Speakers

Akeel Bilgrami, Columbia University
Alan Brinkley, Columbia University
G. A. Cohen, All Souls College, Oxford University
Jon Elster, Columbia University
James D. Fearon, Stanford University
John Ferejohn, Stanford University
George P. Fletcher, Columbia University
Diego Gambetta, Columbia University
Stephen Holmes, New York University
Bernard Manin, New York University
Mayor Antanas Mockus Sivickas, Bogota, Colombia
Adam Przeworski, New York University
Michel Rocard, France
Debra M. Satz, Standford University
Joseph E. Stiglitz, Columbia University
Jeremy Waldron, Columbia University





Akeel Bilgrami, Columbia University

Biography

Akeel Bilgrami received his first degree in English Literature at Bombay University and then went to Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, where he got a B.A in philosophy, politics, and economics. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, where he wrote a dissertation on the indeterminacy of translation. He taught at the University of Michigan for two years before he defected to Columbia University, where he has been since the mid-eighties. He has written a book called Belief and Meaning: The Unity and Locality of Mental Content, which is on issues of linguistic meaning and its relation to thought and reality. Bilgrami has also published various articles on related themes having to do with, generally, intentionality, first-person authority, scepticism, and realism. Apart from the philosophy of language and mind, he also has research interests in moral psychology and political theory.

Bilgrami has two more books coming out from Harvard University Press next year:

  • Self-Knowledge and Resentment, which offers an account of what makes self-knowledge different from all other kinds of knowledge.
  • Politics and the Moral Psychology of Identity, which is a book of essays on the nature of identity in identity politics and the question of how liberalism as a doctrine might be transformed to cope best with the phenomenon of identity politics. Many of the essays in this second book focus, in particular, on Islamic identity.
View Full Speaker List






Alan Brinkley, Columbia University

Biography

Alan Brinkley is the Allan Nevins Professor of History at Columbia University in New York, where he has taught since 1991. He is currently the provost of the University. His published works include Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (Knopf, 1982), which won the 1983 National Book Award; The Unfinished Nation: A Concise History of the American People (Knopf, 1992); The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (Knopf, 1995); and Liberalism and Its Discontents (Harvard, 1998). He is presently writing a biography of Henry R. Luce, to be published by Knopf.

View Full Speaker List






G. A. Cohen, All Souls College, Oxford University

Biography

G. A. Cohen was educated at McGill and Oxford Universities, where he obtained, respectively, the degrees of B.A. in philosophy and politics and B.Phil. in philosophy in 1963. For 22 years he was a lecturer and then a reader in philosophy at University College, London. In 1985 he became Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory and a fellow of All Souls, Oxford. Professor Cohen is the author of Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defense (1978; expanded edition, 2000), History, Labour, and Freedom (1988), Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality (1995), and If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich? (2000). Cohen has given lectures all over the world, including the Tanner Lectures at Stanford University in 1991 and the Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh University in 1996. He was made a fellow of the British Academy in 1985.

View Full Speaker List






Jon Elster, Columbia University

Biography

Before coming to Columbia University, Jon Elster taught in Paris, Oslo, and Chicago. His publications include Ulysses and the Sirens (1979), Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality (1983), Making Sense of Marx (1985), The Cement of Society (1989), Solomonic Judgements: Studies in the Limitation of Rationality (1989), Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences (1989), Local Justice: How Institutions Allocate Scarce Goods and Necessary Burdens (1992), and Political Psychology (1993).

Elster's research interests include the theory of rational choice, the theory of distributive justice, and the history of social thought (Marx and Tocqueville). He is currently working on a comparative study of constitution-making processes from the Federal Convention to the present and on a study of retroactive justice in countries that have recently emerged from authoritarian or totalitarian rule. Research interests include the theory of rational choice and the theory of distributive justice.

View Full Speaker List






James D. Fearon, Stanford University

Biography

James D. Fearon is professor of political science at Stanford University. His research has focused on democracy and international disputes, explanations for interstate wars, and, most recently, the causes of civil and especially ethnic violence. He is presently working on a book manuscript (with David Laitin) on civil war since 1945. Representative publications include "Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War," (American Political Science Review, February 2003), "Rationalist Explanations for War" (International Organization, Summer 1995), and "Domestic Political Audiences and the Escalation of International Disputes" (American Political Science Review, September 1994). Fearon won the 1999 Karl Deutsch Award, which is "presented annually to a scholar under the age of forty who is judged to have made, through a body publications, the most significant contribution to the study of International Relations and Peace Research." He was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences in 2002.

