Epistemic Frameworks and Interpretative Models of Politics Beyond Liberal Democracy
Organized by the Institute for Advanced Study at the Central European University (IAS CEU), the Parisian Institut d’études avancées (Paris IEA), CNRS and CEFRES
Date : June 2, 2026, 15:00-17:30
Location : CEU, Nádor u. 15, Budapest, Room 101
Language : English
Speakers
Valentin BEHR (CNRS) and Joseph TANKE (University of Hawaii)
See the official poster for the event here.
Abstract
This workshop brings together two complementary perspectives on the contemporary transformations of illiberal politics, right-wing thought, and neoliberal governance. Moving across intellectual history, political theory, and the sociology of ideas, the speakers examine how illiberalism has emerged not only as a political phenomenon but also as a transnational intellectual project reshaping democratic institutions, citizenship, and public discourse. Together, the presentations offer an interdisciplinary discussion of the ideological, institutional, and intellectual dynamics shaping contemporary illiberalism and the evolving global right. The event is meant to generate a broader debate on the ways we can study and compare these phenomena in a transnational framework.
Both speakers are recipients of the Oszkár Sárkány Fellowship, established by the Institute for Advanced Study at the Central European University (IAS CEU) and the Parisian Institut d’études avancées (Paris IEA) in partnership with the French National Research Centre Humanities and Social Sciences (CNRS SHS) and the French Research Centre in Humanities and Social Sciences (CEFRES) to commemorate the Hungarian Bohemist Oszkár Sárkány (1912–1943), whose work advanced an inclusive and transnational approach to cultural history informed by developments in French humanities and social sciences. Sárkány died tragically during World War II in a punishment battalion, where he was sent because of his opposition to the Horthy regime.
Historicizing Illiberalism: Insights from the Sociology of Transnational Conservatism
Although a growing body of academic literature is devoted to the rise of far-right and illiberal political actors, the ideological dimension of this phenomenon is relatively unexplored. The role of intellectual networks and intellectual struggles is a promising research avenue, given the transnational circulation of actors, ideas, and discourses. At the intersection of intellectual history and the sociology of intellectuals, his research examines the so-called Global Right as an intellectual field. The presentation will focus on a genealogy of ideas by situating contemporary right-wing and illiberal ideas within a broader history of conservatism. Finally, it will discuss the current reconfiguration of the Global Right and the role of intellectuals in this process.
Valentin Behr is a CNRS research fellow at CESSP, a research center at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University and Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales. He is a political scientist whose research topics include the politics of history and memory, the sociology of political elites and intellectuals, and intellectual history. Currently, his work focuses on the production and circulation of conservative, especially illiberal, ideas in Europe and between Europe and the United States.
Neoliberalism and its Illiberal Afterlives
What might be gained from bringing the critique of neoliberalism into dialogue with Central-Eastern European conceptions of illiberalism? Are we witnessing now, particularly in the US, not the end of neoliberalism but its mutation into a new regime of governance, one which not only hollows out democratic institutions but fundamentally changes the nature of citizenship and belonging? The presentation will test the idea that illiberalism might be understood as a form of governmentality, that is, a set of state-constituting discourses and practices which consolidate executive power while preserving the semblance of democratic legitimacy. If neoliberalism governs individuals in and through the exercise of their freedom, as Foucault suggested, might illiberalism name that moment in which that freedom is reorganized around exclusionary forms of belonging, ethno-religious mythology, and the growing dominance of corporate and technological power?
Joseph Tanke is professor of philosophy at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. He is a specialist in Continental philosophy, with a special interest in aesthetics, social and political philosophy, and historical ontology. Tanke is the author of Foucault’s Philosophy of Art: A Genealogy of Modernity, Jacques Rancière: Philosophy, Politics, Aesthetics, and the editor (with Colin McQuillan) of The Bloomsbury Anthology of Aesthetics. He is currently completing a book on anxiety considered from the standpoint of social philosophy, entitled Nervous System: Neoliberalism and Anxiety.