Watch Democracy in the Time of Coronavirus

The Berlin Family Lectures brings together leading scholars, writers, and creative artists from around the world. Each academic year, the invited guest delivers an extended series of lectures, participates in the university’s intellectual community, and develops a book for publication with the University of Chicago Press.

Over the course of four lectures in May of 2020, Dr. Danielle Allen, the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University and Director of Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, explored the challenges posed to our democracy by the global pandemic. She also described the specific resources the U.S. Constitutional system has for achieving resilience and the challenges we face in activating those resources when the social contract in the country has eroded.

You can listen to each of the four lectures below. These lectures are also the basis of Dr. Allen’s book, Democracy in the Time of Coronavirus. In her book, Dr Allen writes,

“It has turned out that the laws of our politics could not be broken quickly enough to achieve a national strategy for suppression of COVID-19 that might have kept the disease to low levels….To achieve pandemic resilience now and for the future — to achieve justice and health for our constitutional democracy — we will have to break the laws of politics.”

Be sure to join us on June 21st at 3pm ET for a rich virtual conversation with Dr. Allen. You can register here.