Yesterday, we asked scholar Sandra M. Gustafson, author of Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic, to comment on President Obama's recent State of the Union address. This afternoon, she's joined by James T. Kloppenberg, author of Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition, who engages with the history of other deliberative democrats and evaluates where Obama's words fell for a spectrum of interested parties, while remarking on the conflict and compromise that informs both authors' books. Thanks again to Professors Gustafson and Kloppenberg for sharing their thoughts with us!

"Obama's 2012 SOTU: Keeping Open the Invitation to Deliberate" by James T. Kloppenberg

Champions of conciliation face an uphill battle in 2012. As Sandra Gustafson notes, ours is a contentious culture. Of course that's nothing new. As Barack Obama emphasized in The Audacity of Hope and as he has observed many times since, conflict is as American as apple pie. The first settlers in New England began squabbling before they got off the ships that carried them across the Atlantic. William Penn's utopian vision of a peaceful Pennsylvania vanished in a firestorm of criticism. Most of those shipped to the southern colonies arrived as slaves, servants, or convicts, inferior beings to whom the ruling white males would not have to listen. Yet beneath the noisy arguments that erupted everywhere in colonial America, a new sensibility quietly established itself around the idea of self-government. In New England towns, in the villages established by the quarreling religious and ethnic groups that settled the middle colonies, and in the colonial legislatures where southern planters fought a war on two fronts against the demands of English officials and the rabble they wanted to keep subservient, people were learning from experience that, in the absence of a ruling monarch or an aristocracy with privileges secured by law, the members of every deliberative body had to learn to accept the judgment of the majority. Accompanying conflict, in other words, was the imperative of persuasion, the need to convince those who disagreed to see the light and come around.

Ever since the ancient world, a tension has persisted in democratic cultures between the prophet's principled refusal to compromise with evil and the deliberative democrat's equally principled commitment to the institutions and the process of achieving gradual change through conciliation. As Sandra Gustafson shows in her splendid book Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic, and as I try to establish in my forthcoming book Tragic Irony: Democracy in European and American Thought, conflict and its provisional resolution through compromise together constitute the democratic tradition on both sides of the Atlantic. Although Obama understands the power and the necessity of unyielding calls to justice, he also understands that democracy can work only when the chasm between competing and incompatible principles can be bridged through efforts to understand other perspectives and identify and bring to the surface buried commitments to shared ideals. Americans have always fought bitterly over issues ranging from theology to economics, from slavery to abortion, and those who reject compromise always dismiss as unprincipled those conciliators who work to discover or create overlapping consensus where others see only irreconcilable differences. Like deliberative democrats from James Madison to John Dewey, Obama understands that although not every dispute can be resolved through deliberation, the alternative—civil war—is always tragic and usually ineffective as a means to heal the deep wounds it creates. Our culture's romantic celebration of warriors blinds us to war's long-term consequences; democracy depends on persuasion and must resort to force only as a last resort.

Obama's State of the Union address surprised only those who continue to project onto him either their own aspirations for radical change or their own paranoid fantasies about his secret plot to turn the United States into Denmark. The speech instead falls neatly in the continuous line of analysis Obama has offered ever since 1988, when he wrote the little essay "Why Organize?" before he left the Chicago world of community organizing for the Harvard Law School. Some commentators on the left complain that the SOTU left them feeling undernourished: Obama failed to excoriate his opponents or lay out a bold plan—to be accomplished by executive order, evidently, given the Republican majority in the House of Representatives—to bring justice to our land of inequality and oppression. By contrast, members of the self-styled moderate conservative commentariat have been left sputtering about the speech: the food is terrible, they complain about the mildly progressive measures Obama sketched out as his priorities, and there's so little of it. Their frustration is easy to understand. Although Obama did make clear his preferences for a simplified and more steeply graduated income tax, steps to return manufacturing to the United States, and more robust regulation of the environment and the financial sector, there was nothing in the speech to antagonize the independent voters whom his Republican opponent will have to woo in November. Instead he continued to plead for "responsibility," "cooperation," "opportunity," and "fairness," favorite code words invoked by progressives for over a century to justify the reforms we seek. For decades conservatives successfully blocked such initiatives by raising various specters, first communism, now terrorism, and again and again the various demons conjured up by the notion of a culture war. Obama refused to play into the mythology that he is an anti-business or anti-American radical. Instead he embraced the explicitly solidaristic ethos of the military and reminded us that he is willing to deploy helicopters, moles, or drones when he deems it necessary. Americans who actually listened to his words, rather than filtering the speech through the increasingly rickety categories concocted by his critics, heard the voice of a moderate who still believes, against all odds, in deliberative democracy. Although surrounded by people who would rather shout down their opponents than reason with them, Obama showed yet again his commitment to the proposition that the electorate can be persuaded to choose a path of moderate development toward a newer, and more inclusive, understanding of the present-day meanings of the nation's traditional democratic ideals of liberty and justice for all.

