Who Deserves To Rule? Democracy, Elites, And Power In An Age Of Abundance

Thursday, Aug 13

7:00pm

Hosted by

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This is the first gathering of the Harlem Philosophy Society. We'd love for you to be part of it. Once a month, we pick a big question and invite someone who has spent a lifetime wrestling with it to come speak. We then take philosophy back to its roots as a social exercise while we discuss the speaker’s ideas with wine and bites. For our inaugural evening, we're honored to host Samuel Moyn, Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale. We'll gather at a private lounge in Morningside Heights, hear remarks from Professor Moyn, then break into small groups to dig into the questions together before coming back for a full-room discussion. Before you come (optional!) No reading is required — come as you are, the conversation will meet you where you're at. If you'd like a head start, read just this one piece by our speaker: Samuel Moyn, "The Old Guard: Confronting America's Gerontocratic Crisis," Harper's (May 2026) (https://tinyurl.com/HPSVol1Moyn0 — 20 min Want to go deeper? We've collected further readings on elite theory, the abundance movement, and democratic legitimacy: “New Documents Detail Nine-Figure, Silicon Valley–Funded Abundance Movement,” The American Prospect (June 2026) — 15 min “Vilfredo Pareto’s Sociology of a Ruling Class in Decline,” Jacobin (March 2026) — 12 min “The Italian Prophets of Elitism,” Modern Age Journal — 18 min Akbar & Doerfler, “Imperfect Guardians,” California Law Review (2026) — 50 min Doerfler & Moyn, “The Ghost of John Hart Ely,” Vanderbilt Law Review (2022) — 35 min