Kenefick Chair Reading Group
Every other Monday, beginning Monday Feb. 8
3:45-5 p.m.
Zoom
Open to all interested faculty, administrators, staff, and alumni.
This year’s theme is “reconceiving social theory.” It takes its inspiration from this passage in Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si’: “We urgently need a humanism capable of bringing together the different fields of knowledge, including economics, in the service of a more integral and integrating vision”
The Kenefick Chair will supply a copy of the book for participants. A PDF of the book is also available online.
Contact Kenefick chair, J. Patrick Murray, PhD, by email ([email protected]) if you have any questions or if you are interested in participating.
In the fall, commemorating the fifth anniversary of Laudato Si’, the Kenefick Chair Reading Group discussed Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of our Planetary Future (2018), by Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann.
On Nov. 3, 2020, two-thirds of Nebraskans voted to eliminate a provision of the state’s constitution that allowed slavery or involuntary servitude as punishment for a crime. On Jan. 20, 2021, the 46th president of the United States, Joseph Biden, was inaugurated. For 32 of its first 36 years, that high office was held by a slave-owner from Virginia, a group that included Washington, Jefferson, and Madison.
In his book Liberalism: A Counter-History, Domenico Losurdo investigates how such things could be in a nation born of liberal ideas. Losurdo probes the perplexing “twin birth” of liberalism and modern slavery: “Correctly stated, in all its radicalism, the paradox we face consists in this: the rise of liberalism and the spread of racial chattel slavery are the product of a twin birth.” Losurdo intensifies the paradox: “Slavery is not something that persisted despite the success of the three liberal revolutions. On the contrary, it experienced its maximum development following that success.” The other living pope, Benedict XVI (Karl Ratzinger), urges: “We cannot avoid careful analysis of every single component in the modern mind.” Liberalism is one of the most consequential components of “the modern mind.”
Peter Clarke wrote in the Financial Times that Liberalism: A Counter-History is “a brilliant exercise in unmasking liberal pretensions, surveying over three centuries with magisterial command of the sources.” Our discussion text for the spring, then, will be Domenico Losurdo’s Liberalism: A Counter-History (London: Verso, 2014), 384 pages.
Schedule:
- Monday, Feb. 8
- Monday, Feb. 22
- Monday, March 8
- Monday, March 22
- Monday, April 5
- Monday, April 19
