Yale Conference Explores Political Legacies of French and American Revolutions

In a symposium to be held at Yale University, September 20-21, scholars from France and the United States will examine how two revolutions, which took place more than two centuries ago, continue to shape the political landscape of our countries today.

Titled “Revolutionary Traditions and the Law: France and the United States,” the symposium is a forum for a discussion of the only two revolutionary traditions of the Western world that have prevailed in the wake of Communism’s collapse.

Symposium participants will ponder what it means to be an adherent to the American or the French revolutionary tradition now that the communist model of revolution has lost its credibility, and what distinguishes the French and American traditions from each other.

The passions of the American Revolution continue to dominate American politics. In French politics the tradition of the Revolution has never died. Yet if both countries have surviving revolutionary traditions, those traditions do seem to stand for deeply divergent values. The aim of this symposium is to bring American and French scholars to come to some sense of what our revolutionary traditions are about.

The symposium organizers are James Q. Whitman, the Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale Law School, and Peter Brooks, the Sterling Professor of Comparative Literature and French Literature at Yale. The participants include: Keith Baker, Benjamin Barber, David Bell, Seyla Benhabib, David Brion Davis, Susan Dunn, Thomas Ferenczi, Daniel Gordon, Sarah Maza, Jennifer Pitts, Jean Fabien Spitz, Michel Troper and Gordon Wood.

The symposium begins at 2:45 p.m., Friday, with welcoming remarks by Whitman. “Revolutionary Traditions and the Aspirations of Justice,” the first of four two-hour panels that make up the symposium, will begin at 3 p.m. on Friday.

The other three panels, “Revolutionary Traditions and the Disenfranchised,” “Models of Revolution” and “Assessing Revolutionary Traditions,” take place on Saturday, at 9 a.m., 11:15 a.m. and 2:30 p.m., respectively.

The symposium is sponsored by the Whitney Humanities Center, the Yale Law School, the Cultural Service of the French Embassy and the Florence Gould Foundation.

Free and open to the public, the symposium will take place at the Whitney Humanities Center, 53 Wall Street.

For more information, e-mail: manana.sikic@yale.edu