THE POLITICS OF REASON

“The Politics of Reason” (POLSON) was a four year project (September 2021-September 2025) hosted by the Department of Logic and Theoretical Philosophy at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and financed by the Ministry of Science and Innovation, Government of Spain (PID2020-117386GA-I00). It was composed of 16 scholars based at the following institutions: Pontificia Universidad Católica (Chile), King’s College London and Royal Holloway–University of London (England), University of Paris VII–Diderot (France), Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies, Potsdam and Humboldt University (Germany), University of Lisbon (Portugal), University of Dundee (Scotland), Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain), San Francisco State University and University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee (USA).

Project Aims

POLSON inserted itself into contemporary debates in political epistemology to re-engage with the relationship between politics and reason, as a precursor to developing an account of political rationality from the perspective of postfoundational theory. In so doing, POLSON undermines the binary opposition structuring the foundationalist/anti-foundationalist debate, by, on the one hand, incorporating the critiques of the foundational status of formal abstract logic and universal truths found in many contemporary critiques of political reason, without, on the other hand, succumbing to the conclusion (often made by proponents of affectivity or postcolonial theory) that universality need be abandoned politically. By maintaining that foundations are contingent constructions, POLSON engages with the question as to how such construction takes place to offer an original conception of political rationality (1) premised on the construction of contingent foundations; through (2) social performative action rather than individual reflection, with (3) the foundational aspect composed of temporary hegemonic cultural norms (rather than say institutional forms, laws, or sovereignty).

Project Results

The project hosted 6 international conferences that attracted a total of 107 participants from Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, Egypt, England, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Holland, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Norway, Peru, Portugal, Russia, Serbia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and the USA. Research outputs included 8 monographs, published by prestigious international presses including Cornell University Press, Duke University Press, Rutgers University Press, State University of New York Press, (USA), Edinburgh University Press y Bloomsbury (UK); 12 edited collections published by, amongst others, Cambridge University Press, Edinburgh University Press (UK), University of Minneapolis Press, Routledge (USA); 52 peer-reviewed articles, with 65% appearing in journals indexed in Scimago Journal Ranking Q1-Q2 and the rest published in prestigious international journals with high impact factors and h-indices; 56 book chapters in collections published by Cambridge University Press, Edinburgh University Press (UK), University of Minneapolis Press, and Routledge (USA); and 144 presentations at international conferences. 2 members of the project were awarded multi-year Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowships to be held at Jagiellonian University (Poland) and Ca' Foscari University of Venice (Italy).