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SUMMARY:Political Thought\, Time and History: An International Conference 
 - Speaker to be confirmed
DTSTART:20180511T083000Z
DTEND:20180511T163000Z
UID:TALK94555@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Professor John Robertson
DESCRIPTION:*POLITICAL THOUGHT\, TIME\, AND HISTORY*\n\nAn International C
 onference\n\nClare College\, University of Cambridge\n\nThursday 10 and Fr
 iday 11 May 2018\n\n*Registration is now open*: http://onlinesales.admin.c
 am.ac.uk/conferences-and-events/history/political-thought-time-and-history
 /political-thought-time-and-history\n\nIt is easy to assume that political
  thought is bound up with time and history. To most historians\, time and 
 history are obvious dimensions of politics\; politics occur in contexts wh
 ich are temporal and historical\, and must be studied by reference to the 
 evidence provided by those contexts. Periodically historians have question
 ed whether temporality should be regarded as uniform\; recently\, there ha
 s been much interest in the thesis that ‘modernity’ entailed a new und
 erstanding of time. But whether that understanding\, and the understanding
 s of time in pre-modern eras\, are thought of as belonging to contemporari
 es and shared by all those who thought about politics\, or are conceived r
 ather as heuristic models\, is often unclear. The debate hovers uncertainl
 y between intellectual history and historical methodology.\n\nPolitical ph
 ilosophers\, however\, have never taken time and history for granted. Whet
 her temporality is a necessary or normative foundation for the concept of 
 the civitas\, the state\, whether political concepts require to be inserte
 d into a historical narrative to be effective are questions to which they 
 have returned very different answers. A Machiavelli might hold politics go
 verned by an inherently temporal ‘necessity’\, and insist that politic
 al agency be assessed in its specific historical outcomes. But a Hobbes or
  a Rousseau would create a foundation for the state which deliberately lim
 ited the scope for time to make a difference\, and which would be valid in
 dependent of historical circumstance. A similar division may be found amon
 g the jurists. Exponents of customary law argued from prescription\, while
  Roman jurists explored the adaptability of concepts codified for the inha
 bitants of the Roman Empire to the post-Roman world of multiple kingdoms a
 nd city-states. But other jurists set aside time by preferring first princ
 iples to prescription\, or by making historical examples support accounts 
 of natural law as the universal\, supratemporal embodiment of civilised so
 ciability. Viewed as the study of ‘languages’\, the history of politic
 al thought has found itself studying many languages to which time and hist
 ory are essential – but many too which diminish or exclude them.\n\nThe 
 aim of this conference will be to explore the variety of engagements with 
 time and history found in political thinkers\, the better to understand (a
 nd\, perhaps\, to explain) why political philosophy has been unable to tak
 e these concepts for granted. Themes of individual sessions will include T
 ime and the State\, the temporal and historical perspectives available to 
 political thinkers following the fall of the Roman Empire\, time in custom
 ary and Roman legal traditions\, the temporalities of civil and sacred his
 tory in the early modern period\, the conceptual status of Enlightenment 
 ‘stadial history’ and what it contributed to the understanding of soci
 ety and government\, the time of ‘modern’ politics\, in the nineteenth
  and again in the twentieth centuries\, and whether a political thought 
 ‘global’ in time and history is conceivable. It will end with a reasse
 ssment of time in the history of political thought itself: what understand
 ings of time should govern our engagement with the political and legal tho
 ught of the past\, whether remote or still close at hand? Must they be ada
 pted if the history of political thought is\, as many of its foremost prac
 titioners have hoped\, to enhance political philosophy itself? The confere
 nce is organised under the aegis of the Cambridge Centre for Political Tho
 ught and the University’s Faculty of History.\n\nFull details and progra
 mme available here: www.polthought.cam.ac.uk/future-events/conf2018-page
LOCATION:Clare College\, Cambridge University
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