Progressive Reform and the Academy in an Age of Fracture

Abstract

Atop the list of today's major challenges are rising economic inequality, continuing ecological decline, and the ominous influence of concentrated wealth on government, the media, and the framing of public issues. Exacerbating these ills are the various social, cultural, and intellectual trends that have led historian Daniel Rodgers to call ours an age of fracture, trends worsened and made less tractable by a persistent tendency to confine public normative debates to issues of process and individual liberties. This essay -- delivered as an investiture address -- considers how the era's fragmentation and thin normative thinking have weakened society's ability to perceive, assess, and confront its most acute problems. It responds by sketching a new intellectual and moral direction, based on revived engagement with substantive justice and a wide-awake recognition of our many forms of interdependence.