The essays gathered here ask what the American experience — more particularly the debates between federalists and anti-federalists — can teach about the costs, limits, and possibilities of building a union, and whether those lessons travel to Europe at all.
Irit Dekel is guest editor of an ongoing symposium on Jeffrey Goldfarb’s latest book on the retreat of democracy.
The Democracy Seminar relaunches with a renewed global mission: to connect scholars and democrats in confronting today’s mounting threats to democracy. In this new salvo, focused on the “truth” of the New Right, scholars examine how knowledge production and manipulation fuel the rise of illiberal movements in countries such as Argentina, Brazil, and the United States—highlighting the urgent work needed to defend both democracy and truth.
This issue marks a new chapter in the Democracy Seminar’s history. Four decades after its founding as a forum for democratic correspondence across borders, the Seminar begins a new phase through its partnership with the European Democracy Institute at Bard College Berlin and the New School for Social Research. The relaunch comes at a moment when democratic institutions face renewed pressures around the world. Growing authoritarianism, democratic backsliding, …
We relaunched the Democracy Seminar back in 2018 as a “worldwide committee of democratic correspondence” in the hope that “democrats of the world can learn from each other as we oppose the dark forces of our times.”
