Tuesday
24 September 2019
Great Transformation
Please mind that only events in English language will be presented on this page. Please check the corresponding German page de for all events.
All events shown below are in chronological order.
Joan Tronto
Keynote at 9–10 a.m. // Lecture Hall 2
Joan Tronto is Professor of Political Science at the University of MinnesotaExternal link and was previously Professor of Women's Studies and Political Science at the Hunter CollegeExternal link and the Graduate SchoolExternal link, City University of New YorkExternal link. Main areas of work include: care ethics, women’s and gender studies, political theory, caring democracy.
Actions spur reactions. The current neopopulist threats to democracy are a reaction, it is often claimed, to “going too far” in the direction of pluralism and “identity politics.” This paper offers a different view of recent history and of the nature of the threat to democracy. Neopopulism, it is argued here, is a childish response to the sense of precarity created by neoliberal policies. Horizontal aggression against the people who are also in precarious situations creates tribal responses, and it does not eliminate the real danger. The real dangers are the remarkably unequal distribution of resources in society and the mindset that justifies it. This mindset is the ideological assumption that only more growth can solve our problems by making a larger pie to share.
If humans think instead about real needs – the needs for the care of people, of the biosphere, and of the planet – it is possible to imagine an alternative society. Such a society would displace “wealth-care” and revalue all humans as caring beings. The first step to such an alternative is to notice how little our current approach to life provides for care and how, if hierarchies of privileges are eliminated, another future is possible. It could be a genuinely democratic form of governance, based on freedom and equality, to care justly for all of our world.
James Galbraith
Keynote at 9–10 a.m. // Lecture Hall 1
James K. Galbraith is an American economist. He is a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public AffairsExternal link at the Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Lehrstuhl für Government / Business Relations at the University of Texas, AustinExternal link and Senior Scholar at the Levy Economics InstituteExternal link des Bard CollegeExternal link. Main areas of work include: inequality, economic policy, growth theory.
"The End of Normal" (2014) argues that four major changes in the structure of the modern economy have and will impede any sustained return to the high growth rates characteristic of the first thirty years after World War II in Europe and the first fifty-five years – interrupted only by the 1970s, in the United States. The four are energy instability, international insecurity, digital technology and financial fraud. This lecture will review those arguments and link them to the broad concern with economic and social inequality – with reflections on the consequences for political developments in Europe and the United States.
Gurminder Bhambra
Keynote at 1.30–2 p.m. // Lecture Hall 2
Gurminder K. Bhambra is Professor of Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies in the Department of International RelationsExternal link at the School of Global StudiesExternal link of the University of SussexExternal link. Main areas of work include: citizenship, colonialism, world history, historical and political sociology, modernity, postcolonial/decolonial theory,
post-colonialism.
Our times are marked by the unprecedented attention given to the movement of peoples, especially here to Europe. Indeed, in the description of the possible themes of this conference, it is stated that European societies are now ‘forced to accept being plural migration societies’. At the same time, however, there is little understanding that the numbers moving today are nowhere near the proportions who moved during the Great Transformation analyzed by Polanyi, albeit without reference to that movement. This movement of Europeans, in the nineteenth century and earlier, led to the elimination and dispossession of populations globally and to environmental degradation. It is precisely as a consequence of these earlier histories – histories of European colonialism – that there is such movement today. The wider debates on migration, however, whether in the media or scholarly discussions, rarely reference the historical context of this movement. Rather, it is simply presented negatively in terms of its consequences for European societies. In contrast, I argue that the earlier movement of Europeans that was integral to the Great Transformation is the context for the contemporary configuration of modern societies, and without taking it into account we will not be able adequately to address the continuing inequalities and injustices that are its legacy. This legacy is also woven into the conference abstract which posits that transformation does not necessarily lead to betterment, but may in fact result in authoritarian forms of rule and indeed may do so in the future. There is something puzzling about European scholars’ failure to address colonialism as the paradigmatic form of authoritarian rule brought about by the preceding Great Transformation. Perhaps the explanation for this omission rests in the fact that it did lead to the betterment of European societies at the expense of the lives and livelihoods of others. As those others seek some form of repair for the conditions that are the legacy of European colonialism, they, however, are presented as a threat to ‘us’ and our ways of life and in need of ‘offshore’ containment.
