The Sawyer Seminar
From the title page of the first edition of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan: The matter forme, and power of a common-wealth, ecclesiasticall and civill (London, 1651). Aberdeen SLA has four copies of this first edition.
In 2003-2004, the previous director of CEMS, Professor Howard Hotson, in co-operation with Dr Phil Whithington, Dr Cathy Shrank, and other members of CEMS, attracted funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a series of seminars on Citizens within Subjects: Political Rights and Participation in Historical and Contemporary Perspective. It consisted of a series of colloquia, workshops and fellowships addressing contemporary debates on political rights, participation, and responsibilities in the modern world from the perspective of the period which saw the rise rather than the demise of the nation-state: the ’early modern’ period, ranging roughly from 1500 to 1750. The fundamental purpose of the seminar was to break down disciplinary and chronological barriers that have dogged modernist thought and reveal continuities and discontinuities, similarities and differences, between two epochs of profound flux: one which saw the genesis of the ’nation-state’, the other that is witnessing its unravelling. This aim was pursued by providing a forum in which modern scholars and practitioners could engage with, and respond to, the most recent research on, and analysis of, early modern political culture: analysis that has much to say about citizenship in the modern world. The result was a more historicized perspective on crucial contemporary questions than that more commonly afforded by paradigms derived from the post-Enlightenment era: perspectives that are of interest to academics and policy-makers alike.
The viability of this exercise is based on two basic premises. The first, historical premise is the fact that many of the social and political problems at issue in these contemporary debates have roots or analogues in early modern political culture. This applies not only to western but also to many global manifestations of these problems, since early modern European political cultures were exported to, and collided with, indigenous cultures throughout the ’New World’ and much of Asia and Africa. Appreciation of the importance of these roots, however, has been frustrated by the structural, sub-disciplinary divide separating scholars of the periods before and after the industrial revolution. This leads us to a second, historiographical premise: after thirty years of intensive effort, early modern scholarship is now extremely well placed to contribute to contemporary debates about political participation. Over the past three decades, historians of political thought, social historians, cultural historians, literary historians, religious historians, and historians of popular politics have revealed the diverse range of ideological positions and perspectives available to subjects of early modern Europe. By shifting their gaze from monarchs, courts and social elites, they have shown the social depth and geographical extent of political participation, and the capacity for political consciousness, struggle, and resistance for a range of social groups: demonstrating why, in effect, there were citizens within subjects across much of Europe. While it is not expected that the new scholarship on early modern citizenship can provide immediate answers to contemporary problems, the prospect of dialogue between past and present is certainly one means of establishing what we have lost, what we have gained, and what we might yet recover.
Schedule
24-26 November 2005:
Conference: Citizenship and Identity in a Multi-national Commonwealth:
Poland-Lithuania in Context, c. 1500-1750
2004 -2005:
Urban versus National Citizenship?
2003 - 2004:
Citizens within Subjects: Political Rights and Participation in Historical
and Contemporary Perspective