Lectures in Intellectual History

Copyright: © Institute of Intellectual History at the University of St Andrews 2014-15. Lectures are not to be cited without permission of the author.

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Tim Hochstrasser - Lost or Found in Translation? Varieties of Political Economy in the Enlightenment Nov 14, 2014

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One of the themes of recent historiography in Enlightenment Studies focuses on how political economy gathers up so many of the key themes of the philosophers and reformers of the age into a discourse that crosses boundaries, national, institutional and linguistic. In this lecture Tim Hochstrasser examines this notion critically and re-assesses the claim that political economy is the defining and unifying discourse of the European Enlightenment. Brief case studies illustrate the intellectual transfer of key aspects of political economic doctrines between countries within Europe and beyond, including Latin America and India.
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J. R. Milton - The Rise of Mechanism: What and Why? Nov 04, 2014

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At the end of the seventeenth century, corpuscularianism, the mechanical philosophy, and mechanics (as a branch of applied mathematics) were all rising in importance. In this paper, John Milton provides a definitive account of these three concepts, how they relate to each other, and explains why they became popular.
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Rachel Foxley - The City and the Soul in James Harrington's Republicanism Oct 21, 2014

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The political theorist James Harrington transformed and deployed many aspects of ancient thinking about the ethical character of the state in his political thought. In this paper, Rachel Foxley analyses Harrington's use of the correspondence between the city and the soul, arguing that this is a crucial mechanism enabling Harrington to attribute virtue to his ideal polity.
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Knud Haakonssen - Political Economy and Utopia, or the Paternalistic Enlightenment in Scotland Oct 07, 2014

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Thomas 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 and economic problems of his day.
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Andreas Hess - Exile from Exile: The Political Theory of Judith N. Shklar Sep 23, 2014

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How 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.
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Aileen Fyfe - Referees, Editors, and Printers in the Making of Scientific Knowledge May 27, 2014

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Why 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.
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Greg Claeys - Mill, Malthus and Class: Family Values and the Harm Principle May 06, 2014

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So 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 recognition of the basic duty to maintain them. His Malthusian proposal to restrict this right is the strongest instance of his application of paternalism to adults in a civilised society, but is in Mill's view entirely commensurate with the principle of liberty.
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Donald Winch - The Political Economy of Empire Feb 04, 2014

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Historians 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 the 1820s and 1830s.
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John Robertson - Sociability between Natural Law and Sacred History, 1650-1800 Jan 28, 2014

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In 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.
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David Armitage - Every Revolution is a Civil War May 20, 2013

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According 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 Revolutions"; it can also explain the confusion as we attempt to understand political violence in places like Egypt and Syria today.
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