CALL FOR PAPERS

Normative implications of the conceptual turn: Critique, discourse and history in political theory and political science.

3rd International Conference on Political Theory, arranged by the Danish Network on Political Theory, Department of Social Sciences, Roskilde University, March 1-2 2006. 

In political science and the social sciences broadly there has always been a conflict between those who think their role is to employ neutral, operative or ‘scientific’ concepts to describe and explain external social reality, and on the other hand those who insist, in one way or the other, that language and concepts are independently constitutive of ‘reality’ in a more than trivial sense. Those who incline towards the second family of views will also stress what they see as the inherently ideological or normative elements in this conceptual constitution, as in any choice by researchers to use one framework of interpretation rather than another. In earlier days, for instance in the heyday of Marxism and critical theory, to adopt such a stance, would also imply – rarely in any straightforward sense to be sure – that one might criticize and debunk some uses of ideological language, whereas others represented a more critical, liberating standpoint. By contrast, recent decades has seen a constructivist and poststructuralist turn which is much less confident, if also not downright dismissive, in this regard, and which has been defined to a large extent by the theoretical insistence, consolidated in numerous analyses, that any employment of language shuts some doors and excludes some perspectives; that it is foolhardy to expect a single conceptual perspective to be able to capture the surpluses of meaning in diverse historical or cultural contexts (or indeed to reconcile them); and that the very idea of a research community performing anything like a reflectively detached choice between perspectives is a grave misrepresentation of the social constitution of subjectivity, including academic subjectivity. Inside political theory, the background of the return of normative approaches – Rawls, discourse ethics, communitarianism etc. – was dissatisfaction with being restricted, in the early sixties and particularly inside political science, to a role of mere ‘conceptual clarification’, i.e. of the normal language meanings of ‘liberty’, ‘power’ or ‘the state’. To John Rawls, what counted was not the mapping of conceptual disagreement, but the quality of an argument about what concepts should mean – such as the concept of justice. Yet after Rawls political theory is a large and divided house, where the very idea of rational theory-construction through neutral analysis has been criticised, modified, and even downright rejected from many sides. 

The purpose of this conference – primarily addressed to those who treat conceptual historicity, contingency, and constitutiveness as a condition for the researcher, but also as a problem for him or her – is to critically examine and compare a diversity of conceptual approaches, understood in a very wide sense (below), to politics, political science and political theory in terms of the manner each present the possibility, limitations,  or irrelevance,  as the case may be, of drawing critical or normatively constructive consequences from analysis of political phenomena. 

We envisage contributions which thematize the normativity of language-in-analysis from a range of quarters in critical political and social science, political theory and philosophy, and expect contributions with a more or less empirical, theoretical and/or historical content, and also contributions which speculate on the critical perspectives of a conceptual methodologies, or which compare or combine diverse analytical strategies, applied in some field, in this light. Papers may concern, employ or comment upon a variety of traditions of conceptual social analysis, such as old and new forms of critique of ideology (Zizek), Foucauldian genealogy and (critical) discourse analysis (Laclau, Butler, Fairclough, Wodak), Deleuze’s og Gauttari’s conceptual activism, varieties of German Begriffsgeschichte (Koselleck), and Cambridge School intellectual history (Skinner). Equally important we seek papers from (normative) political theory quarters, which take language seriously. Possible contributions may concern the concept/conception distinction in contemporary Anglosaxon (Rawlsian) theory and its appeal to a ’moral constructivism’ of reasonable conceptions in the light of shared, reflective intuitions. Or they may range from discourse ethics (Habermas) to Connolly’s notion of essentially (and rationally) contested ideological concepts as a way to model political pluralism. And we envisage discussions of the conceptual historical/historicist onslaught of ‘philosophical’ histories of ideas in terms of Straussian ’eternal ideas’, as  well as papers which engage with the spatio-historical conceptual specificity of national ‘public philosophies’ as well as analysis of political theory as ideology (Freeden).


The four key note speakers at the Conference will be:

Quentin Skinner (Regius Professor of History, Cambridge University)

Mark Bevir (Professor in Political Science, University of California, Berkeley).

Thomas Lemke (Ass. Professor in Sociology, Universität Wuppertal and Research Fellow, Institut für Socialforschung, Frankfurt a.M.)

Paul Patton (Professor in Philosophy, University of New South Wales)

We invite abstracts for papers on the theme of the conference. 
Abstracts are due 1st.of December 2005 and must not exceed 300 words. The final deadline for papers is set for 10th February 2006. Fees for participation: 1000 DKr.

For further information please contact: Assistant Professor, PhD, Anders Berg-Sørensen, Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, [log in to unmask] or Associate Professor, PhD, Hanne Marlene Dahl, Department of Social Sciences, Roskilde University, [log in to unmask] (on leave until 1st November 2005)


Professor Terrell Carver
Department of Politics
University of Bristol
10 Priory Road
Bristol
BS8 1TU
United Kingdom
+44 (0)117 928 8826