When Ideas Matter by Michael. D. Higgins

Author:Michael. D. Higgins [Higgins, Michael. D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784978266
Publisher: Head of Zeus Ltd.

Defining Europe in the Year of the European Citizen

PARIS-SORBONNE UNIVERSITY

18TH FEBRUARY, 2013

ITIS DEEPLY moving to be speaking in Paris and in an institution that has contributed so much to our attempts, over the ages, at putting the stamp of humanity on our shared existence. It was in Paris and its university lecture halls that so many of the concepts that put the stamp of reason on the ways we live together in society were first introduced.

Sometimes these ideas were welcomed and eagerly sought out. More often they were feared, they were derided, or became the target of sanctions and censorship from those who held power, and by the beneficiaries of authoritarian systems that were under threat from the emerging democratic movements in Paris. These movements were often fashioned by intellectual migrants.

Paris has always been specially hospitable to the migrant mind, and in our present circumstances in Europe, we have much to gain from such minds. While James Joyce and Samuel Beckett may be the best known examples of the Irish migrant intellectual in the modern period, Ireland has an even older connection with Europe and France.

James Joyce’s call in his Trieste lecture to ‘Hibernicise Europe and Europeanise Ireland’ was, we must remember, anticipated many centuries earlier by such figures as Columbanus and Gallus, who brought precious scriptures and treatises from Bangor, through France in the early seventh century; John Scotus Eriugena, who brought Greek back into Europe after the dark ages and travelled all the way to the French King in the ninth century to translate Pseudo-Dionysius from Greek into Latin; Peter of Ireland, who taught Aquinas philosophy; and later George Berkeley, the ‘Irish Cartesian’, who engaged with French thinkers like Malebranche in the eighteenth century – and since I am advocating a rethinking of economics, may I mention the Franco-Hibernian thinker Richard Cantillon, born in Kerry in 1680, whose Essai sur la nature du commerce en general, written in 1730, was described by William Stanley Jevons as ‘the cradle of political economy’, and influenced Adam Smith and Karl Marx.

We Irish have a long history of travelling with intellectual curiosity and subversive creativity, and Paris (and the Sorbonne in particular), has been both a staging post and a destination for us.

Described by James Joyce as ‘the last of the human cities’, Paris was, at the beginning of the twentieth century, one of the most appropriate locations for seeing one’s own people through the lens of exile, and mould-breaking writers were not alone in utilizing the experience of exile, or the freedom and the stimulating company of fellow exiles in Paris. The city’s diverse community of dissidents was far from limited to literature.

Paris was frequently both a source and inspiration of the radical ideas and deeds that led the Irish on their slow road to independence.

The city served as a laboratory for political ideas for groups like the Fenians, who drew on the radical ideas that were emerging from within the walls of universities and the radical suburbs.

The talk among the

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