Book Trouble 2006-2007

Program on Law and Social Thought

Politically alert intellectual work engages us in relationships to books -- to other people's writing -- that are often as important as our relationships to mentors and opponents, professional roles, historical crises, social alliances and social movements, our own normative yearnings and commitments, and our own moments of career success and failure. Sometimes books make our work possible; sometimes they block and baffle us. Sometimes we read them in ways that revive their intellectual and political possibilities; sometimes we read to defeat them, to overcome them, even to avoid them. Sometimes we deploy favorite texts to trouble our world; other times the world that troubles us is somehow immanent in a particular book.

Book Trouble places really wonderful readers in a direct engagement with really important books, seeking to explore the trouble that books and their readers can produce.

All are welcome to the following Book Trouble 2006-2007 seminars. Join us -- we hope sparks will fly!

On this site please find a bibliography and suggestions in where to find texts.

Book Trouble 2006-2007 poster  (*requires Adobe Acrobat Reader )

All meetings will take place in Pound 332 from 4:30-6:30pm.

Thursday, October 5

• William H. Simon
  Arthur Lewitt Professor of Law, Columbia Law School
  on
  John Dewey, The Public and its Problems

Monday, November 13

• Robert L. Howse
  Arlene and Allan F. Smith Professor of Law
  on
  Alexandre Kojeve's Outline of a Phenomenology of Right, trans. Bryan-Paul Frost and Robert Howse

Thursday, December 7

• Talha Syed
  S.J.D. Candidate, HLS
  on
  F. A. Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” 35 American Economic Review 519 (1945), and "Economics and Knowledge,” 4 Economica 33 (1937)

Thursday, February 15

• Beth Povinelli
  Professor, Department of Anthropology, Columbia University
  on
  Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture

Thursday, March 8

• Philip Allott
  Professor Emeritus of International Public Law, Cambridge University 
  on
  Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic, trans. Douglas Smith

Thursday, March 15

• Zina Miller
  J.D. Candidate, HLS and M.L.A.D Candidate, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy
  on
  Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-49

Thursday, April 19

• Arnulf Becker
  S.J.D. Candidate, HLS
  on
  Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin America, trans. Marjorie Mattingly Urquidi

Harvard Law School map

Harvard University map

 

Book Trouble - 2005 / 2006

Book Trouble II - Spring 2006

For further details please contact Terry Cyr.