Historians Look Back with an Eye on the Future

The inaugural conference of CEU's 24th academic year brought together scholars from the European Society for the History of Political Thought (ESHPT) from Sept. 17 to 19 for the “Trust and Happiness in the History of Political Thought” conference. As a young University that was founded when one regime fell and another was born, intellectual freedom, critical thought, dedication to the social sciences and humanities, and rigorous political analysis are cornerstones of CEU's foundation.

“We hope to create a role for the society by creating a platform for exchange and communication in the field across academic traditions, across generations, and across geographic regions,” said CEU History Professor Laszlo Kontler of the ESHPT that was founded in 2009. In light of political systems being scrutinized and challenged globally and faith in political leadership wobbly at best, Kontler, who is also the CEU pro-rector for Social Sciences and Humanities and pro-rector for Hungarian Affairs noted that, although the attending historians' research does not cover contemporary issues, background history is always vital. “Beyond the fact that we are historians and our interests are contextual and historical rather than marked by an ambition to contribute to current debates, I think [the current global situation] is another important consideration for our conference.”

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“This is certainly a timely conference because the world is bedeviled by governance problems of all forms,” said CEU President and Rector John Shattuck. “The search for the public good is perhaps more intense and less certain today than it has been in a long time.”

Shattuck left the conference participants with what he called “mildly provocative questions,” in light of CEU's latest initiative – a two-year series of conferences and lectures called the “Frontiers of Democracy” that aims to promote open debate, discussion, and exchange of ideas with a diversity of views about the nature of democracy. Shattuck asked: Is the happiness and well-being of a country's citizens related to the form of their governance in any way? If so, what form will produce the greatest happiness? If the form doesn't really matter, can a platonic autocracy do as good a job as a democracy in promoting the public good or in defining the public good? Can an autocrat earn the trust of the people as in a democracy?

[[{"attributes":{},"fields":{}}]]ESHPT President Lea Campos Boralevi, a native of Trieste, Italy recalled her days of growing up just meters from Yugoslavia which was then aligned with the Soviet Union. “The history of political thought is not taught in totalitarian regimes,” she noted. “Why? Because it talks of liberty and justice. Why is it so important that we are now here? This subject has characterized the history of European culture for millennia. It is an important, fundamental tool for reconstructing, restoring, rebuilding and building the cultural identity of our continent and shaping civil consciousness. For understanding a process, we need history.”

Historian Steven Johnstone, from the University of Arizona, gave a keynote speech on “Trust and Citizenship in Ancient Greece.” An expert in the Classics, Johnstone doesn't find much evidence of the discussion of trust in Greek political thought. However, importantly, he has reviewed dozens of what he calls “how-to” manuals that delve deeply into issues of trust in areas ranging from agriculture to protecting your city from attack. Special attention is placed on trustworthiness in how citizens behave and relate to one another.

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The second day of the conference saw discussions of trust and happiness in political thought from the 17th through the early 20th century. Professor Ralf-Peter Fuchs of the University of Duisburg-Essen dedicated his keynote to “Trust as a concept of religious plurality during the Thirty Years War.”

“Trust helped to pave the way to peace,” Professor Fuchs started his lecture. The idea of peace became a “medium” during peace negotiations during the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), and later became known as “normative year,” or, as Fuchs explained the “day of reset.” One of the major questions during the peace talks was what the normative year should be, what year was the last period of mutual trust between Roman Catholics and Reformed (Augsburgian) Protestants within the Holy Roman Empire. Discussing religious plurality and the quest for trust in the empire, Fuchs quoted 20th century German sociologist Niklas Luhmann saying “those who trust in someone always offer a common future,” pointing out that trust is a means to peace and security. 

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John Dunn, professor of political theory at King's College, Cambridge University gave a keynote address Sept. 19 entitled "Toleration, Trust and the Travails of Living Together Globally," which served as one of the inaugural events for CEU’s Frontiers of Democracy initiative to explore the nature and challenges faced by democracy today.

According to Dunn, history has shown the basic contradiction in humans, who need and desire social interaction but also have an aversion to each other. Expressing this aversion is a choice, and so is acting upon it, Dunn said. While humans have a natural inhibition toward acting on this aversion, an inhibition that to some degree has historically been supported by Christianity, this breaks down periodically, and we must learn the “aversive lessons of Europe’s spectacular wars.”

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The increasing secularism of Western society has led to a focus on rationalism, which fails to explain why the economic strand of this approach has not led to humans living together more peacefully. The modern democratic state in Europe is a “model of shared social interaction that fails to offer any guarantee for humans to live together securely,” Dunn said.

The reason why democracy is favored is not that it provides good reasons for trusting leaders, but because it allows citizens to “dispose of rulers that people have come to despise, and this is a substantial offer,” Dunn noted. It remains in the nature of regimes to “take presumptuous power to implement policies that perpetuate its interests and powers.” You can view Dunn's full lecture here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mc3BAAahMGw

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The conference also served to inaugurate a new Specialization and Advanced Certificate in Political Thought at CEU that will begin in Sept. 2015. The program will engage students in the comparative study of political thought from a variety of perspectives, both within and outside the Western canon. Special attention will be given to the historicity of diverse political traditions but also to recurring themes and questions.

Kontler organized the conference in collaboration with CEU's Department of History and the ESHPT. In addition to the keynote addresses, the conference offered over 30 papers in 11 panels, presented by a remarkably international group of scholars, on a huge variety of topics from the history of trust and happiness in poiltical thought covering classical antiquity through the 20th century. 

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The conference was sponsored by CEU, the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, and the Research Centre for the Humanities at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. For the full conference program, visit: http://history.ceu.hu/sites/history.ceu.hu/files/attachment/event/1595/eshpttrustandhappinessconferenceprogramfinal.pdf. For all pictures related to the conference, visit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ceuhungary/sets/72157647556508157/.