The dark history of eugenic thought in Germany from the nineteenth century to today―and the courageous counter-voices. In this episode, Robin Mills speaks with Dagmar Herzog about her new book The Question of Unworthy Life: Eugenics and Germany’s Twentieth Century (Princeton University Press, 2024). Between 1939 and 1945, Nazi genocide claimed the lives of nearly three hundred thousand people diagnosed with psychiatric illness or cognitive deficiencies. Not until the 1980s would these murders, a...
Jan 01, 2025
In this episode, Robin Mills speaks with Elad Carmel about his new book Anticlerical Legacies - The deistic reception of Thomas Hobbes, c. 1670–1740 (Manchester University Press, 2024). The conversation touches upon a wide range of topics related to 17th-century religion, reception history, and deism.
Dec 01, 2024
In this episode, Seungeun Lee speaks with Isaac Nakhimovsky about his new book The Holy Alliance: Liberalism and the Politics of Federation (Princeton, 2024). The book challenges the prevailing view of the Holy Alliance as a reactionary and illusory endeavor, as well as the idea of a linear progression of liberalism in opposition to such deviations. Nakhimovsky reconstructs the discourse around a liberal vision of a European federation, where reformers and patriots from smaller European states, ...
Oct 28, 2024
In this interview, Ross Carroll (Dublin City University) talks about what's new and interesting in scholarship on Edmund Burke, following writing a new introduction to the great Irish thinker for Polity's Classic Thinkers series.
Oct 20, 2024
Mark Garnett, Senior Lecturer in Politics at Lancaster University, has a bone to pick with commentators on the British conservative tradition and the British Conservative Party. In this wide-ranging conversation, he discusses how so often what the Party’s ideology is taken being the same thing as conservative political thought. But for most of its history, the Conservative Party has been anything other than conservative. Instead, we might understand the Party’s changing ideology in terms of the ...
Sep 07, 2024
In this bonus episode, we bring an interview with Professor Peter Gordon about the philosopher and social theorist Theodor Adorno (1903 - 1969). The interview is part of a new podcast series on German Intellectual History entitled Zeitgeist und Geschichte. Discover more episodes here and subscribe on iTunes or Spotify.
Aug 14, 2024
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 radic...
Jul 13, 2024
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).
May 17, 2024
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.
Jan 04, 2024
In this episode, Emilie Aebischer speaks with Prof Michael Sonenscher about his most recent book After Kant - The Romans, the Germans and the Moderns in the History of Political Thought (PUP, 2023).
Dec 26, 2023
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, le...
Dec 18, 2023
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 th...
Nov 13, 2023
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 m...
Nov 06, 2023
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 ...
Oct 14, 2023
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 centrali...
Aug 10, 2023
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 Wa...
Jul 06, 2023
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.
Jun 13, 2023
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 p...
Apr 14, 2023
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 ...
Mar 01, 2023
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 sig...
Feb 17, 2023
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 philosoph...
Feb 04, 2023
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 f...
Aug 11, 2022
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 Wo...
Jul 28, 2022
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 Profes...
Jul 21, 2022
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 me...
Jul 14, 2022
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 Christ...
Jul 07, 2022
In this episode, Dr Cesare Cuttica re-examines the idea of democracy in early modern England in his latest book Anti-democracy in England 1570-1642 (Oxford University Press). The main premise of his original interpretation is that democracy did not exist, and in fact, it was seen as a threat to the way of life. Contemporary democratic ideas were dangerous, immoral and were associated with the uneducated commonalty.
Jun 30, 2022
Our guest this episode is Dr Matilde Cazzola who introduces us to the ultra-radical English thinker and activist Thomas Spence (1750–1814), famous for his “Plan” for the abolition of private land ownership. Often dismissed as an eccentric anachronistic figure, Spence is shown by Cazzola to be a fascinating political agitator aiming for the overturning of the ancien regime in favour of the “swinish multitude”. He is also, Cazzola contends, a subtle thinker with something to contribute to radical ...
Jun 23, 2022
Is Adam Smith an apologist for capitalism who viewed it as the fourth and final stage of socio-economic development? Was Smith provoked into his moral and economic defence of capitalism by Rousseau’s Second Discourse? Much current Smith literature would suggest the answer to both questions is yes. But, perhaps, questions like these indicate that something has gone very wrong with our interpretations of Smith? Paul Sagar thinks so. We explore what needs to change and why in this conversation abou...
Jun 17, 2022
In this episode Prof Margaret Connolly talks about the post-medieval reception of medieval texts. Along a selection of eight manuscripts, Margaret traces how three generations of a sixteenth-century family from Middlesex read and used books from the fifteenth century. Examining their annotations of the fifteenth-century manuscripts, Margaret derives insights about the relevance of medieval contents for sixteenth-century readers and places the individual personae into the context of the English R...
Jun 09, 2022
