CfP: Engels in Eastbourne, University of Brighton

This event has now been postponed to June 2021 as a result of Covid-19.  

Call for Papers – Engels in Eastbourne

Conference to be held to mark Engels@200 at the University of Brighton, Eastbourne campus

 

Keynote speakers:

Tariq Ali, writer and filmmaker

Terrell Carver, Professor of Political Theory at the University of Bristol

28 November 2020 marks the bicentenary of the birth of Friedrich Engels, the German radical philosopher who in works such as The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844), The Peasant War in Germany (1850), The Housing Question (1872), ‘The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man’ (1876), Anti-Dühring (1877), Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880), Dialectics of Nature (1883) and The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) made pathbreaking and profound contributions to modern social and political theory.  As the co-thinker of Karl Marx and co-author of The Communist Manifesto and ‘The German Ideology’, he played a critical role in the forging and development of classical Marxism specifically.  But like Marx, Engels was ‘above all a revolutionary’, who also played a role in revolutionary upheavals such as the German Revolution of 1848 and in the international socialist movement. 

When Engels died in London on 5 August 1895, at the age of 74, his last wish was that following his cremation his ashes be scattered off Beachy Head, near Eastbourne.  Marx and Engels had visited many Victorian seaside resorts, such as Margate, Ramsgate and the Isle of Wight, but Eastbourne was Engels’s favourite place and where he holidayed for extended periods during the summers in later life.   Engels wrote to Sorge on 18 March 1893 for example that he had spent two weeks in Eastbourne and ‘had splendid weather’, coming back ‘very refreshed’.

As part of the wider commemorations planned for Engels@200, Engels in Eastbourne welcomes proposals for papers on any aspect of Engels’s life, work and intellectual and political legacy.  Themes may then include but are not restricted to the following:

- Engels’s relationship to Marx and Marxism

- Engels’s anti-colonialism and internationalism

- Engels’s understanding of the origins of women’s oppression

- Engels’s analysis of natural science and the natural world

- Engels’s understanding of religion

- Engels’s analysis of capitalism and working class and peasant struggles

- Engels’s concept of ‘social murder’

- Engels’s role in revolutionary movements and relationship to other revolutionaries

- Representations and commemorations of Engels

Our keynote speakers:  

Tariq Ali is a writer and filmmaker. He has written more than two dozen books on world history and politics, and seven novels (translated into over a dozen languages) as well as scripts for the stage and screen. He is an editor of New Left Review.

Terrell Carver is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Bristol. He has degrees from Columbia University and the University of Oxford, and has held visiting appointments in the USA, Australia, Japan and China. He has published widely on Marx, Engels and Marxism, including Friedrich Engels: His Life and Thought (being re-issued for a 30^th anniversary edition) and his current project is a short book Engels Before Marx coming out in late 2020 as a ‘Palgrave Pivot’.

Please send proposals for papers of up to 250 words to Cathy Bergin c.j.bergin@brighton.ac.uk or Christian Høgsbjerg c.hogsbjerg@brighton.ac.uk by 31 January 2020. 

Conference supported by the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics and the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories at the University of Brighton

http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/re/mnh/centre-events/conferences/cmnh-conference-engels-in-eastbourne

https://www.brighton.ac.uk/cappe/index.aspx

http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/re/mnh