09/22/17 Tocqueville_Lecture - Damon Linker: “The Task of Thinking in an Age of Reaction”

Political pundit and academic book editor Damon Linker will discuss what it’s like to analyze and comment on current affairs at a time of intense political partisanship and polarization. To avoid succumbing to the reactionary temptation—the tendency to respond to political provocation with an equal and opposite show of vitriol—he follows the example of such thinkers as Aristotle, Thucydides, and Tocqueville. All three thinkers strove to rise above the political fray, to avoid easy point-scoring, and to treat participants in political disputes fairly. The same ideal of intellectual equanimity is embodied in the norms of peer review that guide university press publishing. At a moment when political passions are running high and centrifugal forces sometimes seem to be tearing the country apart, the ideal of thinking beyond the distortions of partisan attachments needs to be preserved and nurtured.