The New York Review of Books, CERI Sciences-Po of Paris, the Remarque Institute of New York University, and the Fritt Ord Foundation invite the public to a seminar on June 23–25, 2011at CERI Sciences-Po, 56 rue Jacob, Paris. The seminar is free and open to all.

Bill Bradley | Jean Daniel | Alain Dieckhoff | Ronald Dworkin | Katherine Fleming | Simon Head | Cathrine Holst | Yves-André Istel | Denis Lacorne | Christian Lequesne | Samuel Moyn | Sari Nusseibeh | Avner Offer | Thomas Piketty | Jacques Rupnik | Pierre Rosanvallon | Richard Sennett | Robert Silvers | Jean-François Sirinelli | Anne Marie Slaughter | Fritz Stern | Zeev Sternhell | Jonas Gahr Støre

THURSDAY, JUNE 23
17.00-19.00
Remembering Tony Judt
Katherine Fleming, Denis Lacorne, Avner Offer, Pierre Rosanvallon, Richard Sennett, Fritz Stern
Chair: Robert Silvers

FRIDAY, JUNE 24
11:30-13.00
What Kind of Europe?
Jonas Gahr Støre, Fritz Stern, Jacques Rupnik
Chair: Christian Lequesne

13:00-14:00
Lunch

14.00-15:30
The Future of Social Democracy
Thomas Piketty, Ronald Dworkin, Richard Sennett, Yves–André Istel
Chair: Cathrine Holst

15:30-16:00
Coffee Break

16:00–17:30
French Intellectuals and the Fifth Republic
Pierre Rosanvallon, Samuel Moyn, Jean-François Sirinelli
Chair: Denis Lacorne

SATURDAY, JUNE 25
10:00–11:30
Palestine Beyond Reach?
Zeev Sternhell, Alain Dieckhoff, Sari Nusseibeh, Jean Daniel
Chair: Robert Silvers

11:30–12:00
Break

12:00–13:30
The US and the World
Anne Marie Slaughter, Bill Bradley, Denis Lacorne
Chair: Simon Head

13:30
End of conference

Presented by The New York Review of Books, CERI Sciences-Po of Paris, the Fritt Ord Foundation of Oslo, and the Remarque Institute of New York University.

The Conference has also been made possible by the generous support of The Europaeum, University of Oxford; Ever Glades Fund, Sarah and Landon Rowland, Kansas City; Shakespeare and Co. Paris; and the Zeit Stiftung, Hamburg.

A DISTINCTIVE PRESENCE AMONG US

Our conference title is taken from Thomas Nagel’s review of Tony Judt’s The Memory Chalet in the February 10 2011 edition of The New York Review of Books: ‘A distinctive presence among us’ and a presence, as Nagel went on to say, unforgettable to those who knew Judt and read his works. Judt was first and foremost a historian of modern Europe. His Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 is a history of the whole of Europe, from the Atlantic to the Urals, from Spain to the Soviet Union.

Judt brings to this huge task a scholarly rigor, elegance of style, and acuteness of judgment which few historians of contemporary Europe have matched. The work also represents a personal journey because Judt, grounded in the history and politics of Western Europe, and especially of Britain and France, felt the need to move his centre of gravity eastwards, and in the 1980’s spent time in Prague to learn Czech.

Judt’s life and work also give fresh meaning to the term ‘public intellectual’. The range of subjects to be discussed at this conference testify to his protean intellectual energy: the politics of the Fifth French Republic; the resolution of the Palestinian question; the future of Social Democracy; America’s role in the world. Judt brought to these topics a sensibility which he himself saw as distinctly Jewish, ‘a collective self-questioning and uncomfortable truth-telling: the dafka-like (contrarian) quality of awkwardness and dissent for which we were once known’.

He was therefore uncompromising in denouncing even the things he most cherished when he felt that they had betrayed their own cause. Judt grew up as a beneficiary of the British Social Democracy of mid-century, of the welfare state and of the public grammar schools which he attended, and some of the most evocative and moving passages of the The Memory Chalet recapture that lost British post-war world. But Judt fiercely denounced successive British governments, both Conservative and Labour, for their reforms of secondary education which he saw as denying later generations of young Britons from modest backgrounds like himself the opportunities he had enjoyed.

As a young man he was inspired by the ideals of Labour Zionism and went to work on an israeli kibbutz. But he came to believe that Israel’s post-1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, with the Palestinians becoming a colonized, subject people, had poisoned these ideals, and that the occupation had to end for Israel’s sake as well as the Palestinians. As a young academic he was drawn to the excitement of French intellectual life in the post-war decades, and he wrote admiringly of Léon Blum, Albert Camus and Raymond Aron. But in his book Past Imperfect: The French Intellectuals 1944-1956 he was forgiving of those such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty who he believed had too often turned a blind eye to the abuses of Stalinism, whether in the Kremlin or on the Place du Colonel Fabien.

