Richard Bourke in Paris
Symposium on Gareth Stedman Jones’ Karl Marx, Greatness and Illusion
We are pleased to announce the Annual Symposium in the Humanities and Social Sciences on Gareth Stedman Jones’ Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (Allen Lane, Penguin: 2016). To view the poster for the event, please click here.
The speakers are:
Gareth Stedman Jones (QMUL)
Warren Breckmann (Penn)
Douglas Moggach (Ottawa/Sydney)
Julia Nicholls (Oxford)
Shannon C. Stison (Georgetown)
To view the programme, please click here. Registration is essential.
2017 Annual Nicolai Rubinstein Lecture
We are pleased to announce the details for this year’s annual Nicolai Rubinstein Lecture in Intellectual History and the History of Political Thought. The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception, to which all are welcome. Booking is essential, please register here.
Speaker: Professor Susan Pedersen, Gouverneur Morris Professor of History, Columbia University
Chair: Professor Julian Jackson, QMUL
Title: “The League of Nations Secretariat as a Site of Political Imagination”
Blurb:
What difference did the League of Nations Secretariat make to the practice and theory of international politics? This talk takes us inside the Secretariat to meet some of the men (and one woman) who headed up its different sections, delving into the records of their internal “kitchen cabinet” meetings to uncover what they themselves thought they were doing. The League’s high officials talked freely among themselves about the nature and scope of their authority, about how to balance national loyalties and international service, and about how to deal with public complaints of ineffectuality or lack of accountability. Self-consciously, unevenly and buffeted by political winds, they nonetheless developed strategies and practices that challenged and changed the international system and that still influence it to this day. Historians and political theorists should pay more attention to the Secretariat as a site for political innovation and political thought.
Speaker Brief Bio:
Susan Pedersen is Morris Professor of British History at Columbia University. She has written widely on British, European and international politics after 1900. Her first book examined the way European welfare states came to account for dependence; her second book, a biography of the visionary social theorist and social reformer Eleanor Rathbone, appeared from Yale University Press in 2004. Pedersen’s new book, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford University Press, 2015) was awarded the 2015 Cundill Prize for Historical Literature.
Pedersen received her B.A. and PhD from Harvard University, where she was Professor of History and served for a time as Dean for Undergraduate Education before moving to Columbia in 2003. She has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, the Radcliffe Institute, and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, among others. In 2014 she delivered the Ford Lectures at Oxford University on the subject of “Internationalism and Empire: British Dilemmas, 1919-39”. She is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books.
Quentin Skinner lecture at CEDRE
Professor Quentin Skinner delivered a lecture at the inaugural conference of the Centre Européen des Études Republicaines (CEDRE) at the École Normale Supériore Paris on 24/25th November 2016.
A shortened version of the lecture was published in Libération, 25th November 2016. To read the article, please follow this link.
To coincide with the conference, the journal L’histoire published an interview with Quentin Skinner and Vincent Peillon (French Minister of Education until 2014) under the title ‘La république, avenir d’une longue histoire’ (L’histoire, November 2016, pp. 3-16). To access the interview, please click here (subscription required).
Georgios Varouxakis at ULIP
Professor Georgios Varouxakis will speak at a round-table seminar on the teaching of the history of political ideas in Paris. The round table is part of the series of seminars of the Groupe de recherche sur l’histoire sociale des idées politiques, and will take place at the University of London Institute in Paris (ULIP) on Friday 2 December, 3.00-6.00pm. For more information please click here.
Britain at the Constitutional Crossroads — Prof. Bruce Ackerman (Yale)
In association with the Centre for the Study of the History of Political Thought and the Centre for Law and Society in a Global Context, the Mile End Institute is delighted to welcome Bruce Ackerman, Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University to give a lecture Britain at the Constitutional Crossroads – Court, Parliament, and Popular Sovereignty in the Twenty-First Century.
Professor Ackerman’s lecture comes at a critical moment as the Supreme Court deliberates on the role of Parliament in the process of Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union and the judiciary has come under fire in the popular press. His talk will consider the interaction of representative democracy and referendums and the role of the courts in mediating the two. There will be an opportunity for audience Q&A after the lecture.
The event will be chaired by Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Anniversary Chair in Law at QMUL and co-director of the Centre for Law and Society in a Global Context
To register for the event, please click here. Places are limited, and so booking is essential.
Please click here to watch a recording of the event.
Recent talks by Quentin Skinner at Stanford
Professor Quentin Skinner recently visited Stanford University, where he delivered the annual Harry Camp Memorial Lecture. The Harry Camp Memorial Fund was established in 1956 by friends and associates of the businessman and philanthropist Harry Camp. The fund brings outstanding speakers to the University for public lectures and promotes the study of “the concept of the dignity and worth of the individual”. Professor Skinner’s lecture, titled A Genealogy of Liberty, was delivered on the 27th of October. Please follow this link for the event page on the Stanford website.
While at Stanford, Professor Skinner also gave a lecture to the Department of English on the 26th of October, and presented a paper to the Political Theory workshop on the 28th of October.
Georgios Varouxakis lectures in Shanghai
Professor Georgios Varouxakis has been invited to deliver four lectures on the “Intellectual History of Modern Europe” at Fudan University, Shanghai, China. The lectures will take place on 7, 8, 10 and 11 November 2016.
Richard Bourke reviews István Hont and Richard Tuck
Professor Richard Bourke’s review essay, titled ‘Revising the Cambridge School: Republicanism Revisited’, on István Hont’s Politics in Commercial Society: Jean-Jacques Roussea and Adam Smith and Richard Tuck’s The Sleeping Sovereign: The Invention of Modern Democracy is now available on advance access from Political Theory. Please click here to access the essay (subscription required).