Delimiting the Popular and the Political in Early Modern Europe

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Determining the place of ‘the people’ in the political sphere is a central problem in the history of political thought. This is most evident in conversations about who is permitted to participate in politics. From antiquity to the present, political debate has often revolved around the agendas of erecting, surmounting, undermining, and defining the terms and boundaries of political participation. Political elites have demonstrated extraordinary creativity in their attempts to enforce the fulfilment of such conditions. From ancestry, place of birth, and race, to linguistic, tax, salary, or residence thresholds, myriad proposals to determine the political place of various groups and individuals demonstrate how ‘the people’ are seen alternately to be a threat or potential to politics itself, and how the privileged have always found ways to deploy them—for the most part in abstraction as ‘the people’—for various ends, whilst simultaneously shutting them out as far as possible from the political process itself.

But attempts to establish the conditions for participation are often bound up with the more fundamental question of determining the limits of the political community itself. Writers and thinkers across early modern Europe were acutely aware of this. The succession of religious wars, establishment of the slave trade, and transformation of the European state system through commerce, law, and empire, saw an attendant, increased preoccupation with policing the membership of cities and of commonwealths—of civitates. These bodies politic ostensibly comprised ‘the people’. Yet the persistent hold over political power by a select minority revolving around the throne meant that distinguishing them from the rest of ‘the people’, and the political from the unpolitical, remained intractable.

Our panel explores how various authors in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe dealt with the challenges of delimiting the popular and the political. Our overarching aims are two. First, we want to highlight hitherto under-explored debates in which familiar questions about the place of ‘the people’ were broached. Second, in emphasising how thinking about what constituted the popular was often inseparable from thinking about what constituted the political, we want to highlight the importance of this logic for contemporary debates about participatory politics, citizenship, the state, and democracy. Our papers examine in turn how early modern debates on cosmopolitanism, and on man’s capacity for ‘art’, were entwined with proposals to limit popular access to the political. At the heart of these debates were enquiries into some of the most fundamental rights and capacities attributed to free, civil man: that to move in pursuit of happiness; to exercise one’s reasons and passions; to imagine, to act, and to create. These debates also reveal an uneasiness with what we might now recognise as elitism: in their attempts to determine the place of ‘the people’ in the political sphere, all the authors we examine found themselves compelled to at least acknowledge the possibility that ‘popular’ and ‘privileged’ conceptions of the political could not only look very different, but also be incompatible.

The philosophical sophistication that early modern thinkers demonstrate in trying to resolve that disjuncture is a salutary reminder, equally relevant to political theorists as it is to scholars in constitutional law, political economy, and other related fields, that thinking about what we want from participation ought to prompt us to think first about what we want from the political. While examining authors that both the left and right have claimed as intellectual forebears, this panel also shows how the political undertaking long seen to be the most philosophically defensible was that of designing political communities for the many, not the few.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 1: Political Thought and Philosophy: Historical Approaches

Individual Presentations

• ‘Art’, Artifice, the Natural, and the Political in Enlightenment France - Shiru Lim, European University Institute

• Adam Ferguson on the Separation of the Political and the Economic Spheres - Signy Thora Gutnick Allen, London School of Economics

• The Forgotten Philosophe: Claude Helvétius on Equality, Empire, and Sexuality - Faisal Baluch, College of the Holy Cross

• Christian Burlesque? Thomas Hobbes's Scriptural Strategies - Jacqueline A Basu, Stanford University; Alison McQueen, Stanford University

Chair

• Megan Gallagher University of Alabama

Discussants

• Shannon C. Stimson Georgetown University

• Travis D. Smith Concordia University