On Tyranny

How did two of the sharpest thinkers of human freedom and political power in the last century come to write such incommensurable accounts of inequality in America (and of the lure of tyranny that haunts it)? In this lecture, Dr. Kumar will take us through the strange place and figure of the “American South” in the political thought of Hannah Arendt and Judith Shklar, and ask what might change in our understanding of the American constitutional project — and its fantasies of racial terror — today if only we open ourselves, as Shklar might say, to “putting the South first”? Dr. Rachael Hill (History) will respond.

An American Institutions Common Core Lecture.