The Democracy Seminar is a network of seminars that ran from 1984 to 1994, and again from 2018 to the present (2021). In its original form, the Democracy Seminar was a semi-clandestine series of meetings of scholars held simultaneously in Warsaw, Budapest and New York, before spreading to other cities across Eastern and Central Europe. The seminar discussed topics related to democratic politics and culture, with meetings typically focused on a classic paper of democratic theory, or a forthcoming paper written by a member of the seminar.

The original idea for the Democracy Seminar was conceived of by Polish intellectual and dissident Adam Michnik (in the time between his 1984 release from prison and his 1985 re-imprisonment), and Jeffrey Goldfarb, an American sociologist at The New School. Goldfarb was the convener of the New York seminar until 1990, when fellow New School sociologist Elzbieta Matynia took over the position. The New York meetings took place in the Wolff Conference Room at The New School for Social Research. At every branch of the seminar, the first meeting discussed the work of Hannah Arendt. After the revolutions of 1989 and the fall of communism in the Eastern Bloc, the seminar lost its clandestine nature, and the first international meeting of the seminar was held in 1991 in Budapest. At this meeting it became clear that the Budapest branch of the seminar considered this the final meeting, and the various branches gradually stopped meeting between 1991 and 1994. The activities of the Democracy Seminar were subsumed under the newly created Eastern and Central Europe Program at The New School in 1990. This in turn became the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies in 1997. Key members of the original seminar include Jeffrey Goldfarb, Elzbieta Matynia, Andrew Arato, Ira Katznelson, Adam Michnik, György Bence, Ferenc Fehér, José Casanova and Czeslaw Bielecki. The New York seminar was mostly composed of students and faculty from The New School for Social Research’s Graduate Faculty with an interest in democracy, and the politics of Eastern and Central Europe and Latin America, while the other seminars tended to be composed of members of the democratic opposition in their respective countries.

Noting a global resurgence of illiberalism and authoritarianism, the Democracy Seminar was resurrected in 2018 by Jeffrey Goldfarb, Elzbieta Matynia and political scientist Jeffrey Isaac. "Democracy Seminar 2.0," as it was originally called, differs from the original seminar in that it does not meet regularly. Instead, the seminar is an online platform for written contributions, first hosted on The New School’s online journal, Public Seminar, and then on its own website from 2021. The seminar also sponsors events and discussions in the spirit of the original seminar. The first face-to-face meeting of the seminar and the official launch of the project was held on October 4-5, 2019, as part of The New School’s “Festival of New” centennial celebrations.

References:

“International Democracy Seminar Network (1984-)” newschool.edu, 4 Feb. 1998, Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/19980204011437/http://www.newschool.edu/centers/ecep/demsem.htm

Goldfarb, J. C. “The Democracy Seminar, Then and Now” May 4, 2018, Public Seminar, https://publicseminar.org/2018/05/the-democracy-seminar-then-and-now/

Goldfarb, J. C. “Democrats of the World, Unite!” October 31, 2019, Public Seminar, https://publicseminar.org/essays/democrats-of-the-world-unite/

Jack Wells came to The New School in 2019 as an MA student in sociology. He was born in 1995 in Sydney, Australia, and holds a BCom (Bachelor of Commerce) in marketing and a BA (Hons I) in philosophy and sociology from the University of Sydney. His research interests include the interaction between critical theory and pragmatism, the use of public reason, and the sociology of consumption. In 2020, he took the course “Historical Sociology” with Andrew Arato. While at The New School, Jack held a position as an archives assistant in The New School Archives, where he developed an interest in the history of the Democracy Seminars.