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Patrick McCarthy Memorial Series on Intellectuals and Politics


Supported by the “Patrick McCarthy Fund" (www.jhubc.it/McCarthy/)
hosted by Professor Mark Gilbert


PATRICK MCCARTHY MEMORIAL SEMINAR SERIES

INTELLECTUALS AND POLITICS

Patrick McCarthy was one of the leading scholars of contemporary Italian history and a major figure in the field of intellectual history of twentieth century Europe. He was also a distinguished member of faculty at the Bologna Center and an inspiration for many Bologna Center graduates. Upon his death, many of his former students contributed to establish a memorial fund in his name. Without their past generosity, this series would not be taking place.

This seminar series aims to revive a tradition of studies in the humanities that has always been part of the Bologna Center’s mission. Studying International Relations requires knowledge of what makes other countries and other cultures tick. It requires knowledge of the mores, ideas and histories of societies around the world. Patrick McCarthy, who published books on the French writers Celine and Camus as well as on the politics of Italy, France and Germany, was an able interpreter of this cultural dimension to international affairs.

This seminar series will mostly – albeit with occasional detours – deal with Italy. Italy, along with Greece and, of course, Germany, was the West European country most divided by the Cold War and its intellectual history was marked by the choice between East and West, Communism or Catholicism. The intellectual conflicts of post war Italy are perhaps the most intense in all Europe, but are less well known, in part for linguistic reasons, than the fervent ideological battles that took place in France.

In collaboration with the languages department, the seminar series will also be hosting several film nights in which classic "political" movies, in Italian with English subtitles, will be shown.

Overall, the seminar will help Bologna Center students grasp the immense cultural and political strains that have characterized Italian society in the post-war period.

NADIA URBINATI

Nadia Urbinati (Ph.D., European University Institute, Florence, 1989). Professor Urbinati is a political theorist who specializes in modern and contemporary political thought and the democratic and anti-democratic traditions. She co-chaired the Columbia University Faculty Seminar on Political and Social Thought and founded and chaired the Workshop on Politics, Religion and Human Rights. She is co-editor with Andrew Arato of the journal Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory. She is a member of the Executive Committee of the Foundation Reset Dialogues on Civilization-Istanbul Seminars.

She is the winner of the 2008-9 Lenfest/Columbia Distinguished Faculty Award. In 2008 the President of the Italian Republic awarded Professor Urbinati as Commendatore della Repubblica (Commander of the Italian Republic) "for her contribution to the study of democracy and the diffusion of Italian liberal and democratic thought abroad." In 2004 her book Mill on Democracy (cited below) received the David and Elaine Spitz Prize as the best book in liberal and democratic theory published in 2002.

Professor Urbinati is the author of Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy (University of Chicago Press 2006), and of Mill on Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 2002; Italian translation by Laterza 2006). She has edited Carlo Rosselli, Liberal Socialism (Princeton University Press, 1994) and Piero Gobetti, On Liberal Revolution (Yale University Press, 2000). She co-edited with Monique Canto-Sperber Le socialisme libéral:Une anthologie; Europe-Ëtats-Unis (Editions Esprit, 2003; Italian translation by Marsilio/Reset 2004); with Alex Zakaras, John Stuart Mill's Political Thught: A Bicentennial Reassessment (Cambridge University Press 2007), and with Stefano Recchia, A Cosmpolitanism of Nations:Giuseppe Mazzini's Writings on Democracy, Nation Building, and International Relations (Princeton University Press, 2009). She is co-editing with Steven Lukes Condorcet's Political Writing (Cambridge University Press; Cambridge Texts Series).

Among her books in Italian: Le civili libertá: Positivismo e liberalismo nell'Italia unita, prefaced by Norberto Bobbio (Venice: Marsilio 1990); Individualismo democratico (Rome: Donzelli 1997; 2009 second edition with a new Introduction); and Ai confini della democrazia: opportunità e rischi dell'universalismo democratico (Roma: Donzelli 2007).

In addition to book chapters, she has published articles and book reviews in several international scholarly journals: Political Theory, Ethics, Constellations, Philosophical Forum, Dissent, Review of Metaphysics, The European Journal of Political Theory, Perspectives on Politics, Redescriptions, Rivista di filosofia, Lua Nova, Revista Política & Sociedade, Il Mulino, European Journal of Sociology/Archives Européennes de Sociologie/Europäisches Archiv für Soziologie; Review of Metaphysics; Bryn Mawr Classical Review Website; Dissent Magazine; and Critique. She is also an editorial contributor of the Italian newspaper La Repubblica and publishes articles in the culture section of the Italian newspaper il Sole24ore. She is currently completing a monograph on the ideology of the anti-political and the critics of democracy.

Before coming to Columbia, Professor Urbinati served as visiting professor at New York University and the University of Pennsylvania, and as a lecturer at Princeton University. She also taught at the University UNICAMP in Brazil and was a visiting professor at the Scuola Superiore di Studi Universitari e Perfezionamento Sant'Anna of Pisa (Italy). She has been a member of the School of Social Sciences of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and of the Department of Political Studies of the University of Turin (Italy). She was appointed as a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Fellow for the academic year 2006-07 in the University Center for Human Values, Princeton University.