The Fame of Cicero flourishes at present; but that of Aristotle is utterly decay’d.

Details of Political Thought and Intellectual History Seminars for Michaelmas Term 2026

Edmund Burke’s thoughts on plantation slavery have long been the subject of scholarly attention. Too often, however, discerning Burke’s long-term intention in r...

When in 1937 Michael Oakeshott reviewed Leo Strauss’ The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: its Basis and Genesis, he prefaced his remarks on the book with some general remarks one of which is worth quot...

In chapter 2 of Hume’s Philosophical Politics (Cambridge 1975, all page-numbers are to 2010 edition), one of the points Duncan Forbes makes is that in Hume’s Treatise political obligation is detached ...

I don’t think it ever occurred to me when I was young that my estimation of other people’s scholarship could ever change for the better.

I expect to be a bit busy this week with my participation in the 10th Descartes Lectures, “Individualism and Oppression,” by Serene Khader (CUNY).

I want to start a bit sappy.

In understanding the origins of Machiavellian liberalism, and its art of government, my most important scholarly debt is to Michel Foucault’s Collège de France lectures of the late 1970s.

As Kathleen McCrudden Illert notes in her introduction to this notable addition to the Ideas in Context series, the thought of Sophie de Grouchy (1763–1822

Regular readers know of my interest in Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and More’s Utopia. One non-trivial commonality of both receives very little attention in the secondary literature (or from students). ...

2026-2027 Prize Research Grants

Yesterday’s post got me interested in looking anew at Istvan Hont’s massive (2005) Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation State in Historical Perspective (Harvard).

Published in History of European Ideas (Ahead of Print, 2026)

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).

Back in March, I gave an invited lecture on Voltaire’s Candide at the Montesquieu Forum at Roosevelt University, Chicago.

In the Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu mentions Mandeville twice by name in a footnote pertaining to fashion.

Abstract. The Oxford Handbook of H. G. Wells offers a wide-ranging overview of the life and work of one of the most influential writers of the twentieth ce

Yesterday’s blog post elicited a message from the always erudite David Gordon.

The first ‘fable’ from Bacon’s (1609) Wisdom of the Ancients is rather short.

Arriving in 1776, as the Declaration of Independence gave birth to a new nation and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall gave birth to a new approach to history, Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Cause...

My friends, Martin Lenz and Catarina Dutilh Novaes, always remind me that research (even by my own lights) is a collaborative activity.

One of the best jokes in Candide that survives translation occurs in the Chapter 17 during the visit to Eldorado.

Voltaire (1694-1778) was nearly forty when he published Letters Concerning the English in Nation in London.