Maruyama Lectures by John Dunn

Maruyama Lectures Occasional PapersBook cover

Two Lectures by John Dunn, April 2001

Lecture: The Road to Political Paralysis: A Democratic Hope Mislaid

Who is responsible for Japan's current state of political paralysis? How can we conceive of political responsibility in a democracy, where agency is diffused throughout the population? Maruyama's attempt to answer these questions for his own time was unique in its awareness that any conception of democracy must confront the horrors of politics, which we can neither justify nor repudiate, but for which we are all ultimately responsible. John Dunn offers his own perspective on Japan's current political crisis as he considers the problems and possibilities offered for approaching them by Maruyama's vision of postwar democracy as a "community of contrition."

See here for an excerpt from John Dunn's lecture.

Seminar: Subject to the Sphinx: Capitalist Democracy as Solution and Enigma

What have we come to subject ourselves to by accepting capitalist democracy as the only viable means of political incorporation in the world today? Why has this state form spread as widely and as quickly as it has? Dunn's discussion examines the economic, ideological, and organizational dimensions of the spread of capitalist democracy in order to expose the difficulties in thinking about political responsibility in the modern world.

See here for an excerpt from John Dunn's seminar.