Labyrinth Books, Peter Meyers & Sean Wilentz 2/24/09
Peter Alexander Meyers and Sean Wilentz
Civic War and the Corruption of the Citizen
Tuesday, February 24th @ 6.30PM
Labyrinth Books, Princeton
Join us for a conversation with Peter Alexander Meyers and Sean Wilentz about the continued importance of resisting a politics of fear.
In his book, Peter Alexander Meyers leads us through the social processes by which shock incites terror, terror invites war, war invokes emergency, and emergency supports unchecked power. He then reveals how the domestic political culture created by the Cold War has driven these developments forward since 9/11, contending that our failure to acknowledge that this Cold War continues today is precisely what makes it so dangerous.
With eloquence and urgency Meyers argues that the mantra of our time-"everything changed on 9/11!"-is false and pernicious. By contrast, Civic War and the Corruption of the Citizen provides a novel account of long-term transformations in the citizen's experience of war, the constitution of political powers, and public uses of communication, and from that firm historical basis explains how a convergence of these social facts became the pretext for unprecedented opportunism and irresponsibility after 9/11. Where others have observed that our rights are under attack, Meyers digs deeper and finds that today "government by the people" itself is at risk.
Peter Alexander Meyers is professor of American Studies at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris and is presently a visiting researcher in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Sean Wilentz is the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor in the American Revolutionary Era and a professor of history at Princeton.
Location: Labyrinth Books, Princeton
Date/Time: 2009-02-24 at 6:30 pm - 2009-02-24 at 8:00 pm
Category: Other
History/AMS Department