Lectures in Intellectual History
125 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 1 month ago - ★★★★ - 52 ratingsRecordings from the popular public lecture series featuring new work on all aspects of intellectual history. Hosted by the Institute of Intellectual History at the University of St Andrews.
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Episodes
Knud Haakonssen - Political Economy and Utopia, or the Paternalistic Enlightenment in Scotland
October 07, 2014 17:15 - 55 minutes - 13.2 MBThomas Reid, the philosopher and founder of the Scottish School of Common Sense, did not publish much on politics, but his manuscripts reveal that he was deeply concerned with social, political and economic issues throughout his career. In this talk, Knud Haakonssen presents an analysis of Reid's hitherto unpublished Glasgow lecture notes, and shows that Reid was an acute commentator on contemporary politics and that his theoretical ideas framed solutions to some of the practical political an...
Andreas Hess - Exile from Exile: The Political Theory of Judith N. Shklar
September 23, 2014 17:15 - 53 minutes - 12.7 MBHow does the concept of exile permeate the life and work of the formative political thinker Judith N. Shklar? In this talk, based on research for his forthcoming book entitled 'Exile from Exile', Andreas Hess explores how Shklar's ideas emerged, how her political theory developed, and the impact and legacy she left behind.
Aileen Fyfe - Referees, Editors, and Printers in the Making of Scientific Knowledge
May 27, 2014 17:00 - 50 minutes - 12.2 MBWhy is journal publication so important in the history of science, and how are they responsible for the making of scientific knowledge? In this lecture, Aileen Fyfe reveals the story behind the pages of the oldest scientific journal in existence, the Philosophic Transactions of the Royal Society.
Greg Claeys - Mill, Malthus and Class: Family Values and the Harm Principle
May 06, 2014 17:00 - 48 minutes - 11.6 MBSo much has been written about the harm principle central to John Stuart Mill's classic work On Liberty that any attempt to supplement seems superfluous. However, an anomaly in accounts of one aspect of the text requires rectifying. In this lecture, Greg Claeys emphasises the Malthusian context of Mill's treatment of marriage, and argues that in On Liberty Mill regards the family, not the individual, as the foundational unit in society, and the right to bear children as conditional upon the ...
Donald Winch - The Political Economy of Empire
February 04, 2014 17:00 - 58 minutes - 14 MBHistorians of economics have always been attracted to the political economy of empire because it tells us so much about how serious economic thinking has been shaped by colonial themes. In this lecture, Donald Winch explores this importance of colonies, arguing that whilst the political economy of empire was eventually a theory of capitalist imperialism, it still owed a great deal to those who formulated a case for colonisation as a remedy to some of Britain's problems as a mature economy in ...
John Robertson - Sociability between Natural Law and Sacred History, 1650-1800
January 28, 2014 17:00 - 58 minutes - 14 MBIn this inaugural lecture of the Institute of Intellectual History at the University of St Andrews, Professor John Robertson asks how we can explain the concentration of interest, among the moral and political philosophers and historians of the Enlightenment, in the study of the formation and development of societies.
David Armitage - Every Revolution is a Civil War
May 20, 2013 13:00 - 53 minutes - 25.2 MBAccording to Reinhart Koselleck, the eighteenth century witnessed the gradual and permanent separation of concepts of "civil war" and "revolution". Placing these ideas in a longer perspective – a longue durée that goes back to republican Rome and comes forward to our own times – challenges this narrative by showing that civil war was the genus of which revolution was only a species. This argument presented by David Armitage can help us to rethink the late eighteenth-century "Age of Revolution...
Colin Kidd - The Trials of Douglas Young: Hitler, Aristophanes and the SNP
April 17, 2013 13:00 - 1 hour - 29.4 MB2013 sees the centenary of the birth of Douglas Young, one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century Scottish nationalism. Leader of the SNP from 1942 to the end of the Second World War, Young was imprisoned twice for refusing conscription – both military and industrial. He was also an eminent classicist, who translated some of the plays of Aristophanes into Lallans (Lowland Scots). In this lecture, Colin Kidd investigates Young's chequered career, and examine the broader context o...
