Wednesday Talk: Nov. 20, 2024, 10am-12pm – hybrid

Abstract: The venerable conservative columnist George Will — a retired professor at the U of T! — recently described the choice facing American voters on November 5 as the worst in the country’s history.  In fact both tickets deserved to lose the election and both would have been doomed to do so, were it  not that its only competition was supplied by the other.   Both tickets were aware of their weakness and adopted tactics the main purpose of which was to obfuscate it.  Resistible force met movable object, with the outcome impossible to predict.

Bio:  Clifford Orwin is Professor of Political Science, Classics, and Jewish Studies, a Fellow of St. Michael’s College, and a Senior Fellow of Massey College at the University of Toronto. He is also Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, and Senior Fellow of the Berlin/Bochum Thucydides Center. He is the author of The Humanity of Thucydides (Princeton University Press, 1994, 5th ed. 2020; Mandarin translation 2015), and has contributed to many other books as well as publishing many articles on classical, modern, contemporary, and Jewish political thought. He has argued that professors should put teaching first and has won three major teaching awards at the University, including the inaugural J.J. Berry Smith Prize for Excellence in Doctoral Supervision (2013).