Power and Knowledge from the 18th Century to Today

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

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 stephane.guy@univ-lorraine.fr and powerandknowledge@sciencesconf.org by 24th June 2022. You will be notified early July about the committee’s decision.