Afleveringen
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In this episode, Richard Whatmore speaks with Aurelian Craiutu about his
new book Why Not Moderation? Letters to Young Radicals (CUP, 2023).
The book challenges the conventional image of moderation as a “simple
virtue for lukewarm and indecisive minds, searching for a fuzzy center
between the extremes.” Instead, he shows moderation to be a complex virtue
with a rich tradition and unexplored radical aspects. With its epistolary
form, the book presents an imaginary dialogue between two young radicals
and a passionate moderate, thereby outlining the distinctive political
vision undergirding moderation in modern America. -
In this episode, Ojel L. Rodriguez Burgos interviews the historian of
political thought Professor Ferenc Hörcher about his new book Art and
Politics in Roger Scruton’s Conservative Philosophy (2022). -
Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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In this wide-ranging interview, Richard Bourke (King’s College Cambridge)
discusses not only Hegel’s anatomy of the modern world, but how Hegel’s
reputation changed over the twentieth century. In doing so, we discuss the
significance of not only Hegel’s thought to contemporary society, but also
the study of the history of political thought in general. -
In the aftermath of the Second World War, many prominent liberals looked
towards the future with eyes of disillusion and fear. In response they
jettisoned key progressive ideals of the Enlightenment, such as equality
and perfectibility, and formulated a defence of liberty in opposition to
communism and totalitarianism more generally. In his new book, Samuel Moyn
argues that the intellectual architects of Cold War liberalism truncated
the liberal tradition and thereby left a disastrous legacy, leaving
liberals unable to address the problems that face us today. -
In this episode, Robin Mills speaks with Matthijs Lok (Amsterdam) about his
recently published book Europe against Revolution - Conservatism,
Enlightenment, and the Making of the Past (OUP, 2023). In this book,
Matthijs explores what counter-revolutionary thinkers in the decades around
1800 thought about Europe. Many of his conclusions are surprising, with
critics of the French Revolution often being proponents of cultural and
religious diversity, cosmopolitanism and political moderation that they
viewed as unique to Europe. They believed themselves to be the true heirs
of the European Enlightenment, rather than the radical materialist atheists
who had taken over France. -
In this episode, Robin Mills speaks with Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora
Vargas about their new book Welfare for Markets - A Global History of Basic
Income (UCP, 2023). In their book, Jäger and Vargas trace the history of
basic income from its rise in American and British policy debates following
periods of economic and political crisis to its modern popularity among
‘techno-populists’ in Silicon Valley. They describe how the idea gained
traction in the United States and Europe in the 1960s as a market-friendly
alternative to the postwar welfare state and how interest in the policy has
grown in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and again after the COVID-19
crisis. -
In this episode, Robin Mills speaks with Fredrik Albritton Jonsson and Carl
Wennerlind, authors of Scarcity - A History from the Origins of Capitalism
to the Climate Crisis (HUP, 2023). In this book, modern economics is shown
to be founded on a particular view of scarcity, in which human beings are
said to be possessed of indefinite desires. Society must therefore
facilitate endless growth and consumption – regardless of the limitations
of the natural environment. Jonsson and Wennerlind examine the intellectual
origin and context of this vision of scarcity and demonstrate its
historical contingency, even in the age of capitalism. It reflects the
triumph of infinite-growth ideologies at the expense of all other
conceptions of scarcity that sought to live within nature’s constraints. -
In this episode, Lasse Andersen speaks with Dr Stephen Bogle about his
recently published book Contract Before the Enlightenment: The Ideas of
James Dalrymple, Viscount Stair, 1619-1695 (OUP, 2023). The discussion
covers many of the topics of Stephen’s book, including the life of Viscount
Stair, the state of contract law before Stair, the central innovations in
Stair’s Institutions of the Law of Scotland (1681), and the reception of
Stair’s ideas in the 18th century. We also discuss the centrality of
calvinism to Stair’s understanding of law and contract.
Stephen Bogle is Senior Lecturer in Private Law, University of Glasgow. -
In this episode, Lasse Andersen speaks with Dr James Stafford about his
book The Case of Ireland: Commerce, Empire and the European Order,
1776-1848 (CUP, 2022). The topics of discussion cover many aspects of
James’ book, including the impact of the American and French Revolutions on
Irish politics; the Enlightenment critique of Empire in Ireland; Adam
Smith’s proposal for a Union between Britain and Ireland; the prospect of
Ireland becoming a free port for international trade; the Napoleonic Wars
and their effects on Ireland and on the British perception of Ireland, and
the continental critique of Britain’s failure to address the issues of the
Irish economy. -
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. - Laat meer zien
