DIAS Event: What is democracy? Some answers from the age of revolutions by Joanna Innes

The democratic triumphalism of the 1990s has given way to a sense that democracy is in crisis – whether because it’s been hijacked by woke metropolitan elites, or because it’s being assailed by populist masses. In this context it’s arguably unhelpful to proceed from the premise that the meaning of democracy had been established, but is now failing because of bad actors (which is not to say that there aren’t bad actors around). To free our imaginations to find new ways forward, we should start by recognising that the meanings of democracy have always been contested, that predominant meanings have changed over time (and varied over space), and that democratic projects have often run into difficulties and had to be rethought. 

In this lecture I will draw on the findings of a long-running historical research project, ‘Re-imagining democracy’, which looks at the circumstances in which the ancient concept of democracy was ‘re-imagined’ for modern circumstances, from the era of the American and French revolutions. The project spans Europe and both Americas, focussing on a century in which the fortunes of the word were especially changeable and varied. I will try to give a flavour of how and why its meanings and associations varied and changed.

About Joanna Innes 
Joanna Innes is Professor (emeritus) of Modern History at the University of Oxford. She was educated in Britain and the United States, and first employed at Oxford in 1982. Her early research focussed on social policy-making in England, often in a larger European context, initially focussing especially on punishment and poverty. She is now working on the emergence of new topics on the British parliamentary agenda in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including health, education and working conditions. Her work focusses especially on policy-making processes, in a period in which the British government largely left the initiative to groups outside Parliament. The effect was that policy-making was fairly participatory, and the subject of public debate. Some of this work is collected in her volume Inferior Politics: Social Problems and Social Policies in Britain 1688-1800 (2009). For the past twenty years she has also collaborated with Mark Philp on an international project, Re-imagining Democracy (www.re-imaginingdemocracy.com ). This explores how the ancient concept of democracy was adapted to conceptualise modern problems and opportunities. The project has given rise to three collections of essays (2013, 2018, 2023 – details on the website).  A fourth and final volume, focussing on ‘central and northern Europe’ (including Nordic countries) is currently in train.

Venue
The DIAS Auditorium, SDU Campus Odense

This event is open for all. No registration needed.