Modern cosmopolitanism traces its routes back to the Enlightenment. In its individual and collectivist strains, it has become programatically pacifist by virtue of many of its central defining features. Under such a regime of cosmopolitanism, one might imagine the Kantian goal of perpetual peace. Kant’s conception of cosmopolitanism was progressive and developmental, but also fundamentally conflicted. Its motor was that famous unsocial sociability, which compelled humans to seek peace even as they experienced destructive forms of competition. The connection between cosmopolitanism on one hand and peace on the other, therefore, is neither essential or natural; it is contingent and accidental despite the strong connection between modern contemporary cosmopolitanism and peace. Only recently have scholars acknowledged that cosmopolitanism might indeed have something to say about war, or that war might shed light on its limits and possibilities. Is contemporary cosmopolitanism theoretically robust enough to face the challenges of unconventional warfare in the 21st century? And if cosmopolitanism defines transnational borders as morally arbitrary, what can it tell us about conflicts that occur within such borders, that is to say about civil war? In this lecture, David Armitage pursues these and other important questions.

Lectures in Intellectual History

The Dark Side of Enlightened Cosmopolitanism: Civilisation and Civil War

Why did so many European luminaries who had lived through the turmoil of the French Revolution turn to Scotland as a state that might represent a model for the future of the world? In this Inaugural Lecture, Professor Richard Whatmore explains why so many figures at the end of the eighteenth century felt that the Enlightenment had failed, and that a new beginning was necessary in politics, economics, religion and culture. Europe had been torn apart by war and revolution; Scotland appeared to offer grounds for optimism, being characterised by economic development, religious peace and a distinctive sense of identity.

Scotland, Europe and the End of Enlightenment

Are people’s characters and the values that shape them thought to be stable in terms of what we may judge to be virtuous or vicious performances across time and place? If this was the case, should we today not be able to emulate those of the past in their best practices? In this lecture, Janet Coleman charts a journey, beginning with Aristotle and ending with Hobbes, that deals with what has been called an anthropological prelinguistic set of conditions of experiences that were held by representative premoderns to be the ways in which the self itself comes to acknowledge of suitable human action and seeks to conform to it.

Reflections on the Self Itself: in antiquity, the Middle Ages, and what happened next?

The hallmark of Athenian democracy was equality. From at least the beginning of the 5th century, Athens was a place where there was equality in political rights. By the mid-5th century, the Athenian assembly had sovereignty in matters of decision making. The practical politics of Athens, however, required political leaders: able, often wealthy men, well-practised in rhetoric, who arose out of the elite political think tanks and who guided the decision making in the assembly. At an ideological level, democracy found this tension difficult to resolve. In tracing the early development of Athenian democratic thinking in this paper, Lynette Mitchell argues that there also emerged a way of projecting good and ideal kings onto the ancient history of democratic Athens, and that this positive theorisation of kingship was important to several thinkers for the space it gave to political leadership.

Monarchs in democracy

The years between 1864 and 1867 were among the most fulfilling of Marx’s life. Not only were these the years in which he wrote up Capital, it was also the period in which he became an active and influential participant in the International Workingmen’s Association, founded in London in 1864. Almost by chance, it fell to Marx to compose the inaugural address of the Association and formulate its rules. In this lecture, Gareth Stedman Jones argues that in writing the address, Marx made his greatest and most permanent contribution to the International: he had formulated the new social democratic language of the 1860s, both in the definition of the political and social end of the association, and in a global diagnosis of the worker’s condition.

Karl Marx and the Emergence of Social Democracy

The issue of slavery is a constant in Maria Edgeworth’s thinking about questions of government, from the beginning of her writing career until the 1820s and 30s. In this paper, Susan Manly discusses the multiple elements to this seam of thinking, and in particular examines the importance of the reformist thinker Jeremy Bentham and his French interlocutor Étienne Dumont.

Maria Edgeworth as political thinker: government, rebellion and punishment

The importance of general celestial influences on the Earth in Aristotle’s cosmological model enabled the art of astrology to find a large degree of acceptance in intellectual circles by the mid-twelfth century, even if throughout the late Middle Ages it continued to be haunted by the debate about determinism. Astrology - or the study of the movements and relative positions of celestial bodies in order to make predictions about human personalities, dispositions, and public and personal events - included the belief that the planets could incline men to good and evil, and negatively influence the course of events. In this paper, Sophie Page examines how the question of whether or how demons could provoke, manipulate or make use of these celestial influences was of particular concern to three different types of medieval author: theologians explaining the structure and operations of the cosmos, authors of literary or popular scientific texts discussing the origins of evil in the world, and writers of texts on astrology and magic, whose main goal was to identify networks of power in the cosmos which could be manipulated by humans.

