In Defense of Democracy and Liberalism

To RSVP, please click here. Laurent Cohen-Tanugi and Adam Gopnik explore ideas about current threats to democracy, the meaning and value of liberalism, and the rise of populism in the U.S., France, Great Britain and beyond, explored in their recent books, Cohen-Tanugi’s Résistances: La démocratie à l’épreuve, and Gopnik’s A Thousand Small Sanities: the Moral Adventure of Liberalism. Cohen-Tanugi’s book focuses on the threats to democracy posed by Brexit, Trump’s election, and the fragility of the French political situation. Gopnik’s book is a revisiting and defense of the idea of liberalism against attacks by both the Right and the Left, proposing that “Liberalism isn’t a political theory applied to life. It’s what we know about life applied to a political theory. That good change happens step by step, stone by stone, and bird by bird, that we advance in life by invisible thoroughfares and, feeling our way along in their darkness, awaken to find ourselves changed and, sometimes, improved.”

Event sponsored by the Knapp Family Foundation.