View Full Speaker List






John Ferejohn, Stanford University

Biography

John Ferejohn is a professor of political science at Stanford University, a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution, and a regular visiting professor at NYU Law School. He has previously taught at the California Institute of Technology and is an adjunct professor at the Research School for the Social Sciences at the Australian National University in Canberra. He has written on varied empirical and theoretical topics concerning political institutions and behavior, including social choice theory, electoral processes, and theories of legislatures and of legislation. Currently his interests have been in jurisprudence and political theory and in understanding rational choice explanations of social phenomena. Among his publications are Pork Barrel Politics; Rivers and Harbors Legislation, 1947-1968 (1974), Personal Vote: Constituency Service and Electoral Independence (1987), Constitutional Culture and Democractic Rule (2001), and numerous articles in journals and collections.

View Full Speaker List






George P. Fletcher, Columbia University

Biography

George P. Fletcher writes and speaks in the fields of criminal law, constitutional law, and international affairs. His latest book, Romantics at War: Glory and Guilt in the Age of Terrorism, was published in mid-November 2002. Michael Walzer describes the book "as a deep and engaging meditation . . . [for a lawyer] a wonderfully unlawyerly account, a philosophical investigation, of individual agency, responsibility, and guilt."

Fletcher has published over one hundred scholarly articles and several books designed primarily for an academic audience. He is one of the most respected and widely cited professors of law in the United States. In November 2001 he delivered the prestigious Storrs lectures at the Yale Law School and in 2003 the Notre Dame Law Review will publish a special issue devoted to his commentary about his work.

Not less important, however, are Fletcher's books that are designed for a general audience, which have received widespread publicity, praise, and honors. These include:

  • Our Secret Constitution: How Lincoln Redefined American Democracy (Oxford, 2001), honored as the best book on law published in 2001.
  • With Justice for Some: Victims' Rights in Criminal Trials (Addison Wesley, 1995), quoted by Marsha Clark in the O.J. Simpson trial.
  • Loyalty: An Essay on the Morality of Relationships (Oxford, 1993), praised by William Safire twice in his column in the New York Times; translated into French, German, and Spanish.
  • A Crime of Self-Defense: Bernhard Goetz and the Law on Trial (Free Press, 1988), received the Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association; translated into German, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese.
  • Rethinking Criminal Law (Little Brown, 1978), received the Order-of-Coif award as one of the best books published on law in the late 1970s (designed primarily for lawyers, scholars, and judges).
In the last several years, Fletcher has addressed large bodies of German criminal lawyers in Berlin (in German), prosecutors and judges in Bogota (in Spanish), and the legal staff of the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia in the Hague (in English). On lecture tours in 2001, he delivered speeches typically in local languages in Mexico City, Basel, Paris, Warsaw, and Tel Aviv. Fletcher lectures, publishes, and conducts media spots in Russian, French, German, Hebrew, Spanish, Hungarian, and Italian. He is widely praised as a dynamic and inspiring lecturer, in most of his foreign languages as well as in English.

Fletcher's diverse experience includes prosecuting cases in Los Angeles; running summer programs for Eastern European lawyers in Budapest; editing S'vara, a magazine on Jewish law philosophy; appearing often on television as a pundit on legal issues; and moderating "socratic dialogues" on PBS.

He has published dozens of op-ed pieces and longer articles in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Republic, and the New York Review of Books, as well as several recent online articles about current issues and the war policies of the Bush administration. These are easily found at http://www.findlaw.com and http://www.project-syndicate.org; the latter is published in dozens of foreign-language newspapers around the world. For a recent picture, see http://www.law.columbia.edu/.

View Full Speaker List






Diego Gambetta, All Souls College, Oxford University

Biography

Diego Gambetta is professor of sociology at the University of Oxford and an official fellow of Nuffield College. Born in Turin, Italy in 1952, he received his Ph.D. in social and political sciences from the University of Cambridge, U.K., in 1983. From 1984 to 1991 he was research fellow at King's college, Cambridge. From 1995 until October 2002 he was reader in sociology at the University of Oxford and Fellow of All Souls College. In 2000 he was made a Fellow of the British Academy. His main interests are signalling theory and its applications; trust and mimicry; and organised crime. He is married to Valeria (1992), and has one son, Leo born in 1996, and one daughter, Sofia, born in 2000.

Main books:

  • The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection (Harvard University Press, 1993)
  • Trust: Making and Breaking Co-operative Relations (Ed., Basil Blackwells, 1988)
  • Were They Pushed or Did They Jump: Individual Decision Mechanisms in Education (Cambridge University Press, 1987)
He also has two forthcoming books:
  • Crimes and Signs: Cracking the Codes of the Underworld (Princeton University Press, 2004)
  • Making Sense of Suicide Missions (Ed., Oxford University Press, 2004)

View Full Speaker List






Stephen Holmes, New York University

Biography

Stephen Holmes is currently professor of law at NYU School of Law. From 1979-85 he taught at the department of government at Harvard University. From 1985-97, he was professor of politics and law at the law school and political science department of the University of Chicago. From 1997-2000 he was professor of politics at Princeton.

