Intellectuals and the Crisis of Politics: Interwar Debates and their Contemporary Relevance.
Rooted in a long-term research project, the talk aims at rethinking interwar East Central and Western European crisis discourses as neither the mere reflection of an objective crisis “out there,” nor simply a self-generated moral panic or a thinly veiled effort to achieve political hegemony. Rather than just registering the occurrence of the tropes of crisis, it intends to reconstruct what exactly these intellectuals were doing when describing certain phenomena in terms of a cultural or political crisis. Discourses of crisis are not only frameworks of temporalization, but also ones of spatialization of modernity, and thus can serve as excellent vantage points for a transnational intellectual history. Along these lines, the talk focuses on some of the key debates crossing national and disciplinary boundaries, on the crisis of liberalism, democracy, socialism, and the nation state. It points also to the complex interplay between these »sectorial« discourses, seeking to shed light on the possible relevance of recontructing these debates for our current predicament often described as »polycrisis«.
Balázs Trencsényi (born 1973) is a historian of East Central European political and cultural thought, professor of history at Central European University (Vienna and Budapest). He has published a book on the discourses of national specificity in interwar Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary after 1918 and he was the main author of A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe, covering the period from the early 19th century up to the early 21st century. He is currently working on a book on the intellectual history of crisis discourses in the interwar period.
When? Tuesday, 13 February 2024, 6 pm
Where? FF UK, Voršilská 1, chapel, 5th floor
