International Conference for the Study of Political Thought

Newsletter, December 2013

Dear Colleagues,

We are excited to resume the CSPT Newsletter, which we hope to publish biannually. With regional groups from Texas to Singapore sharing information about conferences, colloquia as well as recent publications, awards and hires, the Newsletter gives a sense of CSPT’s intellectual and international scope. The regional structure of CSPT and its international reach distinguish this organization from many of its peers. In the coming years, we hope to continue building on these unique strengths.

Since our last update at the end of the summer, we organized a workshop titled Revisiting Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Conversation with Partha Chatterjee at Yale University. Returning to Chatterjee’s classic 1986 text of post-colonial political theory, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, the conversation reconstructed the intellectual and political context of its publication while also thinking through the conceptual and analytical innovations that contemporary post-colonial politics requires. A video of the conversation will be available on our website shortly. We hope to organize similar conversations around new texts and classics of political theory and share them with our members and affiliates through our website.

In the spring semester, we will host a Comparative Ancients workshop at Yale University. Drawing on the recent debates in comparative political theory, this one-day event aims to broaden our sense of the ancient world and think through how a comparative method can enrich our understanding of the history of political thought. Details for this conference will be posted at icspt.org/events.

A Letter from the Chairs News from CSPT chapters in Britain and Ireland

Contents

News from CSPT chapters in Europe and Asia

2

3

New books by CSPT members 5

4 News from CSPT chapters in the US and Canada

2

News from the UK and Ireland

“Vivamus porta est sed est.”

As you might already know, the Annual Meeting of the Conference for the Study of Political Thought, Liberty and Conflict: Machiavelli on Politics and Power, will take place at Columbia University this weekend (December 6-7, 2014). We look forward to seeing you at the conference where we will announce our 2013 Spitz Prize winner. We would like to thank the selection committee, Colin Bird, Michael Mosher and Melissa Schwartzberg for their commitment and diligent service. The announcement of the prize will be posted at icspt.org/spitz-prize shortly after the conference.

As always if you have any questions or comments, please contact us at coordinator@icspt.org.

With our best wishes for the end of the year,

Bryan Garsten and Karuna Mantena CSPT Co-Chairs

The Annual Britain and Ireland Association of Political Thought Conference will take place from January 9 to 11, 2014, at St. Catherines College, Oxford. For details, see the conference website. Moya Lloyd and Chris Brooke, the convenors for the Political Thought Conference, have awarded the prize for the best paper submitted by a graduate student from Britain or Ireland to Maximilian Jaede, St. Andrews University, for his paper ‘Why laughing mattered for Hobbes: pity, pusillanimity, and the will to power’. Mr. Jaede will present his paper at the conference.

On April 26, 2014, the Istvan Hont Memorial Colloquium will be held at Clare College, Cambridge. The program is available here. Please register for the colloquium in advance. The colloquium is organized by Prof. John Robertson

The Department of Political Science and School of Public Policy at University College London have made two new appointments in political theory to add to the existing team of Richard Bellamy, Cecile Laborde, Saladin Meckled-Garcia and Albert Weale. Dr. Emily McTernan joins us from Cambridge as Lecturer in Political Theory and MA Legal Political Theory Programme Director, and from January 2014 Dr. Avia Pasternak will be returning to UCL after a period at Essex as Lecturer in Political Theory.

Professor Cecile Laborde has been elected to a Fellowship of the British Academy.

The program for the Colloquium in Legal and Social Philosophy at UCL (2014) can be found here.

3

The German Society for the Study of Political Thought has structured their annual meeting 2013 as a conference relating to the topic of Huntington’s thesis twenty years later. Under the motto “The Process of Civilizations: 20 years after Huntington – Theoretical and empirical analyses for the 21st century,” more than 12 lectures toward the issues of how to write world history, what kind of relevance have the indicated civilizations for the actual political analysis had been presented. The interdisciplinary and international mixed conference with key speakers from Seoul, Tokio, Tel Aviv, Berlin, Munich, Hannover and Heidelberg was organized by Peter Nitschke at the University of Vechta from 8th until 20th of October. In four different panels questions were discussed relating to the standards of World History, Civilizations, Universal Codes, and Futural Perspectives. Especially questions on The Transculturalization of Human Rights or The European Union as a Successful Model for Civilization? were focused together with perspectives on the Arab Spring or Confucianism in the 21st Century. After all it seems that Huntington becomes a sort of historical figure in a concrete historical context, but some of his main questions (not the answers) remain further on. The results of the discussion and the papers will be published in the first half of 2014.

