Between Civic Virtue and Civil War:
Global Genealogies First Part: Civic Virtue to Civil War
Lichtenberg-Kolleg, Georg-August-University
Department of Politics, University of York
Rethinking Civil Society: History, Theory, Critique
RL-2016-044, Leverhulme Trust Research Leadership Award
https://rethinkingcivilsociety.org/
Monday 20 May/Tuesday 21 May 2019
Venue: Historic Observatory/Historische Sternwarte
Geismar Landstraße 11
Between Civic Virtue and Civil War: Global Genealogies
First Part: Civic Virtue to Civil War (20-21 May)
Second Part: Between Civil War and Revolution (23-24 May)
The two workshops explore the ubiquitous and generic vocabularies of civil society from the early modern period up to the twentieth century in both a European and global context.
Here the workshops aim to explore how a breakdown in unity and concord within different political communities placed ideas of civic virtue under intense pressure; and how this came to reshape ideas of civic participation, which became increasingly violent and confrontational. The workshops also look to explore how the vocabularies of civil society operated differently in different cultural and linguistic contexts, as well as across time. We are asking how we might construct “global genealogies” and whether there is a common set of vocabularies associated with civil society?
The first workshop looks at different moments in early modernity when growing religious division, a humanist reengagement with republican thought and citizenship, alongside the emergence of ‘statist’ thought and European colonial expansion, challenged the vocabularies of civil society. The second workshop continues this story up to the twentieth century, when those vocabularies which had emerged out of the early modern period met with the new legitimating forces of populism, democracy and revolution.
Programme
Monday, 20 May
9:15-9:30 Registration and Welcome
The Problem of Civic Virtue
9:30-11:00 SERENA FERENTE (KING’S COLLEGE LONDON)
“On party feeling: freedom and political division in the self-governing city (14th-16th centuries)”
11:00-11:30 Coffee Break
11:30-13:00 PHIL WITHINGTON (UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD)
“Practical humanism and civil war”
13:00-14:00 Lunch
The Problem of Civil Society
14:00-15:30 STUART CARROLL (UNIVERSITY OF YORK)
“Civil conflict as an historical problem”
15:30-16:00 Coffee Break
16:00-17:30 SARAH MORTIMER (CHRIST CHURCH, OXFORD)
“The Reformation and the purpose of politics”
Tuesday, 21 May
Civil War and Reason of State
9:30-11:00 MARK HUTCHINSON (LICHTENBERG-KOLLEG/UNIVERSITY OF YORK)
“The English state and die deustchen Stände: conceptual dissonance in the crisis of the Palatinate”
11:00-11:30 Coffee Break
11:30-13:00 LISA KATTENBERG (UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM)
“‘No virtue like necessity’: Lipsius’ Politica and reason of state in Spanish political thought and action”.
13:00-14:00 Lunch
Different Turns in Religious Thought
14:00-15:30 CHLOE IRETON (UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON)
“Entangled histories: just war and just slavery in the early Spanish empire”
15:30-16:00 Coffee Break
16:00-17:30 TIM STUART-BUTTLE (UNIVERSITY OF YORK)
“The virtue of civility: from English natural jurisprudence to Scottish social science”
Please register until 13 May 2019 via email to Heidi Hopf.