Between Civic Virtue and Civil War: Global Genealogies

Second Part: Between Civil War and Revolution

Lichtenberg-Kolleg, Georg-August-Universität/
Department of Politics, University of York
Rethinking Civil Society: History, Theory, Critique
RL-2016-044, Leverhulme Trust Research Leadership Award
https://rethinkingcivilsociety.org/




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

Thursday, 23 May

9:15-9:30 Registration and Welcome

Humanism in Strife

9:30-11:00 John McCormick (Chicago)
Machiavelli on Conflict and Virtue: Historical Reflections, Contemporary Implications

11:00-11:30 Coffee Break

11:30-13:00 Murad Idris (Virginia)
Re-Orienting Luther: Soldiers, Missionaries, Second-Comings

13:00-14:00 Lunch

In the Shadow of Revolutions

14:00-15:30 Georgios Varouxakis (QM London)
John Stuart Mill on revolution and civil war

15:30-16:00 Coffee Break

16:00-17:30 Liisi Keedus (Talinn)
“The snake biting its own tail": Karl Barth on revolution, war and civil society

Friday, 24 May

The Question of Civility

9:30-11:00 Zsofia Lorand (Lichtenberg-Kolleg, Göttingen)
Intellectual Women and Post-WWII Reconceptualisation of Democracy and Civil Society in East Central Europe. Case Studies from Hungary and Yugoslavia

11:00-11:30 Coffee Break

Liberalisms of Fear

11:30-13:00 Aishwary Kumar (Stanford/Göttingen)
The Logic of Political Cruelty: Ambedkar, Arendt, Shklar (and the New Civil War)

13:00-14:00 Lunch

14:00-15:30 Martin van Gelderen (Lichtenberg-Kolleg, Göttingen)
Where There is God: Fear and Desperation in the Diaries of Anne Frank.