Although the Age of Enlightenment saw the development of radically new approaches to comprehending and reforming society and politics, our current understanding is that the existence of poverty was rarely problematized by eighteenth-century thinkers, writers and officials – notwithstanding that ‘the poor’ made up the clear majority of Europe’s population. This picture only changed in the transformative decade of the 1790s. This conference brings together historians with a wide range of geographical and theoretical expertise to re-examine the ways in which poverty was conceptualised in the social, political and religious discourses of eighteenth-century Europe.

The conference is generously supported by the King’s College London Faculty of Humanities Research Grant Programme, Dept. of History Research Fund and Centre for Enlightenment Studies; University College London’s History Dept. Events Fund; and the Royal Historical Society.

Those wishing to attend are requested to register by emailing Niall O’Flaherty (niall.o’flaherty@kcl.ac.uk) and Robin Mills (robin.mills@ucl.ac.uk) by 31 August. Places are limited and will be offered on a rolling basis. Please click here to download a copy of the conference programme.

Call for Participation: Manuscript Workshop on Professor Annelien de Dijn (University of Utrecht), Freedom: An Unruly History (Harvard University Press, forthcoming).

The Centre for Enlightenment Studies at King’s College London, with support from the Leverhulme Trust, is proud to host a manuscript workshop on Professor de Dijn’s forthcoming intellectual history Freedom: An Unruly History. This will take the form of five hour-long chapter-by-chapter sessions opened by commentators followed by general discussion.

For expressions of interest in attending or for further details please contact robin.mills@ucl.ac.uk. Places are limited so email asap. Participation at this event involves committing to reading as much of the manuscript as possible and attending with the intention to contribute to discussion if possible. Refreshments will be provided and there will be a subsidised dinner for attendees.

Commentators: David Carter (Reading), Valentina Arena (UCL)/Justin Champion (Royal Holloway), Angus Gowland (UCL), Julia Nicholls (KCL), Caroline Ashcroft (QMUL)

We are pleased to announce the programme for the Centre’s Annual International Symposium in the Humanities and Social Sciences, which will be held on Friday, 15 June 2018. The symposium is devoted to the work of Professor Martin E. Jay (Berkeley), and registration is essential. To download the conference programme, please click here. For the conference poster, please click here.

Historians of political ideas since the late 1960s have advocated focussing on authorial intentions instead of tracing the progress of “unit ideas” or the transmission of disembodied concepts. Yet historical practice has not always followed methodological injunctions. Nowhere is this more the case than in the period following the French Revolution. Capacious political movements are assumed to dominate the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, giving rise to a procession of abstract ideologies. Yet is it plausible to think of the era as inhabited by such continuous “discourses”, let alone as being characterised in terms of a clash between them? This conference is intended to probe the durability of ideas that are standardly assumed to traverse the ages while sustaining the integrity of their meaning.

The conference also aims to examine how the epoch is generally presented. In what sense can the period be described as an “age of ideologies” if its constitutive doctrines are disassembled into a succession of speech-acts? In 1982 Karl Dietrich Bracher described the twentieth century as a “Zeit der Ideologien”. Yet this conception already had interesting precedents by the time he wrote, having been applied to the nineteenth century by Reinhart Koselleck in 1959. Koselleck’s depiction has a longer pedigree still, looking back to nineteenth century accounts of the legacy of the enlightenment. Thus, in the wake of the French Revolution, the idea emerged that an era of hostile ideologies had succeeded an older age of religious strife. In exploring how we might best write the history of political thought after 1789, this conference will examine common depictions of the period as living in the shadow of revolutionary upheaval that unleashed an enduring contest between opposing principles.

The speakers at the conference include Peter Ghosh (Oxford), Niklas Oslen (Copenhagen), Greg Conti (Cambridge), Gareth Stedman Jones (QMUL), Emily Jones (Cambridge), Jennifer Pitts (Chicago), William Selinger (Harvard), Maurizio Isabella (QMUL), Stuart Jones (Manchester), Andrew Sartori (NYU), Eva Hausteiner (Bonn), Leslie Butler (Dartmouth), Georgios Varouxakis (QMUL), Duncan Kelly (Cambridge), Anne-Sophie Chambost (Université Jean Monnet Saint-Etienne), Rachel Hoffman (Cambridge), Quentin Skinner (QMUL), Udi Greenberg (Dartmouth), Julia Nicholls (KCL), and Richard Bourke (QMUL).

Registration for this event is essential. To download the conference programme, please click here.