Overview
Please join us to hear Mark Lilla (Humanities, Columbia) speak on "The Open Society Moment." The idea of an open society has a quite recent history. It was born in the wake of the two world wars, when people were conscious of the evils of nationalism and intolerance and taken with the promise of an economically integrated free world. What future does this idea have now, in the face of mass migration and uncontrollable economic globalization?
After his remarks, Lilla will be joined in conversation by Dorothy Noyes (Director, Mershon Center) and Piers Turner (Director, CEHV).
This event is part of CEHV's 2023-24 COMPAS Directions program and cosponsored by the Mershon Center for International Security Studies.
This event will be livestreamed. To register, click below:
Speaker
Mark Lilla (Columbia University)
Mark Lilla, Professor of Humanities (Columbia University), specializes in intellectual history, with a particular focus on Western political and religious thought. He is the author of The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics (2017), The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction (2016), The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (2007),The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics (2001),and G.B. Vico: The Making of an Anti-Modern (1993). He has also edited The Legacy of Isaiah Berlin (2001) with Ronald Dworkin and Robert Silvers, and The Public Face of Architecture (1987) with Nathan Glazer. He is currently writing a book titled Ignorance and Bliss, and another on the history of the idea of conversion.
He has been awarded fellowships by the Russell Sage Foundation, the Institut d’études avancées (Paris), the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), and the American Academy in Rome. In 1995 he was inducted into the French Order of Academic Palms.
Lilla is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, and publications worldwide. His books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He lectures widely and has delivered the Weizmann Memorial Lecture in Israel and the Carlyle Lectures at Oxford University. In 2015 Overseas Press Club of America awarded him its prize for Best Commentary on International News in Any Medium.
Discussants
Dorothy Noyes (Director, Mershon Center)
Dorothy Noyes is College of Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor of English, with a joint appointment in the Department of Comparative Studies and courtesy appointments in Anthropology, French and Italian, and Germanic Languages and Literatures; she also teaches in the Program in International Studies. In summer 2022 she began an appointment as Director of the Mershon Center for International Security Studies; in 2005-2014 she directed Ohio State's Center for Folklore Studies.
Noyes studies political performance and the traditional public sphere in Europe, with an emphasis on how shared symbolic forms and indirect communication facilitate coexistence in situations of endemic social conflict. She also writes on folklore theory and the international policy careers of culture concepts. Among her books are Fire in the Plaça: Catalan Festival Politics After Franco (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Humble Theory: Folklore’s Grasp on Social Life (Indiana University Press, 2016); and Sustaining Interdisciplinary Collaboration: A Guide for the Academy, co-authored with Regina F. Bendix and Kilian Bizer (University of Illinois Press, 2017). She was an external fellow of the Göttingen Interdisciplinary Working Group on Cultural Property and is currently participating in "ConTrust: Trust in Conflict – Political Life under Conditions of Uncertainty" at Goethe University, Frankfurt.
Piers Turner (Director, CEHV)
Piers Norris Turner is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Political Science (by courtesy), and Director of the Center for Ethics and Human Values (CEHV). He is also a faculty coordinator for the interdisciplinary major in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, serves on the faculty advisory board of the Sustainability Institute, and is an active participant in the OSU Political Theory Workshop. At CEHV, he has been closely involved in the University's Shared Values Initiative and Civil Discourse Project, in addition to collaborating with CEHV's steering committee and staff on a range of programs aiming to support ethical reflection and discussion on campus. In 2023, he received the President and Provost's Award for Distinguished Faculty Service.
His research focuses on utilitarianism and liberal political thought, especially as it relates to the moral and political philosophy of John Stuart Mill. He has published articles in a number of leading journals and is working on a manuscript entitled Mill’s Ethics for the Cambridge Elements of Ethics series. He has co-edited Public Reason in Political Philosophy: Classic Sources and Contemporary Commentaries (Routledge, 2018, with Jerry Gaus) and a collection of unpublished social and political writings by Karl Popper, called After The Open Society (Routledge, 2008, with Jeremy Shearmur).
