Abstract
Many contemporary scholars note the growing popularity of the term contingency in modern social and humanitarian studies. As the famous Finnish historian of concepts Kari Palonen wrote at the turn of the XX-XXI centuries, “today it is almost fashionable to speak of contingency in political theory, philosophy and historiography” [1]. Closer to our time, in 2019, the author of an extremely thorough dissertation on the meaning of contingency in Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory, Ari Edmundson, writes that over the past three decades, contingency has become one of the main watchwords of the historical discipline and even “a rallying cry” for professional identity: “To be a historian today means to pay fealty to historical contingency” [2]. At the same time, Edmundson draws attention to the fundamental ambiguity of the term’s meaning in relation to a historical event. He believes that it makes no sense to talk about the contingency of the event “without reference to some notion of structure, some pattern, regularity, or even expectation against which something could appear as a deviation or surprise”. It is therefore reasonable to suspect that the concept of contingency is somewhat redundant, that it is incapable of adding new meaning to what has long been considered the subject of the historian’s main interest.
The proposed paper is an attempt to justify the productivity of using the concept of contingency in developing the distinction between event and fact begun in the twentieth-century French intellectual tradition, as well as in bringing to the fore those properties of contingency that allow us to speak of it more as a category of historical possibility/potentiality than as a category of historical reality.
[1] Palonen K. Contingency in Political Theory // Finnish Yearbook of Political Thought. 1999. Vol. 3. № 1. P. 5.
[2] Edmundson, Ari Shuldman. A Selective Affinity: Niklas Luhmann’s Systems Theory and the Sense of Contingency, 1958-1973, 2019. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2gp5h602
Bionote
Andrey Oleynikov is a visiting researcher at Bielefeld University. Until June 2022, he worked at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences. He specializes in the field of philosophy and theory of history. In his translations into Russian and under his editorship, works by Quentin Skinner, John Pocock, Hayden White, Frank Ankersmit and other well-known Western historical theorists were published. Since 2023, with the support of DFG (the German Research Foundation), he has been working on the project ‘Contingency as a Key Element of Contemporary Historicity’.
Practical information
When? May 22 – 2 PM
Where? Malpertuis: UFO, third floor, Sint-Pietersnieuwstraat 35, 9000 Ghent.
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