The Relevance of Early Modern Thought in Contemporary Perspective

Session Submission Type: Virtual Roundtable

Session Description

Early modern political thought has long been mined for its formative influence on contemporary political debates and concepts. But there are other reasons for (re-)considering this era and its relationship to the present. As an era marked by intense worldly awareness, the profound expansion of print culture, and emergent capitalist enterprise, it heralds modernity and anticipates many of its key anxieties; significantly, however, its imaginaries were not yet dominated by the European visions of empire that would underlie the political thought of later centuries. In this roundtable we consider how this unique historical situation produced political thought of enduring relevance for contemporary dilemmas of empire and domination, critically reflecting as well on how these early modern pasts are often marshalled in the present to address the very anxieties they prefigured.

Torrey Shanks frames the roundtable around how and why scholars of the early modern period have looked to the past and how this past figures in contemporary political theoretical debates. In what ways does historicization serve to enliven our political and legal concepts and how does it work to deauthorize them as artifacts of bygone contexts? Early modern thinkers grappled deeply with this question, consumed by an expanding range of historical references accompanied by the impulse to innovate, exemplified in the coining of new words—particularly around the language of property. What is the political value, if any, of generating new words and definitions from within these past worlds? Might there yet be a future yet for the failed neologisms of the past?

Leigh Jenco considers some Sinic neologisms for difference and empire in her examination of how early modern Chinese scholars began thinking more critically about the past as significantly and meaningfully different from the present. Experiencing similar socio-political developments to those emerging in early modern Europe, including the territorial expansions associated with empire, Chinese thinkers began drawing parallels between the differences of past and present societies, on the one hand, to those between foreign and Chinese societies, on the other. Jenco suggests that these parallels enable a glimpse of a non-European global imaginary that sits in tension with much postcolonial theory.

From the perspective of New World peoples, Tim Vasko notes that some of the most emblematic early modern thinkers are often depicted as unilaterally asserting of territorial possession of new lands for European empires. Closer attention to the historical context and philosophical content of early-modern political thought, however, reveals a more complicated picture about the nature of its relationship to European imperialism during that period. Vasko argues this can help to explain the stubborn, and paradoxical, persistence of imperial hierarchies in contemporary national and international law.

Emily Nacol and Signy Gutnick-Allen zero in more closely on the anxieties generated by these socio-economic expansions to consider the politics of work more specifically. Nacol explores how notions of undesirable work were generated and disseminated in early modern Britain to shore up shared visions of productivity and improvement. Drawing on the political economy, literature, and material culture of the Long 18th Century, she looks at representations of what might be called “dirty” work—forms of commercial labor deemed morally suspect (e.g. prostitution and stockjobbing) and dangerous forms of care work demanded by crises like pandemics. How did moralizing analyses of these forms of labor express deeper anxieties about the risks of daily life in early modern Britain?

Gutnick-Allen thinks alongside these considerations, drawing on 17th century debates over productivity in collective and private land ownership models. By considering the ways in which private land ownership was framed as a means of integrating worldly and divine history, through the combination of narratives of the divine donation of the Earth with accounts of the secular, political social contract, she explores how specific models of property distribution were presented as not only sanctioned by political and religious commitments, but also demanded by them. Through an exploration of works by Locke, Pufendorf and Grotius, she suggests that this was itself a project of historical re-writing, involving the marginalisation of early modern experiments in collective land ownership which had themselves engaged in a project of self-justified through reference to earthly productivity and God’s plan for humanity.

For all panelists, historical reconstructions from the early modern period offer new lenses to consider how theories of work, property, and empire more broadly depend on differing accounts of time and history which may, in turn, come into tension with each other.

Sub Unit

• Division 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Chair

• Daniel J. Kapust University of Wisconsin, Madison

Presenters

• Leigh K. Jenco London School of Economics

• Emily Nacol University of Toronto

• Torrey Shanks University of Toronto

• Signy Thora Gutnick Allen London School of Economics

• Timothy Bowers Vasko Barnard College of Columbia University