Development Fund 2021/22: The politics of decadence
Prof. Neville Morley (Classics and Ancient History): The Politics of Decadence
This project brought together researchers from a range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences to explore ‘decadence’ seriously as a political and cultural theory. ‘Decadence’ –labelling a kind of behaviour or even an entire culture as decaying and corrupt, a sign of imminent collapse –clearly has power to arouse emotions or shape people’s understanding. Each workshop involved prepared contributions from experts in different fields, exploring how their areas of study might contribute to the examination of the overall tradition of understanding society in such terms, in different periods and contexts. The first workshop considered ‘classical’ decadence; not just the familiar tropes of the ‘Decline and Fall’ of the Roman Republic and Empire, butthe earlier ideas of Greek political thinkers about the lifecycle of political regimes and the forces that lead to crisis and decay in the polity. The second workshop then examined the ways that such ideas were taken up and developed in post-Renaissance Europe, with the first explicit theories of ‘decadence’ in French authors like Montesquieu and Rousseau and the deployment of Roman history in commentary on contemporary events.
The third workshop brought the discussion up to date through different perspectives on 20th-century and contemporary right-wing movements, comparing the rhetoric of decadence from Nazism and Italian fascism via the French ‘New Right’ of the 1970s to present-day political campaigns and online chatrooms. This included discussion of the appeal of such ideas, and the question of how far understanding their intellectual roots could help combat them.
The final workshop, devoted solely to discussion, returned to these themes, with the sense that ‘decadence’ offered one response to the crises of liberal democracy and capitalism that framed the problem in a particular manner in order to aggregate different fears and grievances into a single movement and exhort it to action against a society perceived to have been captured and betrayed by different enemies.
The workshops were held online, allowing the participation of researchers from the USA and continental Europe as well as different parts of the UK. We agreed that there clearly is a significant topic here that requires further research, and identified a range of key themes, issues and problems to be addressed; key participants are now working together, under the leadership of Prof Morley, to develop funding proposals for further networking events and research activity, which will cover not just the history of the concept and its theoretical parameters but also empirical research into the nature of its appeal and concerted efforts to ensure its impact on current responses to societal threats.
Blog by Prof Neville Morley.
