Novelty, Spontaneity, and Creativity in Political Thought

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

There is a widespread sense in academic disciplines and the broader political world that the present moment is characterized by destabilization: inherited discourses and categories are struggling to address novel challenges. Amidst the resurgence of left- and right- wing-populism, authoritarian backsliding, the over-leveraged and grossly inegalitarian capitalist economy, and the palpable ecological disaster of global climate change, among other new challenges, we are confronted with the need to respond to a world that is, in a sense, new. At the same time, these challenges intersect with ongoing conversations in political theory about how to understand novelty in relation to the present, about what differentiates a challenge as “new,” when we may say that an old category no longer suffices for our reality, and about the reform of or revolution out of inherited ways of thinking. This panel examines spontaneity, novelty, and creativity in political theory to analyze how such moments of destabilization and transformation can both expand and preclude opportunities to develop new forms of political critique, resistance, and action. Indeed, while social scientific efforts to understand political phenomena in terms of longer-term trends and large-scale structural transformations have much to credit them, they also risk obscuring the possibilities that emerge when old structures grow stagnant in the face of novel challenges. Offering an antidote to understandings of our political situation that emphasize the impasses and threats that characterize it, the papers on this panel examine ideas of novel possibilities: when old ideas take on renewed vitality in response to transformed conditions; when we need to posit new values as old moralities and ethical forms stagnate; in the intrinsic spontaneity of human thought and practical activity; and in the need of new generations to render in their own image the world (and categories) they inherit from previous generations. Each of these papers explores figurations of newness, creativity, and spontaneity as well as the need to imagine the ways they – and political theory more generally – might contribute to the creation a better future.

Sub Unit

• Division 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Individual Presentations

• On Moral Novelty: How Do We Learn to Break the Old Customs and Create New Rules? - Eduardo Mendieta, Pennsylvania State University

• New Readings of Humanism and Structuralism in the Work of the Early Marx - Judith Grant, Ohio University

• Spontaneity and the German Tradition: A Hidden Source for Critical Theory - William Levine, Goethe University

• Historical Change and the Problem of Political Generations - Loren Goldman, University of Pennsylvania

Chair

• Lars Rensmann University of Groningen

Discussant

• Lars Rensmann University of Groningen