Mark Salber Phillips - On Historical Distance
March 13, 2013 13:00 - 52 minutes - 24.8 MBIdeas of historical distance have long been fundamental to Western conceptions of historical knowledge. In practice, however, distance seems to have dwindled into little more than a professional shibboleth - a way of defending the historian's labours against the simplifications of popular journalism or the shortcuts of the guided tour. In common usage, historical distance refers to a position of detached observation made possible by the passage of time, but the standard conception narrows the...
Richard Whatmore - Democracy and Empire
March 05, 2013 18:30 - 51 minutes - 24.5 MBOne of the great surprises of modern thought is the survival of democracy. Today the victory of democracy continues to be associated with the American and French Revolutions. But democracy was for the most part castigated by reformers and revolutionaries across Europe during the enlightenment era. Attempts to apply democratic ideas universally were generally ridiculed. In this lecture, Richard Whatmore argues that the challenge faced by advocates of democracy was to make the theory compatible...
Blair Worden - Two 17th Century Century Concepts of Liberty and their Legacy
January 23, 2013 13:00 - 51 minutes - 24.1 MBOver the quarter of a millennium from the later seventeenth century to the Great War, the phrase 'civil and religious liberty' was a pervasive feature of English political language. How and why had the phrase come into being? In 1600 it would have been unintelligible. The alliance of religious with civil liberty became possible only when religious liberty acquired a new meaning and became something like a human right. In this lecture, Blair Worden argues that its emergence has two claims on...
Ian Hunter - The Mythos, Ethos, and Pathos of the Humanities
October 11, 2012 17:00 - 42 minutes - 20 MBJustifications of the humanities often employ a mythos that exceeds their historical dispositions and reach. This applies to justifications that appeal to an 'idea' of the humanities grounded in the cultivation of reason for its own sake. But the same problem affects more recent accounts that seek to shatter this idea by admitting an 'event' capable of dissolving and refounding the humanities in 'being'. In offering a sketch of the emergence of the modern humanities from early modern humanism...
James Moore - Calvinists, Socinians and Arminians: Reformation and natural rights in early modern political thought
October 11, 2012 15:00 - 46 minutes - 21.9 MBIn this lecture, James Moore discusses three denominations of Protestant theology: Calvinism, or the dogmatic theology of the Reformed or Presbyterian churches; the theology of the Arminians or the Remonstrants in the Netherlands, the most important of whom for the purposes of this lecture is Hugo Grotius; and the theology of the Socinians, the most significant of whom was John Locke. It is a story that travels from Geneva to Holland, to England, and back to Geneva for some closing remarks on...
Manuela Albertone - Benjamin Franklin's Radical Agrarian Project
June 18, 2012 18:00 - 58 minutes - 28.6 MBBenjamin Franklin's interest in physiocracy and the radical implications of French economic ideas extended from Turgot and Condorcet to the British radical milieus. In this lecture, Manuela Albertone highlights Franklin's ability to deliver economic reflection and radical thought, and his passionate belief that only a new attention to the nature of land ownership and its role could combat the forces of corruption so prevalent in commercial societies and shape a modern republic.
Keith Tribe - Karl Marx: 'Ricardian Socialist'?
May 09, 2012 18:00 - 1 hour - 29.7 MBWith the general loss of interest in Marx as an analyst of capitalism, argument over the development of his thinking, from his early writings to Capital Vol. I, has given way to a more or less uncritical acceptance of Capital as the centrepiece of his endeavours, and a neglect of its sources. However, in 1913 Lenin rightly noted that there were "three sources and component parts" of "Marxism": German philosophy, English political economy, and French socialism. Curiously, few readers of Marx h...
Donald Winch - Arnold Toynbee's Industrial Revolution
April 30, 2012 12:00 - 49 minutes - 23.3 MBArnold Toynbee's Oxford lectures on the 'Industrial Revolution' were once thought to have been responsible for coining and diffusing an idea that has remained essential to students of British history since the lectures were posthumously published in 1882. Toynbee has also been credited with transmitting an interpretation of the revolution that became known, in the words of E. P. Thompson, as 'classical catastrophic orthodoxy'. In this lecture, Donald Winch re-examines Toynbee's role as histor...
Jeremy Jennings - Travels with Alexis de Tocqueville
April 17, 2012 18:00 - 1 hour - 31.3 MBDemoracy in America' by Alexis de Tocqueville is possibly the most famous book about America, but what did Tocqueville see when he visited America and how did his visit influence his writing? In this lecture, Jeremy Jennings seeks to answer both of these questions and to cast light on how other French authors saw America in the nineteenth century.
