The 2019 Maurice and Muriel Fulton Lectureship in Legal History will feature Professor James T. Kloppenberg, Charles Warren Professor of American History at Harvard University. 

Why Madison Matters: Rethinking Democracy in America

At this moment in US history, when the rule of law itself is endangered by a dangerously autocratic president, James Kloppenberg returns our attention to the founding. Rather than trying to excavate the so-called “original meaning” of the Constitution, he will show the range of meanings understood by eighteenth-century Americans. Alert to their fallibility and aware of their deep disagreements, they aimed not merely to balance competing interests but to pursue what Madison called “justice and the general good.”

James T. Kloppenberg is the Charles Warren Professor of American History at Harvard, where he has chaired the Department of History, the graduate program in the History of American Civilization, the interdisciplinary  undergraduate program in Social Studies, and the Standing Committee on Public Service. For his commitment to undergraduate teaching, he has been named a Harvard College Professor, awarded the Levinson Prize by the Harvard Undergraduate Council, and eleven times voted one of their favorite professors by Harvard graduating classes. His first book, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870-1920 (1986), won the Merle Curti Award from the Organization of American Historians. His second book, The Virtues of Liberalism (1998), helped resolve debates over the role of liberal and republican ideas in American political culture. Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition (2nd ed., 2011), was named book of the year by NPR White House correspondent Mara Liasson. His most recent book, Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought (2016), was awarded the George Mosse Prize by the American Historical Association. He has co-edited two volumes, A Companion to American Thought, with Richard Wightman Fox (1995), the standard reference work in American intellectual and cultural history; and The Worlds of American Intellectual History, edited with Joel Isaac, Michael O'Brien, and Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen (2107), a collection that illustrates the field's transnational turn. Kloppenberg has held Danforth, Whiting, Guggenheim, ACLS and NEH fellowships. He has served as the Pitt Professor at Cambridge and twice as a visiting professor at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. He has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Executive Committee of the Organization of American Historians, and served fifteen years as a Wellesley College trustee. Current projects include a global history of social democracy since 1920, a study of the philosophy of pragmatism from its origins to the present, and an interpretive overview of democracy in America since 1500. 

Lunch will be provided.