Democracy Seminar
Dates
- Existence: 1984 - 1994
- Usage: 1984 - 1994
Biography
The Democracy Seminar, a network of seminars that ran from 1984 to 1994, and again from 2018 to the present (2021), was a semi-clandestine series of meetings of scholars held simultaneously in Warsaw, Budapest and New York, before spreading to other cities across Eastern and Central Europe. The seminar discussed topics related to democratic politics and culture, and was the genesis of what is, in 2021, the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies at The New School for Social Research.
The original idea for the Democracy Seminar was conceived of by Polish intellectual and dissident Adam Michnik (in the time between his 1984 release from prison and his 1985 re-imprisonment), and Jeffrey Goldfarb, an American sociologist at The New School. Goldfarb was the convener of the New York seminar until 1990, when fellow New School sociologist Elzbieta Matynia took over the position. The New York meetings took place in the Wolff Conference Room at The New School for Social Research. At every branch of the seminar, the first meeting discussed the work of Hannah Arendt. After the revolutions of 1989 and the fall of communism in the Eastern Bloc, the seminar lost its clandestine nature, and the first international meeting of the seminar was held in 1991 in Budapest. At this meeting it became clear that the Budapest branch of the seminar considered this the final meeting, and the various branches gradually stopped meeting between 1991 and 1994.