Call For Papers
North Eastern Modern Language Association Convention
Buffalo, April 7-8, 2000
Proposed Panel:
Victorian Social Criticism and Political Economy:
Revisiting Early Critiques of Capitalist Democracy
The world order that many Victorian thinkers found revolutionary and
disturbing would seem to be enjoying its final triumph two centuries
later in our own time. The end of the Cold War, the eastward
expansion of NATO, the creation of a single European currency, and
the active involvement in all parts of the world of Western
institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World
Bank, all suggest a decisive triumph for capitalist democracy.
There is considerable disagreement, however, about how such events
should be interpreted. Some, such as Francis Fukyama, have declared
an "end of history," and asserted the climactic emergence of a form
of political and social life governed by principles of freedom and
equality to which all nations will soon aspire. Others, such as
Jurgen Habermas, perceive a threat in comprehensive "systems
integration," a condition in which the harmonization of international
markets and the concentration of decision-making in the hands of
international Western institutions renders the idea of popular
government meaningless, because capitalist democracies are unable to
secure citizens' rights and effect actual political outcomes.
Important aspects of this debate were prefigured in the Victorian
age. Liberal intellectuals such as John Stuart Mill championed the
compatibility between democratic and economic life, and argued
persuasively that the principles of liberty and equality were best
expressed--and even secured--through the free exchange of one's
goods and labor. Other Victorian intellectuals such as John Ruskin,
Matthew Arnold, and Karl Marx, opposed this optimistic view of
political economy, and feared that an unregulated market threatened
individual freedom precisely because it tended to conflate economic
phenomena (the mere accumulation of wealth) with political goods and
ends.
This panel looks to revisit the intellectual prose of the Victorian
period, not only to investigate how it is rooted in the specific
conditions of its own era, but to ask how it does or does not
continue to address contemporary social, economic, and political
phenomena.
We invite papers on such English writers as Thomas Carlyle, John
Stuart Mill, John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, and William Morris--as
well as such non-English Victorians as Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels. Are these writers relevant to us today? In what ways
have their expectations and fears proved to be unjustified? In what
ways have those expectations and fears been realized? What do they
suggest, if anything, about the future development of our political
and economic culture?
Send drafts or 500 word abstracts by September 15 to:
or
Gilbert Gigliotti
English Dept.
Central Connecticut State University
1615 Stanley Street
New Britain, CT 06050
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