Citizens within Subjects:
Political Rights and Participation in Historical and Contemporary Perspective
2003 - 2004
I. INTELLECTUAL AGENDA
1. The topic: early modern perspectives on post-modern political culture
The on-going process of political devolution in Scotland raises questions of global significance in acute local terms. Around the world, social and political processes are undermining the hegemony of the nation-state as the most progressive form of political organisation. In addition to devolution and the ’new nationalism’, these processes include European integration, globalisation and resistance to it, the resurgence of religious fundamentalism, the decay of socialist and labour movements, and apparent apathy among broad sections of European and American electorates toward their political cultures.
This Sawyer Seminar will consist 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 is 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 will be pursued by providing a forum in which modern scholars and practitioners can 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 intended result will be a more historicized perspective on crucial contemporary questions than that more commonly afforded by paradigms derived from the post-Enlightenment era: perspectives that will be 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.
2. Comparative frameworks: chronological, methodological, geographical
Crucial to the success of this project is a forum carefully designed to foster dialogue across the deep sub-disciplinary divide separating modernists from early modernists. This requires careful attention to the chronological, methodological and geographical framework of the seminar.
To facilitate chronological comparison, panels of distinguished early modernists and contemporary scholars will be brought into carefully focused dialogue on a programme of common concerns. The task of the early modernists will be to present some of the most important recent work on early modern political culture in a way which highlights to non-specialists its relevance to contemporary problems. Eminent contemporary scholars - invited on the basis of their expertise in, and experience of the questions addressed in each colloquium - will then respond to these early modern papers, exploring their contemporary resonances.
An equally crucial methodological prerequisite for the success of this dialogue will be the adoption of a broad conception of political culture, which includes institutional practice and ritual as well as texts and artefacts. In order to reveal the extent and nature of political participation in early modern, non-democratic societies, it is necessary to reject the implicit restriction of ’the political’ to the workings of western democracy in general and the right to vote in particular. In this seminar series, therefore, early modern and (post-)modern participants alike will be encouraged to consider politics as a broad cultural process, informed by inequality and relationships of power on the one hand, by reciprocity and negotiation on the other. Whilst the series is concerned with the dynamics of participation and its relationship to political consciousness, it will also examine the capacity of people, either as groups or individuals, to produce and appropriate their own political cultures within existing structures.
Finally, equal care will be taken to ensure geographical comparison and differentiation. The processes, practices, and values under discussion in this seminar varied across Europe, although in important senses some were also pan-European. One aim of the colloquia is to place citizenship in a richly differentiated geographical context, displaying local particularities as well as inter-relationships and connections across diverse European regions. Some papers will treat ideas, traditions or networks of pan-European or even global scope. Others will deal with processes, practices, and values which varied enormously from one European country, region or even locality to another. No single approach or format will therefore suit all speakers; but all will be enjoined to avoid the antithetical dangers of the anodyne textbook survey on the one hand and the highly specialised research paper on the other. A third caveat will be to take the nation neither as a given, nor necessarily as the primary unit of analysis, but as one among many possible contexts for political activity. The national bias of much early modern scholarship has needlessly divided students of common themes in different countries and deflected attention from other units of analysis, such as ’centre and periphery’ or ’urban and rural’. In general, we shall aim to bring together individuals whose geographical area of special expertise illuminates the precise topic of their paper and who can relate that area to other regions or broader underlining tendencies. Above all, rather than attempting a seamless survey of the early modern period, the main criterion for choosing topics, areas and speakers will be their potential relevance to the current political debates which are the ultimate focus of this seminar.