"As someone who works in democratic theory, I've been struck by how quickly discussions of national identity have veered away from civic ideals - sometimes toward rhetoric of ancestry, exclusion."
"The way you get your independence, the way your founding moment operates ... determines what unites your people,"
"But if you read the Declaration of Independence, the claim was that the law was not applied the same way in the colonies as it was in the [British] mainland,"
"The fight was over the enforcement of law."
The Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics hosts a Civil Discourse initiative that invites academics, journalists, and public servants to model thoughtful disagreement on politically charged questions. Ethics Center Director Eric Beerbohm observed that discussions of national identity have veered away from civic ideals toward rhetoric of ancestry and exclusion. Nien-hê Hsieh guided exploration of potential bases for national ties, including aspirational values, shared geography, and opposition to common threats. Harris Mylonas argued that a nation's founding moment shapes what unites its people, contrasting Greece’s struggle against Ottoman rule centered on faith with the U.S. founding focus on unequal enforcement of law.
Read at Harvard Gazette
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]