Interventions | The Intellectual History Podcast

How does skepticism serve history? What lessons does Hegel hold for the modern historian? Why is an understanding of historical consciousness so important across the humanities? These are some of the questions we asked Richard Bourke, Professor of the History of Political Thought at the University of Cambridge.

Publications mentioned in this episode include:

István Hont and Michael Ignatieff, Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (CUP: 1983)

Richard Bourke, Peace in Ireland: The War of Ideas (Pimlico: 2003)

Richard Bourke, Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke (Princeton University Press: 2015)

Richard Bourke and Quentin Skinner, eds. History in the Humanities and Social Sciences (CUP: 2002)

Richard Bourke, Hegel’s World Revolutions (Princeton University Press: forthcoming, 2023)

What can decolonisation in twentieth century Africa tell us about the history of political thought? How might African intellectual history shed light on new methods and modes of inquiry? And what does it mean to ‘decolonise’ intellectual history? Emma Hunter, professor of global and African history at the University of Edinburgh and the 2018/19 Quentin Skinner Fellow, joins us to discuss these questions and more in this episode.

What can history contribute to the pursuits of contemporary political theory? What does the notion of the Anthropocene have to do with the history of political thought? And what exactly is the legacy of the political thought produced during the First World War? These are some of the questions discussed in this episode with Duncan Kelly, professor of political thought and intellectual history at the University of Cambridge, and the author of Politics and the Anthropocene (2019).

What is the place of history in the study of law? How do historians of international law conceive of emergent actors on the global stage? To what extent do legal histories shape the expectations and commitments of today’s international institutions? Dr Megan Donaldson, recently appointed to a lectureship in Public International Law at University College London, addresses these questions and shares her experience of a complex intersection between law, legal history and the history of political thought.

#Globalgovernance #legalhistory #internationallaw #deliberativedemocracy #publicity #interwarperiod

How does an attention to gender change our understanding of Renaissance political texts and the history of ideas more broadly? How can we challenge the traditional divide between the political public and the apolitical private spheres? And in what ways is re-evaluating the conceptual relationship between disadvantaged groups in the early modern period fruitful for our own times? We spoke to Anna Becker, from the Centre of Privacy Studies at the University of Copenhagen, to discuss these questions and more.

#gender #Renaissance #household #Machiavelli #Bodin #power #sovereignty