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Early-Modern Rights Regimes: A Genealogy of Revolutionary Rights

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Most histories of early-modern rights focus on particular concepts of rights: for instance, notions of subjective vs. objective right, or on the presence/absence of particular rights (e.g., self-preservation). But focusing on specific rights has led scholars to pay less attention to what happens to rights as a whole when individuals enter into a political state, and also to miss the fact that historical actors tended to think about rights within broader conceptual regimes. In this paper, I identify three major early-modern rights regimes: the abridgment regime, which emphasizes the abandonment or alienation of rights (e.g., Hobbes); the transfer regime, in which natural rights are transferred to the state, and can only be retrieved under specific conditions (e.g., Spinoza and Locke); and the preservation regime, which insists that we should be able to enjoy the individual exercise of our natural rights even under government (e.g., Jefferson). After laying out the historical origins and conceptual bases of these regimes, I sketch a brief history of their respective trajectories between the early sixteenth and the late eighteenth centuries, focusing in particular on the rather curious and contingent reasons why the preservation regime shot to success after the 1760s.

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Dan Edelstein
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Joan Wallach Scott: Theorizing the Relationship between Gender and Politics

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Lecture by Joan Wallach Scott, Harold F. Linder Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Studies.

Sponsored by the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, Clayman Institute for Gender Research, Humanities Center, France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, The Europe Center, History Department, Department of Anthropology.

Levinthal Hall

Stanford Humanities Center

Joan Wallach Scott Harold F. Linder Professor of Social Science speaker Institute for Advanced Studies
Lectures

Edgar Salin and Social Theory in the Circle around Stefan George.

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Trying to extract political messages from poetry when political statements are not immediately self-evident can lead one quickly to speculative and even contradictory results. The temptation for critics to seize the oppottunity to imprint their own agendas onto a poetic oeuvre can be nearly irresistible. Thus Armin Mohler claimed to be able to categorize Stefan George and his group within the field of the Conservative Revolution, the anti-democratic intellectuals of the interwar period, thereby projecting his own political allegiances onto George and the very diverse group of thinkers around him. In contrast, in his radio speech on poetry and society, Theodor Adorno famously read one of George’s poems as signaling an emancipatory condition for an undivided humanity, “the voice of human beings between whom the barriers have fallen,” hardly a conservative position. Both readings imply a revolutionary George, but the different revolutionary agendas of right and left, Mohler and Adorno, could not be further apart. The distance between them marks the difference between the two readers, but it also leaves the challenge of describing the political location (or locations) of the George group unresolved.
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TELOS
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Russell A. Berman
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The Current Social and Political Challenges in Catalonia: An Unprecedented Process

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The social and political process that a significant part of Catalan society is engaged in needs to be explained analyzing its origins some ten years ago and its current state of development. At present no one can reasonably predict the future evolution and eventual outcome of this impressive democratic challenge to twenty-first century Europe.

Photo of Professor Salvador Cardüs

Salvador Cardús is a professor of sociology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and the current Ginebre Serra Visiting Professor in Catalan Studies at Stanford's Division of Literatures, Languages, and Cultures.  His research interests include identity and immigration, sociology of religion, mass media and culture, nationalistic phenomena and the epistemology of the social sciences. Cardús' recent work is on the shaping of a new paradigm to study contemporary identity processes and the challenges of fragmented societies in the global order as a means to negotiate recognition while avoiding difficulties of self-definition.

Salvador Cardús Professor of Sociology, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and the Ginebre Serra Visiting Professor in Catalan Studies, Division of Literatures, Languages and Cultures Speaker
Lectures

Anna Grzymała-Busse

Encina Hall
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA  94305

 

(650) 723-4270
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Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Michelle and Kevin Douglas Professor of International Studies
Professor of Political Science
Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution
anna_gb_4_2022.jpg

Anna Grzymała-Busse is a professor in the Department of Political Science, the Michelle and Kevin Douglas Professor of International Studies, senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the director of The Europe Center. Her research interests include political parties, state development and transformation, informal political institutions, religion and politics, and post-communist politics.

