Recent years have seen attacks on liberalism for failing, but defenders deny that liberalism ever lost its way. In this lecture, Professor Samuel Moyn from Yale University will reprise some of the themes of his recent book Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times, arguing that the best parts of liberalism have to be rescued from the mistakes of liberals in the last few decades. As the 2024 United States presidential election raises questions about the health and quality of its democracy, whether and how liberalism can and should survive is one of the most pivotal questions of our time.
The Yale-NUS Lecture on Global Affairs is sponsored by the late Professor Saw Swee Hock.
About the speaker
Professor Samuel Moyn
Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History, Yale University
Samuel Moyn is the Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University, specialising in modern European intellectual history. He has authored several notable books including The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History , Christian Human Rights, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World and Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War.
In 2022, Prof Moyn delivered the Carlyle Lectures at the University of Oxford, which culminated in his latest book, Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times. He is currently engaged in diverse projects on aging, constitutional law, and the Vietnam war.
Prof Moyn is a regular contributor to various publications, including The Atlantic, The Guardian, and the New York Times. He is also a fellow of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
About the moderator
Assistant Professor Benjamin A Schupmann
Assistant Professor of Social Sciences (Philosophy, Politics, and Economics), Yale-NUS College
Assistant Professor Benjamin A Schupmann received his PhD in Political Science from Columbia University. Besides Yale-NUS College, he has also worked at Duke Kunshan University and the National University of Singapore.
In his research, Asst Prof Schupmann examines what early twentieth century German political and legal theory has to offer to twenty-first century democratic constitutionalism. He believes that those thinkers grappled with problems similar to some of the most pressing problems facing democracies today, including democratic backsliding and the legitimacy of democracy’s self-defence. In his research, he aims to show that we can still learn much from their theories and solutions to those problems.
