Regius Professor of History University of Cambridge
About these lectures
The Moment of Decision
Lecture I – What is a decision?
Monday, May 4, 2026
4:10 pm – 6:15 pm
Banatao Auditorium, Sutardja Dai Hall
Lecture II – The Decision in history
Tuesday, May 5, 2026
4:10 pm – 6:15 pm
Banatao Auditorium, Sutardja Dai Hall
Lecture III – Seminar and Discussion
Wednesday, May 6, 2026
4:10 pm – 6:15 pm
Banatao Auditorium, Sutardja Dai Hall
About Christopher Clark
About these lectures
These two lectures address the theme first from a general perspective and then through the lens of historical and contemporary narratives focused on specific decisions and decision-makers.
Lecture I (What is a Decision?) opens with the questions posed by the theoretical literature around decision-making, from rational choice theory, game theory and decision theory to studies that focus on cognitive bias, the impact of neuroscience and the appraisal of emotional factors in ostensibly rational decision-making. It addresses various questions in turn: How do decisions differ from choices? When is a decision political? Are all political decisions fundamentally alike or should we differentiate by type? How do constitutional, legal, cultural and social frameworks shape processes of decision-making and their place within government? The lecture closes with reflections on the special case of decisions for (or against) and in war from Thucydides to Clausewitz.
Lecture II (The Decision in History) moves the focus to the historicity of decision-making: how do the narratives that structure our understanding of past and present use the moment of decision? What status or functionality do they assign to it? By means of a whistle-stop tour of decisional narratives drawn from areas of which I happen to be less ignorant, we examine the idea of the decision as an attribute of sovereignty in principal and practice, non-decisional understandings of sovereignty, and the rise of the modern idea of the states(wo)man was a ‘decision-maker’. We reflect on the need to discriminate between real and ostensible decision-making and on cases where an environment supersaturated with determinism can shrink the space for decision-making by focusing the political process on supposedly foreordained outcomes. The lecture closes with reflections on decision-making in our time. Has deciding become harder, and if so, why? What are the challenges facing today’s decision-makers and how do they seek to meet them? How different are decision-making processes in democratic/pluralist and authoritarian political cultures? How should we understand the impact of a predicament like global climate change on traditional decision-making practices? Have we got better at decision-making, or does the moment of decision rest on residual behaviours that are resistant to rationalization and progressive evolution?
About the Commentators
Stephen Kotkin
Kleinheinz Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution
Stanford University
Birkelund Professor of History and International Affairs Emeritus, former Woodrow Wilson School
Princeton University
Stephen Kotkin (PhD UC Berkeley 1989) moved fulltime to Stanford University in 2022, after thirty-three years at Princeton. His research concerns authoritarianism and geopolitics, across Eurasia from Japan to the British Isles inclusive, with a focus on Communism in the Soviet Union and China. He founded the global history initiative at Princeton and directed the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Affairs. At Stanford he founded and directs the Hoover History Lab. He is working on the final installment of a three-volume biography-history of Stalin’s power in Russia and Russia’s power in the world.
Christian List
Professor of Philosophy and Decision Theory
Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich
Christian List is Professor of Philosophy and Decision Theory at LMU Munich and Co-Director of the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy. He works at the intersection of philosophy, economics, and political science, with a particular focus on individual and collective decision-making. His publications include Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents (Oxford University Press, 2011, with Philip Pettit) and Why Free Will is Real (Harvard University Press, 2019). In recent years, a significant part of his work has addressed questions at the intersection of metaphysics and decision theory, including questions about the nature of agency, choice, and free will. List is a Fellow of the British Academy, a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and a member of Academia Europaea.
Sophia Rosenfeld
Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History
Department of History
University of Pennsylvania
Sophia Rosenfeld is Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History and former chair of the History Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Her latest book is The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in the Modern World (2025), which was recently named a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a finalist for the Cundill History Prize. She is also the author of A Revolution in Language (2001); Common Sense: A Political History (2011), which won the Mark Lynton History Prize and the Society for the History of the Early Republic Book Prize; and Truth and Democracy: A Short History (2019), as well as co-editor (with Peter Struck) of the award-winning, six-volume Cultural History of Ideas (2022) and a former co-editor of the journal Modern Intellectual History. Her work has been translated into many languages and supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Studies (Princeton), the Institute for Advanced Studies (Paris), the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and both the Remarque Institute and the Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU, as well as well as previous positions as Professor of History at the University of Virginia and at Yale University and visiting professorships at UVA Law School and the EHESS in Paris. From 2018 to 2021, she was Vice President and head of the research division of the American Historical Association. In 2022, she held the Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the North at the Library of Congress and was also named by the French government an Officer in the Ordre des Palmes Académiques. In 2025, she was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She also continues to write and to speak in a wide variety of venues about the state of contemporary democracy and the challenges of free speech. Her essays and reviews on these subjects can be found in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and The Nation, among other outlets.
Wheelchair accessible and service dogs welcome. For disability-related accommodation, email [email protected] or call 510-643-9164 ten days in advance of the lecture.