The Common Interest in an Age of Economic Division : The Radical Challenge of Republican Political Thought

• Legal, Politics & Economics

In this talk, Michael J. Thompson will argue that American liberalism has taken us off course and is unable to sustain a genuine critique of the modern social order. He will propose an alternative view of social, economic and political life and institutions drawn from the tradition of radical republicanism: a principle of political thought drawn from thinkers such as Machiavelli, Milton, Rousseau, Hegel and Marx.

Thompson will sketch a theory “republican modernity” to compete with the liberal-conservative consensus in Western political life and culture.

Michael J. Thompson, a writer in residence in the Wertheim Study, is Associate Professor of Political Philosophy at William Paterson University. He has published seven books, among them The Politics of Inequality (Columbia University Press), and is currently working on two new books, The Republican Reinvention of Radicalism and The Perversion of Subjectivity: Studies in the Critical Theory of Consciousness. He is also the Founding Editor of the quarterly Logos: A Journal of Modern Society & Culture (www.logosjournal.com).