Discussion | Hope of the Intellect? Thinking and Seeking Possibilities in Politics
Hope of the Intellect? Thinking and Seeking Possibilities in Politics
Join the Institute for Public Knowledge on Wednesday, October 14 (5:30–7:00 PM) for a panel with Lisa Ruddick, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, and George Scialabba, moderated by Nikhil Goyal. Introduced by Daniel Wortel-London. Cosponsored by the Harvard Public Culture Project and the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College.
“Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” has long served as a rallying cry for progressives confronting political and social crises. The phrase suggests a sober assessment of the world combined with a determination to act despite discouraging realities. But in a moment when democratic institutions appear fragile, inequality entrenched, and public trust frayed, one might ask whether this formula is still adequate—or even realistic. At what point does critique become politically debilitating? And what point is willpower insufficient? Do we need to reimagine the ways that our culture and politics relate to one another?
This panel will bring together a social critic, a historian, a literary scholar, and a politician to answer a fundamental question: what kind of optimism—and what kind of criticism—does this moment require? Our speakers will discuss how they have attempted to balance critical thinking with the cultivation of hope in their work and political activities, what kinds of pressures they have faced and navigated in doing this, and what lessons this might hold for reforming our institutions and politics. By considering and reimagining the way we evaluate political possibilities today, this panel will reveal new routes for political transformation.
Nikhil Goyal is a sociologist and author of Live to See the Day: Coming of Age in American Poverty (Metropolitan/Macmillan), which The New Yorker named A Best Book of 2023 and the Washington Post raved about: “the stories of these children will change the way you think about poverty.” He is also a policymaker who served as senior policy advisor on education and children for Chairman Senator Bernie Sanders on the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions and Committee on the Budget. He developed education, child care, and child tax credit federal legislation as well as a tuition-free college program for incarcerated people and correctional workers in Vermont. Goyal has taught sociology at New York University, the University of Vermont, and Wesleyan University. He has appeared on CNN, Fox, and MSNBC, and written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Time, The Nation, and other publications. Goyal earned his B.A. at Goddard College and M.Phil and Ph.D at the University of Cambridge. He lives in Vermont.
Lisa Ruddick is Associate Professor of English Emerita at the University of Chicago. Her current project is a book on groupthink in the academic humanities.
George Scialabba is an essayist and critic known for his incisive writings on politics, literature, and culture. Considered by James Wood to be “one of America’s best all-round intellects,” Scialabba is the author of numerous reviews and essays, and was praised by Richard Rorty for writing “models of moral inquiry.” His book, The Sealed Envelope (Yale University Press, 2026), investigates the moral imagination of modernism and our intellectual and political inheritance.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and the co-founder of Hammer & Hope. Her book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, which won the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book, was recently published in an expanded second edition by Haymarket Books, with a new foreword by Angela Y. Davis. Her book Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership was a semi-finalist for the National Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History. She is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and a former Contributing Opinion Writer for The New York Times. In 2021, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. With Colin Kaepernick and Robin D. G. Kelley, she edited Our History Has Always Been Contraband: In Defense of Black Studies. Her latest book is the expanded and updated edition of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, featuring a new introduction by Taylor and a powerful new interview with Angela Y. Davis.
Daniel Wortel-London, PhD is a historian of American economic history. He earned his PhD in history from New York University in 2020, where he served as a Jefferson Scholar National Fellow at the Jefferson Scholars Foundation, a Louis Galambos National Fellow in Business and Politics at the Hagley Museum and Library, a visiting scholar at the Urban Democracy Lab, and a Fellow at the Clarence S. Stein Institute for Urban and Landscape Studies. His research has been published in such outlets as the Journal of Urban History, The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and in edited collections by the Columbia University Press, Jacobin, The Washington Post, and the New York Daily News. Dr. Wortel-London’s research interests grew from his work as a political advocate, having served as a policy coordinator at Civworld @ Demos, policy co-lead at the Wellbeing Economy Alliance, and policy specialist at the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy, as well as town planning committee of Occupy Wall Street and the DSA.