Cody James Inglis: “The Republican Left in Danubian Europe, 1900–1948: A Comparative History of Political Thought”
Zgodovina na Špici / History on the Edge
Cody James Inglis (Central European University, Budapest/Vienna; Institute of Political History, Budapest): The Republican Left in Danubian Europe, 1900–1948: A Comparative History of Political Thought
Predavanje bo v živo v sejni sobi Inštituta za novejšo zgodovino, v sredo, 9. 11. 2022 ob 13. uri četrtek, 24. 11. 2022 ob 13. uri.
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Abstract
This lecture will provide an overview of my dissertation project, which re-examines republicanism as one of the key political-theoretical foundations of radical democratic thought in the late Habsburg Empire and its successor states, a space I call “Danubian Europe.” Republicanism is not particularly visible as a tradition of political thought in this part of Europe, largely because it was overshadowed by the repeated coming-to-power of more hegemonic ideologies (e.g., liberalism, nationalism, socialism, and fascism) through the long nineteenth century, the short twentieth, and in our own day. As such, republicanism was neither politically realized, theorized as a standalone ideology, nor given extensive historiographic treatment as in Western Europe and North America. Thus, as one of the more complex and interesting modern cross-ideological frameworks of political thought produced in Danubian Europe, republicanism deserves intellectual and historiographic canonization on regional and comparative bases.
In order to make modern republican political thought visible in this part of Europe, then, I have chosen to examine the place of republicanism on the Left, where it found its most clearly pronounced and complex articulations. Between 1900–48 in Danubian Europe, this “movement of negation toward the existing world”—as Polish philosopher and intellectual historian Leszek Kołakowski defined “the Left” in 1968—was largely represented by civic radicals, anarchists, left-liberals, radical peasantists, social democrats, socialists, and communists, all of whom consistently claimed the ideals of the French Revolution as their own from the late eighteenth century onward. This project aims to integrate twentieth-century developments in republican thought in Danubian Europe into existent historiographic investigations about republicanism as a shared European—that is, a truly pan-continental—intellectual tradition, while still placing central emphasis on specific regional dynamics and autonomous paths of development.
Bio
Cody James Inglis is a doctoral candidate in comparative history at Central European University in Budapest and Vienna, and Junior Researcher on the European Research Council Consolidator Grant “Negotiating post-imperial transitions,” hosted at the Institute of Political History in Budapest. His research interests include intellectual history and the history of political thought, the history of concepts, and the history of historiography, regionally focused on the Habsburg Empire and its successor states in Central and Southeastern Europe from 1848–1948.