James A. Robinson, a political scientist and an economist at Harvard University, presented his and economist Daron Acemoglu's recent and renowned work, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (Random House, 2012), released in German as Warum Nationen Scheitern (S. Fischer Verlag) at the European School of Management and Technology. The timely and contested volume offers detailed arguments that a nation’s economic success s determined predominantly by its political institutions, with historical examples from the Roman Empire, Mayan civilization, medieval Venice, the Soviet Union, Latin America, England, Europe, the United States, and Africa. At this March 11 talk, Robinson discusses the economic and political history of the Americas.

The Frankfurt School critics of the Weimar Republic were bedazzled – and confused – by the deluge of new mass technologies (photographs, movies, illustrated magazines, billboards, etc.) that were being developed in tandem with a new form of mass politics – for example, fascism. Weimar-era intellectuals, especially Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, and Siegfried Kracauer, engaged in sharp debate about whether these new forms would lead to a revolutionary consciousness or were, instead, opiates of the people. In this lecture, journalist Susie Linfield will discuss how eighty years later we are equally bedazzled, and equally confused, about the role of new technologies – digital cameras, Facebook, the Internet, Twitter – in the popular uprisings in the Arab and Muslim world, both inspiring and ominous, known collectively as the Arab Spring.