Oikonomia, Economy and War

2012 Graduate Conference in Political Thought and Intellectual History

19th and 20th March 2012

Since 2008, graduate students in the Cambridge Faculty of History have organised highly successful annual graduate conferences in political thought and intellectual history.

In 2012 this is the fifth such event and the Cambridge Political Thought and Intellectual History Conference has become established as a valuable inter-institutional event on a par with long-standing graduate conferences at Harvard and Princeton.

The theme for the 2012 conference is "Oikonomia, Economic and War". Like the themes of previous conferences ("The State", "The Idea of Politics", "Politics, Faith, and Reason", "Politics, Order, Law"), the theme has been designed to attract papers on a wide variety of topics and periods, and to produce a coherent programme to facilitate conversation across disciplines. The call for papers will therefore encourage an emphasis on the variety of ways in which conceptions of law and orderliness have informed political thinking in the past. Papers might address some of the following questions:

• How have the relationships between household management, economics, and war been understood in different historical contexts? Which takes precedence, and how have they been distinguished or conflated?
• Are concerns about economics more or less central to political thought at different times?
• How have conceptions of the private and public spheres of economic activity interacted and evolved, and how have they informed political thought in different periods?
• To what extent have different conceptions of material order or breakdown informed thinking about politics? How do economic relations and competition relate to violence?

We anticipate three panels of two or three twenty-minute papers held over a single day_; March 20, at a Cambridge college. A Cambridge graduate student will chair each panel and offer a commentary on the papers before general discussion. Papers will be pre-circulated to the members of the panel and discussant only.

Professor Andrew Gamble of the Cambridge Department for Politics and International Studies has agreed to deliver a keynote address on the evening of March 19.

For up to date information on the call for papers, the event itself and details of how to register please go to the Political Thought and Intellectual History website