James T. Kloppenberg is the Charles Warren Professor of American History at Harvard University and the author of Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition (Second Edition, 2012).

Following President Barack Obama's recent State of the Union address, we thought it a fitting occasion to invite a dialogue from two leading scholars of civic rhetoric and the democratic tradition. Today, Sandra M. Gustafson, author of Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic, examines the metaphor of war in Congressional politics and evaluates President Obama's use of military imagery, in light of his initial post-partisan appeal. Tomorrow, she'll be joined by James Kloppenberg, author of Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition, who accounts for our own projections onto the President and explores Obama's use of moderate policies and progressive language. We're delighted to host both of them on the blog, and hope you're as intrigued by their analyses as we are.

President Barack Obama opened his fourth State of the Union address with a paean to the American armed forces. In a tribute designed to showcase important achievements of his first term, he celebrated the end of the Iraq War, which Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta declared over on December 15, 2011; the assassination of Osama bin Laden earlier that year; and the diminished power of the Taliban and draw down of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Overlooking some notable military failures—the Abu Ghraib scandal, the "kill team" in Afghanistan, the hazing related death of Pvt. Danny Chen, statistics indicating widespread sexual assault—the president instead celebrated the "courage, selflessness and teamwork" that have made the U.S. armed forces successful: "They're not consumed with personal ambition. They don't obsess over their differences. They focus on the mission at hand. They work together." Building on an image of an American military characterized by fairness and discipline, he contrasted them with less successful institutions that have "let us down." He did not need to say that for many people the central example of a failed institution was Congress itself, which in the days leading up to his speech had an approval rating of 13 percent.

That the most recent sitting U.S. president to be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize should look to the military as a model for Congress bears reflection. The legislative branch is in its design and function very different from the hierarchical military system. It is an independent branch of government, not subordinate to the commander in chief. By calling on Congress to be more like the military, Obama was not suggesting a breach of separation of powers. He was speaking to one of the central issues that has bedeviled his presidency: the increasingly rigid refusal of Congressional Republicans to work with him and the Democrats to solve pressing national problems.

Candidate Obama campaigned on a platform of post-partisanship. His early years as a mixed-race child raised by white grandparents and his work as a community organizer prepared him for his mediating role as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, which launched his political career. In The Audacity of Hope, Obama characterized the United States as a "deliberative democracy" that works through free and open discussion. He promised to move past rigid polarities and take good ideas where he found them, a stance based in pragmatist philosophy as James Kloppenberg has shown in Reading Obama. This promise was tacitly premised on the willingness of Republicans to work with him. Instead, fueled by Tea Party money and energy, they embraced an oppositional role. War, not dialogue, has been the guiding metaphor in Congressional politics for much of the last three years.

This turn of events cannot have been wholly unanticipated. The readiness with which the president's most truculent opponents label his policies "socialism" draws on a long tradition of associating African Americans with leftist ideologies—a tradition based in the reality that in the four decades between the Russian Revolution and the Stalinist revelations, many African American intellectuals turned to those ideologies for an antidote to the pervasive racism of a segregated United States that prided itself on its democracy while inscribing inequality in law. Ralph Waldo Ellison was one such intellectual. In his great novel Invisible Man, which celebrates its sixtieth anniversary this March, he portrayed a young black man's attraction to and ultimate disillusionment with powerful ideologies. During his campaign Obama repeatedly observed that he was a human Rorschach test, meaning that people saw in him what they wanted to see—a not-so-subtle allusion to Ellison's unnamed hero.

