1. Political Thought and Philosophy: Historical Approaches

Eileen Hunt Botting, University of Notre Dame, ehunt@nd.edu
Richard Boyd, Georgetown University, rb352@georgetown.edu

In the spirit of the 2008 APSA conference, the Political Thought and Philosophy: Historical Approaches section invites paper and panel proposals that address the conference theme, “Categories and the Politics of Global Inequalities.”

The tension between equality and inequality is one of the oldest themes in Western political thought, with roots in classic texts like Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics. We are interested in papers that illuminate the emergence of ideas of equality and inequality in the history of political thought. How did individual thinkers such as Aristotle, Locke, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Tocqueville, Marx, and de Beauvoir theorize the sources of human inequality, especially inequalities associated with gender, race, class, and colonial domination? How (if at all) should canonical (and not so canonical) texts inform contemporary dilemmas of social justice and globalization? Do these historical texts reveal anything surprising about the way inequality shapes political institutions, market economies, or the moral texture of everyday life? Are their analyses, and the “categories” to which they give birth, adequate or inadequate for understanding how we should deal with inequality? From a comparative perspective, are there significant differences in the “categories” that Western and non-Western political thinkers bring to bear in theorizing inequality? How have protests and social movements contributed to changes in the social, legal, and political categories pertaining to inequality? Papers might also consider related concepts like democracy, justice, recognition, identity, sex, family, civic engagement, power, or domination in which equality or inequality play a key role.

The conference theme raises broader questions about the enterprise of historical political theory. Are historians of political thought really any different from other social scientists who invent “categories” by which to interpret the “politics of global inequalities”? Are some methodological approaches deployed by political theorists (with their associated “categories” of ancient versus modern, liberal versus republican, analytical versus historical, originalist versus contextualist, liberal versus radical feminist, post-modern, post-structural, or post-colonial, etc.) more helpful than others in clarifying the politics of inequality? Have the “categories” generated by modern liberal theory—for example, natural rights, property, consent, justice, public and private—done more to abate or to deepen the effects of inequality?  How have these categories been gendered, racialized, and sexualized such that women and minorities have experienced displacement in both politics and the study of political thought?

The preceding are only suggestions, but we hope they will stimulate creative, insightful, and intellectually rigorous proposals. We encourage the submission of entire panel proposals, particularly those bringing together scholars at different stages of university life and those incorporating diverse methodological approaches to the study of the history of political thought.