*Power and Knowledge from the 18th Century to Today*



*International Conference*



*University of Lorraine (Nancy, France), 24-25 November 2022*



*Call for Papers*





Dating back to the beginnings of Greek democracy and the Platonic
conception of the philosopher king, the relations between power and
knowledge have recently come back to the fore with the rise of populism or
the sanitary crisis. Whether an obstacle to democracy, a means for citizens
to control their representatives or a vehicle for regenerating democracy
(Mounk, 2018), knowledge now appears, more than ever before, as a
constitutive feature of government.

This interdisciplinary conference will seek to explore the implications of
such relations since the 18th century and to examine to what extent
knowledge may establish, legitimize or discredit the forms and figures of
political power.

Alongside the democratic ideal, the specialisation and secularisation of
knowledge during the Enlightenment gave rise to conceptions of a social
order based on knowledge, be it Robert Owen’s utopian schemes, Comtean
positivism or the clerisy called for by S. T. Coleridge. As mass democracy
spurred the growth and influence of political parties, debating societies
and think tanks appeared with the aim of influencing political
decision-makers as well as public opinion, precipitating reforms and
asserting the dominance of thought over action (Stone & Denham, 2004;
Landry, 2021). In the liberal and democratic project, education has come to
represent a valuable means of promoting citizenship for reformers ranging
from philanthropists, socialists and liberals, to philosophical traditions
such as British idealism or American pragmatism (Tyler, 2006; Dewey, 1916).
On a broader scale, *cultural critics* or intellectuals have invoked their
learning or expertise to purportedly counterbalance institutional power or
to exert influence in the public sphere.

That knowledge may imply coercion has been the butt of criticism from
multiple traditions. Together with the poststructuralist movement inspired
by Michel Foucault or *cultural studies*, critics of modernity such as Eric
Voegelin, hostile to what he deemed a gnostic conception of power, or Carl
Schmitt, for whom Hegel’s philosophy implied an “educational dictatorship”,
have concurred in their questioning of Enlightenment optimism, dismissing
knowledge as a necessary condition for progress and holding it to be the
locus of a political struggle.

The debate has been central to the theorization of disciplines, understood
as fields of knowledge that presuppose the existence of “disciples” and
therefore some form of authority (Moran, 2002). If the specialisation of
knowledge seems inevitably linked to the world being perceived as
increasingly complex, what are the checks on experts’ judgements? Can a
government reliant on specialised knowledge be genuinely democratic? Can
philosophy, as Nietzsche would have it, challenge the claims of objectivity
and disinterestedness voiced by “we, scholars”? Or should principles and
values regulating knowledge and information in the public sphere be
formulated to overcome the current “epistemic tribalism” underlying the
surge in disinformation and conspiracy theories (Rauch, 2021)?

Knowledge also stands at the intersection of political power, economic and
social policies and ideologies. New Labour governments, for instance,
claimed to base their agenda on the knowledge economy while fostering a
brand of governance dubbed by some as technocratic or managerial (Dillow,
2007 ; Parry & Protherough, 2002). On this view, the crisis of democracy
has been assumed to originate in an intellectual elite’s promotion of
identities, amounting to « the critical demolition of foundationalism »
(Lasch, 1995), or in a system giving birth to « a bloated cognitive class »
(Goodhart, 2021). More fundamentally, the Hayekian critique of
constructivist rationalism set out in « The Use of Knowledge in Society »
(Hayek, 2014) and the Keynesian conception of economic policy (Dow &
Hillard, 1995) paved the way for an ongoing debate over the possibility of
knowledge serving both social justice and liberty in a democratic regime.

With an interdisciplinary approach, the conference will welcome proposals
dealing with the relations between knowledge and power from the 18th century
to today: papers can address the history of political and/or economic
ideas, intellectual, cultural and political history or political science
and sociology.

In-person presentations, in English or in French, will be encouraged but
arrangements for remote delivery may be made. A selected number of papers
may be published.