In her first book, Redeeming the Communist Past, she examined the paradox of the communist successor parties in East Central Europe: incompetent as authoritarian rulers of the communist party-state, several then succeeded as democratic competitors after the collapse of these communist regimes in 1989.

Rebuilding Leviathan, her second book project, investigated the role of political parties and party competition in the reconstruction of the post-communist state. Unless checked by a robust competition, democratic governing parties simultaneously rebuilt the state and ensured their own survival by building in enormous discretion into new state institutions.

Anna's third book, Nations Under God, examines why some churches have been able to wield enormous policy influence. Others have failed to do so, even in very religious countries. Where religious and national identities have historically fused, churches gained great moral authority, and subsequently covert and direct access to state institutions. It was this institutional access, rather than either partisan coalitions or electoral mobilization, that allowed some churches to become so powerful.

Anna's most recent book, Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State argues that the medieval church was a fundamental force in European state formation.

Other areas of interest include informal institutions, the impact of European Union membership on politics in newer member countries, and the role of temporality and causal mechanisms in social science explanations.

Global Populisms

A new project examining the global surge in populist movements and what it means for established democratic rules and institutions.
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Director of The Europe Center
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What's Happening with Germany's Party System? Exploring the Emergence of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD)

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For many years, it seemed as if the German party system was immune to the temptations of right-wing populist parties. This picture changed with the emergence of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). With its initial anti-European, and later strongly anti-Islamic rhetoric, the AfD has become the most successful emerging party in Germany. Just a few months after its foundation in 2013, the AfD received nearly 5% of the votes in the Federal Election and failed to enter the German Bundestag by only a few thousand votes. Today, the AfD is represented in ten out of sixteen German state parliaments, entered the European Parliament and gained several seats in both regional and local elections.

This talk will discuss how the emergence and establishment of the AfD is likely to alter Germany’s party system. Various resources (candidate surveys, election data and party manifestos) are analyzed to shed some light on the AfD’s ideological positioning, its political personnel, and the unequal regional distribution of its electoral success. The talk will conclude with a brief outlook toward the upcoming German Federal Election in 2017 and how a permanent extension of the party system to the extreme right-hand side of the ideological spectrum will narrow the scope for the formation of future government coalitions.

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Markus Tepe is a professor of Political Science (Political System of Germany) at the University of Oldenburg. He holds a doctoral degree from the Free University of Berlin (FU Berlin) and an MA in Political Science, Public Law and Economic Policy from the University of Münster. His research centers on public policies, political economy, and laboratory experiments in social science research. Currently, he is conducting a research project on need-based justice and redistribution (FOR2104) funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Markus is a Visiting Scholar at The Europe Center for 2016-2017.

Markus Tepe Professor of Political Science Speaker University of Oldenburg
Lectures
European Governance

Is Britain Going to Leave the EU? The Referendum Campaign and the Crisis of British Democracy

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David Cameron's promise to renegotiate the terms of British membership and organise an in/out referendum rested on a double gamble. The first one was that he would achieve a successful negotiation in Brussels, which he made possible by watering down his demands and relying on his partners' good will. The second is a more challenging one, which is to convince a majority of British voters to support staying in the EU. This is made particularly difficult by the long-standing anti-EU political culture in the UK, the divisions in the Conservative Party and an underlying crisis of British democracy, which finds expression in the rejection of the political elites, the rise of populist parties (UKIP) and the strains in the union between the component nations of the UK. This makes the outcome of the referendum, with massive consequences in case of a negative vote, hard to predict.

Image of Professor Pauline Schnapper, Paris Sorbonne Nouvelle University


Pauline Schnapper is professor of British Studies at the Paris Sorbonne Nouvelle University and a former fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France. She is the author (with David Baker) of Britain and the Crisis of the European Union, 2015, Palgrave Macmillan.

