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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Colin Kidd - The Trials of Douglas Young: Hitler, Aristophanes and the SNP Apr 17, 2013

Show notes

2013 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 of the curious Scottish nationalist response to the world crisis of the 1940s.
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Mark Salber Phillips - On Historical Distance Mar 13, 2013

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Ideas 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 idea of distance and burdens it with a regulatory purpose. In this lecture, Mark Salber Philips argues that distance needs to be re-conceived in terms of the wider set of engagements that mediate our relations to the past, as well as the full spectrum of distance-positions from near to far. Re-imagined in these terms, distance sheds its prescriptiveness and becomes a valuable heuristic for examining the range and variability of historical representation.
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Richard Whatmore - Democracy and Empire Mar 05, 2013

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One 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 with larger forms of state; in short, to turn a democracy into a stable empire.
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Blair Worden - Two 17th Century Century Concepts of Liberty and their Legacy Jan 23, 2013

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Over 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 our attention. It betokened a new conception of the relationship between God and society. And it demonstrates the capacity of political events, and of pressures of political power, to shape developments in intellectual history.
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Ian Hunter - The Mythos, Ethos, and Pathos of the Humanities Oct 11, 2012

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Justifications 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, the paper argues that these twin philosophical justifications fail to capture both the array of intellectual arts that have informed the humanities disciplines and the variety of uses to which these arts have been put. Nonetheless, the two philosophical constructions have had a concrete impact on the disposition of the modern humanities, seen in the respective structuralist and poststructuralist reconfigurations of the disciplines that began to take place under the banner of 'theory' during the 1960s. In discussing the effects of theory on the humanities in Australia, Ian Hunter focuses on the unforseeable consequences of attempts to provide arts-based disciplines with a foundation either in cognitive structures or in an 'event' that shatters them.
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James Moore - Calvinists, Socinians and Arminians: Reformation and natural rights in early modern political thought Oct 11, 2012

Show notes

In 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 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose political principles are taken to be a return to the principles of Calvin and his followers.
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Manuela Albertone - Benjamin Franklin's Radical Agrarian Project Jun 18, 2012

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Benjamin 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.
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Keith Tribe - Karl Marx: 'Ricardian Socialist'? May 09, 2012

Show notes

With 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 have taken this point seriously; while some attention has been paid to "German philosophy", little attention has been paid to the importance of Proudhon and others, while almost none at all has ever been paid to Marx's debt to the writings of David Ricardo and Adam Smith. In this lecture, Keith Tribe seeks to readdress this imbalance in Marx scholarship.
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Donald Winch - Arnold Toynbee's Industrial Revolution Apr 30, 2012

Show notes

Arnold 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 historian of catastrophe and his remedies for dealing with its consequences with the aim of establishing the nineteenth-century political, moral, and intellectual context within which his interpretation of the industrial revolution can best be understood.
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Jeremy Jennings - Travels with Alexis de Tocqueville Apr 17, 2012

Show notes

Demoracy 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.
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