Freedom and the Construction of Europe  

New perspectives on

philosophical, religious and political controversies

Martin van Gelderen

Quentin Skinner

 We aim to set up a Network, predominantly consisting of scholars at an early stage in their careers, for the study of freedom in early-modern and modern Europe . This project is being wholly funded by the Balzan Foundation. The goal of the Network will be to publish two volumes examining key philosophical, religious and political controversies surrounding the idea of freedom in Europe . We have taken as our model the earlier network on Republicanism that we jointly organised. We shall again act as joint convenors of the four workshops we propose to hold, and we intend to co-edit the resulting papers for publication by the Cambridge University Press. We have already discussed our plans in detail with Mr Richard Fisher, Executive Director, Humanities and Social Sciences, Cambridge University Press, who has agreed to act as publications adviser to our project. We hope to provide a forum in which scholars at a relatively early stage in their careers can discuss their work with one another, and at the same time with more senior researchers. To this end, we plan to invite two senior and eminent scholars to each of our workshops, who will present keynote addresses and discuss the work being undertaken by the core members of the group.

Our workshops will be held at the European University Institute, Florence . The first workshop is scheduled for early July 2008. Participants are invited to arrive in Florence on Wednesday 2 July. Our work sessions will be on Thursday, Friday and Saturdaymorning, with Sunday 6 July as convenient departure date. Along the same lines the second workshop is planned for Wednesday 24 September until Sunday 28 September 2008 ; our final workshops are currently planned for early July and September 2009.

Our basic ambition is to make some new and original contributions to historical scholarship. We hope in particular to adopt as widely comparative a perspective as possible, seeking to correct the current imbalance in the historiography towards western Europe and the origins of the liberal state. We hope to do greater justice to the complexity of the political and intellectual traditions out of which modern European conceptions of freedom emerged.

Besides these scholarly ambitions, we want to consider whether the early-modern controversies may provide us with resources for thinking about contemporary political issues in Europe . The emergence, in the early-modern period, of religious pluralism, commercial society and the apparatus of the nation state intensified debates about the relationship between civic liberties, religious identities, commercial markets and governments. Within this matrix, many key concepts and questions were generated that still inform European thinking at the present time. We hope in consequence that our historical investigations may have considerable relevance for present-day Europe . The European Union currently faces the necessity of reinvigorating a culture based on freedom, democracy and mutual tolerance. But these problems cannot be dealt with in an historical vacuum. Rather their solutions must in part be drawn from an understanding of the conceptual resources provided by European traditions of political thinking and practice. It is this understanding that we hope to deepen and to foster by means of our scholarly work.

First Conference: Religious freedom and civil liberty

Florence , 2-6 July 2008

The discussion of freedom in early-modern Europe largely derived from, and always involved, ideas about religious liberty. The Christian heritage of arguments about the freedom of the will, as well as the more basic Christian narrative of redemption and liberation from sin, framed the European understanding of individual human liberty. Religion also impacted on conceptions of civil liberty, with individuals and groups struggling to secure freedom of worship and a more general freedom of conscience. We accordingly begin by focusing on religion as the discursive realm within which much of the vocabulary of freedom was developed, and on religious disputes as sites where concepts of freedom were debated.

(1) Freedom and rights in Catholic theology

(2) Freedom in Reformation theology: Luther and the Politica Christiana

(3) Freedom and predestination

(4) Freedom of conscience and the foundations of the liberal political order

(5) Freedom at the crossroads of Judaism and Christianity

(6) Freedom, Christianity and Islam

Second Conference: Liberty and liberties in legal and constitutional thought

Florence , 24-28 September 2008

We take as our starting-point the fact that early-modern Europe was marked by a multitude of charters and customs granting liberties and privileges to groups, towns and regions. Across Europe , debates about these privileges were intertwined with struggles for religious and political freedom. This conference will explore the complexities and varieties of the relations between liberty and liberties.

Section A: The European framework:

(1) Liberty , customary law and ancient constitutionalism

(2) Women and Liberties

Section B: Liberty and liberties in monarchies:

(3) ‘German liberty' in the Old Empire

(4) Liberty and liberties under the crowns of Aragon and Castile

(5) Liberty and liberties under the Habsburg monarchy

(6) Liberty and liberties in Great Britain

Section C: Republican liberty and liberties

(7) Liberty and liberties in the city-republics

(8) Liberty and liberties in the Polish commonwealth

(9) Liberty and liberties in federal republics

Third Conference: Freedom, citizenship and the state

Florence , early July 2009

After focusing mainly on notions of collective liberties, we turn to the freedom of the individual. We first consider the psychology of freedom and the notion of free action; we then examine how the liberty of individual subjects under government was analysed and discussed.

Part I: The psychology of freedom

(1) Freedom and reason, passion and slavery

(2) Neostoicism and the freedom of man

Part II: Freedom in the political realm

(3) The revival of the civitas libera

(4) Freedom of speech and its limits

(5) The liber homo and the ‘ free state '

(6) Freedom and the tradition of political Aristotelianism

(7) Freedom and federalism

Fourth Conference: Boundaries

Florence , September 2009

We end by scrutinising the limits and boundaries of European discourses of freedom, focusing in particular on the importance of encounters with ‘otherness' and the relationship between freedom and other central values.

(1) European perceptions of Ottoman freedom

(2) Ottoman perceptions of freedom in Europe

(3) Freedom, slavery, and colonial expansion

(4) Freedom and International Law

(5) Freedom and nature

(6) Natural and commercial liberty

(7) The freedoms of women

(8) Freedom versus equality