede to the norms of liberal culture. Each will struggle to change the other. But democracy without religion is empty of meaning, and religion without democracy is empty of faith. We fought those battles once already in America, at the dawn of the twentieth century. How appropriate to find ourselves revisiting them at the dawn of the twenty-first. Free and open to the public.
Readings:
Copies of the assigned readings are available to the public at the New Haven Free Public Library on the Green or may be purchased online with a credit card through Yale's RIS Department (at http://www.yale.edu/ris/cpl.htm). To order reading materials for Democratic Vistas, please visit the Web site listed above. Once on the site: read the instructions, scroll down the page and look for "click here to begin ordering". Once on the ordering page, scroll down and look for the packets DEVN 194b_ wk 01 through wk 13. You can choose any of the DEVN 194b readings by clicking the checkbox to the right of each reading. After selecting one or more readings, scroll up and click "continue." This will take you to an order form. Please fill this out to complete your order.
Readings may be purchased in a packet that includes the whole course, or by the week. Starred items will not be included in the packet, but will be available for purchase at the Yale Bookstore/Barnes and Noble.
Democracy and Foreign Policy |
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17 & 19 April 2001
DeVane Lecture: John Lewis Gaddis, Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History
This lecture will begin with a short history of American thinking on the issue of whether the United States should try to spread democracy elsewhere, focusing especially on the tension between the idea that people should determine their own forms of government, on the one hand, and belief in the superiority of American institutions, on the other. It will then examine the actual expansion of democracy throughout the world during the 20th century, with a view to determining the extent to which American actions - deliberate or otherwise - helped to bring about this result. The lecture will conclude with an assessment of prospects for this trend toward global democratisation in the 21st century, and with an evaluation of arguments for and against the proposition that sustaining it is or should be a vital national interest for the United States.
Readings:
Copies of the assigned readings are available to the public at the New Haven Free Public Library on the Green or may be purchased online with a credit card through Yale's RIS Department (at http://www.yale.edu/ris/cpl.htm). To order reading materials for Democratic Vistas, please visit the Web site listed above. Once on the site: read the instructions, scroll down the page and look for "click here to begin ordering". Once on the ordering page, scroll down and look for the packets DEVN 194b_ wk 01 through wk 13. You can choose any of the DEVN 194b readings by clicking the checkbox to the right of each reading. After selecting one or more readings, scroll up and click "continue." This will take you to an order form. Please fill this out to complete your order.
Readings may be purchased in a packet that includes the whole course, or by the week. Starred items will not be included in the packet, but will be available for purchase at the Yale Bookstore/Barnes and Noble.
Meritocracy and Democracy: The Temptations of Mechanical, "Objective," and Impersonal Measures of Quality |
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24 & 26 April 2001
DeVane Lecture: James C. Scott, Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Professor of Anthropology
"Why are nearly all modern democracies, as well as large bureaucracies, inclined to devise impersonal, mechanical, 'objective' measures for what most of us would agree are qualitative judgments? Thus, although we now understand that there are many kinds of intelligence (analytical, aesthetic, imaginative, mechanical, spatial, etc), intelligence is, for the purpose of college admissions, gauged by the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). Many of the benefits and burdens of large projects (dams, agricultural colonization, roads) defy measurement. And yet, a single metric called 'cost-benefit analysis' which assumes that all outcomes are commensurable, is typically used to evaluate them, whether by the World Bank, Ministries of Public Works, or development consultants. Why are professors increasingly evaluated by the number of articles, books, and their "social science citation index' scores? Why are school teachers judges by the mean scores of their pupils? What are the consequences of judging the quality of people and their work in this fashion? Why, in other words, do political systems designed to peaceably resolve differences in values actually end up removing so much of the stuff of politics to the realm of technical calculation? Free and open to the public.
Readings:
Copies of the assigned readings are available to the public at the New Haven Free Public Library on the Green or may be purchased online with a credit card through Yale's RIS Department (at http://www.yale.edu/ris/cpl.htm). To order reading materials for Democratic Vistas, please visit the Web site listed above. Once on the site: read the instructions, scroll down the page and look for "click here to begin ordering". Once on the ordering page, scroll down and look for the packets DEVN 194b_ wk 01 through wk 13. You can choose any of the DEVN 194b readings by clicking the checkbox to the right of each reading. After selecting one or more readings, scroll up and click "continue." This will take you to an order form. Please fill this out to complete your order.
Readings may be purchased in a packet that includes the whole course, or by the week. Starred items will not be included in the packet, but will be available for purchase at the Yale Bookstore/Barnes and Noble.
Pictures of the People: Visual Multiples and their Role as Supporting Tools for the Democratic Process |
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1 & 3 May 2001
DeVane Lecture: Richard Benson, Dean of the School of Art, Professor of Photography
The question underlying the lecture will be of the chicken and egg variety did technological innovation precede social developments, and make them possible, or did desire and need drive the development of technology.
This point can be nicely illustrated by examining the origin of printing from moveable type. The development of this invention had nothing to do with a philosophical ideal, such as disseminating knowledge broadly to a previously un-empowered audience; rather printing was invented simply to make cheaper books. Only after its establishment did the possibility of widespread education, through the production of identical multiple copies, become a possibility. Free and open to the public.
I will show pictures that illuminate 5 major technical aspects of pictures:
1 The nature of pictures as representational, symbolic or decorative.
2 The development of pictures that can move (not moving pictures, but rather ones that can travel to widespread audiences)
3 The revolutionary possibilities of identical multiple images.
4 The invention and implications of photography.
5 The steadily decreasing mass of printing matrices and multiple picture forms.
All of this is about the dissemination of knowledge through the power of pictures, and the manner in which systems such as democracy can grow to previously unheard of scales through the efficient spread of identical blocks of information through visual forms that exist in multiple copies. Free and open to the public.
Readings:
Copies of the assigned readings are available to the public at the New Haven Free Public Library on the Green or may be purchased online with a credit card through Yale's RIS Department (at http://www.yale.edu/ris/cpl.htm). To order reading materials for Democratic Vistas, please visit the Web site listed above. Once on the site: read the instructions, scroll down the page and look for "click here to begin ordering". Once on the ordering page, scroll down and look for the packets DEVN 194b_ wk 01 through wk 13. You can choose any of the DEVN 194b readings by clicking the checkbox to the right of each reading. After selecting one or more readings, scroll up and click "continue." This will take you to an order form. Please fill this out to complete your order.
Readings may be purchased in a packet that includes the whole course, or by the week. Starred items will not be included in the packet, but will be available for purchase at the Yale Bookstore/Barnes and Noble.
Exhibition will be on display through June 1st, at the Yale University Visitor Information Center.
William C. DeVane Lectures - Ideals Without Ideologies: Yale's Contribution to Modern Architecture Robert A.M. Stern, Dean School of Architecture |
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10 September - 10 December 2001
DeVane Lectures/School of Architecture: This series of lectures, given by Robert A.M. Stern, Dean of the School of Architecture and six guest speakers, will examine post World War II architecture through the lens of the Yale School of Architecture, where key issues of architectural modernity, especially the conflicting relationship between European and American modalities of thought and practice, were vividly portrayed and debated in the classroom, studio and in the work of leading faculty and graduates. For more information, please call 203-432-2889 or email jennifer.castellon@yale.edu.
