Center for Civic and Constitutional Futures

THE DEMOCRACY INSTITUTE

Global Inquiries in Freedom and Tyranny

An award-winning project that seeks to develop a common core, a common grammar, and above all, a common sense about why democracy matters.

American Institutions Common Core

A galvanizing dive into the history of American political thought and moral philosophy studied through the nation’s ideals and its institutions.

Liberal Strategies Leadership Initiative

An invitation to think about our civic contract, and probe not only how we must prepare the next generation of faculty leaders but also ask, fundamentally, what it is that we now need to be prepared for in the Humanities.

Nonviolence Studies

The Democracy Institute provides students the space and skills to engage, through a series of seminar-style courses, the radical tradition of political and democratic nonviolence that spans the globe, striving ceaselessly for an equal world.

Global Justice Pathway

A curricular intervention that seeks to systematically reimagine the study of the modern social contract and the human condition in a global frame, through re-engagement with the most critical thinkers of our democratic inheritance.

Dialogues at the End of Democracy

A podcast of global political thought. A rigorous recuperation of the words and concepts without which we cannot understand the power and the fragility of the democratic promise.

IDEAS, IDEALS, AND INSTITUTIONS

The Democracy Institute generates and provokes conversations on interlinked and global questions of political thought and moral philosophy, of history and civic institutions, of theology and technology. Above all, it asks: what would a democracy without and after this new mode and epoch of violence look like? A non-violent democracy, in other words? The Institute is committed to preparing next-generation student-scholars in the art of thinking on global, transdisciplinary scale.

Our Vision

James Baldwin and Martin Luther King Jr.

Our Neodemocratic Condition

"It is today impossible to understand the fragility and violence of democracy’s global life without grappling with the appearance of an unprecedented political form on our horizon, one that perilously reintroduces the logic of cruelty into our constitutional compact. I call it the neodemocratic condition."

The Right to Have Rights

“One of the fundamental issues Hannah Arendt raises when she writes of 'the right to have rights' is whether democracy and national sovereignty can coexist without a destructive tension at their heart. It is a tension embodied most brutally, in our time, in the figure we call the migrant. One is considered almost disposable the moment one leaves the nation state and finds oneself in that gray zone of nothingness we call the modern border. It is these people who have been rendered absolutely superfluous, Arendt argues, who bring us up against the limit of human rights."

What is Freedom?

“To ask "what is freedom?" requires a certain kind of moral imagination about inequality today. An imagination that transcends the easy, lazy, all-too-quick demarcations of the world into left and right, even if one is decisively worse than the other. A spectrum of thought that does not simply reduce freedom to the clash between two or more visions of power—which it always will be—but to a new conception of life as such, to a new pursuit of happiness, indomitably claimed and equally shared."

Our Events

Rethinking the Commons

The modern democratic vision is rooted fundamentally in the idea of the commons: a shared commitment to the future whose moral and material ownership—and common sense approach to matters of government—rests on the resilience of the human bond. At The Democracy Institute, we curate events that rethink this common purpose—the principle of the commons—that lies at the heart of our social and political universe. In collaboration with institutions and thinkers worldwide — across disciplines and geographies — the Institute fosters dialogue between faculty, students, and the public.