Today war has become a standard way of modeling difference. In her 1998 book The Argument Culture: Stopping America's War of Words, Georgetown linguist Deborah Tannen analyzed "a pervasive warlike atmosphere" infecting public dialogue. Noting that a conflict-based approach to difference has a long history, she nevertheless documented its rise to new heights in recent decades. Conflict pervades the media, the law, technology (think computer games), and education. I work at the home of the "Fighting Irish," where a leader of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies was featured in a promotional video series "What Would You Fight For?" The installment was called "Fighting for Peace."

Writing about the fate of the president's post-partisan agenda in the New Yorker, Ryan Lizza cited research on the extremely limited impact that presidential rhetoric has historically had. Obama has called for compromise and consensus-building on many occasions over the last three years, including during the health care reform discussions and during his negotiations with John Boehner over the debt ceiling. Those appeals have contributed to a number of concrete legislative results, but they have probably also contributed to the heightened oppositionalism of the Tea Party Republicans. While it was this atmosphere that Obama promised to change, the extent of the problem requires long-term, systemic efforts, not quick fixes.

A number of initiatives—some originating with the administration, some not—offer a vision of a longer-term transformation. Last June NEH chairman and former Republican congressman Jim Leach completed a nineteen-month "Civility Tour" of all fifty states to promote better public dialogue. This month the National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement, on commission from the Department of Education, released "A Crucible Moment: College Learning and Democracy's Future." The report calls on institutions of higher education to promote "capacities to engage diverse perspectives and people" and build more robust institutions of democratic civic engagement. Meanwhile the group No Labels has encouraged people to eschew party labels and promoted a set of Congressional reforms designed to fix the processes that have contributed to polarization and paralysis.

At the conclusion of his State of the Union address, President Obama returned to his opening military imagery, this time in connection with the flag given him by the SEAL Team that killed Bin Laden. The names of the team are written on the flag, and the president noted that "some may be Democrats. Some may be Republicans. But that doesn't matter." What matters, he went on to say, is that they were able to work together, to have each other's backs, and he called on Congress and the nation to do the same. It is a reflection of our moment—sad, perhaps, but real—that American culture has become so saturated with conflict that our Nobel Peace Prize-winning president turns to the military institutions designed to engage in conflict as our best examples of teamwork and cooperation.

Sandra M. Gustafson teaches at the University of Notre Dame, where she is a member of the English department and a faculty fellow at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. Her book Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2011.

Stay tuned for tomorrow's response from James Kloppenberg, Charles Warren Professor of American History at Harvard University, and the author of Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition (Princeton University Press, Second Edition, 2012).

In Why Iowa?: How Caucuses and Sequential Elections Improve the Presidential Nominating Process, David P. Redlawsk (five-time former Iowa precinct caucus chair), Caroline J. Tolbert, and Todd Donovan argue that not only is Iowa's impact warranted, but it reveals a great deal about other informational aspects of the campaign. Iowa's exceptionally well-designed caucus system brings candidates' arguments, strengths, and weaknesses into the open and—most importantly—under the media's lens.

A recent piece by John Sides for the NYT's FiveThirtyEight blog focused on Iowa's dramatic finish, where a late surge by Rick Santorum left Mitt Romney with a narrow, eight-vote victory. Sides's appealed to media data and commentary from the Why Iowa? authors, in addition to polling data from Nate Silver. The result? In Sides's words:

Why does this matter? Mr. Redlawsk and his colleagues demonstrate that not only do candidates who do relatively well in Iowa do better in New Hampshire—see also Nate's analysis—but this shift in media attention may play the causal role. The media's attention matters too, and their attention depends on how candidates perform versus expectations. Mr. Redlawsk and his colleagues then show that the results in New Hampshire shape the candidates' overall share of votes in the primaries as a whole. So Iowa affects New Hampshire, and New Hampshire affects everything else. . . .

