Project description
Exploring first millennium’s political thought
In political thought, Late Antiquity is often viewed as a period where monarchy supplanted city-states and religious texts began to overshadow philosophical works. This era is typically contrasted with modern republicanism and secularism, but this perspective has received limited scholarly attention and has overlooked non-Western traditions. The ERC-funded New Polities project aims to reinterpret this period as a new beginning for emerging political entities. It explores the first millennium, encompassing the Roman Empire, the Abbasid, Byzantine, and Carolingian empires, and expands the range of source material to include various languages and cultures. The project also investigates underexplored topics such as the relationship between human society and nature, transcending disciplinary boundaries to reveal the development and adaptation of political ideas.
Objective
In the history of political thought, Late Antiquity is usually considered the period when the city-state gave way to monarchy and the Bible and Qur’an took the place of Plato. With a focus on kingship and religion, late antique political thinking – so the story goes – represents the antithesis of modern republicanism and secularism. For far too long, this teleological perspective has directed scholars toward a narrow range of topics and inhibited the recognition of different narratives and integration of non-Western traditions. Instead of seeing this period as the end of the paradigmatic ancient polity (namely the polis), New Polities proposes that it was a beginning: an age of new polities. Indeed, it witnessed the spread and consolidation of new religious, ethnic and political communities. Their use of ancient political language to describe themselves sparked a proliferation of political discourse into new contexts. To uncover the innovation and variety thus generated, New Polities expands the scope of research in a three-fold way. 1) It embraces the first millennium from the Roman Empire to the Abbasid, Byzantine and Carolingian empires, when different traditions crystallised from a common pool of late antique material. 2) It shifts the focus away from classical treatises and languages (e.g. Augustine & Al-Farabi) to a wider array of sources in many more languages from a broader range of cultures (e.g. Syriac, Armenian, Hebrew). This enlarged corpus allows to chart a greater breadth of ideas and possible cross-cultural influences. 3) It introduces little-studied topics, such as oikonomia and the relation between human society and nature. Breaking down disciplinary boundaries, New Polities not only recovers the formation, circulation, and adaptation of political ideas in the first millennium, but also foregrounds the importance of late antique and early medieval societies in the wider history of political thought.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
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Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
9000 Gent
Belgium