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Did Liberalism Fail?

When: Tues, March 27th, 12 noon

Where: Amado Room, Irvine Auditorium

Co-sponsored by the Penn Program for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society, the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy, and the Penn Department of Political Science

Of the three dominant ideologies of the 20th century–fascism, communism, and liberalism–only the last remains. Could liberalism’s triumph be its own undoing? Collegium Institute welcomes Prof. Patrick Deneen, the David A. Potenziani Memorial Associate Professor of Constitutional Studies at the University of Notre Dame, to Penn to discuss his new book on the roots of the American political project and its contemporary upheaval.

Response by Prof. Samuel Freeman, Avalon Professor of the Humanities, Professor of Philosophy and Law (Penn)

Our Keynote Speaker

Patrick J. Deneen holds a B.A. in English literature and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Rutgers University. From 1995-1997 he was Speechwriter and Special Advisor to the Director of the United States Information Agency. From 1997-2005 he was Assistant Professor of Government at Princeton University. From 2005-2012 he was Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis Associate Professor of Government at Georgetown University, before joining the faculty of Notre Dame in Fall 2012. He is the author and editor of several books and numerous articles and reviews and has delivered invited lectures around the country and several foreign nations.

Deneen was awarded the A.P.S.A.’s Leo Strauss Award for Best Dissertation in Political Theory in 1995, and an honorable mention for the A.P.S.A.’s Best First Book Award in 2000. He has been awarded research fellowships from Princeton University and the Earhart Foundation.

His teaching and writing interests focus on the history of political thought, American political thought, religion and politics, and literature and politics.

Our Respondent

Samuel Freeman teaches courses on social and political philosophy, ethics, and philosophy of law at the University of Pennsylvania. He has written books on Justice and the Social Contract and on the political philosophy of John Rawls. His collection of papers, entitled Liberalism and Distributive Justice, is to appear in Spring 2018. Freeman edited the Cambridge Companion to Rawls (2002), as well as John Rawls’s Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy (2007) and his Collected Papers (1999). He is currently working on a manuscript on liberalism.

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What is Humanity? A Veritas Forum Event

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Faith & Film: A Magi Project Module