The Singapore Chapter held its inaugural event, “A Symposium Occasioned by David Armitage’s Foundations of Modern International Thought,” in April 2013 in the Department of Political Science, National University of Singapore. A second symposium, “Realism and Right: Rationality in Politics and its Limits,” is planned for April 2014. Interested scholars should contact the CSPT Singapore regional convener, Terry Nardin, for details.

The University of Lausanne hosted “Commerce and Perpetual Peace: International conference in honour of Istvan Hont,” July 4-5, 2013. Prof. Hont’s lecture, “Luxury and Revolution in Rousseau’s Second Discourse,” delivered at the University of Lausanne in 2012 is now available online.

Aliquam dolor.

byline

Lorem Ipsum

News from Europe and Asia

4

News from the US and Canada

Nam nec dui vel sapien semper sollicitudin. Curabitur dui justo,

venenatis a, pharetra vitae, ultrices in, velit.

Washington University, St. Louis, continued its 11 year long Workshop in Ethics, Politics and Society. This interdisciplinary workshop is supported by the School of Arts and Sciences, the programs in American Cultural Studies and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, the Center for New Institutional Social Science and the Departments of History, Philosophy and Political Science. Visitors in recent years have included Charles Beitz, Daniel Weinstock, John Tomasi, Harry Brighouse, Adrian Vermeule, Robert Goodin, Ira Katznelson, and Philip Pettit. Next semester’s visitors will include Lawrie Balfour, Helene Landemore, Nancy Hirschman and Charles Mills. For more information is available here.

Over the course of the last year the Toronto chapter has hosted talks by Rainer Bauböck (European University Institute), David Miller (Oxford), Jeffrey Collins (Queen’s University), and most recently, James Ingram (McMaster University). In the spring of 2014, we plan to hold gatherings featuring Patchen Markell (University of Chicago), Jacob Levy (McGill University), and Marìa Pìa Lara (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in Mexico).

“Cosmopolitanism and the Enlightenment,” a conference in honor of Anthony Pagden, will be held on December 13 and 14, 2013,

at the University of California, Los Angeles. Participants will include David Armitage, Sankar Muthu, and Anoush Terjanian.

Organized by Joan-Pau Rubiés (ICREA/ Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona) and Neil Safier (The John Carter Brown Library), the conference is co-sponsored by the Center for 17th- & 18th- Century Studies, The Clark Library, and the Huntington Library. Saturday’s events will be held at the Clark; Sunday’s events will be held at the Huntington.

The UCLA Political Theory Workshop recently hosted a talk by John McCumber on ‘Autonomy vs. Diversity: Kant & Hegel’. Steven Bilakovics will speak on ‘Dramatizing Democracy: Crisis, Civic Education, and the Common Good’ on December 6, 2013.

5

Prof. Albert Weale’s new book, Democratic Justice and the Social Contract has been published by Oxford University Press.

G. A. Cohen’s Lectures on the History of Moral and Political Philosophy, edited by Jonathan Wolff of UCL, has just come out from Princeton University Press.

CSPT’s Regional Convenor in London, Richard Bellamy, has published his latest collection of essays, Croce, Gramsci, Bobbio and the Italian Political Tradition with ECPR Press.

Regional Convener in Switzerland, Béla Kapossy, has published two edited volumes: Béla Kapossy and Pascal Bridel (eds.), Sismondi: Républicanisme modern et libéralisme critique with Éditions Slatkine in Geneva; and, Isaac Nakhimovsky, Béla Kapossy and Keith Tribe (eds.), Johann Gottlieb Fichte: Addresses to the German Nation with Hackett.

Former Regional Convener for the Lonestar Chapter of CSPT, John Randolph LeBlanc, has published Edward Said on the Prospects of Peace in Palestine and Israel (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2013).

Books published by members of the Toronto chapter include: Joseph Carens, The Ethics of Immigration, published by Oxford University Press, and, James D. Ingram, Radical Cosmopolitics: The Ethics and Politics of Democratic Universalism, published by Columbia University Press.

Sonia Kruks has published Simone de Beauvoir and the Politics of Ambiguity with Oxford University Press.

Recent books in political theory