At the end of his life Judt showed extraordinary courage in the face of a debilitating, terminal illness. Completely paralyzed, he nonetheless dictated the extended essay on Social Democracy, published as Ill Fares the Land, and the biographical essays of the Memory Chalet, mostly first published in The New York Review. These were among the finest pieces he ever wrote and reveal the qualities that made him such a compelling figure; both his brilliance as scholar and polemicist in his advocacy of Social Democracy, and his life enhancing passions for mountains, green spaces, buses, trains and railway stations, and for the vibrant Greenwich Village neighbourhood which surrounded his Washington Square apartment where he lived with his wife Jennifer, and his sons Daniel and Nicholas.

We are delighted and honoured that they are here with us in Paris, and we are grateful to Jennifer Homans for her support for the conference, as we are for the support of all our speakers and sponsors, and for the support of all those who have come to Paris to honour the life and work of a remarkable man.

Denis Lacorne Directeur de Recherche, Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Internationales, CERI Sciences Po
Simon Head, Director of Programs, The New York Review Foundation, and University of Oxford.

BIOGRAPHIES

BILL BRADLEY is a Managing Director at Allen and Co., investment bankers of New York City. From 1978 to 1996 he was US Senator (Democrat) from New Jersey, and in 1999-2000 a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. He played professional basketball for the New York Knicks 1967-1977. He is the author of Time Present and Time Past: A Memoir, Knopf (US) 1996 and The New American Story, Random House (US) 2007.

JEAN DANIEL is the founder and executive editor of Le Nouvel Observateur. He is the author, with Milan Kundera, of Les Miens, Gallimard (Fr.), 2010; and of Avec Camus: Comment Résister à l’Air du Temps , Gallimard (Fr) 2006.

ALAIN DIECKHOFF is Senior Fellow at the Centre for International Studies and Research (CERI/Sciences Po) with a research focus on contemporary Israel. He is the author of The Invention of a Nation: Zionist Thought and the Making of Modern Israel, Columbia UP (US), 2003; The State of Israel (ed. Routledge (US, UK) forthcoming; and of of Le conflit Israélo-Arabe, Armand Colin (Fr), 2011.

RONALD DWORKIN is Professor of Philosophy and Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law at New York University. He is Emeritus Professor of Jurisprudence at University College, London, and a Fellow of the British Academy. He is the author of Is Democracy Possible Here? Principles for a New Political Debate, Princeton UP (US and UK) 2006; and Justice for Hedgehogs, Harvard UP (US) 2011. In 2007 he received the Holberg International Memorial Prize of the University of Bergen.

KATHERINE FLEMING is Senior Vice Provost and Vice Chancellor, Europe, at New York University. She is Alexander S Onassis Professor of Hellenic Culture at NYU, Professor of History in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and Director of the Remarque Institute’s branches in Paris and Florence. She is the author of Greece: A Jewish History Princeton UP (US, UK) 2008.

SIMON HEAD is an Associate Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute Oxford, a Scholar at the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University, and Director of Programs for the New York Review Foundation. He is the author of The New Ruthless Economy: Work and Power in the Digital Age, OUP (US, UK) 2005.

REA HEDERMAN has been Publisher of The New York Review of Books since 1984. In 1983 The Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, Mississippi won the Pulitzer Prize for an investigation of the Mississippi state school system undertaken while Hederman was Executive Editor.

CATHRINE HOLST is a Senior Researcher at the Arena Center for European Studies at the University of Oslo. She is the author, with John Erik Fossum, of Progressive Nationalism? Norwegian Intellectuals and Europe in Lacroix and Nicolaidis (eds.) European Stories: European Debates on Europe in National Contexts OUP (US, UK) 2010.

JENNIFER HOMANS is Tony Judt’s widow and the mother of their two boys, Daniel and Nicholas. She is the author of Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet, Random House (US) 2010; and the dance critic for The New Republic. She is a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at New York University.

YVES-ANDRÉ ISTEL is Chairman of the Advisory Board of the Remarque Institute at New York University. He is also Chairman of the Center for French Civilization and Culture, and of the European Institute, both at NYU. He is a member of NYU’s Board of Overseers. He is a Senior Adviser to Rothschild Inc, a member of its investment banking committee, and a Director of Analog Devices Inc.

DENIS LACORNE is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Internationales (CERI/Sciences Po). He is the author of Religion in America. A Political History, Columbia UP, (US) July 2011, and editor of Les Etats-Unis, Fayard, (Fr) 2006. He was the co-editor with Tony Judt of With Us or Against Us. Studies in Global Anti-Americanism, Palgrave (US, UK) 2005 and also with Judt of Language, Nation and State. Identity Politics in a Multilingual Age, Palgrave (US, UK) 2004.

CHRISTIAN LEQUESNE is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Internationales (CERI/Sciences Po). From January 2004 to August 2006 he was director of the Centre Français de Recherche en Sciences Sociales (CEFRES) in Prague, Czech Republic. He was LSE – Sciences Po Alliance Professor at the European Institute of the London School of Economics, 2006-2008. He has been Director of CERI at Sciences Po since January 2009. He is the author of La France dans la Nouvelle Europe : Assumer le Changement d’Échelle, Presses de Sciences Po (Fr.) 2008.

