Imagined Worlds in the History of Political Thought (Seventh Annual London Graduate Conference in the History of Political Thought)
30 June – 1 July 2016, University College London
The quincentenary of the publication of Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) occasions renewed reflections on imagined worlds in the history of political ideas. Thinkers have long wrestled with notions of perfect worlds and their antitheses, contemplating the possibilities and pitfalls of attempting their realisation. From Plato’s Republic and Dante’s Inferno to Bacon’s New Atlantis and Rousseau’s Social Contract, to Bentham’s Panopticon and Fourier’s phalanxes to Orwell’s Oceania and Huxley’s Brave New World, the imagined world has surfaced in innumerable forms and served myriad purposes in the history of political ideas. Why have so many thinkers and writers been fixated with imaginary worlds? What is the rhetorical function of the imagined world in political thought? How does it negotiate and redefine the boundaries between literature and political theory, fiction and reality, and blueprint and commentary? This year’s London graduate conference therefore invites proposals for papers and panels exploring imagined worlds in the history of political ideas, whether utopian or dystopian, fantastical or practical, theorised or realised.
Proposals for papers and panels may wish to consider some of the following themes:
- Imagined communities: nations, empires, kingdoms, civitates, and civilisations
- State(s) of nature, conjectural histories, and noble savages
- Discoveries and explorations of e.g. the New World and the Pacific
- Theories of utopias and dystopias: blueprint or commentary?
- Political reform: philosophical kingship, ideal polities and societies
- Social and economic utopias and dystopias
- Theories of the state: from contractarianism to the body politic to the persona ficta
- Imagined worlds and political ideas in literature and the theatre
- Afterlives, underworlds, millenarianisms, and eschatologies
- Perpetual peace, international arbitration, imagined futures, and visions of world order
To submit a paper, please email a CV and proposal of max. 500 words for presentations of approximately 20 minutes to conference@historyofpoliticalthought.net. Panel proposals will also be accepted.
Deadline for Proposals: 15 April 2016 (Notifications of acceptance will be sent out on 30 April 2016)
For further information see the conference website.