Paradoxes of Universalism

The Centre of Excellence in Law, Identity and the European Narratives (EuroStorie) is proud to invite you to the Paradoxes of Universalism conference! This will be a hybrid conference with presentations both in-person and virtually over Zoom. The whole conference will be streamed in Zoom. The Zoom session is open to everyone without registration. The Zoom link and meeting ID will be updated on the conference website a few days before the conference.

After WWI, there was a growing dissatisfaction with the European conceptions of universalism epitomized by the Enlightenment’s faith in the progress of reason. The dire consequences of industrialization, imperialism, and colonialism, made apparent by the unprecedented physical, moral, and economic ruins of war, seemed to require the abandonment of the core ideas that had hitherto defined European identity. Among these, the idea of universal reason began to appear as a naïve, if not outright dangerous, product of the belief in European cultural superiority. Both, universal reason and its companion Eurocentrism, needed to be profoundly questioned and possibly discarded. However, many of those engaged in this questioning soon found out that it was difficult to drop the idea of universality altogether. Most analyses of the crisis found a key cause in the pre-war degradation of universal reason into relativistic doctrines. Consequently, relapsing into relativism was perceived as a dead end, for it could very well have been the crisis’ own source and it could not answer the very problems the questioning sought to address. Therefore, in law, political thought, philosophy and even in the arts, we witness a wave of creative reinterpretations of universalist narratives, rather than an outright abandonment of universalism.

The keynote speakers of the conference are:

• Kevin Olson (California – Irvine)
• Jayne Svenungsson (Lund)
• Ayten Gündoğdu (Columbia)
•  Rose Parfitt (Kent Law School)

See the conference website for the full programme, abstracts, and Zoom session details. Welcome!