Danielle Charette

  Judith Shklar has a provocative little essay called “Why Teach Political Theory?” Crafting the response she might give to “some imaginary dean,” Shklar emphasizes that a liberal education is […]

We’ve decided to experiment with a new feature on the blog called “close-reading Tocqueville.” The premise is simple: we’ll periodically select one chapter from Tocqueville’s corpus and comment on what […]

  In a 1972 speech at the Chicago Public Library, the novelist Saul Bellow described the Westside branch where he borrowed books as a boy. The regulars at the Humbolt […]

This is the launch of our book forum for Sophia Rosenfeld’s Democracy and Truth: A Short History (University of Pennsylvania Press 2019).    Populist and “post-truth” politics have a long pedigree. Pamphlets […]

  The SAT was back in the news last week, thanks to the College Board’s introduction of something called an “adversity score.” Admissions officers will now see a number, between […]

The New York Times recently ran an entertaining—if somewhat unnerving—piece on Silicon Valley’s fascination with Stoicism. A number of prominent tech entrepreneurs claim to follow the philosophy of self-mastery taught by […]

Review of Matthew Pressman, On Press: The Liberal Values That Shaped the News (Harvard University Press, 2018)     Readers imagining the history of the American news media might think of […]

David Runciman s’est rendu à l’Université de Chicago en février 2019 pour y donner une conférence sur la notion d’ « artificialité » chez Hobbes et présenter son dernier livre, How Democracy Ends. […]

Danielle Charette and Robert Stone sat down this week with Josiah Ober, the Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis Professor of classics and political science at Stanford University. They discussed Professor Ober’s latest book, Demopolis (Cambridge, […]

Jacob Hamburger and Danielle Charette sat down with David Runciman at the University of Chicago, just after his Political Theory Workshop presentation, where he connected ideas of artificiality and corporatism […]

Stephen Sawyer’s post in January on the democratic paradoxes of the administrative state got me thinking, somewhat tangentially, about the Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein. Like many non-lawyers, I first came […]

Last month, Samuel Moyn declared in The Chronicle of Higher Education that law schools might be bad for democracy. He seems to have struck a nerve. Moyn, a prominent human […]

Images by Claude Truong-Ngoc via Wikimedia Commons (CC by SA-3.0 ; https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kamel_Daoud_par_Claude_Truong-Ngoc_février_2015.jpg) Review of Kamel Daoud, Chroniques: Selected Columns, 2010-2016 (Other Press, 2018) Translated by Elisabeth Zerofsky I’m a latecomer to the Affaire […]

Image by Btb.jo via Wikimedia Commons (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:WW1_Trench_Warfare.jpg) The evolution of photography seems to correspond with our modern capacity for sympathy. Someone in a […]

Image by Dr. François S. Clemmons via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0 ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Rogers#/media/File:DivaMan_as_Officer_Clemmons.png) Until watching Morgan Neville’s documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, it had been a long while since […]

This past February, the Times Literary Supplement published a translation of Edith Wharton’s lecture, “France and Its Allies at War: The Witnesses Speak.” It’s a curious little speech, delivered in […]

Film review: Lady Bird, written and directed by Greta Gerwig; The Florida Project, written by Sean Baker and Chris Bergoch, directed by Sean Baker Tocqueville’s observations on raising girls in the United […]

  Danielle Charette is a PhD Student with the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, where she studies political theory. She graduated from Swarthmore College with a BA in […]