There Never Was a West / Greg Yudin and Mirko Canevaro
The third discussion of Graeber’s essay “There Never Was a West”: A conversation between Greg Yudin and Mirko Canevaro, in the frame of “The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World…”.
The third meeting of “The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World…” reading group, the last one of 2024, will be a conversation between sociologist Greg Yudin and historian Mirko Canevaro.
In one of his most powerful essays, Graeber debunks the idea that there ever was such a thing as “the West”. More specifically, he attacks the view that democracy was a “Western” invention and questions the admiration for democratic Athens. We will discuss how to disentangle democracy from the project of “Westernization” and what lessons can be drawn from the Athenian experience for this endeavor.
Greg Yudin on “There Never Was a West”
This will be the final session of the group in 2024. The meetings will continue next year. Follow us on social media to get the latest updates on the schedule for 2025.
Register here.
View the full program of “The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World…” reading group here.
Greg Yudin is a professor of political philosophy and an MA program head at The Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences. He studies the political theory of democracy with a special emphasis on public opinion polls as a technology of representation and governance in contemporary politics.
Yudin holds a PhD in philosophy from the Higher School of Economics, Moscow with a dissertation on Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology of science. Currently, he is working on a second PhD in politics at The New School of Social Research in New York. His book Public Opinion: The Power of Numbers was published in Russian by European University Press in 2020. He has also edited a collective volume entitled Living in Debt, on the effect of consumer credit on the life of communities in Russia (Saint Tikhon University Press, 2020).
He teaches political philosophy and social theory at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences and the Higher School of Economics (Moscow). Since 2024, he has been a research scholar at the University Center for Human Values, Princeton University.