POLITICAL CONVICTION AND INTELLECTUAL SERIOUSNESS In the time that James Miller has taught at The New School, he has found that “the students are the most interesting thing about the university. The fact that The New School actually stands for something, starting with the University in Exile, still attracts students from around the world.” Graduate students in politics in particular “come to The New School out of a sense of political conviction, as well as intellectual seriousness. The students vary greatly in background and training, but almost all have a profound passion for politics; they care about changing the world as well as understanding it.” In 2011, Professor Miller published Examined Lives, a collection of biographical essays that begins with Socrates, ends with Nietzsche, and discusses ten other “philosophers who tried to live philosophically.” He began writing Examined Lives as a result of research he did for an earlier book, The Passion of Michel Foucault. Professor Miller particularly enjoys teaching Modernity and Its Discontents, a course with an interdisciplinary syllabus that juxtaposes novels and pamphlets, essays and manifestos by writers ranging from Rousseau, Goethe, and Robespierre to Joseph Conrad, André Breton, and Hannah Arendt. “The New School attracts extraordinary students from around the world, creating a distinctly cosmopolitan student body,” says Professor Miller. It is these scholars who will be the political thinkers and leaders of the future.
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The students vary greatly in background and training, but almost all have a profound passion for politics; they care about changing the
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world as well as
understanding it.
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