Keynote Speakers
John Dunn (Cambridge University)
Title of Lecture: Indeterminate Primacy: Domestic Politics and International Relations across the Millennia
Abstract of Lecture:
Are the external relations of human communities more determined by the relations, economic, social and political between their own members or are the latter necessarily always at the mercy of relations between states or economic structures unmistakably situated beyond their borders ? What determines the political trajectory of any community ? This is an analytical question about political causality; but it is also a practical issue about the nature of political comprehension. It is not hard to see its urgency in face of an episode like the Brexit referendum. The winning slogan of the Brexit campaign "Take back control !" captured the raw political appeal of the internal answer but did nothing to allay the fear that the control it invoked must be simply a mirage.For the last century and a half Marxism provided the boldest answer to this question, though one which, under sustained interrogation, proved more equivocal and less politically directive than its initial formulations suggested.
The most powerful attempt to answer the question in the last four decades was made by a Hungarian scholar, the late Istvan Hont. Hont forged his answer through study of the historical formation and subsequent trajectory of political economy. From this study he developed over time an analysis of the politics of a new form of political, economic and social community, what he called a commercial society, tied ineluctably to a new structure of global interaction and a political field defined by this conjunction which he christened the permanent crisis of a divided mankind. Within this field there were four fundamental sources of normative and practical instability - the domestic basis of political authority, the terms on which the denizens of any commercial society were to trade with those of any other, the interactions between the states which must guarantee their respective property orders, and the normative plausibility and practical resilience of the property orders themselves.
This was a field, his analysis strongly suggested, which could be durably stabilized neither from within a given community nor from outside it. Its dynamics systematically destabilized every attempt to construct and sustain order, either nationally or internationally. But disconcerting though it was, it has become the only world in which any of us can now live, the indispensable frame fr any serious attempt at political comprehension and the mandatory setting for every exercise in political judgment. It determines how just (and unjust) any society can now be and how far it really can be a political community. It sets the terms to all our lives.
Duncan Kelly (Cambridge University)
Title of Lecture: Élie Halévy's Intellectual History of the Great War
Abstract of Lecture:
What might an intellectual history of the First World War look like? The work of French historian and philosopher Élie Halévy has had little competition here for nearly a century, despite the agglomeration of diplomatic, cultural, political, economic and obviously military analyses of the period 1914-1918. Many have discussed questions of intellectual mobilization, propaganda, literature and art, generational transformations and so on, but self-consciously intellectual histories of political and economic ideas have been remarkably thin on the ground. Perhaps this is because it is not entirely clear what an intellectual history of the war should actually be about. But if it is taken to be about the power of ideas to transform contemporary political and economic action, and therefore to be appropriately "realistic" in the spirit of this conference, it must therefore say which ideas were able to be so practically transformative. It must also offer an explanation as to why they were so. And this is precisely what Halévy undertook, in 1929 when he was invited to give the Rhodes Lectures at Oxford University, published shortly thereafter as "The World Crisis, 1914-1918".
In a little under thirty pages, he outlined a global history of ideas and politics, and made a general argument about shared responsibility for the causes and consequences of the Great War. Public opinion lay behind the rise of modern national politics, and public opinion was complicit in its movement towards global war and world peace. In order to write about this, though, Halévy had to construct a broad analytical canvas upon which he could expand the scale and shape of the war, extending its temporality and chronology back to the Morocco Crisis and the Balkan Wars, and forward to end with the ill-fated Treaty of Sèvres in 1920. My lecture will discuss Halévy's account of the Great War, while trying to show how his account in fact builds on a distinctive approach to the study of intellectual history and political thought that was quite original in the context of early twentieth-century France, and which seems in keeping with the demands of many contemporary political theorists and intellectual historians for the study of politics to bear the marks of "realism". Halévy's realism was a mixture of dialectical investigation into the movement of ideas and concepts, a deep engagement with the histories of leading contemporary political and economic ideas in England, France and Germany as well as Russia, particularly those of nationalism, socialism and liberalism. It resulted in a very particular concern with political stability as a complex, impossible to design in the abstract, equilibrium of prudential leadership, economic competition and fairly high levels of human uncertainty or inquiétude.