Craig Calhoun on Meritocracy, Public Virtue, and Revitalizing Our Democracy

Craig Calhoun is University Professor of Social Sciences at Arizona State University. Previously, he was Director of the London School of Economics, President of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), founder of the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU, and a professor there and at UNC-Chapel Hill, Columbia, and Princeton. He is also a member of the Pulaski Board.

Calhoun’s newest book is Degenerations of Democracy (Harvard 2022, co-authored with Dilip Gaonkar and Charles Taylor). This takes democracy to be a project, not simply a set of formal arrangements, and looks at the ways disempowerment of citizens, partisan polarization, and politics oriented only to winning and not the public good undermine democracy from within. He has also recently edited The Green New Deal and the Future of Work (Columbia 2022, with Benjamin Fong). This explores ways in which the pursuit of better lives and livelihoods for workers could – potentially – be integrated with environmental justice and action to minimize damage from climate change.