A collaboration with The New School and the European Democracy Institute
 

Category: A Symposium on Jeffrey C. Goldfarb’s Gray is Beautiful

Irit Dekel is guest editor of an ongoing symposium on Jeffrey Goldfarb’s latest book on the retreat of democracy.

Understanding the retreat of democracy with Jeff Goldfarb’s Gray is Beautiful

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Irit Dekel reflects on how the book’s subtitle, Confronting the Retreat of Democracy from the Radical Center, poses the potent tensions that are crucial for attempting to solve the problems at hand, suggesting that through his concept of the “radical center,” Goldfarb and the people who create this space create it consciously and arguing that it is radical to confront the retreat of democracy from a center that is plural and open.

Thoughts on “The Radical Center” and the Defense of Democracy

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Jeffrey C. Isaac suggests that this “paradoxical idea” (paradoxical, for: how can “radicalism” be “centrist?”) is best defended by Goldfarb himself, but that the answer goes something like this: however polarized the situation, and however righteous the cause, there is never a single way to act or to be. And so, there is always a need for there to be a space for thinking beyond oneself and one’s commitments, and for real dialogue—listening as well as speaking—as a constitutive feature of ethically justified action.

Resisting cynicism and neo-totalitarianism

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Siobhan Kattago notes that while “radical center” may sound like a contradiction in terms, the center that he envisions is radical because its roots can withstand the abyss of raging anger promoted by strongmen and clever algorithms, insofar as it is also an ethical space that grounds how we orient ourselves to one another and to the world. In this way, the radical center is similar to Krzysztof Czyzewski’s understanding of Sejny, as a small center of the world.