The Light That Failed: A Reckoning – webinar recording

Speakers: Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes

On 1 October 2020, Ivan Krastev* and Stephen Holmes** joined us to discuss their their book, The Light that Failed: A Reckoning, with the three leaders of the Constitutional Populism project – Adam Czarnota and Martin Krygier, of the University of New South Wales Faculty of Law, and Wojciech Sadurski of the University of Sydney School of Law.

The session was recorded and the archive edition is now available for viewing.^

The discussants take a tour of key themes from the book, then several of the large international audience participated in the Q&A session (Q&A begins at about 1 hour 10 minutes).

View the session

Listen to the session

For those with a more limited download speed, an audio-only file is provided below.

Our project co-hosted this talk with the Network for Interdisciplinary Studies of Law.

^Recording was advised to all participants. Views expressed herein are those of the authors/speakers and are not necessarily those of the Australian Government, the Australian Research Council, or the individual’s parent institution.

*Ivan Krastev is the chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies and permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences, IWM Vienna. He is a founding board member of the European Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the Board of Trustees of The International Crisis Group and is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. He is the author of After Europe(2017); Democracy Disrupted: The Politics of Global Protest (2014) and In Mistrust We Trust: Can Democracy Survive When We Don’t Trust Our Leaders? (2013). He is the winner of the Jean Améry Prize for European Essay Writing 2020. His latest book Is it Tomorrow, Yet? How the Pandemic Changes Europe was published in more than 20 languages in mid-June 2020 and will be published in English by Penguin in October 2020.

**Stephen Holmes is Walter E. Meyer Professor of Law at NYU School of Law. He previously taught at Harvard, Princeton, and the University of Chicago. His fields of specialization include the history of liberalism, the disappointments of democratization after communism, the politics of combating terrorism within the limits of the rule of law, and the contributions of the American Constitution to the projects of territorial expansion and Indian dispossession. Besides The Light that Failed: A Reckoning, he is the author of Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism (1984), The Anatomy of Antiliberalism (1993), Passions and Constraint: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy (1995), and The Matador’s Cape: America’s Reckless Response to Terror (2007). He is co-author (with Cass Sunstein) of The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes (1999), and (with Moshe Halbertal) ofThe Beginning of Politics: Power in the Biblical Book of Samuel (2017).