Program:

Welcoming Remarks Kevin O'Shea, Minister, Political Affairs, Embassy of Canada [view event] Carl Gershman, President, National Endowment for Democracy [view event] Introduction Marc Plattner, Vice President, Research and Studies, National Endowment for Democracy and Co-Editor, Journal of Democracy Lecture Pierre Hassner, Research Director Emeritus, Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales, Paris, France [view event] Question & Answer Session [view event]

Contributors:

The National Endowment for Democracy would like to thank the following donors for their generous support of this event: The Albert Shanker Institute The American Federation of Teachers The Embassy of Canada William Schneider

Additional Lectures:

2007 - Pierre Hassner, "Russia's Transition to Autocracy: The Implications for World Politics" 2006 - Saad Eddin Ibrahim, "Toward Islamic Democracies" 2005 - Francis Fukuyama, "Identity, Immigration, and Liberal Democracy" 2004 - Fernando Henrique Cardoso, "Scholarship and Statesmanship"

Pierre Hassner is research director emeritus at CERI (the Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales) in Paris. For many years he was a professor of international relations at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques in Paris and a senior visiting lecturer at the European Center of Johns Hopkins University in Bologna. Currently a visiting professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal, he has previously held visiting appointments at the University of Chicago, Harvard University, and the Institut des Hautes Etudes Internationales in Geneva. He is also a member of the editorial boards of Esprit and Commentaire and an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Pierre Hassner's major writings have focused on war and peace, totalitarianism, ethics and international relations, and international order. His books include Washington et le monde: Dilemmes d'une superpuissance (with Justin Vaisse, 2003); La terreur et l'empire (2003); and La violence et la paix: De la bombe atomique au nettoyage ethnique (1995, with an English translation in 1997). He is the coeditor of Justifier la guerre? De l'humanitaire au contre-terrorisme, a volume published in French in 2005 that will appear in English in 2008. His articles have appeared in The American Interest, The National Interest, the Journal of Democracy, Problems of Communism, International Affairs (London), Survival, Survey, Esprit, Le Débat, Politique Internationale, Commentaire, and other publications. He has also written on political philosophy, including book chapters in English on Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel.

Born in Romania, Mr. Hassner studied at the Sorbonne and the Ecole Normale Supérieure. In 2005 he received France's prestigious Tocqueville Prize, which is awarded every two years; past recipients include such luminaries as Raymond Aron, Karl Popper, Octavio Paz, and Leszek Kołakowski. In 2003, Mr. Hassner was presented a volume of essays in his honor, Entre Kant et Kosovo, edited by Anne-Marie Le Gloannec and Aleksander Smolar. The contributors include more than 30 well-known scholars, including Francis Fukuyama, Timothy Garton Ash, Stanley Hoffman, and Jacques Rupnik.

Seymour Martin Lipset was one of the most influential and prolific social scientists of the second half of the twentieth century. The son of Russian immigrants, Lipset studied sociology at the City College of New York, whose "Alcove One" brought him into contact with other rising intellectuals of the anti-Stalinist left.

One of Lipset's major scholarly interests throughout his career was the question of why socialism never took hold in the United States. This led him to write his doctoral dissertation at Columbia University on the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), a Canadian agrarian socialist party that at the time was experiencing significant electoral success in Western Canada. This work marked the beginning of a lifelong interest in Canada and in the comparative study of the two great democracies of North America.

Early in his career his interest turned to the comparative study of the conditions for democracy. His major work was in the field of political sociology, including studies on trade union organization, social stratification, public opinion, and the sociology of intellectual life. Lipset's academic affiliations included Columbia, Berkeley, Harvard, and Stanford. Until his death in 2006, he was a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford and a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He was also the Hazel Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University.

He authored or coauthored numerous books and monographs. Translations of his work have appeared in eighteen languages. In addition, he edited twenty-four books and published more than four hundred articles. Lipset received the MacIver Prize for Political Man and the Gunnar Myrdal Prize for The Politics of Unreason. His book The First New Nation was a finalist for the National Book Award, and his scholarship was recognized with many other awards.

Elected to several academic and honorific societies in the United States and abroad, Lipset was the only person to have been president of both the American Sociological Association (1992–93) and the American Political Science Association (1979–80). His many other affiliations included leadership roles in organizations that span the realms of the arts and sciences, public policy, international affairs, and the Jewish community.

Lipset, who passed away in December 2006, is survived by his three children, David, Daniel, and Cici, and his wife, Sydnee Guyer.