St. John's College Formal Lecture Series - "Foundational Urgency and Institutional Inertia" - Greg Recco

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This Friday, Annapolis tutor Greg Recco will deliever his lecture, Foundational Urgency and Institutional Inertia.

This lecture will examine the difficulty of sustaining collective action. In working together, we respond to exigent circumstances, but the social structures we thereby create have exigencies of their own. To the student of history, it can even seem inevitable that temporary triumph yield to eventual failure. Central chapters of Jean-Paul Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason will help illuminate essential reasons for the tendency of effective groups to turn into ineffective institutions, and some remarks on Plato's Republic (particularly Books 1 and 8) will frame the inquiry