• Workshop: Democracy: Past and Present

Time: 10:00 - 13:00

Location: Oost-Indisch Huis, E.14B

Individual researchers are invited to give short research pitch on the topic of history of democracy (5 minutes max) and discuss their work with Müller.

Interested? Please contact Matthijs Lok (m.m.lok@uva.nl) before 27 January.

• Lecture: Architecture and Democracy: Past and Present?

Time: 16:00 - 18:00

Location: Bushuis, F1.14

Modern democracy, from the French and American Revolutions onwards, has been haunted by the question how it might be expressed in iconography and the built environment.  Some, probably most famously, American president John Quincy Adams held that democracy was necessarily iconoclastic and suffered from a deficit in self-presentation; others saw no problem with re-using monarchical and aristocratic visual strategies and buildings.  The question of democratic self-presentation in architecture was posed again with particular urgency after the Second World War and after the fall of the Berlin Wall.  The talk will closely examine the strategies pursued by different political actors in these two periods and also seek to draw some larger lessons about the relationship between democracy and the built environment.

About Jan-Werner Müller

Jan-Werner Müller studied at the Free University, Berlin, University College, London, St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and Princeton University. From 1996 until 2003 he was a Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford; from 2003 until 2005 he was Fellow in Modern European Thought at the European Studies Centre, St. Antony’s College. Since 2005 he has been teaching in the Politics Department, Princeton University. Müller is the author of Another Country: German Intellectuals, Unification and National Identity (Yale UP, 2000; Chinese translation), A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War European Thought (Yale UP, 2003; German, French, Japanese, Greek, and Chinese translations); he is also the editor of Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of the Past (Cambridge UP, 2002) and German Ideologies since 1945: Studies in the Political Thought and Culture of the Bonn Republic (Palgrave, 2003). His book Constitutional Patriotism was published by Princeton University Press in 2007 (Chinese, Serbian, Greek, Turkish, and Korean translations; an expanded and revised German edition was published by Suhrkamp in 2010).

His history of political thought in twentieth-century Europe, Contesting Democracy, was published by Yale University Press in the summer of 2011 (Italian, French, Danish, German, Swedish, Russian, Polish, Chinese, Danish, and Serbian translations). His book Was ist Populismus? was published by Suhrkamp in April 2016; the University of Pennsylvania Press brought out an American version in September of 2016; the book has been published or is scheduled to be published in more than twenty other languages so far. Müller's book Furcht und Freiheit: Für einen anderen Liberalismus was published by Suhrkamp in 2019 and won the Bavarian Book Prize. 2021 saw the publication of Democracy Rules by FSG in the US and Penguin in the UK.  His public affairs commentary and essays have appeared in the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, Foreign Affairs, The Guardian, the New Times, and Project Syndicate.

Organisers

• Nik de Boer (DEMRES, UvA Platform for Democratic Resilience)
• ACES (Amsterdam Centre for European Studies)
• ARTES (Amsterdam School for Regional, Transnational and European Studies)
• DIA (Duitsland Instituut Amsterdam)