Architecture and Democracy: Past and Present? – Lecture by Jan Werner Müller (Princeton)
3 FEbruary 2025, Amsterdam
This lecture is preceded by a workshop on Democracy: Past and Present? This event is organised by Matthijs Lok with the Amsterdam Centre for European Studies.
For more information, see: https://aces.uva.nl/content/events/2025/02/the-history-of-democracy.html?origin=NY%2F9hMhAQhOv8%2FEeoPahTA
Knowledge Without Territory: An Abject Vassal’s Claim to Kingship (South India, late 18th c) – Lecture by Shahzad Bashir (Aga Khan University)
11 February 2025, Amsterdam
This lecture is organised with the research group Global Political Thought of the University of Amsterdam. See: https://ash.uva.nl/content/research-groups/global-political-thought/global-political-thought.html
The limits of Enlightenment: Frederick II, the philosophes and the common people – Lecture by Avi Lifschitz (Oxford)
18 March 2025, Amsterdam
This lecture is organised with the research group Global Political Thought of the University of Amsterdam. See: https://ash.uva.nl/content/research-groups/global-political-thought/global-political-thought.html
Richard Price’s Prudence and the Unintentional Invention of Modern Capitalist Values (1758-1790) – Jake Soll (University of Southern California)
This is the Annual Lecture of the Utrecht University Centre for Early Modern Studies. Register at: https://www.uu.nl/en/research/utrecht-centre-for-early-modern-studies/events/annual-lecture
Thursday 15 May, utrecht
Historians have typically traced a the tradition of Machiavellian Classical Republicanism as a political and moral movement opposed to commercial values. While recent research has shown pro-commercial strains of republicanism—in the Dutch Republic for example—my presentation will show a more complex relationship between republican ideas of liberty and capitalist traditions. The example of Richard Price shows a remarkable attempt to use capitalism to create an innovative form of prudence to mitigate the dangers of finance and complex trade. Paradoxically, by trying balance greed and finance with anccounting and probabilistic prudence, Richard Price helped build essential elements that would support the rise of financial capitalism.
This talk was organized by UUCEMS in collaboration with the Descartes Center.
Beyond the ‘Minister-Concubine Complex’: Rethinking Bureaucracy and Masculinity in Ming China (1368-1644) – Lecture by Ying Zhang (Leiden)
21 May 2025, amsterdam
This lecture is organised with the research group Global Political Thought of the University of Amsterdam. See: https://ash.uva.nl/content/research-groups/global-political-thought/global-political-thought.html
Africa and Material Desire: A Note on an Enduring Western Stereotype – Lecture by Florence Bernault (Sciences Po, Paris)
15 October 2025, Amsterdam
Abstract
That Africans are structurally and historically moved by an uncontrollable lust for material objects remains a powerful component of Western knowledge. Surging in the 16th century on the coast of Guinea, diffused by merchants’ narratives back in Europe, theorized in the 17th and 18th century by philosophers, and hardened in the 19th century as a commonplace stereotype, the idea that Africans are possessed by a misguided hunger for imported commodities and material riches, has a genealogy as ancient as the first contacts between West Africa and foreign sailors. These Western fabrications have obscured many of the complex, real strategies of local societies to engage with material and immaterial wealth.
To critically examine these propositions I propose to group them together under the term of “double material curse.” Belonging to different periods and to various disciplines and social spheres, the double material curse, I argue, has worked, and still works, as a complex cluster of theories, opinions, and decisions, historically fluid yet enduring, to placate the relationships that Africans supposedly nurture with various forms of assets.
Biography
Florence Bernault is professor of history at Science Po in Paris and specializes in the political and cultural history of Central Africa. Her research focuses on historical dynamics that crossed over African and European societies. Her latest monograph, Colonial Transactions (Duke University Press 2019) historicizes the notion of witchcraft, power and puissance in Gabon.
This lecture is organised with the research group Global Political Thought of the University of Amsterdam. See: https://ash.uva.nl/content/research-groups/global-political-thought/global-political-thought.html and supported by the Amsterdam School of Historical Studies, Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture and the Decolonial Futures Research Priority Area
Title: Barbarism, religion, and the tsars: Eighteenth-century Europe imagines the Treaty of Nerchinsk – Lecture by Shiru Lim (Leiden)
18 November 2025, Amsterdam
Abstract
This paper explores the 1689 Treaty of Nerchinsk between Tsarist Russia and Qing China, and its evolving imprint on the eighteenth-century European intellectual landscape. Equally mythologised as the reign of Peter I, the Treaty confounded the categories of analysis that those seeking to understand the character of European civilisation often employed. Making sense of the Treaty’s significance, this paper argues, meant working out its place within a wider web of arguments about geography, people, mores, and government befitting an expanding world of commercial societies.
Biography
Before taking up this assistant professorship at Leiden in August 2023, I was Junior Fellow at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies (2021-23), Early Career Fellow at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg at the University of Göttingen (2019-21), and Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence (2018-19). I took my BA and PhD in History from University College London (UCL)—the former at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES), where I also studied Russian—and my MPhil in Modern European History from the University of Cambridge.
This lecture is organised with the research group Global Political Thought of the University of Amsterdam. See: https://ash.uva.nl/content/research-groups/global-political-thought/global-political-thought.html
The Future of “Un”Democratic Theory – Alexander Kirshner (Political Science, Duke University)
Moderator: Philipp Nielsen
17 December 2025, Groningen
Abstract
Most people live in autocracies. And over the past two decades, the study of autocracy has boomed across a variety of fields. But not in political philosophy. Relatively few recent works examine non-democracy. This presentation tackles this lacuna. It does so by thinking through how political philosophy can contribute to the study of autocracy. In other words, I try to imagine a future for (un)democratic theory.
Here is the main idea: it is helpful to divide the normative analysis of autocracy into three buckets. The first bucket includes works, like my own, that consider autocracy to better understand democracy. These works instrumentalize the study of autocracy. The second bucket includes both defenses of democracy and autocracy. These works are competitive; they aim to show the superiority of one system over the other. Most recent normative analyses of autocracy are instrumental and/or competitive.
There is nothing wrong with those works. But they don’t deal with many of the most interesting and important normative questions that are raised by autocratic government. Works that fall into the third bucket—works that focus on autocracy for its own sake—can tackle such questions and fill important scholarly gaps. For instance, how do autocracies shape social relations? Is the need to compromise one’s integrity part of the nature of autocracy? What should we make of autocratic courts and systems of separated powers? What is the normative status of political representation in non-democracies? There is currently little contemporary work focusing on questions of this sort. This presentation makes the case that there should be more.
This talk is jointly organised by the Centre for Historical Studies group Power, Statecraft, and the History of Political Experiences and the RUG European Politics & Society (REPS).