Margaret Canavan / Ronnie Beiner / Jeffrey Newman / Gerd Schåfer / Richard Sennett / Richard Bernstein / Waltraud Meints / Julia Kristeva / Nancy Fraser / Rabbi Albert Friedlånder

10am-5pm | Sunday 10 November 2002
The School of Oriental and African Studies, London

“Deadly danger to any civilisation is no longer likely to come from without. Nature has been mastered and no barbarians threaten to destroy what they do not understand, as the Mongolians threatened Europe for centuries. Even the emergence of totalitarian governments is a phenomenon within, not outside, our civilisation. The danger is that a global university interrelated civilisation may produce barbarians from its own midst by forcing millions of people into conditions which, despite all appearances, are the conditions of savages”. Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism)

Since the experience of totalitarian domination in the last century and, more particularly, since 11 September 2001, questions concerning the nature of political responsibility, and the costs of failure to face up to its demands, have taken on a renewed urgency. This broadly interdisciplinary conference will address these themes through discussion of the ways in which they underline so much of Hannah Arendt’s work: responsibility for politics in our role as citizens and as central to our concern for the world in which we all live: responsibility for what is done in our name.