The Moment of Decision
Lecture I – What is a decision?
Monday, May 4, 2026
4:10 pm – 6:15 pm
Alumni House, Toll Room, UC Berkeley

Lecture II – The Decision in history
Tuesday, May 5, 2026
4:10 pm – 6:15 pm
Alumni House, Toll Room, UC Berkeley

Lecture III – Seminar and Discussion
Wednesday, May 6, 2026
4:10 pm – 6:15 pm
Alumni House, Toll Room, UC Berkeley

Christopher Clark was educated at Sydney Grammar School and completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. After a spell at the Freie Universität Berlin, he completed his doctorate at the University of Cambridge. In the 1990s, he was a Research Fellow and College Lecturer at St Catharine’s College. Having won a Faculty post in 2000, he was appointed Professor of Modern European History in 2007. In 2015 he became the twenty-second Regius Professor History at the University of Cambridge. Clark’s principal publications are: Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia 1600-1947; The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914; Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World, 1848-1849, all of which appeared with Allen Lane The prizes awarded for his books include the Los Angeles Book Prize, the Bruno-Kreisky-Preis, the Deutscher Historikerpreis, the Prix d’Aujourd’hui, the Prix Madeleine Laurain-Portemer de l’Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, the NSW State Premier’s Literary Prize, the Wolfson History Prize and the Laura Shannon Prize. He was awarded the Officer’s Cross of the Federal Order of Merit in 2010, was knighted in 2015 for his services to Anglo-German relations and in 2022 received the Knight Commander’s Cross of the Federal Order of Merit. He is a member of the Orden Pour le Mérite. In November 2025, he was awarded the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art, a state decoration of the Republic of Austria.

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
Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute
Kleinheinz Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution
Stanford University

Christian List
Professor of Philosophy and Decision Theory
Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich

Sophia Rosenfeld
Department Chair and Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History
Department of History
University of Pennsylvania