For more information about The Five Thousand Pound Life, including an introductory essay here.

This lecture will explore a new ideal of citizenship for a sustainable society, drawing on classical political thinkers to do so.  Instead of separating the role of citizen from everyday work and family roles, it reformulates citizenship as the posture in which individuals carry out those roles in light of a broader understanding of their contribution to (or undermining of) the overall achievement of sustainability. By reshaping our understanding of the division of labor, sustainable citizenship entails a challenging rethinking of professional ethics and architectural practice.

Melissa Lane is professor of politics at Princeton University, where she is also Director of the Program in Values and Public Life at the University Center for Human Values and a core participant in an interdisciplinary Research Community on “Communicating Uncertainty: Science, Institutions, and Ethics in the Politics of Global Climate Change,” supported by the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies.  Professor Lane is also an associated faculty member in the departments of classics and philosophy at Princeton.  She is the author of Method and Politics in Plato’s “Statesman”and Plato’s Progeny: How Plato and Socrates Still Captivate the Modern Mind, as well asEco-Republic: What the Ancients Can Teach Us About Ethics, Virtue, and Sustainable Living, published by Princeton University Press in 2012.

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