His fields of specialization include democratic theory, the history of liberalism, the disappointments of democratization after communism, the Russian criminal justice system, and the near impossibility of combating terrorism within the limits of liberal constitutionalism. Holmes was the editor in chief of the East European Constitutional Review from 1993-2003. He is the author of Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism (Yale University Press, 1984), The Anatomy of Antiliberalism (Harvard University Press, 1993), Passions and Constraint: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 1995), and coauthor (with Cass Sunstein) of The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes (Norton, 1999).

View Full Speaker List






Bernard Manin, New York University

Biography

Bernard Manin is a professor of political science at New York University and Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris. He taught previously at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Principles of Representative Government (1997). He coauthored, with Alain Bergounioux, La Social-Démocratie ou le Compromis (1979) and Le Régime Social-Démocrate (1989). He has also written on democracy and political deliberation, and on the history of eighteenth-century political thought (Montesquieu in particular). He is currently writing a book on the French Revolution and emergency powers.

View Full Speaker List






Mayor Antanas Mockus Sivickas, Bogota, Colombia

Biography

Antanas Mockus was born in Bogota, Colombia, on March 25, 1952. In 1972 he obtained a B.A. in Mathematics at the Université de Dijon, France, and in 1988 an M.A. in philosophy at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia.

Early on he took a particular interest in academic work both in mathematics and philosophy, and became a professor and researcher at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia from 1975 to the present. He also became involved with more general issues related to teaching, pedagogy, and public education, which finally led him to occupy the position of vice president (1988-1991) and president (1991-93) of the university. As president of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia (the country's main public university) he participated in the discussions and workshops for the creation of the 1991 Constitution, particularly on subjects related to public education.

In 1995 he was elected mayor of the city of Bogota and he carried out a government plan based on the implementation of policies and programs for the construction of civic culture (Cultura Ciudadana). This meant the promotion of certain rules for civic coexistence through a change of culturally accepted behavior based on pedagogical mechanisms (self-regulation and mutual regulation of behavior) rather than on the exclusive use of coercion or law enforcement. In this manner some of the following policies put into effect were: alcohol restriction, voluntary disarmament, compliance with traffic regulations, interruption of clientelistic relations between the city administration and the city council, voluntary water saving (during a water supply crisis in 1997), among others. At the end of the period the city's violent death rates had significantly decreased. After his first period in office he carried out research on the main questions he had confronted as city mayor. He undertook a study of coexistence of youngsters in Bogota with the aim of identifying the main traits and behavior that foster peaceful coexistence. In 2000 he was again elected mayor of Bogota. The 2001-03 government plan set out to be a development of the previous civic culture program but with an emphasis on voluntary compliance of the law, that is, on the alignment of cultural and moral regulations with the law. With the same priority of promoting peaceful coexistence, the mayor's office has carried out a pedagogy of the law (through the formation of democratic culture and of a culture of legality). Additionally, and closely related to the concept of civic culture, the mayor has promoted a tax culture (as a the necessary condition for social investment) and civil resistance (as nonviolent citizen action against violence and terrorism). The city's violent death rates have been continually decreasing and the citizens are more involved with the development of the city from a perspective of co-responsibility.

Antanas Mockus' period as mayor of Bogota ends on December of 2003.

View Full Speaker List






Adam Przeworski, New York University

Biography

Adam Przeworski was born in Warsaw, Poland. He holds an M.A. in philosophy from Warsaw University and a Ph.D. in political science from Northwestern University. Currently he is the Carroll and Milton Petrie Professor of Politics at New York University. Formerly he was the Martin A. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. He has taught and researched at scholarly institutions in Chile, France, Germany, India, Poland, Switzerland, and Spain. Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1986, he won the 2001 Wilson Prize and the 1998 Luebbert Prize.

Przeworski is the author or coauthor of ten books--which have been translated into several languages--as well as numerous articles in journals published in the United States and abroad. His recent books include States and Markets: A Primer in Political Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2003), Democracy and the Rule of Law (co-editor, Cambridge University Press, 2003), Democracy and Development (coauthor, Cambridge University Press, 2000), Democracy, Accountability, and Representation (co-editor, Cambridge University Press, 1999), and Sustainable Democracy (coauthor, Cambridge University Press, 1995).

His current interests continue to focus on the impact of endogenous political institutions on economic and social development.

