Inclusion and Exclusion in the History of Ideas

The Helsinki Centre for Intellectual History invites you to its first international conference, which will take place 14-15 December 2017. Papers presented at the conference will address intellectual history, broadly speaking, and relate to the general conference theme of ‘inclusion and exclusion’. While the theme of ‘inclusion and exclusion’ can be approached from many different perspectives and applied to many different topics, research in fields related to intellectual history has not prominently done so thus far. The conference organisers want to highlight a few ways of how this might be done:

• Inclusion and exclusion in theorising on political representation. How has the lack of representation due to gender, income or status been historically addressed? How has the fulfilment of citizenship been treated in the history of political thought? How are conceptualisations of politics and forms of government related to mechanisms of exclusion?
• Inclusion and exclusion in the recognition of social, cultural, religious or ethnic difference and the tradition of conceptualising tolerance. How have religious convictions and doctrines shaped the intellectual history of mutual recognition and toleration? Does the recognition of different identities and beliefs endorse or rather prevent the creation of cooperative and sociable societies?
• Inclusive and exclusive mechanisms regarding the location of knowledge and intellectual life. How do travel and communication between intellectuals and translation processes shape thinking in different parts of the world? How can today’s attempts to move toward global intellectual history shape and transform the practices and outputs of the field?
• Inclusion and exclusion through trade politics, institutions, and regulatory mechanisms. How were current international trade regimes shaped by forms of economic, fiscal, legal, and diplomatic inclusion and exclusion? How did different institutional and legal regimes develop in their usage of inclusion and exclusion mechanisms, thereby shaping trade patterns and political power relations?

Conference registration is free of charge.

The conference is organized by the Helsinki Centre for Intellectual History and is supported by the Centre of Excellence on Reason and Religious Recognition, HELDIG and the project History, Nature and Empire in Eighteenth-Century Europe.