Our workshop, hosted by the Institute for Advanced Study at CEU in Budapest, organized in cooperation with the CEU Democracy Institute (Democracy in History workgroup), CEU’s Advanced Certificate in Political Thought and the Department of History, seeks to rethink the possible national, transnational, mesoregional, and global frames of studying the history of political thought. Rather than positing a fatal contrast between national and global, we are more interested in the communication and heuristics of different approaches. Most of all, we are interested in how these different takes can reflect on their own historicity and thus facilitate empathic border-crossings without melting everything into a decontextualized meta-narrative.
The participants represent different such directions of border-crossing, both geographical and temporal, writing on the interplay of Chinese and Western liberalism, German and American political sciences at the turn of the 20th century, communism and feminism, pre-modern and modern political theologies, or the politics of translating the Enlightenment.
Drawing on their expertise and personal embeddedness in transnational research networks, we hope to reflect together on the ways these experiences shape our work and in turn our work might help rethinking the analytical and narrative frames for reflecting on the history of political thought beyond the traditional Western-European “core.”
The format of the workshop will provide ample space for a lively exchange of ideas, and we ask each participant to present shortly some of their key points for the debate, followed by an intra-panel round of reflections and then involving the audience.
MODERATOR:
Balázs Trencsényi (CEU / CEU IAS / CEU DI)
Professor, CEU Department of History, Director of CEU Institute for Advanced Study, Research Affiliate at CEU Democracy Institute
SPEAKERS:
Dongxian Jiang (Fordham University / IAS CEU): Doing Comparative Political Theory, but for whom?
Dongxian Jiang is Assistant Professor of Chinese Studies in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Fordham University, Lincoln Center. As a political theorist and intellectual historian, his research and teaching interests encompass comparative political theory, the history of Chinese and Asian political thought, and contemporary normative political theory. His focus includes issues of political legitimacy, human rights, democratic institutions, and authoritarianism within the context of global and regional dynamics. His current work intervenes in the “China Model” debate since the 1980s and explores its implications for liberal democratic theories. Dongxian has also contributed to the understanding of the history and contemporary relevance of Confucianism, the reception of Western political thought in East Asian contexts, and the representation of non-Western societies in Western political thought. He has published articles in academic journals such as Political Theory, Comparative Political Theory, Journal of Confucian Philosophy and Culture, and Global Intellectual History.
Tetiana Zemliakova (EUI / CEU DI): The German historical world of American political science
Tetiana Zemliakova is an intellectual historian of modern disciplinary knowledge and a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at the EUI. Her first book project, Building Schools: the American Research University and the Birth of Modern Political Science (1850–1910), is a study dedicated to the intersection between the institutional development of modern research universities and the rise of academic disciplines in Germany and the US. Tetiana’s second project—The Last Men and Their Times: Modernity’s Emancipation from History—explores the history of embodied time in modernity. Following the discoveries of the geological, ontogenetic, and mythical time, the project traces the change in affective schemes of the last men. Tetiana also teaches courses on the history of ideologies and the politics of warfare at the Invisible University for Ukraine, directs IUFU’s Winter Schools, and conducts a writing seminar with IUFU’s graduate students.
Zsófia Lóránd (University of Vienna): Feminist Thought in Eastern and Central Europe as a Laboratory for Transnational History
Zsófia Lóránd is Assistant Professor at the Department of Contemporary History and RECET at the University of Vienna. Earlier, she was a Marie Curie Fellow at the Faculty of History and Wolfson College at the University of Cambridge, and had held positions at the European University Institute in Florence and the Lichtenberg-Kolleg of the University of Göttingen. Her book, The Feminist Challenge to the Socialist State in Yugoslavia focusing on the intellectual history of feminism in the 1970s and 1980s was published in 2018 and got translated into Croatian in 2020. Whilst living in Hungary, she worked for 8 years as an SOS helpline volunteer and trainer in the field of domestic violence. Currently, she is working as PI on her ERC-funded project HERESSEE “The History of Feminist Political Thought and Women’s Rights Discourses in East Central Europe 1929 – 2001”.
Maciej Janowski (Polish Academy of Sciences): Up or down: debates on the patterns of Carpathians settlement in the Middle Ages and early Modern period
Maciej Janowski b. 1963, graduate of Warsaw University (1987), Professor at the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences; in Warsaw (doctorate 1993, habilitation 1999, full professor 2020). Visiting Professor at the CEU 1993-2020. Field of research: Polish and Central European History 18th - early 20th century.
László Kontler (CEU): Trans-what? Translation, reception and the mediation of political ideas in the Republic of Letters
László Kontler is a professor of history at Central European University (Vienna/Budapest). His research and publications focus on intellectual history, the history of political thought, translation and reception, and the production and circulation of scientific knowledge in early modern Europe, mainly the Enlightenment. His books include A History of Hungary (Palgrave, 2002), Translations, Histories, Enlightenments: William Robertson in Germany, 1760-1795 (Palgrave, 2014) and (with Per Pippin Aspaas) Maximilian Hell (1720-1792) and the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe (Brill, 2020), and many (co-)edited volumes.
Matthias Riedl (CEU): Pirate Enlightenment and Post-Comparative Philosophy: Recent Approaches to Global Political Thought
Matthias Riedl is an associate professor of history at Central European University, Vienna, and chair of CEU’s Advanced Certificate Program in Political Thought. He also taught at Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Duke University, Durham, NC, Jean Moulin University of Lyon 3, and Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. His research focuses on the relation between religion and politics in Western Christianity, from late antiquity to the early modern period. He is the author of a monograph on the 12th century apocalyptic thinker Joachim of Fiore (2004), numerous articles on the history of religious and political thought, as well as (co-)editor of volumes on Prophets and Prophecies (2005), Humans at War, at Peace with Nature (2006), Religions – The Religious Experience (2008), God or Gods? (2009), The City –Axis and Centre of the World (2011), The Apocalyptic Complex (2018), and Companion to Joachim of Fiore (2018).
PROGRAM:
4:00 – 5:30 PM: Roundtable discussion ‘Transnational Histories of Political Thought’ (N15, Room 103)
5:30 – 6:00 PM: Reception
6:00 – 8:00 PM: Fusion concert: Traditional Epic and Experimental Music - Kenzhebek (Kyrgyzstan) and Baykochkar (Southern Uzbekistan) with the Turan Road Music (Hungary) (N15, Auditorium A)