New Work In Intellectual History

In this episode, Max Skjönsberg speaks with Greg Conti about his newly published scholarly edition of Albert Venn Dicey's writings on democracy and the referendum. The writings collected in the edition cover Dicey’s attempt to construct a credible theory of democracy on a new intellectual and institutional foundation. Listen to an interview with Greg Conti here. Gregory Conti is Assistant Professor of Politics at Princeton University.

In Women Philosophers in Nineteenth Century Britain (OUP, 2023), Alison Stone explores the contributions of twelve women to philosophy in the nineteenth century. Focusing on five areas - naturalism, philosophy of mind, evolution, morality and religion, and progress in history - she shows how these women philosophers were responding to each other as part of bigger intellectual networks in order to develop their own original contributions. Women Philosophers encourages the reader to reassess the position women held in nineteenth century intellectual life and what it means to do philosophy. Alison Stone is professor of philosophy at Lancaster University.

In Adam Smith’s America (Princeton, 2022), Glory Liu explores how an 18th century Scottish philosopher became an icon of American capitalism. She shows how Smith became known as the father of political economy in the nineteenth century, and how the Chicago School of Economics, in the aftermath of the Great Depression, transformed Smith into the preeminent theorist of free markets and self-interest. Liu also explores how a new generation of political theorists and public intellectuals has sought to recover Smith’s original intentions and restore his reputation as a moral philosopher. Glory M. Liu is a college fellow in social studies at Harvard University.

A commonly held position in post-WWII American intellectual life was that John Locke's Second Treatise of Government underpinned not only the Declaration of Independence, but also the American Political Tradition more generally. This might be wrong. Claire Rydell Arcenas's often surprising new history of American engagement with Locke from the early eighteenth century to the late twentieth suggests that successive generations of American readers found different aspects of Locke thought to be significant. Claire Rydell Arcenas is associate professor of history at the University of Montana.

The Nobel-prize winning economist Milton Friedman famously argued in Capitalism and Freedom (1962) that free markets were a necessary condition for political freedom, as well as being the only true motor of economic growth. In his provocative and ambitious new book Free Market – The History of an Idea (Basic Books, 2022), Professor Jacob Soll suggests that studying the history of economic thought back to Cicero suggests praise for free markets was usually bound up with Ciceronian moral philosophy and a greater degree of state intervention than mid-twentieth century free marketeers countenanced. Jacob Soll is Professor of History and Accounting at the University of Southern California

In this episode, Dr Lavinia Maddaluno discusses the role of scientific practices in the production of political economic ideas in Enlightenment Milan. Discussing her upcoming monograph Science and political economy in enlightened Milan (1760s-1815), Lavinia explores the role played by lesser known naturalists in answering political economic questions of how to preserve and increase state wealth. Dr Lavinia Maddaluno is an early modern historian and historian of science. Her research so far has focussed on the role of scientific knowledge production in the realization of ideas of wealth, state and society in Enlightenment Europe. She currently works as non-tenured Assistant Professor on an ERC project at Ca’ Foscari University in Vernice, Italy.

In this episode, Robin Mills talks to Dr Ross Carroll about his recently published book Uncivil Mirth – Ridicule in Enlightenment Britain (Princeton, 2021). Ross Carroll examines how leading Enlightenment thinkers thought about the purpose, possibilities and limits of public discourse in their search for an acceptable form of ridicule, one that supported religious toleration, the abolition of the slave trade, and the dismantling of patriarchal power. Focussing on Hobbes, Shaftesbury, Hume and Wollstonecraft among others, Ross Carroll’s book casts Enlightenment Britain in a new light, which speaks to our present-day debates about the lack of civility in public discourse.

One perspective on the classical utilitarians (Bentham, James and John Stuart Mill) is that they built their political philosophies on abstract reasoning and without regard for history. The charge has some weight, but it's also a charge they responded to, as Callum Barrell explains. Bentham et al – Barrell adds George Grote to the mix – were more interested in history than we give them credit for and this needs to be factored in when analysing their thought. Dr Callum Barrell is Associate Professor of Political Theory at Northeastern University London

In this episode, Dr Jaume Aurell talks about the value of twentieth-century historians’ autobiographies as intellectual artefacts of historiographical and academic intervention. He traces a trend in autobiographies throughout the twentieth century to move from a documentary to an interventional perspective and uncovers what he means by the term “interventional historians”. Dr Jaume Aurell is Professor at the Department of History at the University of Navarra in Spain. His research focusses on medieval and modern historiography. In 2019, he published his book Theoretical Perspectives on Historians’ Autobiographies: From Documentation to Intervention with Routledge.

Who can refute a sneer? asked William Paley of Edward Gibbon’s bitingly satirical account of the emergence of Christianity in the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1789). The plausibility of Paley’s characterisation indicates that maybe, Dr Hugh Liebert suggests, Gibbon’s acumen as a historian of religion has been ignored. An ironic philosophical historian he certainly was but Gibbon was also an astute psychologist of religion able to empathetically understand, even admire, early Christianity’s appeal and power. Gibbon’s insights into religion derived, moreover, from his own complicated personal engagement with religion as much as his erudition as a historian. Dr. Hugh Liebert is an Associate Professor of American Politics in the Department of Social Sciences at the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York.