We are glad to give notice of the International Online Conference “Emancipation in Hegel’s Metaphysics and Social Theory? The Liberal Reading Under Question”, which will find place on August 15th-16th, 2024, at SOAS University of London (Online only, via zoom).
The conference, organised by Paul Giladi and Bernardo Ferro, is sponsored by the MIND Association, with support from the Portuguese Government’s Foundation for Science and Technology (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia).
To register, please click here.
About the conference:
Doppelsatz and the notion of social freedom constitutive of Sittlichkeit, either as a quietist conservatism serving as an elaborate defence of the status quo that is critically impotent, with no significant room for progressive reflection on current power dynamics and current intersubjective recognition orders; or as a dialectical articulation and speculative justification of totalitarianism (viz. Friedrich Haym (1962), Karl Popper (1966), Bertrand Russell (1961), and Ernst Tugendhat (1986)).
Against the conservative and totalitarian readings of the Doppelsatz, commentators such as Jay Bernstein (2017), Dudley Knowles (2002), Lisa Herzog (2013, 2015), Axel Honneth (2014, 2015), Frederick Neuhouser (2000, 2008), Richard Winfield (2015), and Allen Wood (1990) have respectively argued that Hegel’s work is best interpreted as displaying a commitment to John Rawls-style social democratic reformism. The majority of these thinkers believe that viewing Hegel as more aligned with social democracy and political liberalism than with conservatism or totalitarianism is partly achieved by avoiding burdening Hegel’s social theory with any metaphysical mortgages (viz. Habermas 1987).
However, in recent years, a number of scholars, such as Arash Abazari (2020), Charlotte Baumann (2020), Victoria Burke (2020), Bernardo Ferro (2019), Paul Giladi (2020), Bruce Gilbert (2013), Todd McGowan (2019), C.J. Pereira di Salvo (2015), Nathan Ross (2015), and Michael J. Thompson (2015), have challenged this kind of approach. In line with Gillian Rose’s ground-breaking Hegel contra Sociology (1982), they have respectively argued not only that Hegel’s social theory is saturated with metaphysical commitments, but also that these metaphysical commitments, while confirming his clear opposition to conservatism and totalitarianism, enable the disclosure of conceptual resources that contribute to a far more radical critique of the status quo and capitalist modernity than the Rawlsian liberal critique of inequality.
The aim of this conference is to bring exciting and dynamic intellectuals across a range of critical social theoretic traditions to challenge both the Rawlsian, ‘anguished Tory’ (viz. Knowles 2002) reading of Hegel, and to consider the extent to which the “dragon seed project” that terrified so many 19th-century Prussian reactionaries may be said to be conceptually imbricated with not only radical Global North critiques of liberalism and capitalism, but also with Latinx-inspired critical theoretic discourses of pluriversality, epistemic disobedience, and transmodernity (viz. Enrique Dussel (1993) and Walter Mignolo (2009, 2011, 2018)).
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Conference Programme (all times British Summer Time)
Day 1 – 15th August
– 10:30-11:00: Welcome – Dr Bernardo Ferro (IEF, Coimbra) and Dr Paul Giladi (SOAS)
– 11:30-12:30: Giovanna Luciano (Padova), Humanism as Struggle: An Emancipatory idea of Education from Hegel to Freire’s Critical Pedagogy and Back
– 13:30-14:30: Iñigo Baca Bordons (Valencia), Hegel: Thinker of Empire
– 14:30-15:30: Joshua Folkerts (Rostock) & Lewis Wang (Boston), Hegelian Sufficientarianism as an Anti-Colonial Theory of Justice
– 16:00-17:00: Jason Yonover (Princeton), King and Hegel on History and Contradiction
– 17:00-18:00: Keynote 1 – Sybol Anderson (Southern Maryland), Towards a Higher Liberation: The ‘Bildung’ of Conscience in Hegel’s Ethical Life
Day 2 – 16th August
– 10:30-11:30: Alok Kumar (Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology), Recognition, Embodiment, Solidarity: Issues of Compatibility
– 11:30-12:30: Manuel Tangorra (Leuven), ‘The people’ as a Metaphysical Category
– 13:30-14:30: Robert Ziegelmann (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), The Problem of Progressive Hegelianism
– 14:30-15:30: Thomas Telios (St. Gallen), Dialectics as De-/Relinking: Relationality, Collective Self-Determination, and the Negative Utopia of Absolute Knowledge
– 16:00-17:30: Keynote 2 – Arash Abazari (Emory), Hegel’s Logic and the Limitations of Capital
– 17:30-17:45 – Concluding Remarks
For more information, please visit the event page.
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