SAMUEL MOYN is Professor of History at Columbia University and editor of the journal Humanity. He is the author of A Holocaust Controversy: The Treblinka Affair in Postwar France, Brandeis UP (US); and Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas Between Revelation and Ethics Cornell UP (US) 2005. In 2007 he received Columbia’s Mark Van Doren award for outstanding undergraduate teaching, voted by undergraduates.

SARI NUSSEIBEH is President of the Al Quds University of Jerusalem. He was a Visiting Lecturer at the Sorbonne in 2011, and a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard 2004-2005. He is a member of the Palestinian National Council, a Co-Founder of the Peoples Peace Campaign, and PLO Commissioner for Jerusalem Affairs in 2002. He is the author of What’s A Palestinian State Worth? Harvard UP (2011); and, with Anthony David of Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life. Farrar Straus Giroux (US) 2007.

AVNER OFFER is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford and Chicele Professor of Economic History at Oxford. He is the author of In Pursuit of the Quality of Life, OUP (US, UK) 1996 and The Challenge of Affluence: Self- Control and Well-Being in the US and the UK since 1950 OUP (UK,US) 2006. In May 2011 he received a grant from the Institute for New Economic Thinking to support his research on the rise of market liberalism during the past forty years.

THOMAS PIKETTY is Professor at the Paris School of Economics and a Senior Research Fellow at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. He is the co-author, with A B Atkinson, of Top Incomes. A Global Perspective, OUP (US, UK), 2010 ; and with Camille Landais and Emmanuel Saez, of Pour une Révolution Fiscale. Un Impôt sur le Revenu pour le XXIe Siècle, Le Seuil, (Fr) 2011.

PIERRE ROSANVALLON has been Professor of Early Modern and Modern Political History at the College de France since 2001. He is Professor and chair of the Raymond Aron Center for Political Research at l’École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and also President of the international intellectual workshop La Republique des Ideés. He is the author of La Legitimité Democratiqué: Impartialité, Reflexivité, Proximite Seuil, (Fr) 2008.

JACQUES RUPNIK is Senior Research Fellow at the Center for International Studies and Research (CERI/ Sciences Po). He is Professor at the College of Europe in Bruges. He is the author, with Christian Lequesne, of 1989 as a World Polical Event, Routledge (US, UK), December 2011. He is a co-author, with Anne de Tinguy, Silvia Serrano, and Florent Parmentier, of Les Banlieus de l’Europe: Les Politiques de Voisinage de l’Union Européene. Les Presses de Sciences Po (Fr) 2007.

RICHARD SENNETT is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Professor of Sociology at New York University. He is the author of The Culture of the New Capitalism Yale UP (US, UK) 2005, and The Craftsman, Yale UP (US, UK) 2007. He won the Hegel Prize of the City of Stuttgart in 2006, and the Spinoza Prize of the International Spinoza Award Foundation of Amsterdam in 2010.

ROBERT SILVERS is Editor of The New York Review of Books. With Barbara Epstein he was founding editor of the Review in 1963, and co-editor with her until her death in 2006. He received an honorary degree at Harvard in 2007. He is the editor of Hidden Histories of Science, New York Review Books (2003) and with Barbara Epstein of The Company They Kept: Writers on Unforgettable Friendships, New York Review Books, (US) 2006.

JEAN FRANÇOIS SIRINELLI is the Director of the Centre for History and Professor of Contemporary History at Sciences Po, Paris. He is President of Le Comité Français des Sciences Historiques, and Vice-President of L’Association pour le Développement de l‘Histoire Culturelle. He is the editor of Comprendre la Ve République, PUF (Fr) 2010; and the author of La France de 1914 à nos Jours PUF (Fr) 2004.

ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER is University Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton. She was Director of Policy Planning at the US State Department 2009-2011, and Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton, 2002-2009. She is the author of The Idea That is America: Keeping Faith with our Values in a Dangerous World (Basic Books (US) 2007; and A New World Order Princeton UP (US, UK) 2004.

FRITZ STERN is University Professor Emeritus at Columbia University, and was Professor of History at Columbia, 1953-1997. He is the author of Einstein’s German World, Princeton UP (US, UK) 1999, and Five Germany’s I Have Known, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (US) 2006. In 2006 he was awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the German Federal Republic, and in 2007 The Prize for Understanding and Tolerance of the Jewish Museum in Berlin.

ZEEV STERNHELL is Leon Blum Professor of Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a columnist for Haaretz. He was a Fellow at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris in 1972 and 1977, and a member of the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton, 1983-1984. He is the author with David Maisal, of The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition, Yale UP (US, UK) 2009; and the Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State Princeton UP (US, UK) 1998.

JONAS GAHR STØRE has been Minister of Foreign Affairs, Norway since 2005. He is a graduate of L’Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences-Po) and was a teaching fellow at the Harvard Law School in 1986. He has been Executive Director of the World Health Organization, Chief of Staff in the Prime Minister’s Office 2000-2001, and Secretary General of the Norwegian Red Cross, 2003-2005.