2016 Hans Maeder Lecture: Recovering Equality in America: A Talk by Danielle Allen

Thanks to Cold War era politics and rhetoric, Americans came to believe that liberty and equality are opposing ideals. This would come as a shock to the founding generation for whom liberty and equality were mutually reinforcing ideals.

This talk helps us recover our understanding of the relationship between liberty and equality so that we can reclaim the power latent in their connection. In showing the links between liberty and equality, the talk touches on political, social, and economic aspects of equality.

Danielle Allen is a political philosopher renowned for her ability to connect us to complex ideas about democracy, citizenship, and justice. She is the author of four books: The World of Prometheus: The Politics of Punishing in Democratic Athens (2000), Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education (2004), Why Plato Wrote (2010), and, most recently, Our Declaration (2014), an exploration of America’s founding document and its continuing relevance in our society—a work that The New York Review of Books called a “tour de force.”