HIGHLIGHTS
John Owen speaks on National Champion Radio
How adaptable is liberal democracy in our global age? John Owen talks with Andre Ray on the National Champion Radio Show.
Taming the Octopus: The Long Battle for the Soul of the Corporation
Kyle Edward Williams tells the untold story of how efforts to hold big business accountable changed American capitalism.
John Owen on power and security in China and the US
John M. Owen IV: “Power and security are at stake because different types of international orders can grant material and social advantages to different types of states.”
David Brooks on James Davison Hunter’s new book
Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis is featured in the New York Times.
John M. Owen IV wins 2025 Grawemeyer Award for World Order
For his book, The Ecology of Nations: American Democracy in a Fragile World Order, John M. Owen IV has been awarded the 2025 Grawemeyer Award for World Order.
Jackson Lears: Animal Spirits
Institute Visiting Fellow Jackson Lears’s new book, Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality from Camp Meeting to Wall Street, was published this week by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
The Ecology of Nations: American Democracy in a Fragile World Order
John M. Owen IV explains how democracies compete with autocracies to bias international order in their favor—and why democracies are losing.
A Community of Scholars
Our mission to understand contemporary cultural change and its consequences is carried out in the rare context of a thriving community in which disciplines and generations intersect. Institute Fellows come together to pursue the highest level of scholarship on the most important questions facing the late-modern era. The Institute is led in this endeavor by the Institute Council.
Colloquies
The heart of the Institute’s research agenda is to develop the highest level of scholarship on the most important questions facing the contemporary world. Within an interdisciplinary community, the Institute conducts both theoretical and empirically grounded research in major areas of social life. Our research is organized into four colloquies and our labs.
Phenomenology Labs
The Institute’s Phenomenology Labs attempt to understand how people are grappling with cultural change at the level of lived experience, in their daily lives.
An award-winning journal
Published three times a year, The Hedgehog Review offers critical reflections on contemporary culture—how we shape it, and how it shapes us. Its interdisciplinary approach draws on the best scholarship and thought from the humanities and social sciences to explore and illuminate the puzzles, vexations, and dilemmas that characterize our late modern predicament.
Our Blogs
The THR Blog is designed to sustain the conversation around cultural change between The Hedgehog Review's three issues.