New Work In Intellectual History

In this episode, Yifan Wang and Seungeun Lee speak with Professor Georgios Varouxakis (Queen Mary) about his new book The West: The History of an Idea (PUP, 2025).

In this episode, Harim and Hyein interview Lasse S. Andersen about the new edited volume entitled Political Economy from Pufendorf to Marx: Culture, Needs and Property Rights (CUP, 2026). This volume, which brings together seven hitherto unpublished papers by the late István Hont, was published by Cambridge University Press in January of 2026. The interview was conducted in the spring of 2025. Apologies for the poor audio.

In this episode, Derek van Voorst interviews Professor Ferenc Hörcher. The two discuss his new edited text “Intellectual Conservatism: From Burke to Scruton”, as well as the history and future of modern conservatism both politically and philosophically.

In this episode, Seungeun Lee interviews Professor Robert Frost, the Burnett Fletcher Chair in History at Aberdeen University. Professor Frost gave a lecture at the Institute of Intellectual History on 17 September 2025, on which day he also sat down for an in-depth interview about his ongoing, multi-volume work on the Polish-Lithuanian Union, 1385-1569.

What is the relation between philosophy’s claim to disinterested universal rational inquiry and its historical existence as an assemblage of apparently sectarian schools? This is the question that formed the topic for a conversation that Valery Vino initiated with Ian Hunter.

In this episode, Derek van Voorst speaks with Dr Edward Jones Corredera, who is senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law and assistant lecturer at the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (Madrid). The discussion focused on his recent book, Odious Debt: Bankruptcy, International Law, and the Making of Latin America (OUP, 2024), although it also covered topics such as the theoretical framework of 'odious debt', historical debt, future developments of debtor nations, and so forth.

Roots and Branches: First episode out now. Intellectual Historian Richard Whatmore (University of St Andrews) explains why the Enlightenment, 18th century republicanism and the history of free states matter for today’s global politics. Subscribe to Roots and Branches on Spotify or iTunes by visiting the Episode Website below.

Get ready for Roots and Branches, the new ideas podcast from the Institute of Intellectual History at the University of St Andrews. In this introductory episode, host Selma Sondern explains what Intellectual History is, why it matters, and what to expect when Roots and Branches launches on 1 July 2025 with Prof Richard Whatmore. Subscribe to the podcast on Spotify and iTunes by visiting the Episode Website below.

In this episode, Seungeun Lee speaks with Professor Davide Cadeddu (University of Milan) about his forthcoming book Classics of Historiography in Historical and Global Perspective (CUP), which will be published as part of the CUP ‘Elements in Critical Heritage Studies’ series.

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, as well as the coercive sterilisations of some four hundred thousand others classified as “feeble-minded,” be officially acknowledged as crimes at all. The Question of Unworthy Life charts this history from its origins in prewar debates about the value of disabled lives to our continuing efforts to unlearn eugenic thinking today.

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.

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, as well as abolitionists beyond Europe, looked to Russia as the potential guarantor of a peaceful order.

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.

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 overlapping and competing perspectives of liberalism, nationalism and pragmatism. And we might also think again about what ‘conservative political thought’ actually has been in England the past two centuries.

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.

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 radicals and a passionate moderate, thereby outlining the distinctive political vision undergirding moderation in modern America.

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).

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.

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).

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, leaving liberals unable to address the problems that face us today.

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 they viewed as unique to Europe. They believed themselves to be the true heirs of the European Enlightenment, rather than the radical materialist atheists who had taken over France.

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 market-friendly alternative to the postwar welfare state and how interest in the policy has grown in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and again after the COVID-19 crisis.

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 the intellectual origin and context of this vision of scarcity and demonstrate its historical contingency, even in the age of capitalism. It reflects the triumph of infinite-growth ideologies at the expense of all other conceptions of scarcity that sought to live within nature’s constraints.

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 centrality of calvinism to Stair’s understanding of law and contract. Stephen Bogle is Senior Lecturer in Private Law, University of Glasgow.

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 Wars and their effects on Ireland and on the British perception of Ireland, and the continental critique of Britain’s failure to address the issues of the Irish economy.

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.

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 position women held in nineteenth century intellectual life and what it means to do philosophy. Alison Stone is professor of philosophy at Lancaster University.

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 to recover Smith’s original intentions and restore his reputation as a moral philosopher. Glory M. Liu is a college fellow in social studies at Harvard University.

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 significant. Claire Rydell Arcenas is associate professor of history at the University of Montana.

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 philosophy and a greater degree of state intervention than mid-twentieth century free marketeers countenanced. Jacob Soll is Professor of History and Accounting at the University of Southern California

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 focussed on the role of scientific knowledge production in the realization of ideas of wealth, state and society in Enlightenment Europe. She currently works as non-tenured Assistant Professor on an ERC project at Ca’ Foscari University in Vernice, Italy.

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 Wollstonecraft among others, Ross Carroll’s book casts Enlightenment Britain in a new light, which speaks to our present-day debates about the lack of civility in public discourse.

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 Professor of Political Theory at Northeastern University London

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 medieval and modern historiography. In 2019, he published his book Theoretical Perspectives on Historians’ Autobiographies: From Documentation to Intervention with Routledge.

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 Christianity’s appeal and power. Gibbon’s insights into religion derived, moreover, from his own complicated personal engagement with religion as much as his erudition as a historian. Dr. Hugh Liebert is an Associate Professor of American Politics in the Department of Social Sciences at the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York.

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.

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 thinking about communal property today.

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 about his newly published and enjoyably iconoclastic Adam Smith Reconsidered: History, Liberty and the Foundations of Modern Politics (Princeton, 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 Reformation.