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Roundtable on Seyla Benhabib’s Exile, Statelessness, and Migration

Thu, August 30, 10:00 to 11:30am, Sheraton, Back Bay C

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

This roundtable brings together a diverse set of scholars to discuss Seyla Benhabib’s forthcoming book Exile, Statelessness and Migration: Playing Chess with History From Hannah Arendt to Isaiah Berlin (Princeton University Press, 2018). The book will be available in print by the 2018 APSA Annual Meeting, and it speaks directly to this year's theme, “Democracy and Its Discontents.”

Exile, Statelessness and Migration explores the intertwined lives, careers and thoughts of the exiled Jewish intellectuals in the middle of the last century—Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Judith Shklar, Albert Hirschman, and Isaiah Berlin, among others (including Gershom Scholem, Leo Strauss, Hans Kelsen, and Emmanuel Levinas)—who produced one of the most brilliant and effervescent intellectual movements of modernity. By illuminating the force-field formed by the attraction and repulsion of their ideas, it surveys the salutary plurality of their Jewish lives, and examines the themes of identity and otherness in modern societies; exile, voice and loyalty; legality and legitimacy; pluralism and the problem of judgment. Their contributions are refracted by their individual and collective experiences, but their significance transcends biographical detail to provide us with universal insights into the meanings of exile, statelessness and migration in a new century as we face challenges to democratic polities not unlike those encountered by this remarkable group of political thinkers.

The participants of the roundtable will discuss the enduring legacy of these émigré Jewish intellectuals by grappling with the contemporary discontents and dilemmas of liberal democracies. They will examine the key themes and contributions of Benhabib’s timely book by attending to some of these discontents and dilemmas, including those related to the erosion of liberal democratic norms, the rise of global migration and new forms of statelessness, and the challenges of cultivating plurality in the midst of political polarization.

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