In the run-up to the caucus, Redlawsk spoke with Ezra Klein at the Washington Post about how Iowa rose to its current first-in-the-nation status and why so many candidates care about such a small number of delegates. As Redlawsk commented:

Probably what Iowa does best is winnow the field: eliminate the also-rans, the ones who just can't build a campaign. That's really what Iowa does. It teaches them to build a grassroots campaign. Those who do well get to move forward, and those who don't drop out. That said, in the last few cycles, Iowa has played a very significant role. There's no question that it launched Obama. But in the end, it's not so much winning Iowa as it is generating attention because you beat expectations.

Tolbert chimed in for a piece by Gail Collins for the NYT, which presented a dissenting perspective on Iowa, where as Tolbert noted, "Caucuses tend to foster more grass-roots participation."

Redlawsk also sat down for Public Radio International's The Takeaway, and offered some wisdom about the caucuses unpredictable results and what the truth is about their effect on candidate selection:

It's the media that's the primary king-maker here. What the media does is interprets the results of Iowa, the results of New Hampshire, as we go forward in a sequential process.

For more information about Why Iowa?, check out the authors' interactive website, which includes excerpts, interviews and talks (including recent mentions on the BBC and Southern California Public Radio's Madeleine Brand Show, and other information about the book and its scholarship.

In the meantime, here's some coverage of the 1988 Republican and Democratic Iowa caucuses from PBS's MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour (including some vintage Roger Mudd) that grapples with some of same questions Why Iowa? continues to debate:

Sad news from Berlin: the passing of critic, novelist, and essayist Christa Wolf. Long credited for helping to establish a distinctive East German literary voice, Wolf was the author of numerous works, including Divided Heaven, The Quest for Christa T., Patterns of Childhood, Cassandra, Medea, On the Way to Taboo, and Accident: A Day's News. Though much of Wolf's work engaged with issues of feminism, self-reflexivity, societal pressures, and German fascism, it was her quest for "subjective authenticity" that helped to position her literary output in vital proximity to the social and political issues of her time. In 2002, Wolf was awarded the inaugural German Book Prize for her lifetime achievement.

In her 1994 lecture "Parting from Phantoms: On Germany," extracted here, Wolf reflects on Germany's reckoning with its history five years after reunification. Along the way, she describes confronting "a compromising phase in my past" and the uproar that ensued when she revealed that she had worked as an informal collaborator for the East German secret police between 1959 and 1962. "Parting from Phantoms: On Germany" appears in full in Christa Wolf's Parting from Phantoms: Selected Writings, 1990-1994, published by the University of Chicago Press.

Everything about Germany has been said. I make this claim after wearily pushing aside the stacks of recently published books, the piles of fresh newspaper articles that I have read, skimmed, or left unread. What a giant gruel Germans have been cooking up, talking and writing and analyzing and arguing and polemicizing and pontificating and lamenting, even satirizing themselves and Germany, in the past four years. We have stirred this gruel ourselves, put the pot on the fire, watched it simmer, bubble, sizzle, boil over; we have tasted it, eaten it up like good little children. But the gruel cannot be consumed, nor can it be held in check any longer. It is spilling over the stove and kitchen, out from the messy house onto the road, onto all the streets of our German cities, apparently bringing no nourishment to the homeless Germans who huddle there. And if we well-housed Germans want to be honest—and what do Germans today want more urgently than to be honest!—we must admit that we no longer like the taste of this German millet gruel. We are sick of it. We are fed up with it.

"No!" cries the German Suppenkaspar, the Boy Who Won't Eat His Soup, who along with his friend Struwwelpeter is just this year celebrating his 150th birthday in blooming health (that is, their story is still being printed in great numbers): "O take the beastly soup away / I won't eat any soup today!"' The question arises how a child raised to be antiauthoritarian can be forced to eat up the soup he has cooked himself, to swallow something he doesn't like….

Where am I headed? I am searching for a name for a feeling. In Santa Monica, I confronted a compromising phase in my past. I learned how difficult it can be to face the past honestly and adequately when, in Germany, "overcoming the past" on the public level usually takes the form of a chronicle of scandals or a mere skimming of documents—documents that reduce people's personal histories to simple patterns of yes or no, black or white, guilty or innocent, and provide no information beyond that. I thought then and still think that this credulous faith in files is possible only in Germany. I shall not forget, nor do I want to forget, the physical sensation of being replaced, piece by piece and limb by limb, by another person who was built to suit the media and seeing an empty place arise at the spot where I "really" was. It was an eerie sensation. I then found words for my eerie feeling: the disappearance of reality.

