Dean of the College Presents
Faculty Seminar by Professor Kevin Duong
Wednesday, October 3, 2018
6:30 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
What Was Universal Suffrage?
No concept is as central to the history of democratic theory as the vox populi. Christian in origin, it would evolve into a foundational, self-authorizing source of public authority in the age of democratic revolutions. Henceforth, its fate would become bound up with an institutional innovation which, to this day, has become the sine qua non of modern democracy: universal suffrage. This talk places modern political theories of universal suffrage in dialogue with the invention of instruments designed to make the voice of the people sensible: colored ballots, probability theory, daguerreotypes, automatic voting booths, large-n polling. It does so to measure the distance between conceptions of popular voice then and now: where early struggles for the suffrage identified the vox populi’s manifestation with the egalitarian transformation of everyday life, the twentieth century witnessed its contraction into liberal theories of public opinion and preference aggregation. The universalizing itinerary of the suffrage came at the cost of an emaciated democratic imagination. Professor Duong will suggest that older visions of the ballot as a weapon for revolution are worth wielding once more.Please join us for a reception prior to the event beginning at 6:00 p.m. in the Faculty Commons Room
For more information, call 845-758-7421, or e-mail [email protected].
Time: 6:30 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4