Deva Woodly, associate professor of politics at The New School for Social Research recently sat down with Danielle Allen, a professor in Government Department and Graduate School of Education at Harvard University, and Director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, to discuss notions of liberty and equality in the contemporary American political landscape.
Allen, a political philosopher renowned for her ability to connect us to complex ideas about democracy, citizenship, and justice, came to the New School for Social Research in March 2016 to deliver its annual Hans Maeder lecture, with the proposal that “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.” Allen 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).