"Unreality" is a word Thomas Mann applied to Germany in 1934, when he was already abroad but not yet in exile. He spoke of the return to unreality. The phrase struck me and preoccupied me deeply. I would often travel up to Mann's house in Pacific Palisades and go down Amalfi Drive, where he used to walk almost daily when he was writing Doctor Faustus, that awe-inspiring self-confrontation of the German intelligentsia in their failure against fascism. Cautioning myself inwardly not to make pat comparisons, I wondered, Have we Germans now come together in a polity that at last is proof against the temptation to think "tragically, mythically, heroically" the kind of thinking Mann attributed in 1934 to the dear compatriots of his who had succumbed to German myth? Aren't we now thinking "economically," "politically"—that is, realistically—at last, in what Mann said was not the German way? Yes, if thinking economically means thinking that the maximization of profit is the highest of all values and if thinking politically means putting the interests of one's own party above everything else.

Am I being unjust? Partisan? Four and a half years of German unity, and myths and legends abound—some circulated intentionally, some necessarily arising from the way German unity is being pursued. The large-scale attempt to reduce the GDR to the status of an "unconstitutional state," to assign it to the realm of evil and thus to block historical thinking about it, has proved useful in the equally large-scale title challenges and mass expropriation of the property of GDR citizens. But above all it has helped hide the fact—from our West German fellow citizens, among others—that history is once again sailing in the direction favored by those who have enough clout to determine which way the wind blows. . . .

Where am I headed? I think that in East and West Germany it is time to part from the phantom that each was to the other for so long and thus to part from the phantom of our own land, too. Get down to business, Germany! And why not? We know what happens to denied, repressed reality: it disappears into the blind spot in our consciousness, where it engulfs activity and creativity and generates myths, aggressiveness, delusion. The spreading sense of emptiness and disappointment also produces social maladies and anomalies in which groups of young people "suddenly" drop out of civilization, cancel what seemed abiding social con-tracts, and turn into young zombies without com-passion, even for themselves. At a secondhand bookstore in Santa Monica, I found a story by Friedrich Torberg: "Mein ist die Rache" (Vengeance is mine). The author describes the sadistic practices of a concentration-camp commandant in 1943 who drives a group of Jewish prisoners to commit suicide one after another. It is almost unbearable to read. One reader, apparently an emigre German Jew, added some bitter marginal notes after the war. On the last page this reader penciled in, "America is full of Jews who love Germany and long for it."

The night after I read this book, a question occurred to me that has stayed on my mind ever since and that I want to pass on to you: What would we all give, each one of us, each individual German, for this not to have happened? It's a "pan-German" question. Perhaps we will know something more about ourselves if each one of us tries to answer it individually, as honestly and above all as concretely as possible. And doesn't it lead to three other questions that are worrying us: What was? What remains? What will be?

An English clergyman told us recently that the Germans must make up their minds about themselves, must learn to affirm themselves and the positive sides of their history; otherwise the young people would drift farther and farther away. My family thought about what we Germans could be proud of, what we have that is particularly good, and my fourteen-year-old grandson, who had just spent two weeks in the United States, said, "The bread we bake in Germany." We laughed, and the more I thought about it, the more I was satisfied with that answer. Bread as an ancient symbol and as everyday concreteness, as the food par excellence, a sensual pleasure you never tire of, simple and at the same time delicious. It fills you, it has aroma, it has flavor, and with its color and manifold shapes it is also a feast for the eyes. Along with wine, it stimulates conversation, friendship, hospitality. What I would like to see—and it's already happening—are Germans from different points of the compass working together, developing projects, and then sitting down around the table to talk, even to argue, and to eat, to eat in common, the soup they have cooked for themselves. To set on the table the bread they have brought from their various regions, offering it to each other and sharing it gladly and generously.