*Papers may discuss, but are not limited to*



- Experts, intellectuals, scholars in the public sphere

*- Think tanks* and *debating societies* and their relations with rulers,
parties and ideologies

- Historiography as a political project

- Political economy as the art of governing and/or economic science in the
service of the political (mercantilists, physiocrats, classics, scientific
socialists…)

- The disciplinary evolution of economics: depoliticisation and
politicisation

- Knowledge as constitutive of national identity

- The legitimisation of policies through science

- The fashioning of the elite (intellectual trajectories and influences,
training, *Oxbridge*, the *Ivy League*, the formation of canons…)

- Committed academics and knowledge as a channel for protest: *Cultural
Studies* theorists and practitioners, neo-Conservative intellectuals, *cultural
critics*…

- The specialisation of knowledge and democratic representation

- Power and knowledge in formal institutions and/or the public sphere



*Indicative bibliography*



Burrow, J.W., *The Crisis of Reason. European Thought, 1848-1914, *New
Haven, Yale UP, 2000

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, *On the Constitution of the Church and
State, *in *The
Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge*, vol. 10, Ed. John Colmer,
London, Routledge & Kegan Paul/Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1976

Collini, Stefan, *Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain*, Oxford, Oxford
University Press, 2006

Comte, Auguste, *Discours sur l’ensemble du positivisme*, Paris, Garnier
Flammarion, 1998

Dewey, John, “Democracy and Education”, in *Middle Works *(1977), Ed. J.
Boydston and A. Carbondale, Illinois, Southern Illinois University Press,
1983

Dillow, Chris, *The End of Politics: New Labour and the Folly of
Managerialism*, Petersfield, Harriman House Publishing, 2007

Dow, Sheila C, and John Hillard, *Keynes, Knowledge and Uncertainty*,
London, Edward Elgar Publishing, 1995

Drayton, Richard. *Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain and the
‘Improvement’ of the World*, New Haven, Yale UP, 2000

Foucault, Michel, *L’ordre du discours*, Paris, Gallimard, 1971

*Surveiller et punir*, Paris, Gallimard, 1975

Goodhart, David, *Head, Hand, Heart: The Struggle for Dignity and Status in
the 21st Century**, *London, Penguin, 2020

Hall, Stuart, “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power”, in *Modernity:
An introduction to modern societies*, Ed. S. Hall, D. Held, D. Hubert, and
K. Thompson, Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1996

Hayek, Friedrich A. von, “The Use of Knowledge in Society” (1945), in *The
Collected Works of F.A. Hayek*, Ed. Bruce Caldwell, vol. 15, Chicago,
University of Chicago Press, 2014

Landry, Julien, *Critical Perspectives on Think Tanks*, London, Edward
Elgar Publishing, 2021

Lasch, Christopher, *The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy*,
New York and London, Norton and Co., 1995

Lubenow, William C., *Liberal Intellectuals and Public Culture in Modern
Britain, 1815-1914. Making Words Flesh*, The Boydell Press, 2010

Medema, Steven G., *The Hesitant Hand: Taming Self-interest in the History
of Economic Ideas*, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009

Monbiot, George, *Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis*,
London, Verso, 2017

Moran, Joe, *Interdisciplinarity*, London, Routledge, 2002

Mounk, Yascha, *The People vs. Democracy*, Cambridge, Mass., London,
England, Harvard University Press, 2018

Nietzsche, Friedrich, *Par-delà le bien et le mal* (1886), Paris,
Gallimard, 1987

Owen, Robert, *A New View of Society and Other Writings* (1813), London, J.
M. Dent & Sons, 1963

Parry, Chris, and Robert Protherough, *Managing Britannia: Culture and
Management In Modern Britain*, London, Edgway Books, 2002

Rauch, Jonathan, *The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth*,
Washington, Brookings, 2021

Schmitt, Carl, *Parlementarisme et démocratie* (1923), Paris, Seuil, 1988

Stone, Diane and Andrew Denham (Ed.), *Think tank Traditions. Policy
Analysis Across Nations*, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2004

Tyler, Colin, *Idealist Political Philosophy: Pluralism and Conflict in the
Absolute Idealist Tradition*, London, Bloomsbury, 2006

Voegelin, Eric, *The New Science of Politics* (1952), Chicago, University
of Chicago Press, 1987



*Organising committee*



Vanessa Boullet (Université de Lorraine)

Pauline Collombier (Université de Strasbourg)

Stéphane Guy (Université de Lorraine)

Linda Mathlouthi (Université de Lorraine)

Alice Monter (Université de Lorraine)

Peterson Nnajiofor (Université de Lorraine)

Ecem Okan (Université de Lorraine)

Françoise Orazi (Université Lumière Lyon II)

Rafal Soborski (Richmond: The American International University in London,
UK)

Colin Tyler (University of Hull, UK)





*Submissions*



Please send proposals in English or in French (300 words maximum) and a
short biography to [log in to unmask]
<[log in to unmask]> by *24th June 2022*. You will be
notified early July about the committee’s decision.