Franke Lectures in the Humanities

This lecture historicizes the use of racial crime statistics as a technology of social difference to justify new white supremacist ideas as well as innovative forms of state violence, segregation, and discrimination after the end of chattel slavery when African Americans gained their citizenship and civil rights. In the context of nineteenth-century eugenics, crime statistics in Europe and the US were not new in this way. And yet, the shifting economic and political priorities of US elites with respect to European and Asian immigrants as well as African Americans led to a more salient and durable form of anti-Black racial criminalization in the twentieth-century United States.

Khalil Muhammad is the Ford Foundation Professor of History, Race, and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he directs the Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project. He is coeditor of “Constructing the Carceral State,” a special issue of the Journal of American History; contributor to The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences; and award-winning author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America. He is currently codirecting a National Academy of Sciences study on reducing racial inequalities in the criminal justice system. His writing and scholarship have been featured in the New Yorker, the Washington Post, The Nation, National Public Radio, PBS Newshour, Moyers and Company, MSNBC, and the New York Times; and he appears in the recently released documentary Amend: The Fight for America, the Oscar-nominated 13th, and Slavery by Another Name.

The Soviet Gulag system was established in 1918 after the Russian Revolution, expanded under Stalin across the 1930s and into the war years, and did not reach its height until the early 1950s. Some 18 million people passed through this system and an estimated 4.5 million did not survive it. We now understand far better what the Gulag was, how it evolved, what purposes it served, how many people lived and died within it. Yet what do we really remember of the camp system? What do Russians remember? And how does that memory, or the lack of it, affect Russian politics today?

Anne Applebaum is a journalist, prize-winning historian, staff writer for The Atlantic, and senior fellow at the Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, where she coleads a project on twenty-first-century disinformation. Her books include Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine; Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944–1956; and Gulag: A History, which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. Her most recent book is the New York Times bestseller Twilight of Democracy, an essay on democracy and authoritarianism. She was a Washington Post columnist for fifteen years and a member of the editorial board; she has also been the deputy editor of the Spectator and a columnist for several British newspapers. Her writing has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Republic, the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy, among many other publications.

The Value of Marx’s Capital

Cinzia Arruzza is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. She works on ancient Greek philosophy and Marxist and feminist theory. She is the author of Dangerous Liaisons: The Marriages and Divorces of Marxism and Feminism (2013); Plotinus. Ennead II 5. On What Is Potentially and What Actually (2015); A Wolf in the City: Tyranny and the Tyrant in Plato’s Republic (2018); and coauthor of Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto (2019).
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Poster

The Value of Marx’s Capital

Massimiliano Tomba is Professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Previously, he taught political philosophy at the University of Padua. He has published several texts on the political philosophy of Kant, Hegel, the post-Hegelians, Marx, and Walter Benjamin, among them Krise und Kritik bei Bruno Bauer: Kategorien des Politischen im nachhegelschen Denken (2005); La vera politica. Kant e Benjamin: La possibilità della giustizia (2006); Marx’s Temporalities (2013); Attraverso la piccolo porta: Quattro studi su Walter Benjamin (2017); and Insurgent Universality: An Alternative Legacy of Modernity (2019).

Professor Tomba will mostly discuss Chapters 4, 5, and 6 of Capital, Vol. 1 (Penguin edition) in his talk. Attendees are invited to (re-)visit these passages before Wednesday in preparation for the conversation.

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Poster

The Value of Marx’s Capital

William Clare Roberts teaches political theory at McGill University. He is the author of Marx’s Inferno: The Political Theory of “Capital” (2018), which won the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize.
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Poster