Translated by Jan van Heurck

Lecture given at the Dresden Staatsoper as part of the "Dresden Lectures" series, February 27, 1994. This translation (first published in PMLA, May 1996) ©1996 by the University of Chicago; all rights reserved.

The publishing world has lost a lion in the death, at the age of eighty-five, of Morris Philipson, who served as Director of the Press from 1967 to 2000. During his tenure—the longest of any director in the Press's 119-year history—he raised the bar in academic publishing to unprecedented heights, promoting the intellectual revolutions in culture, scholarship, and the arts that characterized this dramatic period.

His remarkable judgment and taste earned him a reputation for making bold choices that resulted in pioneering works that defined their fields. This vision was exemplified by such monumental projects as The Works of Giuseppe Verdi, The Lisle Letters, and Yves Bonnefoy's Mythologies. Other outstanding publications included John Boswell's Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, a 1980 American Book Award winner that broke new ground in gender studies; the pioneering Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society; several editions of the Chicago Manual of Style, the definitive reference for any writer; and Norman Maclean's best-selling A River Runs Through It. Philipson was also an innovator in paperback publishing, expanding the Press's commitment to reissuing classic works by provocative writers including André Malraux, Isak Dinesen, Anthony Powell, and Paul Scott.

Philipson took great pride in establishing the Press as one of America's leading publishers of translations, forging fruitful partnerships with French and German publishers in particular. Philipson and his editors introduced to an American audience works by Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricoeur, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Thomas Bernhard, among others. A translation of essays and letters by the German publisher Kurt Wolff, who as an émigré founded Pantheon Books, was for Philipson "an occasion to make conscious the fact that the character of a press is determined by the publisher making selections on the basis of his conceptions of art and serious thought," he told Publishers Weekly in 1991.

In recognition of his extraordinary contributions, in 1984, the French government awarded Philipson the Commandeur de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres for his service to French letters, and in 1982 he became the first director of a scholarly press to win PEN American Center's Publisher Citation. Shortly before retiring in 2000 Philipson also received the Association of American Publishers' Curtis Benjamin Award for Creative Publishing.

Philipson was born in New Haven, Connecticut, and received his BA (1949) and MA (1952) from the University of Chicago. Abroad, he pursued studies at the Sorbonne and as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Munich. He received a PhD in philosophy from Columbia University where, under the mentorship of Jacques Barzun, he concentrated on aesthetics. As an advocate for the pursuit of "the best that has been said and thought in the world," he inspired the next generation by teaching courses in philosophy, cultural history, and literature at the Julliard School of Music, Hunter College, and the University of Chicago. Before returning to his alma mater to assume the directorship, he established his distinctive editorial style at Random House, Alfred A. Knopf, and Basic Books during the golden age of New York publishing.

His passion for publishing was reflected not only in recognizing the potential in other authors, but in realizing his own literary aspirations. He was the author of five acclaimed novels—Bourgeois Anonymous (Vanguard, 1965), The Wallpaper Fox (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1976), A Man in Charge (Simon & Schuster, 1979), Secret Understandings (Simon & Schuster, 1983), and Somebody Else's Life (Harper & Row, 1987)—as well as short stories and works of nonfiction. Cynthia Ozick praised his work as comprising "lucid and engaging prose, incisive social insight, high wit, ironic brilliance, narrative urgency, the puzzlement and poetry of human life."

Philipson and his wife, Susan, who died in 1994, shared their love of books and ideas by making their home a salon, where they entertained a diverse spectrum of writers, thinkers, and artists, including such luminaries as Hugh Trevor-Roper, Jack Fuller, Wendy Doniger, and Bill Russo. This enthusiasm for discovery and sharing lives on with their children, Nicholas, Jenny, and Alex.

Marshall Sahlins—globally renowned ethnographer, Polynesian historian, and the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology (Emeritus) at the University of Chicago—has had quite a series of weeks.

First came notice from the French Ministry of Culture, helmed by Frédéric Mitterand: Sahlins has been named a Chevalier des Arts et des Letters (Knight in the Order of Arts and Letters), an honorary position that commends artists, scholars, and others who have contributed "to the enrichment of French culture."

