Author Meets Critics: Matthew Longo’s "The Picnic"

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

This “Author Meets Critics” roundtable proposes to examine Matthew Longo’s book, The Picnic: A Dream of Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain (W.W. Norton 2024), which details the flight of East German refugees to freedom across the Hungary/Austria border in August 1989. The book tackles themes central to political theory – the relationship between solidarity and freedom, for example; and the interwoven moral decision-making of refugees and border guards. However, the roundtable will focus principally on the book’s unorthodox structure and approach. Far from a traditional work of scholarship, The Picnic foregrounds narrative storytelling rather than argument-as-such. This roundtable will use the book as a launching-off point to engage a broader discussion about the form of arguments in the subfield: what kinds of writing should we embrace, to what benefit and at what cost?

More specifically, the roundtable may engage several interlocking questions. The first pertains to method – pursuant to political theory’s so-called “methodological turn” (Erman & Möller 2015) – regarding how and to what end political theorists deploy stories in the service of their claims (see e.g. Hirschmann 1996; Honig 2001; Zacka 2017). A second question, which is conceptual in nature, pertains to the definition of storytelling, and whether we should distinguish stories from other devices common to political theory, such as intuition pumps or stylized examples. Finally, and more radically, a third question will ask whether we might consider storytelling as not just contributing to political theory, but also plausibly as a form of political theory. This latter interest follows the recent revival of “public philosophy” (see e.g. Floyd 2023), as well as examples of political theorists adopting alternate writing forms, as in Lea Ypi’s Free (2021). This is the more radical position suggested by Longo’s book.

The Author Meets Critics panel will begin with a short presentation by Matthew Longo, which will introduce the main themes of The Picnic and lay out a case for storytelling in political theory. Thereafter, the panel – Bernardo Zacka (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Chandran Kukathas (Singapore Management University), Carmen Dege (Radboud University), Terrell Carver (University of Bristol), Steven Klein (King’s College London) and David Owen (University of Southampton) – will discuss the substantive contribution of the book, as well as engage this wider conversation about narrative storytelling and its place in the discipline.

Sub Unit

• Division 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Chair

• Chandran Kukathas Singapore Management University

Presenters

• Matthew Longo Leiden University

• Bernardo Zacka Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Steven Klein King's College London

• Terrell Carver University of Bristol

• Carmen Lea Dege New York University

• David Owen University of Southampton