Reception to follow in 420 Barrows Hall
The Difficulty of Democracy in Democratic Socialism
The greatest challenge for ecological democratic socialism is not the generation of just provisioning and protection of all sentient life. The hard part is achieving this democratically, especially on a large scale and in a globally integrated world. The lecture meditates on this problem with reference to the utopian dreams of Erik Olin Wright.
Wendy Brown's fields of interest include the history of political theory, nineteenth and twentieth century Continental theory, critical theory and theories of contemporary capitalism. She is best known for intertwining the insights of Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Frankfurt School theorists, Foucault, and contemporary Continental philosophers to critically interrogate formations of power, political identity, citizenship, and political subjectivity in contemporary liberal democracies. In recent years, her scholarship has focused on neoliberalism and the political formations to which it gives rise. Professor Brown received her Ph.D in Political Philosophy from Princeton University in 1983. Prior to coming to Berkeley in 1999, she taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz and at Williams College. Her work has been translated into more than twenty languages. She lectures around the world and has held a number of distinguished fellowships and visiting professorships, most recently at Columbia, Cornell, Birkbeck and the London School of Economics. In 2017-18 she was a Simon Guggenheim Fellow and a UC Presidents Humanities Research Fellow.