In addition, Sahlins is set to receive not one—but, two—honorary doctorates, from the Sorbonne and the London School of Economics.

In addition, the Sorbonne will host a daylong conference on Monday, November 14, 2011, in celebration of Sahlins and his work, featuring contributions from sociologists, anthropologists, and philosophers from around the world.

The author of numerous books (an assortment of which have been translated into French,
including The Western Illusion of Human Nature), Sahlins is also the executive publisher of Prickly Paradigm Press. Among those books of Sahlins published by the University of Chicago Press are Culture and Practical Reason, winner of the Gordon J. Laing Prize; How Natives "Think": About Captain Cook, For Example; Islands of History; Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa; and the two-volume Anahulu: The Anthropology of History in the Kingdom of Hawaii (coauthored with Patrick V. Kirch).

Sahlins personal ties to France are notable—in the late 1960s, he experienced the May 1968 student protests firsthand, while studying with anthropologist and ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss at his Laboratoire at the College de France. Later, Sahlins returned as the sole American participant in the ceremonies celebrating Lévi-Strauss's 100th birthday in 2009.

Quipped Sahlins in acknowledgement of the honors:

"I think I am the Jerry Lewis of French anthropology. The French love me, and the Americans can't understand why."

Photo by Alan Thomas

To watch the movement's rhetorical development and the increasing exile, imprisonment, and death of its leaders alongside the community's—and nation's—growing disillusionment with the Vietnam War, Nixon administration politics, and urban poverty, is a fascinating exercise in the nuances of discrimination and endemic societal problems. To watch all of this alongside a sometimes sympathetic, often curious, and largely culturally distanced assortment of Swedish journalists (drawn from over twenty televised broadcasts) leaves you pondering an almost inexplicable gap—between that time and the present, between these two societies (often united by their anti-Vietnam political stance), and between the roles of participant and observer. What sort of historical reading properly prepares you for a bus of blonde-haired Swedish investigative journalists being chastised about exploring Harlem, as their tour guide uncomfortably stumbles out a comment about how their fear is shared by better ("better?" "Can I say that?") African American citizens?

In 2001, Eddie S. Glaude Jr., the William S. Tod Professor of Religion and African American Studies at Princeton University, edited the collection Is It Nation Time? Contemporary Essays on Black Power and Black Nationalism—thirty-five years after Adam Clayton Powell Jr. delivered, as part of his baccalaureate address at Howard University, an early version of the phrase: "To demand these God-given rights is to seek black power." Is It Nation Time? collects new and classic writings on the Black Power Movement and its legacy by renowned thinkers—including Glaude, Cornel West, and Robin D. G. Kelley—in order to tackle contemporary issues such as the commodification of blackness, class tensions, and the larger discourse surrounding black nationalism.

A precursor to Is It Nation Time?, William L. Van Deburg's New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975, follows the literal arc of much of The Black Power Mixtape's historical trajectory, offering a comprehensive account of the Black Power Movement's rise and fall, from its preconditions to ideologies that straddled everything from labor and campus life to sports, soul music, theology, and nationalism. The book garnered the Gustavus Myers Center's Outstanding Book Award (1993), and was praised by Bob Blauner in the New York Times as a "densely textured evocation of one of American history's most revolutionary transformations in ethnic group consciousness."

Angela Davis, who recently retired from the University of California, Santa Cruz's History of Consciousness program, where she long served as a professor (she's currently Distinguished Professor in the Women's and Gender Studies Department at Syracuse University), has several key moments in The Black Power Mixtape (including one that demonstrated the journalists' unusual access to Davis during her 1971-72 stay in a Marin County prison cell). The most pressing of these occurs during the conclusion of one interview, where Davis states (in response to a question about violence in the movement): "When someone asks me about violence, I find it incredible," she says. "A person asking that can have no idea about what black people have gone through in this country."

To understand the raw emotion and power of Davis's articulation, Is It Nation Time? and New Day in Babylon are fine places to start—but to place her words in the context of our own continued struggles for social justice and equality today, where institutional racism, economic disparity, the struggle for GLBTQ rights, and other issues play out in daily headlines, is to hear an echo of her furious intensity as part of a soundtrack whose audience continues to grow.