In and Out of the Canon in Intellectual History

Conference of the Helsinki Centre for Intellectual History 
15-17 December 2025
University of Helsinki

Intellectual history is not a unified tradition of thought, but a series of interventions on what topics should be studied, which perspective should be deployed and to what end should intellectual history be written. Some interventions harmonize, while others are vehemently opposed to one another. This conference is aimed at discussing the history and current state of the kind of boundary making that is involved in the self-reflexive process of doing intellectual history.

The story of intellectual history is unavoidably a chain of exclusions and inclusions, sometimes based on articulated political beliefs, sometimes unintentional blind spots and sometimes the result of a deliberation among intellectual historians. Past debates include remarks on which topics, thinkers and sources are included or excluded from intellectual history. Gender, ethnicity, language and geographically situated intellectual milieus among other things have all affected whether or not particular intellectuals have been made part of the canon of intellectual history. However, the process of canon making and the inevitable changes in who or what are included in the canon are different in different parts of the world. Ultimately there is no one canon, but rather there have been multiple different canons that do overlap, but also change over time. Canon-making has affected other canons, but so has the critique of canons and the questioning of intellectual traditions.

The canon can then be that of intellectual history, but it can also be about any tradition, question or methodological choice relevant for intellectual history. Wherever intellectual historians make boundaries and define a tradition there is a question of in and out of the canon.

Day 1, 15.12 keynote: Alicia Montoya

Title: “Inventing the Eighteenth-Century Common Reader: Libraries, Canon-Making, and the Book Trade”

Abstract

In his seminal study, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, the late William St
Clair suggested that a corpus of texts commonly recognized as possessing canonical value started to crystallize in the English-speaking world in the 1770s and 1780s. The construction of this new canon, according to him, was directly linked to commercial considerations, in casu, a change in British copyright law that allowed publishers to cheaply reprint a mass of works by an earlier generation of authors. Coincidentally or not, these canon-making years also witnessed Samuel Johnson's coining of the notion of the 'common reader' in his Lives of the Poets, which had originated as a text commissioned to preface Bell’s English Poets, one of the many series of books produced in order to capitalize on the sudden copyright-free availability of these older texts. Eighteenth-century publishers, it could therefore be hypothesized, created new canons in order to sell their books to new readers, with the imagined ‘common reader’ functioning as an effective advertising ploy, inextricably linking commercial motives to literary and intellectual valuations.

These processes, however, were not limited to the British Isles, as the conceptualization of belles-lettres and 'literature' as a new cultural category, and the concommitant canonization of selected 'national' authors, was a process that took place across eighteenth-century Europe. Furthermore, beyond the authors and works that came to be recognized as belonging to national canons, some authors were also integrated into broader, European-wide canons. In this paper, I therefore take up St Clair's hypothesis but give it a new, transnationally comparative angle by extending it to other geographic contexts, including the eighteenth-century Dutch Republic and France, and using digital bibliometric tools to ask whether a shared reading culture, or a corpus of authors and works recognized by large swaths of the European reading public as constituting a transnational, ‘common’ canon, did indeed take shape in the second half of the eighteenth century. I test this hypothesis both by examining some examples of bibliographic advice literature that had a European-wide reach, and by comparing the reading recommendations in these manuals to the contents of 600 actual eighteenth-century private libraries, using eighteenth-century booksellers’ taxonomies and subject categorization systems to reveal both common patterns and notable discrepancies. In doing so, in short, I will interrogate the vexed relationship between commerce, canonization processes, and two specific categories of books that might be termed 'bestsellers': 'fast sellers' and 'steady sellers'.

Bio

Alicia Montoya is Professor of French Literature and Culture, specializing in eighteenth-century studies. Her research concerns French and European literary history, with special attention for the role of book history, the production of knowledge and cultural transmission in early modern times.

She is the author of Medievalist Enlightenment: From Charles Perrault to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Cambridge 2013), Marie-Anne Barbier et la tragédie post-classique (Paris 2007) and the co-editor of several volumes, including Lumières et histoire / Enlightenment and History (Paris 2010). She is currently Principal Investigator on the NWO-funded Civic Fictions project, and was formerly PI on the ERC-funded MEDIATE project (2016 - 2022). She is the recipient of the 2017 Ammodo-KNAW Award Humanities, and a member of the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities (Koninklijke Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen).

Day 2, 16.12 keynote: Banu Turnaoğlu Açan

Title: “Rethinking the Canon: Global Intellectual History and the Boundaries of Political Thought”

Abstract

This paper examines the question of “in and out of the canon” through the perspective of global intellectual history. Canon formation in the history of political thought has long centred European thinkers, producing analytical depth but also a narrow sense of where significant political thinking is assumed to occur. As a result, intellectual traditions across Eurasia, Africa, and Latin America have often been placed outside the canon not because they lacked conceptual richness, but because established academic norms have privileged particular languages, archives, and geographies over others.

The paper argues that the problem of inclusion and exclusion cannot be addressed simply by adding more names at the margins. Instead, we must recognise that many of the political concepts and ideas we study were themselves formed through global processes. An inclusive canon is therefore an epistemic necessity, achievable only by genuinely globalising our understanding of political thought and by adopting three methodological pillars: tracing connections, attending to translation, and practising sustained comparison. By restoring the worldliness of ideas, the paper challenges the canon from within and demonstrates that political thinking has always been produced across, rather than only within, its conventional boundaries.

