"Cosmopolitan Norms, Human Rights and Democratic Iterations"
Seyla Benhabib is the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University and was Director of its Program in Ethics, Politics and Economics from 2001 to 2007. Professor Benhabib was the President of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in 2006-07. She has previously taught at the New School for Social Research and Harvard University, where she was Professor of Government from 1993 to 2000 and Chair of Harvard's Program on Social Studies from 1996 to 2000.
She is the author of numerous works, including "Critique, Norm and Utopia. A Study of the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory" (1986); "Situating the Self. Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics" (1992; winner of the National Education Association's best book of the year award); and "The Rights of Others." "Aliens, Citizens and Residents" (2004), which won the Ralph Bunche Award of the American Political Science Association (2005) and the North American Society for Social Philosophy award (2004). Her latest book, "Another Cosmopolitanism: Hospitality, Sovereignty and Democratic Iterations," with responses by Jeremy Waldron, Bonnie Honig, and Will Kymlicka, based on her Tanner Lectures delivered at UC Berkeley, was published by Oxford University Press in 2006.
Professor Benhabib is a member of the Editorial Committee of the American Political Science Review and is on the editorial boards of more than ten U.S. and international journals.
In her lecture, Professor Benhabib will discuss one of the most divisive controversies of our times: What are cosmopolitan rights? Are they, as some argue, "the Trojan horse" of an imperial neo-liberal order extending throughout the globe? Or are they principles of any future cosmopolitical order based on the principles of equality, autonomy, and self-government?