Title (1): The Excessive Ambitions in the Social Sciences
Speaker(1)： Jon Elster, Robert K. Merton Professor of the Social Sciences, Columbia University
Title (2): Matador's Cape: Review of Counter-Terrorism Operations in the United States
Speaker (2): Stephen Holmes, Walter E. Meyer Professor of Law, NYU School of Law
Moderator: Wang Hui, Professor of School id Humanities, Tsinghua University
Commentators: Feng Xiang, Professor of School of Law, Tsinghua University
Cui Zhiyuan, Professor of School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University
Time: 19:30, April 29th , 2013
Venue：Auditorium Hall, School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University
Organizer: Center for China Studies
Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences, Tsinghua University
Bio of Speakers:
Jon Elster
Jon Elster taught at Paris, Oslo and Chicago before coming to Columbia. His publications include Ulysses and the Sirens, Sour Grapes, Making Sense of Marx, The Cement of Society, Solomonic Judgements, Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences, Local Justice, Political Psychology, Alchemies of the Mind, Ulysses Unbound, and Closing the Books: Transitional Justice in Historical Perspective. His research interests include the theory of rational choice, the theory of distributive justice, and the history of social thought (Marx and Tocqueville). He is currently working on a comparative study of constitution-making processes from the Federal Convention to the present and is engaged in a project on the microfoundaitons of civil war.
Stephen Holmes
Holmes taught briefly at Yale and Wesleyan Universities before becoming a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1978. He next moved to Harvard University's Department of Government, where he stayed until 1985, the year he joined the faculty at the University of Chicago where he taught, in both the Political Science Department and the Law School, until 1997. From 1997-2000, Holmes was Professor of Politics at Princeton University. In 2000, he moved to New York University School of Law where he is currently Walter E. Meyer Professor of Law and faculty co-director of the Center on Law and Security.
At the University of Chicago, Holmes was Director of the Center for the Study of Constitutionalism in Eastern Europe. At Chicago and NYU he also served and as editor-in-chief of the East European Constitutional Review (1993-2003). In addition, he has also been the Director of the Soros Foundation program for promoting legal reform in Russia and Eastern Europe (1994-96).
Holmes' research centers on the history of European liberalism, the disappointments of democracy and economic liberalization after communism, and the difficulty of combating international Salafi terrorism within the bounds of the Constitution and the rule of law. In 1988, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete a study of the theoretical foundations of liberal democracy. He was a member of the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin during the 1991-92 academic years. He was named a Carnegie Scholar in 2003-2005 for his work on Russian legal reform. Besides numerous articles on the history of political thought, democratic and constitutional theory, state-building in post-communist Russia, and the war on terror, his publications include: Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism; Anatomy of Antiliberalism; Passions and Constraint: The Theory of Liberal Democracy; The Cost of Rights, coauthored, with Cass Sunstein; and Matador’s Cape: America’s Reckless Response to Terror.