Pauline Schnapper Professeur de civilisation britannique Speaker Université Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle
Lectures

Is Poland Really Lost? Poland’s Contested Governance Reforms and the Further Role of the Central Eastern European Area (CEE) in the EU

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On January 13, 2016 for the first time in its history the European Union launched an investigation against one of its full member states, i.e. Poland. The dispute is about new Polish laws that allegedly disempower the national constitutional court and the public media thus breaching EU democracy standards. The newly elected Polish government in charge since November 2015 denies this and calls its “reforms” legitimate, even necessary to achieve a government better capable of acting in order to renew the economy and the political and social system. The dispute reaches far beyond Poland and questions the state and perspectives of integration of the Central Eastern European (CEE) nations into the EU. It is both effect and motor of the current pluri-­‐dimensional European crisis.

In essence, the EU-­‐Poland dispute is the outcome of the combination of the specific problems of governance in the Central Eastern European (CEE) nations with a superficial institutionalism of the EU that long neglected the area’s developmental issues. Poland’s democracy problems show that new attention of the EU to its CEE member states is needed which were for many years ignored because of other concerns such as the economic and financial crises since 2007 and the subsequent debt crisis since 2012, latest because of the threat of a “Brexit”, of Britain leaving the EU. In order to save the European integration project, it will be crucial for the credibility and acceptance of the EU to help the CEE nations to reform their socio-­‐economic systems. The case of Poland is the chance for a debate about how the EU and its CEE member states can cooperate better instead of arguing. This debate will be an important pillar of the ongoing overall discussion about the future of the European Union in the coming years.

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**Cancelled** Seminar with Torben Iversen

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**This event has been cancelled**

 

Torben Iversen is Harold Hitchings Burbank Professor of Political Economy at Harvard. His research and teaching interests include comparative political economy, electoral politics, and applied formal theory. He is the author of Capitalism, Democracy, and Welfare (Cambridge UP 2005), Contested Economic Institutions (Cambridge UP 1999), and co-author (with Frances Rosenbluth) of Women, Work, and Power: The Political Economy of Gender Inequality (Yale UP, 2010). He is also the co-editor of Unions, Employers and Central Bankers (Cambridge UP 2000) and has published more than three dozen articles in leading journals and edited volumes. His work has won numerous American Political Science Association prizes including the Victoria Schuck Award, Best Book on European Politics and Society Award, the Luebbert Best Article Award, and the Gabriel Almond Best Dissertation Award. He is a former Guggenheim Fellow and National Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is currently completing a book-length project with David Soskice on the political representation of economic interests in historical perspective.

 

This seminar is part of the Comparative Politics Workshop in the Department of Political Science and is co-sponsored by The Europe Center.

Torben Iversen Harold Hitchings Burbank Professor of Political Economy Speaker Harvard University
Lectures

Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve

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Most people in the world today think democracy and gender equality are good, and that violence and wealth inequality are bad. But most people who lived during the 10,000 years before the nineteenth century thought just the opposite. Drawing on archaeology, anthropology, biology, and history, Ian Morris, author of the best-selling Why the West Rules--for Now, explains why. The result is a compelling new argument about the evolution of human values, one that has far-reaching implications for how we understand the past--and for what might happen next.

Fundamental long-term changes in values, Morris argues, are driven by the most basic force of all: energy. Humans have found three main ways to get the energy they need--from foraging, farming, and fossil fuels. Each energy source sets strict limits on what kinds of societies can succeed, and each kind of society rewards specific values. In tiny forager bands, people who value equality but are ready to settle problems violently do better than those who aren't; in large farming societies, people who value hierarchy and are less willing to use violence do best; and in huge fossil-fuel societies, the pendulum has swung back toward equality but even further away from violence.

But if our fossil-fuel world favors democratic, open societies, the ongoing revolution in energy capture means that our most cherished values are very likely to turn out--at some point fairly soon--not to be useful any more.

Originating as the Tanner Lectures delivered at Princeton University, the book includes challenging responses by novelist Margaret Atwood, philosopher Christine Korsgaard, classicist Richard Seaford, and historian of China Jonathan Spence.

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Princeton University Press
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Ian Morris
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