Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber

Wendy Brown, one of America’s leading political theorists, analyzes the nihilism degrading and confounding political and academic life today and proposes ways to counter nihilism’s devaluations of both knowledge and political responsibility. She is joined for a conversation by the eminent critic and journalist Fintan O’Toole.

How has politics become a playpen for vain demagogues? Why has the university become an ideological war zone? What has happened to Truth? Wendy Brown places nihilism at the center of these predicaments. Nihilism removes the foundation on which values, including that of truth itself, stand. It hyperpoliticizes knowledge and reduces the political sphere to displays of narcissism and irresponsible power plays. It renders the profound trivial, the future unimportant, and corruption banal.

To consider remedies for this condition, Brown turns to Weber’s famous Vocation Lectures. There, Weber himself decries the effects of nihilism on both scholarly and political life. He also spells out requirements for re-securing truth in the academy and integrity in politics. Famously opposing the two spheres to each other, he sought to restrict academic life to the pursuit of facts and reserve for the political realm the pursuit and legislation of values.

Without accepting Weber’s arch oppositions, Brown acknowledges the distinctions they aim to mark as she charts reparative strategies for our own times. She calls for retrieving knowledge from hyperpoliticization without expunging values from research or teaching and reflects on ways to embed responsibility in radical political action. Above all, she challenges the left to make good on its commitment to critical thinking by submitting all values to scrutiny in the classroom and to make good on its ambition for political transformation by twinning a radical democratic vision with charismatic leadership.

Wendy Brown is Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study and was for many years Professor of Political Science at Berkeley. Her influential books include In the Ruins of Neoliberalism; States of Injury; Undoing the Demos; and Walled States, Waning Sovereignty. Fintan O’Toole is a columnist for the Irish Times and  professor in the Lewis Center for The Arts at Princeton University. A regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and the Guardian, he is the author of many acclaimed books, most recently of We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland, which is on the list of best books of 2023 of The NYTimes, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Foreign Affairs, and the New Statesman.

In-person event at Labyrinth, more details here. 

This event is cosponsored by the Institute for Advanced Study and Princeton University’s Humanities Council, Lewis Center for the Arts, and Center for Human Values.