Ecologies of Freedom: Global Political Thinking in the Age of Socrates

“Ecologies of Freedom: Global Political Thinking in the Age of Socrates”

A lecture by Joel Alden Schlosser, Department of Political Science, Bryn Mawr College

Drawing on the ancient historian Herodotus as well as ancient Greek poetic and scientific texts,
this talk will consider an underappreciated strand of political thinking in the classical world, one deeply concerned with the complexity and interdependency of geography, culture, and political structure among diverse groups of people. This approach offers a politics of freedom that can rival the politics of virtue that has dominated interpretations of ancient political thought; it also adds new resources for working through the challenges presented by globalization and diversity in the present era.

Mr. Schlosser is the author of What Would Socrates Do? Self-Examination, Civic Engagement, and the Politics of Philosophy (Cambridge, 2014) as well as numerous articles on classical political theory.