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Center for Global & Area Studies presents the first in its Global Populism lecture series:
THE END OF
THE END OF HISTORY
Kim Lane Scheppele,
Princeton University
October 2, 2017
3:00 – 4:30pm | Smith 140
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Francis Fukuyama pronounced the “end of history” when it seemed that the world was moving toward a consensus on the establishment of liberal, democratic, constitutional governments. Twenty-five years later, the number of liberal constitutional democracies is steadily declining. Backsliding states are developing a new set of legal tools to maintain the façade of democracy and constitutionalism, while hollowing out the liberal content. The lecture will examine Hungary, Poland, Russia, Turkey, Venezuela and Ecuador as models of the new illiberal constitutionalism. In each case, strongman leaders modify or replace constitutions while turning their new forms of constitutionalism into the production of “worst practices.” This lecture shows why liberal constitutionalists have been losing the battle for hearts and minds of angry publics and proposes the standard of “self-sustaining democracy” to spearhead the normative critique of these new regimes.
Professor Kim Lane Scheppele is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton. She held tenure in the political science department at the University of Michigan, was the founding director of the gender program at Central European University Budapest and has taught in the law schools at Michigan, Yale, Harvard, Erasmus/Rotterdam, and Humboldt/Berlin. From 2017-2019, she will serve as the elected President of the Law and Society Association.
This series is co-sponsored by Journalism Program; College of Arts & Sciences-Humanities; Center for Political Communication; School of Public Policy & Administration; and Departments of Anthropology; English; History; Languages, Literatures & Cultures; Political Science & International Relations; and Sociology & Criminal Justice.
Download a flyer for this event here or the series here.
