Universalism and Particularism in European Contemporary History
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Dr. Samuel Sadian

Dr. Samuel Sadian

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Work group

Economy

Samuel Sadian studied politics and international relations at Rhodes University and sociology at the University of Barcelona, where he was a member of the Trajectories of Modernity research project. He has recently been a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape and an honorary research associate at the Institute for Social and Economic Research at Rhodes University. His sociological interests lie principally in economic and historical sociology, as well as inter-disciplinary critical social theory. In his research he focuses on trade, consumption, welfare and social and political movements in light of broader debates about post-war capitalism and democracy in different world regions, with a focus on African and European experiences.

Research Project

Good to Think With: Half a Century of Reinventing Liberalism in the European Union

Samuel Sadian’s research seeks to gauge the extent to which we might meaningfully read the historical consolidation of what would eventually become the European Union as part of a wider global shift towards ‘neoliberalisation’ in many societies over the last half century. This research builds on some recent approaches to neoliberalisation that are wary of epochal over-generalisation and insist on the need for more grounded analyses of particular liberal groups, receptivity to the broader global and regional contexts in which their ideas took shape, and caution when reading large-scale institutional changes as responses to these ideas.

Against this background, his research looks at the role that prominent liberal epistemic communities have played from the 1970s onwards in conceptualising and influencing the direction of institutional change in the European Union in response to multiple upheavals that converged through temporally adjacent trade and financial ‘shocks’ while playing out against the background of longer-running global and regional processes of decolonisation and resource nationalisation, revolution, Cold War geopolitics and geoeconomics, and financial restructuring as well as perennial disagreements and compromises within the European Union about its possible futures.