{"id":8044,"date":"2025-09-15T13:32:23","date_gmt":"2025-09-15T11:32:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sgeaj.ch\/?p=8044"},"modified":"2025-09-15T17:02:18","modified_gmt":"2025-09-15T15:02:18","slug":"cfp-a-social-question-before-the-social-question","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sgeaj.ch\/fr\/actualite\/cfp-a-social-question-before-the-social-question\/","title":{"rendered":"CfP: A Social Question Before the Social Question"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Call for Papers for the international conference \u00ab\u00a0A social question before the Social Question: Addressing poverty in the long eighteenth century\u00a0\u00bb, organised by Damiano Bardelli (University of Oxford). The conference will take place at Oxford, from 22 to 23 October 2026. Deadline for submissions: 31 December 2025.<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Precariousness and hardships were inescapable features of the life of the lower orders in early modern European society. In the Age of Enlightenment, just like in previous centuries, the majority of the population either lived in poverty or faced the constant risk of becoming unable to meet basic needs. Throughout the long eighteenth century, rulers and reformers alike showed sustained interest in the problem of poverty, with the purpose of improving the condition of their poorer subjects and countrymen and indirectly stabilising the social order. This concern took on multiple forms, ranging from the introduction of new institutions of confinement and labour to the critique of long held systems of relief like the English Poor Laws, and is testified by the widely participated academic prize contests on poverty and indigence of those years. At the same time, traditional conceptions of charity were redefined in secular terms \u2013 e.g. bienfaisance, Gemeinn\u00fctzigkeit, philanthropy \u2013 while the French Revolution and radical movements inspired innovative approaches that resonated well into the nineteenth century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet the attention paid to poverty by eighteenth-century rulers and reformers cannot be reduced to a pragmatic response to pressing social needs. Those concerns were also closely tied to broader philosophical developments, including the emergence of a secular conception of history in which human beings, rather than divine providence, were seen as major agents of change. This new perspective made progress in the human condition conceivable, stimulating novel interest in society and encouraging the development of new solutions aimed to reform existing institutions. At the same time, the decline of manorial serfdom and the emergence of a \u201cfree\u201d labour market, alongside the transition from mercantilism to political economy, brought about new ideas of population, scarcity, social mobility, and work discipline. Unlike their predecessors, Enlightenment reformers no longer viewed poverty as part of a godly plan but rather as a consequence of human institutions and practices. Whereas some of them considered it as an injustice standing in stark contradiction with natural law theories of equality, others saw it as the unavoidable outcome of the dynamics of production, which mandated the existence of poverty as a necessary spur to industry. Breaking with the past, Enlightenment thinkers thereby framed poverty as a distinctively social question well before the nineteenth century made the Social Question a crucial political issue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This international conference seeks to shed light on the innovations introduced by Enlightenment debates on poverty that paved the way for the later emergence of the Social Question. It solicits presentations on reform projects developed \u2013 and occasionally applied \u2013 in the long eighteenth century that were aimed to address poverty as the key social issue of the age, breaking with traditional approaches based on Christian theology and morals. Of special interest will thus be Enlightenment reform projects that sought to find a solution to the social consequences of contemporary economic dynamics and questioned existing institutions and theoretical frameworks of poor relief. Participants will be encouraged to reflect on the novelty of these eighteenth-century schemes, their relation to both older systems, modern notions, and novel disciplines (including natural law and political economy), and their potential impact on and legacy in early nineteenth-century reflections on pauperism and the development of the Social Question. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Papers will ideally (but not exclusively) deal with the following topics:<\/p>\n\n\n\n