Bio

Banu Turnaoğlu Açan is a historian of modern and international political thought whose work bridges Ottoman, Middle Eastern, and European intellectual traditions. She is College Lecturer and Director of Studies in Politics at Magdalene College, and Bye-Fellow and Director of Studies in Politics (HSPS) at Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge. She is also Assistant Professor in the History of Political Thought at Sabancı University in Istanbul. She was a Tübitak fellow under the Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Co-fund Program at Sabancı University. Before joining Sabancı University, she was an affiliated lecturer and held a postdoctoral position as an Early Career Leverhulme Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge, where she also received her PhD. She holds an MSc in Political Theory from the University of Oxford and a BA in International Relations and History (double major) from Koç University.

Her research explores the global circulation of ideas on empire, constitutionalism, and republicanism, with particular attention to the late Ottoman Empire, the early Turkish Republic, and comparative constitutional thought. She investigates how concepts such as liberty, sovereignty, justice, and order travelled between empires and nation-states, and how moments of crisis and disruption shaped competing visions of political order. By placing Ottoman and Middle Eastern experiences in dialogue with European debates, her work challenges Eurocentric narratives and repositions extra-European traditions at the centre of modern political thought.

Her first monograph, The Formation of Turkish Republicanism (Princeton University Press, 2017), redefined the intellectual landscape of Ottoman and Turkish political thought by tracing the long development of republican ideas and their global connections. Her current projects include The Eastern Question: A New History (Princeton, under contract), which reframes the Eastern Question as a crucible of global political thought; Positivism, Anti-Imperialism and Republicanism: The Political Thought of Ahmed Rıza (Cambridge, under contract); and Histories of Global Constitutionalism (Cambridge, co-edited, under contract). She serves on the editorial boards of Intellectual History Review and Max Weber Studies and regularly convenes international workshops on republicanism and global intellectual history.

Day 3, 17.12 keynote: Richard Serjeantson

Title: “Universities and the State, In and Out of the Canon of Late Renaissance Political Thought”

Abstract

The question of where education stands in relation to the nature and powers of the state is a debate that has drifted in and out of the history of political thought: sometimes it has been central, sometimes peripheral, and sometimes inconsequential. This paper will address the question of the place of university education, in particular, at the historical moment of the late Renaissance. It will argue that the articulation of a vision for, and a defence of, higher education had a significant place in the late humanist political thought of this moment. But it will further argue that these defences, and these visions, played a characteristically supplementary role to theories of the state. At the core of the argument will be a new interpretation of a hitherto unpublished manuscript book In Defence of Universities, written in 1596 by the most ambitious political theorist of late Elizabethan England, John Case (1540–1600).

Bio

Richard Serjeantson teaches history at Trinity College, Cambridge. His research interests lie in British and broader European history between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Particularly in the shared history of philosophy and the sciences, and in their conceptual foundations; in political thought and action; in the production, circulation, and censorship of manuscripts and printed books; and in religion and irreligion. The figures he has studied have included Elizabeth Cary, Edward Herbert (of Cherbury), Thomas Hobbes, Meric Casaubon, John Milton, John Wilkins, Francis Willughby, John Locke, David Hume, and René Descartes. With his collaborator Michael Edwards he has recently published a study, edition, and translation of a newly discovered manuscript of an early draft of Descartes’s early philosophical work, the Regulae ad directionem ingenii (Oxford University Press, 2023) ISBN: 9780199682942.

His edition of John Case’s intensely humanistic unpublished manuscript book from 1596 entitled In Defence of Universities (Apologia Academiarum) will be published by Oxford University Press in the coming year.

University of Helsinki - Main Building (Fabianinkatu 33, 00170 Helsinki)

Third floor rooms: Tekla Hultin F3003, classrooms F3004 and F3010.

PS. The conference will take place on-site only and online participation is not available.

The Helsinki Centre for Intellectual History publishes a yearbook with De Gruyter Oldenbourg called Helsinki Yearbook of Intellectual History. A selection of papers will be considered for publication in the Yearbook. In your proposal, please indicate if you are interested in submitting a reworked version of the paper to the Yearbook. Decisions on publication are separate from the conference and are based on rigorous and fast peer review.

About presentation sessions

As you can see from the schedule, we have multiple presentation sessions that run parallelly throughout the three conference days which are scheduled to take 90 minutes per session. To assure that everyone who wants to move between the rooms and listen to different talks would have the chance to do so, we would like to ask all of the presenters of the presentation sessions to prepare their talk so that it takes up to 20 minutes. Right after the talk, there will be 10 minutes for the Q&A and discussion session about the presented paper, and then we will move on to the next presenter.

Therefore, we have allocated 30 minutes per one paper (20 minutes of talking + 10 minutes of Q&A right after). The sessions will have chairs who will keep an eye on the time, so that all of the presenters would have their promised 30 minutes.

About panels

With the panel sessions, we have decided to let the panelists decide between themselves how exactly they would like to manage their own panel and panel time. The panels take place parallelly to the presentation sessions which have mostly three papers each and last for 90 minutes per session, so the panels are also scheduled to take 90 minutes per panel. Feel free to use the time for the panel in however way you see to be the best for your discussion!