Anthony Laden Lecture: “Ongoing Activities”
Fellows Lectures
March 12, 2020
4:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Lecture: “How Democracy Doesn’t End”
Worries about the death of democracy are as old as democracy itself. According to a common view of democracy, democracies come to an end when their institutions and laws break down and are replaced by undemocratic ones. I contrast this common picture of democracy with one that depicts democracy as a way of living together, as a form of action that is, in principle, ongoing. On this second picture, democracy need not die even if its institutions do, because the civic actions that make a society democratic are a form of activity that doesn’t end.
Anthony Laden is Professor of Philosophy, and, since Aug. 2012, Chair of the department. He is the Associate Director of the Center for Ethics and Education, a collaboration with the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received his PhD in philosophy from Harvard University in 1996. He works in moral and political philosophy, where his research focuses on reasoning, democratic theory, feminism, the politics of identity, and the philosophy of education. He also has interests in the history of moral and political philosophy, especially Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel. He is the author of Reasoning: A Social Picture (Oxford University Press, 2012), and Reasonably Radical: Deliberative Liberalism and the Politics of Identity (Cornell, 2001), as well as the co-editor, with David Owen, of Multiculturalism and Political Theory (Cambridge, 2007). He has published numerous essays on the work of John Rawls, including “The House that Jack Built” (Ethics, 2003), and most recently, “Constructivism as Rhetoric” (Blackwell’s Companion to Rawls, 2014).
Date posted
Dec 10, 2019
Date updated
Feb 7, 2020