View Full Speaker List






Michel Rocard, France

Biography

Michel Rocard was born in 1930 in Courbevoie, France. He studied at the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris and was named inspector of finance in 1958 after finishing his training at the École National d'Administration. He became a leader of the Unified Socialist Party, serving as its national secretary from 1967-73, and has been a member of the Socialist Party executive bureau since 1975. Rocard served as minister of planning and regional development from 1981-83 and then as minister of agriculture from 1983-85. He was the prime minister of France from 1988-91 and then headed the Socialist Party from 1993-94. He was also the mayor of Conflans-Saint-Honorine between 1977-94 and senator for Yvelines from 1995-97. Rocard has been a member of the European Parliament since 1994, where he served on the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs from 1997-99. In January 2002, he became the president of the Committee on Culture, Youth, Education, the Media, and Sport.

View Full Speaker List






Debra M. Satz, Stanford University

Biography

Debra Satz is an associate professor of philosophy and, by courtesy, of political science at Stanford University. She is also director of the interdisciplinary program in Ethics in Society. She teaches courses in ethics, social and political philosophy, and philosophy of the social sciences. Within these fields, her research has focused on the ethical limits of markets, theories of rational choice, democratic theory, feminist philosophy, and issues of international justice. Her articles have appeared in Ethics, Philosophy and Public Affairs, the Journal of Philosophy, and the World Bank Economic Review.

View Full Speaker List






Joseph E. Stiglitz, Columbia University

Biography

Joseph E. Stiglitz was born in Gary, Indiana, in 1943. A graduate of Amherst College, he received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1967, became a full professor at Yale in 1970, and in 1979 was awarded the John Bates Clark Award, given biennially by the American Economic Association to the economist under forty who has made the most significant contribution to the field. He has taught at Princeton, Stanford, MIT, and was the Drummond Professor and a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He is now a professor of economics and finance at Columbia University in New York. In 2001, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics.

He was a member of the Council of Economic Advisors from 1993-95 and served as CEA chairman from 1995-97. He then became chief economist and senior vice president of the World Bank from 1997-2000.

Stiglitz helped create a new branch of economics--The economics of information--which explores the consequences of information asymmetries and pioneers such pivotal concepts as adverse selection and moral hazard, which have now become standard tools not only of theorists, but also of policy analysts. He has made major contributions to macroeconomics and monetary theory; to development economics and trade theory; to public and corporate finance; to the theories of industrial organization and rural organization; and to the theories of welfare economics and of income and wealth distribution. In the 1980s he helped revive interest in the economics of R&D.

His work has helped explain the circumstances in which markets do not work well, and how selective government intervention can improve their performance.

Recognized around the world as a leading economic educator, Stiglitz has written textbooks that have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He founded one of the leading economics journals, The Journal of Economic Perspectives. His book Globalization and Its Discontents (Norton, June 2001) has been translated into twenty languages and is an international bestseller.

View Full Speaker List






Jeremy Waldron, Columbia University

Biography

Jeremy Waldron is the Maurice and Hilda Friedman Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and is the director of Columbia's Center for Law and Philosophy.

He was born and educated in New Zealand and earned a B.A. in philosophy (1974) and an LL.B. from the University of Otago. He was admitted as a barrister and solicitor of the Supreme Court of New Zealand in 1978. He pursued graduate studies at University College, Oxford, and obtained his doctorate (D.Phil. in legal philosophy) from Oxford in 1986. He has taught law, philosophy, and political theory at Otago, at Oxford (where he was a Fellow of Lincoln College), at the University of Edinburgh, at the University of California at Berkeley (where he was also associate dean at Boalt Hall and chair of the jurisprudence and social policy program), at Princeton (where he was the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Politics), and at Columbia.

Waldron's publications include several books, including The Right to Private Property (Oxford, 1988); Nonsense Upon Stilts: Bentham, Burke and Marx on the Rights of Man (London, 1988); Liberal Rights: Collected Papers (Cambridge, 1993); The Dignity of Legislation (Cambridge, 1999); Law and Disagreement (Oxford, 1999); and most recently, God, Locke and Equality (Cambridge, 2002). He is also the author of over eighty articles on jurisprudence, liberalism, property, social justice, rights, democracy, cosmopolitanism, and the history of political philosophy. He writes frequent reviews for the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, and the New York Times Book Review.

He gave the second series of Seeley Lectures at Cambridge University in 1996, the 1999 Carlyle Lectures at Oxford University, and the spring 2000 University Lecture at Columbia. He was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998. He is a regular visitor to the law faculty at Victoria University of Wellington in his native New Zealand and he has given public lectures throughout the world, including Auckland, Berkeley, Buenos Aires, Canberra, Harvard, Houston, Lisbon, London, Minneapolis, Princeton, St. Andrews, Tel Aviv, Tilburg, and Toronto. He was awarded an honorary doctorate of laws by the Catholic University of Brussels in February 2003.

View Full Speaker List