The Uses of Disenchantment: Law, history and the public intellectual
Monday 4th March, 2024
It’s hard not to feel pessimistic about the state of the world. The news is already bad; fake news and algorithms make it worse. Calls for academics to respond with a renewed responsibility in public debate often suffer from the same malaise. And the struggle for well-informed commentary can be hard to sustain in the light of the critical demands of justice and lawful conduct, and the criticism of law and justice.
Over the last fifteen years, Samuel Moyn has developed a sustained historical disenchantment of the promises and fantasies of the Euro-American post 1945 settlement. He is the author of several critical histories of international law and human rights including The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (2010); Christian Human Rights (2015), and Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (2018). His recent books include Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War (2022) and Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (2023).
Sam was joined by Melbourne scholars, Shaun McVeigh and Sundhya Pahuja to discuss the role of the historian and jurist, styles of academic engagement in Western universities and the struggle between pessimism and hope in political discourse.
Shaun McVeigh is a professor of legal theory at Melbourne Law School. Sundhya Pahuja is a Melbourne Laureate Professor and ARC Kathleen Fitzpatrick Laureate Fellow.
This event was supported by the Melbourne Law School, the Institute for International Law and the Humanities, the Laureate Program in Global Corporations and International Law and the Adelaide Writers’ Week.