Cosmology and Ritual Magic in the Late Middle Ages

There is no evidence for any Roman jurist writing a treatise entitled On Natural Law, or similar. Ius naturale had a very limited place in Roman jurisprudence, and when Roman jurists want to reason about law, they pretty much always began from the standpoint of the Roman ius civile and worked outwards. There is a fundamental difference between this concentric way of reasoning about natural law, and the way in which the medieval natural lawyers influenced by Thomas Aquinas, as well as later 17th and 18th century thinkers, reason about it. In this lecture, Caroline Humfress examines this tension.

Natural law and casuistic reasoning in Roman jurisprudence

William Wordworth’s Sonnets Dedicated To Liberty are dominated by his personal and political connections with France, and his changing attitudes to Britain’s participation in the counter-Revolutionary war effort. Wordsworth’s experiments with the sonnet form in this period were clearly sustained, intensive and closely engaged with affairs of state. However, a number of the sonnets are also keenly responsive to 17th-century British history in ways that raise distinct challenges to our sense of Wordworth’s shifting political attitudes. Are the sonnets continuous with Wordsworth’s early radicalism? Or are the poems better understood as a redirection of political and imaginative energies under the pressure of the Napoleonic threat towards the conservative defence of the nation and tradition? In this lecture, Phil Connell considers these and other questions.

Wordsworth’s “Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty” (1802-3) and the British Revolutionary Past

In the literature of the Just War tradition there is an overdrawn association between the Just War tradition and Christian political theology. This produces a misconception that Just War is an exclusively Christian idea, and also that is an exclusively Western idea as well. In this lecture, Rory Cox argues that ideas analogous to Just War developed in Ancient Egypt, more than 2,000 years prior to the advent of Christianity and beyond the traditional boundaries of the West.

Just War Doctrine in Ancient Egypt

How can you combine the so-called Cambridge School of intellectual history, which tends to shrink the focus to a particular period and particular context, with a longue durée approach which follows through themes over many centuries? In this lecture, David D’Avray attempts to resolve this argument with the help of 20th century German philosophers Niklas Luhmann and Hans-Georg Gadamer.

How to do intellectual history

Whilst George Berkeley’s visit to Livorno in 1714 may seem relatively unremarkable at first look, the content of the sermons he preached there appear significant to the attitudes and behaviours of his later life. Chief among these is Berkeley’s project to establish a university or college on Bermuda, and his interest in economic reform, particularly in Ireland in the 1730s. In this paper, Tom Jones identifies the early association of missionary Anglicanism and commerce as pivotal to our understanding of the history of Berkeley’s later thought.

George Berkeley in Livorno: Missionary Anglicanism and Commerce

After the Second World War, political philosophy was dead. This changed in 1971 when John Rawls published his Theory of Justice, reviving philosophy and injecting it with normative foundations. Whilst this view has subsequently been subjected to several corrective arguments, they all implicitly confirm the idea that Rawls transformed political philosophy. And they also infer that Anglo-American political philosophy has been relatively static ever since. Meanwhile a second view, held by those interested in the broader history of the 20th century, holds that post-war welfarist ideology was in crisis in the 1970s, with welfarists and collectivists overthrown by various forms of liberalism. How does the view of the 1970s as a great period of re-invention in philosophy correspond to that vision of the decade as a moment of political crisis? In this lecture, Katrina Forrester explores this deep tension.

The Origins of Contemporary Liberal Theory Revisited

The political thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau is typically identified with two aspects of that of Thomas Hobbes. The first is the subject of sociability, and the similarities in their treatments of the natural state. The second is the civil state, and their joint hostility to any kind of independent religious organisation and, more broadly, any kind of factional grouping. In 1765, Rousseau’s entry on Political Economy in Diderot’s Encyclopédie was published in Geneva as a pamphlet entitled ‘The Citizen’. This title echoed Hobbes’ De Cive, and in this lecture, Michael Sonenscher discusses whether the similarity in titles indicates a broader similarity in thought.

Hobbes, Rousseau and Democratic Politics

Marxist theory has had a massive influence on medieval economic and social history. Lots of historians, even those who are not Marxist in their politics, have in a sense been historical materialist in their analyses. Marx and Engels themselves, meanwhile, were very interested in the middle ages, in part because of its importance in understanding the transition from feudalism to capitalism. In this paper, Steve Rigby examines seven key Marxist claims that were illustrated by reference to medieval history.

Marxism and the Middle Ages

Recordings from the popular public lecture series on intellectual history in all its forms and across all ages. From 2014 held at the University of St Andrews, and between 2010 and 2013 held at the University of Sussex.