Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber

Wendy Brown, one of America’s leading political theorists, analyzes the nihilism degrading and confounding political and academic life today and proposes ways to counter nihilism’s devaluations of both knowledge and political responsibility. She is joined for a conversation by the eminent critic and journalist Fintan O’Toole.

Wendy Brown is Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study and was for many years Professor of Political Science at Berkeley. Her influential books include In the Ruins of Neoliberalism; States of Injury; Undoing the Demos; and Walled States, Waning Sovereignty.

Fintan O’Toole is a columnist for the Irish Times and  professor in the Lewis Center for The Arts at Princeton University. A regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and the Guardian, he is the author of many acclaimed books, most recently of We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland, which is on the list of best books of 2023 of The NYTimes, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Foreign Affairs, and the New Statesman.