Interventions | The Intellectual History Podcast

Should you judge a book by its cover? Victorian historians and their readers did; and through examining the decisions that went into binding, titling, annotating and prefacing historical works, we can recover some of the anxieties and labour that went into creating the image of the historian we have today.

This is Elise Garritzen's task, in 'Reimagining the Historian in Victorian England: Books, the Literary Marketplace, and the Scholarly Persona': a work which draws on over 500 nineteenth-century publications to shed light on the struggle to impose a respectable order on the chaos of history. Hosted by Joshua Shortman

Who will rule the rulers? Who will chaperone the chaperones? Who will guard the guardians? These questions are rarely associated with Plato. Usually seen as the arch-defender of the rule of the enlightened few over the ignorant many, he has not been perceived as a friend of accountable government. But is this traditional picture of Plato true?

Melissa Lane, the world’s foremost interpreter of Plato’s political thought, thinks not. Far from being blind to the need to hold political leaders to account, Plato was in fact deeply invested in developing a system of limited rule in which the order of offices would be directed to the good of the ruled. 

Hosted by Sam Tchorek-Bentall

Produced by Joshua Shortman

Theophrastus was an ancient Greek philosopher. He wrote widely on topics including metaphysics, plant-life, dizziness, odours, and juice. Most notably, though, he was the author of a colourful text detailing the vices of thirty typical characters from Athenian city life. The impact of this short book of sketches, known simply as Characters, was prodigious. In early modern Europe, it spawned an entire tradition of character sketching and character classifying which, for a period of some two hundred years, formed a central current in the great stream of moral and political philosophy. 

Join Katie Ebner-Landy, author of the path-breaking Character Sketch as Philosophy: Manners, Mores, Types, as she uncovers the history of Theophrastus’s peculiar work, revealing a forgotten way of doing moral philosophy, one centred not on hidden principles but the characterisation of personality. Hosted by Sam Tchorek-Bentall and Joshua Shortman

Martin Crusius (1526-1607) spent most of his life in the Lutheran town of Tübingen. While there, he became Europe's foremost expert on Ottoman Greece. Drawing on hundreds of conversations he held with the Greek Orthodox alms-seekers who visited his home, he painted a picture of a people unparalleled in its richness and scope. Yet he also constructed a narrative of the religious and cultural decline of Greece which shows his self-proclaimed philhellenism to have been entangled with a disdain for Ottoman culture and a desire to spread his Lutheran faith. 

Join Richard Calis, whose research into Crusius’s intellectual world has shed new light on the history of Protestant reform, ethnography, and early modern cultural encounters, as he takes us into the mind and home of one of sixteenth-century Germany’s most original scholars. 

Hosted by Sam Tchorek-Bentall

Produced by Joshua Shortman

By her death in 1797 at the age of 38, Mary Wollstonecraft had produced a body of work unmatched for its honesty and critical acumen. In a society where marriage often amounted to legal prostitution, Wollstonecraft confronted the ways in which property and power distorted lives and corrupted our most essential relationships: as human beings, men and women, mothers and children. Following a revolution in France that failed to deliver, Wollstonecraft came to see education as the only viable route to a world in which love and liberty could flourish.

How we might imagine this world — which of Wollstonecraft's ideas capture it best, and how her vision was different from our own — are questions addressed by Sylvana Tomaselli, a historian who has long been critical to our understanding of Enlightenment political thought, and the role played by women within it.

Hosted by Sam Tchorek-Bentall

Produced by Joshua Shortman

After the founding of the American Republic, African-American Intellectuals never accepted passively the narratives of racial difference maintained by the defenders of slavery and segregation. At a time when the belief in human equality was under attack from religious reactionaries and scientific innovators alike, Black thinkers succeeded in vindicating the unity of the human community as a divinely created whole, in constructing their own science of the races in opposition to white theories of human inequality, and eventually in brining about the demise of the idea of race as a legitimate object of scientific inquiry.

Join Mia Bay, one of the most penetrating authors writing on American history today, as she leads us along the twisted paths which ideas of race have taken since the nineteenth century, pointing along the way to the place of Thomas Jefferson in Black American thought and the work of the great anti-lynching campaigner Ida B. Wells. 

Sometime in the eighteenth century, a great transformation took place in the language of liberty. Since the days of the Roman Republic, to be free had meant to be independent of the arbitrary will of another. You enjoyed freedom if nobody could impose their will on you without your prior consent. You were free if you were your own master, and you were unfree to the extent that you answered to anyone else. 

This was the concept of liberty which dominated political discourse in England until the outbreak of the American Revolution and Revolutionary War. How it gave way in the wake of the Declaration of Independence to the idea of freedom as absence of restraint — to the concept of negative liberty — is the question that Quentin Skinner, the doyen of intellectual historians in the English-speaking world, attempts to answer. In doing so, he also questions whether the road that was taken was the right one for a democratic society to take. In order to be free, is it enough that we encounter no obstruction on our way, or is something more, and more fundamental, required? 

If you visited Britain around 1700, you’d find hardly a single advocate of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. You’d hear the institution of slavery described as a moral evil, but no one would tell you that it could be done away with if only people put their minds to it. Slavery was supported by monarchy, government, church, and public opinion in general. Yet in 1807, the trade in enslaved Africans was abolished throughout the British Empire. How and why this momentous shift in public opinion took place remains a topic of heated debate, with the roles of material interest and lofty idealism proving difficult to disentangle. 

Join John Coffey, one of the finest historians of religious and political ideas working in Britain today, as he grapples with the question of British slavery’s dramatic, if incomplete, eclipse. 

Why is Carl Schmitt one of the most widely read political theorists of the twentieth century? A lifelong antisemite, a petty careerist, a Nazi ideologue who only avoided being tried at Nuremberg because he wasn’t considered important enough, Schmitt was an unlikely candidate for canonical fame. And yet from today’s perspective, few other authors present as many opportunities to think through the struggles of the twentieth century. From the besieged cities of the First World War to the global delusions of the Cold War superpowers, the stuff of Schmitt’s thought both excites and repels, forcing us to face a world in which liberal democracy is the enemy and fool. 

Join Lars Vinx and Samuel Zeitlin as they travel in time from Schmitt’s early years in Catholic Westphalia to his spectral afterlife in today’s divided world, shedding light on his theories of dictatorship, the political, sovereignty, and law.

In 1686, a French witness spoke openly of a Native American declaration of independence. ‘We have to assume’, he said, ‘that the Iroquois do not accept any master’. Claims such as this were made frequently throughout the history of European colonialism, forming a rich tapestry of indigenous ideas. Although often dismissed by historians as badly documented and politically irrelevant fictions, these ideas helped shape the destiny of peoples and polities across the globe, from New Zealand and New Caledonia to Ontario and Quebec. 

Join Saliha Belmessous, a leading light in the emerging field of indigenous intellectual history, as she looks at the legacy of the Treaty of Waitangi, visits the insulated offices of Victorian lawyers, and reflects on the interplay of colonial cooperation and violence.