Report Prof. Duncan Ivison's Lecture for 12th Political Philosophy Workshop
On April 19th, 2018, the Department of Philosophy (Zhuhai) hosted Professor Duncan Ivison, of the University of Sydney, for a talk entitled “Three Conceptions of the Political”. Professor Ivison was introduced by Professor Jun Hyeok Kwak of the Department of Philosophy, who also moderated the subsequent question and answer session.
Professor Ivison’s starting point was that “the dominance of Rawlsian and Habermasian political theory over the past two decades has resulted in a desire for more realistic and contextually specific political theory.” He then proceeded to examine the nature of this requirement by considering three conceptions of liberty as a political value: a liberal conception, a republican conception, and a realist conception.
Professor Ivison argued that, while the republican conception defended by Philip Pettit is correct to highlight the liberty-restricting impact of domination, it would be a mistake to dismiss negative liberty entirely, on the one hand, and republicans may need to adopt a more Foucaultian conception of domination, on the other. This argument was reinforced with a critique of Pettit’s reading of Thomas Hobbes, who Professor Ivison maintained was more sympathetic to the idea that law can be constitutive of a form of liberty than Pettit’s reading suggests.
Following the talk, Professor Kwak offered a summary of Professor Ivison’s position, pinpointed the ways in which the realist conception of freedom differs from its republican counterpart, and noted the significance of this debate for Pettit’s claim that democracy should be ‘depoliticized’. A response was then provided by Dr Tim Beaumont, a Research Associate at the Department of Philosophy. Dr Beaumont raised some questions concerning how Professor Ivison viewed the relationship between the debate over the nature of politics, on the one hand, and the debate over the correct conception of liberty, on the other. Dr Beaumont also suggested that Pettit could use some of the doubts that Professor Ivison had raised about Foucault’s conception of domination to argue against the claim that republicanism should take a more Foucaultian form.
The Department of Philosophy is very grateful to Professor Ivison for taking time to visit, and we hope that he will visit again soon.