Peter Mandler - The sociological imagination in mid-twentieth century Britain and America
March 12, 2012 18:00 - 56 minutes - 28.3 MBHow has the language of social science penetrated its way into the everyday discourse of educated people, particularly in the period after the Second World War? In this lecture, Peter Mandler examines the extent to which people in mid-twentieth century Britain and America used the conceptual tools of psychology, sociology and anthropology to view their personal 'issues' also as social 'problems'.
Nicola Miller - Reading Rousseau in Latin America
February 27, 2012 18:00 - 49 minutes - 25.3 MBIt is well known that many of the leaders of the Wars of Independence invoked Rousseau in support of their challenge to colonial authority, but how exactly were Rousseau's works read and interpreted in early nineteenth-century Latin America? In this lecture, Nicola Miller identifies variations in how Rousseau's ideas were adopted and adapted by different actors, in different parts of the region, in order to explore the problems and possibilities of explaining how and why ideas travel.
Norman Vance - What gave you that idea Paddy?
February 06, 2012 18:00 - 50 minutes - 25.4 MBIs there such a thing as 'the Irish mind', or is that the ultimate Irish joke? If there is a distinctive Irish intellectual history, how did it develop in the face of the disruptions of a complicated and traumatic political and social history? Somehow, new ideas and initiatives keep bubbling up in every generation, but where do they come from? Is there an Irish intellectual aristocracy, or should that be aristocracies? In this lecture, Norman Vance explores these and other Irish questions.
Stefan Collini - The Very Idea of the University
December 05, 2011 18:00 - 49 minutes - 25.2 MBStefan Collini offers a few brief reflections on the history and current state of the institution we call the university, and then goes on to propose a vocabulary and a perspective which enable us to discuss the role of such institutions in more fruitful terms than the clichés about 'contributing to economic growth' which currently dominate public debate on the topic. This lecture was given in memory of John Wyon Burrow (1935-2009), who was the first holder of a chair in Intellectual History ...
Isabel Rivers - The Pilgrim's Progress in the Evangelical Revival
November 21, 2011 18:00 - 1 hour - 36.3 MBFirst published in two parts in 1678 and 1683, 'Pilgrim's Progress' was to become the most popular religious work in English after the King James Bible. In this lecture, Isabel Rivers explores its fortunes in the evangelical revival of the eighteenth century: how it was made into a polemical text in the battles between Arminians and Calvinists; how it was used for pastoral purposes, both in print and in society meetings; and how it became a means of writing the history of dissent and evangeli...
John Robertson - Sacred History and Political Thought 1650-1750
October 18, 2011 18:00 - 1 hour - 32 MBHow was the Hobbesian proposition - that man was not naturally sociable - answered by recourse to sacred history, the account of the ancient Hebrews and contemporary peoples found in the Old Testament? Focussing particularly on the Neapolitan historians Giambattista Vico and Pietro Giannone, in this lecture John Robertson shows how they adapted and extended the framework for the study of sacred history laid down by the authorities in Rome, and from this, produced remarkably original accounts ...
Donald Winch - John Maynard Keynes: Economist as Biographer and Intellectual Historian
June 06, 2011 18:00 - 57 minutes - 28.6 MBBiography was an occupation which sustained Keynes throughout his life in parallel with his work as an economist, and it resulted in his 'Essays in Biography', first published in 1933 but expanded by later essays that make up the Royal Economic Society (RES) edition of this work. As Publications Secretary to the RES, Donald Winch has written a reappraisal of Keynes's work in this field to accompany a reissue of the essays. The lecture is based on this and deals with the literary context of Ke...
J.G.A. Pocock - Anglican Enlightenment and Christian revelation: The reception of Gibbon's Decline and Fall
March 02, 2010 18:00 - 52 minutes - 26.7 MBIn 1776, two chapters of Edward Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall' on the spread of Christianity; they aroused such controversy that it is still supposed that he wrote his history as an attack on religion. In this lecture, Professor Pocock argues to the contrary that the two chapters were prematurely written, and that the controversy is to be understood in the setting of the Church of England's need to reconcile a civil religion with the belief in Christian revelation.