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Bounded Sovereignties*
Renewing Ethical Reflection in Europe Today?
Sovereignties: Political, Social, and Personal
April 22-25, 2013 Olomouc and Prague
Peter McCormick
Institut international de philosophie (Paris)
The Royal Society of Canada (Ottawa)
In Spring 2013, the European Union’s internal unity and external
status came freshly into question. The occasion was the fractious
discussion of the EU’s next five-year budget. That discussion
concluded all too weakly. By contrast, some months earlier the EU’s
two major global trading partners, the US and China, had in the one
case re-elected its incumbent president for another four years and in
the other appointed a new president for the next ten years. Shortly
afterewards, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and
Development and the International Monetary Fund issued two very
negative reports. Their analyses demonstrated that the EU’s continuing
struggles with the manifold crises that had begun in the US five years
previously were -- ineffectual. Resolving such crises would require
serious self-limitation at many levels. The present lectures and
seminars aim to elucidate, if only in a small way, the nature of such
necessary limitations in several key areas of the political, social, and
personal dimensions of European lives today. The cardinal notion will
turn out to be what I shall be calling “bounded sovereignties.”
*Two lectures and three seminars sponsored by the Philosophy Faculties of the
Palacky University (Olomouc) and the Charles University (Prague) in cooperation with
the Eastern European Ethics Network (Olomouc, Cracow, Ruzomberok, and Lviv).
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Olomouc: Monday, April 22, 10:30-12:00, room 11/3
CMTF, Palacky University
Initial Lecture: “Renewing Philosophical Ethics Today? I”
“Rearticulating Social Justice as Moments of Mutuality”
How is the ethically unacceptable persistence of utterly destitute
street children in extraordinarily rich European capital cities to be
durably remedied? Perhaps in part by re-articulating current
inadequate understandings in the EU of social injustice, not as an
absence of solidarity and reciprocity, but as the continuing failures to
imagine and to act on the “mutualizations” of fairness, understanding,
respect, and articulacy,” the recognition, realization, and sharing of
limitations. Is it the case then that pursuing philosophical ethics today
at least in Europe requires closer empirical connections?
Reading Suggestions: A. S. Bhalla and P. McCormick, Poverty among
Immigrant Children in Europe (London: Palgrave / Macmillan, 2009),
especially pp. 1-23; and P. McCormick, Moments of Mutuality:
Rearticulating Social Justice in France and the EU Today (Cracow: The
Jagiellonian University Press, 2012), especially pp. 11-29 and 147-156.
Olomouc: Tuesday, April 22, 10:00-11:30, room “rotunda”
CMTF, Palacky University
The First Sovereignty Seminar: The Political: “Absolute
and Relative European Sovereignties: The Case of
Mycenaean Polities – Critical Self-Restraint and Lawfulness.”
Starting from contemporary discussions in intellectual history of
different conceptions of sovereignty, a brief opening presentation will
center on a general, historically grounded idea of political sovereignty
as a form of critical self-restraint. The ensuing seminar discussions
will then take up this general philosophical informed idea of
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sovereignty in the historical contexts of its emergent historical origins
in the early European political cultures of late Aegean Bronze Age
Mycenaean civilization. A brief closing presentation will attempt to
summarize the seminar discussions by linking the historical case study
more tightly with several still outstanding conceptions of sovereignty
as perhaps too exclusively political.
Reading Suggestions: R. Jackson, Sovereignty: Evolution of an Idea
(Cambridge: Polity, 2007), Preface and pp. 1-23; and K. Shelton, “[Late
Bronze Age] Mainland Greece,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Bronze
Age Aegean, ed. E. H. Kline (Oxford: OUP, 2010), pp. 139-148.
*****
Prague: Wednesday, April 23, 12:30-14:00, room 225V
Faculty of Arts, Charles University
The Second Sovereignty Seminar: The Social: “External
and Internal European Sovereignties: The Case of Cretan
Societies – Critical Self-Restraint and Temperateness.”
Starting from another contemporary discussion this time about
social theory, a brief opening presentation will center on a particular
idea of sovereignty as both political and social forms of critical selfrestraint. The ensuing seminar discussions will then take up this
particular notion of sovereignty in the historical contexts of its
emergent historical origins in the still earlier European social contexts
of Aegean Bronze Age Cretan civilization. A brief closing presentation
will again attempt to summarize the seminar discussions by linking the
historical case study to a still outstanding conception of sovereignty
as not just either political or even exclusively political and social but
as requiring further metaphysical reflection on kinds of contingency.
Reading Suggestions: H. Joas and W. Knöbl, Social Theory (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2009), pp. 500-528; and Ilse Schoep, “[Middle Bronze
Age] Crete,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Bronze Age Aegean, ed. E.
H. Kline (Oxford: OUP, 2010) pp. 113-125.
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Prague: Wednesday, April 23, 17:30-19:00, room 217
Faculty of Arts, Charles University
The Third Sovereignty Seminar: the Individual
“Realistic and Humane European Sovereignties: The Case of
Cycladic Individuals – Critical Self-Restraint and Personal
Dignity.”
Starting from a final contemporary discussion, this time in
political theory, a brief opening presentation will center on a specific
idea of sovereignty as requiring not just political and social forms of
critical self-restraint but individual, indeed personal forms as well. The
ensuing seminar discussions will then take up this specific idea of
sovereignty in the historical contexts of its emergent historical origins
in its earliest European social contexts of Aegean Bronze Age Cycladic
civilization. A brief closing presentation will finally try to summarize
the seminar discussions by linking all three historical case studies-general, particular, and specific--to a proposed novel conception of
sovereignty as a social and political conception arising most basically
from a metaphysical notion of personal and not just modal
contingency.
Reading Suggestions: J. Bethke Elshtain, Sovereignty: God, State and
Self (New York: Basic Books, 2008), pp. 227-249; and C. Renfrew,
“[Early Bronze Age] Cyclades,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Bronze
Age Aegean, ed. E. H. Kline (Oxford: OUP, 2010) pp. 83-98.
*****
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Prague: Thursday, April 24,19:10-20:40, room 225V
Faculty of Arts, Charles University
Final Lecture: “Renewing Philosophical Ethics Today? II”
“Eco-Ethics and Globalized Nuclear Technologies.”
Sympathetic yet critical appreciations of contemporary Japanese
eco-ethics are still infrequent. Despite international symposia and
publications devoted to understanding eco-ethics as “a new ethics for
our new times,” specifying its nature remains elusive. Here, I try briefly
to elucidate the pursuits of an eco-ethics as perhaps an instructive
instance for societies in Europe generally and for Czech society in
particular. I do so by identifying several cardinal connections between
eco-ethics and specifically the now globalized information and
communications technologies with respect to the Fukushima nuclear
disaster. I also try to exhibit for ongoing critical discussion some of the
philosophical interest in trying to think second thoughts about the
nature of normative ethics today when viewed from an unfamiliar ecoethical perspective. Perhaps, then, pursuing philosophical ethics at
least in Europe today may also require closer attentiveness to global
contemporary issues?
Reading Suggestions: T. Imamichi, An Introduction to Eco-Ethica, tr.
J. Wakabayashi (Lanham, Maryland: The University Press of America,
2009), especially pp. 1-31; and P. McCormick, Aspects Yellowing
Darkly: Ethics, Intuitions, and the European High Modernist Poetry of
Suffering and Passage (Cracow: The Jagiellonian University Press,
2010), especially pp. 17-34.