Six Univ. faculty receive Guggenheim Fellowship
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Richard Halpern, Sir William Osler Professor of English, and Veena Das, Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology and Professor of History, are two of the fellows from Hopkins currently at work on their research projects.
The research that Halpern is currently pursuing concerns tragedy and its relation to ideas of political economy.
"Part of the appeal of this project is that it draws on two areas that do not seem very obviously related," Halpern said.
"I am arguing that the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith introduced a new way of thinking about the self, society and human action."
Halpern's studies address the question of what human action is and what its ethical ramifications are.
Always interested in literature, Halpern came up with the idea for his research while reading The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt.
"I was drawn to a footnote to Adam Smith. All of this sort of happened in one afternoon," Halpern said.
After looking up the suggestive passage in Smith's work, Halpern was inspired to investigate the connection between tragedy and political economy.
Halpern discussed how Aristotle saw ethical and political action as the highest forms of human action, an idea that Smith overturned when he asserted that human action comes from what we make.
Smith believed happiness depends on wealth and that wealth depends on people engaging in activity.
"This way of thinking poses a crisis for tragic drama. Since tragedy imitates, action has been demoted. It is no longer the summit of human endeavor, but is second place to what we make," Halpern said.
Halpern notes that though Smith writes in the second half of the 18th century, what he has to say does have implications for drama.
"Smith brings conceptual fault lines to the surface," he said.
The research that Halpern is conducting will follow tragedy from Escalus through Samuel Beckett, a major 20th-century playwright.
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