THE 16^TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
*FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE SOCIETY OF GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND*
*Nietzsche, Power & Politics*
*March 23 – 25, 2007 *
*UNIVERSITY OF LEIDEN, THE NETHERLANDS*
*2nd*
*CALL FOR PAPERS*
In recent years Nietzsche’s significance for political thought has become a central and hotly contested area of Nietzsche research, especially in the Anglophone world: Is Nietzsche a political thinker at all, or an antipolitical philosopher of values and culture? Is Nietzsche an aristocratic political thinker who damns democracy as an expression of modern Nihilism, or can his thought, especially his thought on the Greek /agon/, be appropriated for contemporary democratic theory? Do Nietzsche’s criticisms of democracy allow for a politics that is compatible with democratic commitments? Nietzsche is known to be an important source of inspiration for Hannah Arendt, but does Arendt’s concept of politics and the public sphere go decisively beyond Nietzsche – or are they fundamentally compatible as political thinkers? These are some of the issues being currently debated.
The 2007 conference will follow the standard FNS conference format of five parallel sessions and five plenary sessions with well-known speakers in the field. But it will also depart from this format in the sense that three of the plenary sessions will involve not a single speaker, but two speakers, each making the case for one side in some of the current controversies mentioned above.
*/Confirmed plenary speakers:/*
*Dan Conway (Texas A&M University)* on Nietzsche as a political thinker
*Paul van Tongeren (Radboud University Nijmegen)* on Nietzsche as a non-political thinker
*William Connolly* (*Johns Hopkins University*) on Nietzsche and radical democracy
*Bernhard Taureck (Braunschweig University*) on Nietzsche as anti-democratic thinker
*Dana Villa (University of Notre Dame*) on Arendt contra Nietzsche
*Vasti Roodt, University of Stellenbosch*) on Arendt and Nietzsche
*James Conant* (*University of Chicago*) on Nietzsche’s Perfectionism and Democracy
*Keith Ansell-Pearson* (*Warwick University*) topic tba
The Friedrich Nietzsche Society welcomes proposals for 30-minute papers on all topics relevant to the conference theme, including the following:
* Nietzsche and ancient political philosophy / Nietzsche and modern political philosophy
* Nietzsche and political values: freedom, justice, equality, pluralism / tolerance, identity & community
* Nietzsche and political action: praxis and poiesis
* Nietzsche and political power
* Topics in Nietzsche’s political thought, including ‘grosse Politik’, the critique of democracy, aristocracy, the agon, legislation, Germany / das Reich, the Greeks
* Nietzsche and Liberalism / Republicanism / Aristocratism / Agonistic democracy
* Nietzsche and the Frankfurt School / Critical Theory; Foucault; Leo Strauss; Hannah Arendt; Carl Schmitt; Machiavelli; Spinoza; Rousseau; Hobbes; Plato; Thucydides
* Nietzsche and Nineteenth Century politics / political thought (Bismarck; Napoleon; Burckhardt, Marx, Feuerbach, de Tocqueville, Mill; Wagner)
Papers on other relevant topics will also be considered.
Abstracts (no longer than 400 words) should be submitted by *01 November* to Herman Siemens (_fnsleiden2007@xxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:fnsleiden2007@xxxxxxxxxxx>_). Early submissions are welcome.
Webpage under construction at: _http://www.fns2007.leidenuniv.nl/_
SUPPORTED BY:
THE FACULTY OF PHILOSOPHY, UNIVERSITY OF LEIDEN