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Home > Agenda/Calls > CfP: Graduate Conference in the History Thought – Vice, Corruption, and Decay in the History of Political Thought – 11-12 June 2026 (UCL)

CfP: Graduate Conference in the History Thought – Vice, Corruption, and Decay in the History of Political Thought – 11-12 June 2026 (UCL)

The problems of vice, corruption and decay have always been central to the history of political thought. Since the earliest days of civilisation, humans have sought to define what it means when things go wrong, doing their utmost to detect any trace of rot in their rulers, their enemies, or themselves. Designed to prevent further disaster, such enquiries have often been accompanied by broader ruminations on decline elsewhere. These ruminations have frequently focused on drawing conclusions from the comparative analysis of societies and empires past and present. Those conclusions have, in turn, formed the basis for a plethora of political theories, ranging in scope from emancipatory liberty to authoritarian control. Most of the political traditions we can identify have engaged with questions of decay – either to lament or prevent its occurrence in their political and cultural contexts. Undoubtedly, one cannot produce a full history of ideas for any particular period without asking how people thought about explanations and remedies for societies (often including their own) that seemed to be heading the wrong way.

The prominence of the idea of corruption in the Western political tradition can be seen in Plato’s Republic, which was concerned with reversing the decay of states and the people that lived in them. The Roman authors followed suit, with Sallust illustrating the decay of republican virtue, and Tacitus combining it with the corruption of the imperial courts that followed. The corruption of particular princes was also a major theme of ancient and medieval political thought, with examples of anti-vice princely guides and instructions present in a swathe of societies from the kingdom of Sumer to Confucian China. Centuries later, the consequences of individual vice for the corruption of humanity were laid out in the tradition of Saint Augustine, while Mirrors for Princes from the Great Seljuk Empire to Árpád Hungary informed monarchs of the most proper approaches to rule. Renaissance humanists used ideas of corruption and vice to attack the Catholic Church in tracts like Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly, with those debates ultimately finding expression in the Protestant Reformation and the Church’s intellectual response. Decay was about more than decline – in the political realm, The Discourses of Niccolò Machiavelli presented a novel view of constitutional change, adapting the ideas of Polybius to offer a new perspective on how empires come into being, hold onto power and ultimately come to ruin. This two-pronged interest in the degeneration of princes and the wider populace persisted into the eighteenth century, with the fall of Rome a subject of continuous concern for a plethora of historians, philosophers and political thinkers. Anglo-American writers were preoccupied with the potential for their own commonwealths to repeat the cycles of decay and corruption highlighted in the writings of the republican theorists before them.

Vice, corruption and decay acquired even greater relevance in the 1700s. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s virtue-centric morality provided a critique to the rationalism of what he saw as a socially corruptive Enlightenment, splitting contemporary intellectuals and their interlocutors. Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees illustrated the necessity of vice for modern commercial life. This latter insight became a cornerstone of nineteenth-century critiques of capitalism, particularly by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Critiques of society also came from others parts of the political spectrum: Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, for instance, offered a more regressive view of a civilisation in crisis, on the path to the ascendancy of a new Caesar. After the Second World War, anti-colonial movements and writers such as Frantz Fanon built on ideas of vice, corruption and decay to explain the collapse of oppressive regimes that had subjugated millions of people they saw as inferior for centuries prior.

The idea of corruption might, of course, also be applied to political ideas themselves. The changes concepts undergo through articulation, transmission, and translation continue to be fruitful areas of exploration for historians of political thought. Scholars working on conceptual history and linguistic change are increasingly studying how our very understanding of the political world and the terms we use to describe it change along with our experiences and expectations.

This conference will explore how different thinkers have conceived, put forth and articulated their perspectives on vice, corruption and decay, particularly those concepts’ political implications. We invite submissions from graduate students in history and related disciplines (even if you do not necessarily view your research as falling within the traditional bounds of the history of political thought), working on all periods and places. We especially welcome submissions seeking to push the boundaries of the history of political thought, whether by focusing on lesser-known thinkers, adopting a new approach to well-explored works, or building on other strands of history or other academic disciplines.

Proposals for papers and panels may wish to consider the following themes:

  • Concerns over moral, political, constitutional and civilisational decay
  • Strategies to stop vice, corruption and decay
  • The politics of knowledge and its decline
  • The decline and fall of empires and states
  • The decay of the body, natural and politic
  • Notions of religious decay
  • The corruption and decay of political concepts, philosophies, or ideologies over time
  • Ideas of virtue and vice
  • The political ideas behind imagery illustrating vice, corruption and decay

To apply, please email a proposal and an academic CV to [email protected]. Abstracts should be no more than 300 words for papers of 20 minutes in length. Abstracts must be submitted by Sunday, 1 March 2026, and successful applicants will be notified by Wednesday, 8 April 2026.

Please note that as this is a graduate conference, we can only consider proposals from applicants who have not yet been awarded a doctorate, and priority will be given to those who have not previously presented at this conference.