Conference: Liberty: an Ancient Idea for the Contemporary World
5-6 June 2015, University College London
The project aspires to investigate the ancient understandings of liberty in the interconnected societies of the Near East (including ancient Israel), Greece, and Rome as well as to establish the potential impact of the ancient intellectual world on contemporary political debates. It shall focus on the idea of liberty articulated in its constitutional, individual, and religious dimensions and aims to unearth rival understandings of this concept and to explore key episodes in the history of liberty in these ancient societies. Within ancient studies the trend of scholarship on liberty has focused on either decontextualized investigations of this value arranged chronologically from a putative beginning to a putative end or on author-by-author studies of rather limited breadth. Rather than writing an overarching history of liberty, adopting a synchronic approach, the aim of this project is to compose a study of the processes of contingent adaptation and constant reinterpretation to which the idea of liberty has been variously subjected in these different ancient societies. Based on the contextualist method, this research will investigate the history of the ideas of liberty as a sequence of contexts where identifiable agents adopt strategically the appeal to liberty to achieve a definable aim. The symposium will also attempt to identify ways of joining these contexts together and to suggest potential processes of transmission between them. Only in the past fifteen years, posing themselves in the long historical tradition of Republicanism, some philosophers and modern historians, of whom Philip Pettit and Quentin Skinner are just two of the most eminent, have turned their attention to the ancient world, and in particular to the Roman Republic, to suggest a revival in modern times of what they consider a distinctive trait of its ideological tradition: the notion of liberty as absence of domination or dependence upon the will of someone else. Based on the belief that historical inquiry can function as a means of political analysis, and feeding into the anthropologists’ work on social responsibility, the aim of the proposed research is to investigate whether alongside this Republican way of thinking about liberty, the ancient world can offer us other ways of conceptualising this ideal. Our objective is to bring together scholars of the ancient world, anthropologists, political theorists, philosophers, and legal scholars to formulate the first synchronic account of the ancient notions of liberty, from the Ancient Near East (including ancient Israel) to Greece, Rome, and Byzantium in order to identify rival intellectual understandings of this value and bring intellectual clarity to the conceptualisations of liberty in contemporary political discourse.
Attendance is free. However, to register for the event, please click here.
The event is sponsored by UCL, Grand Challenges Intercultural Interaction and the Institute of Classical Studies, London.
For any questions, please contact Valentina Arena.