Lectures in Intellectual History

Dr Giulia Delogu (Venice) delivered this lecture on February 5th 2020.

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Professor Thomas Maissen (Heidelberg/Paris) delivered this lecture on January 28, 2020 at the University of St Andrews.

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Professor Ian MacLean (Oxford/St Andrews) delivered this lecture at the Institute of Intellectual History on November 19th 2019.

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Professor David Weinstein (Wake Forest) delivered this lecture on November 12, 2019 at the University of St Andrews.

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Dr Lucia Rubinelli (Cambridge) delivered the 18th István Hont Memorial Lecture on October 29 2019 at the University of St Andrews "This paper is the third chapter of a book manuscript, titled Constituent power: A history. The book mainly focuses on how Sieyes’ first theorisation of pouvoir constituant has been used and misused by subsequent theorists, including Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt. In this chapter, I argue that Schmitt theorised constituent power as the democratic embodiment of sovereignty. Schmitt’s collapse of constituent power and sovereignty is well known, but I suggest that he did not simply take the two ideas to be interchangeable. Rather, he aimed to introduce a meaning for popular power that could be consistent with his definition of sovereignty as the power to decide on the exception. This was not provided by ideas of national and parliamentary sovereignty. The latter gave birth to liberal parliamentarianism, which he accused of dissolving the essence of sovereignty; the former encouraged direct and local democracy, which prevented the prompt expression of the sovereign will. By contrast, Schmitt found in Sieyes’ idea of constituent power a way to associate the extra-ordinary character of his account of sovereignty to the democratic principle of popular power. He thus presented constituent power as the meaning of sovereignty in democratic states. On his interpretation of Sieyes’ theory, constituent power belonged to the nation but, to be exercised, needed to be represented by a unitary figure, approved through plebiscites, and able to embody the unity of the nation acting as a unitary instance of decision: the sovereign dictator. The result is a complete reversal of Sieyes’ theory."

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Dr James Poskett (Warwick) delivered this lecture on October 15th 2019 at the University of St Andrews. Phrenology was the most popular mental science of the Victorian age. From American senators to Indian social reformers, this new mental science found supporters around the globe. James’s new book, Materials of the Mind, tells the story of how phrenology changed the world—and how the world changed phrenology. It is a story of skulls from the Arctic, plaster casts from Haiti, books from Bengal, and letters from the Pacific. It shows how the circulation of material culture underpinned the emergence of a new materialist philosophy of the mind, while also demonstrating how a global approach to history can help us reassess issues such as race, technology, and politics today.

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Dr Emma Hunter (Edinburgh) delivered this lecture at the University of St Andrews on September 24, 2019.

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Dr Silvia Sebastiani (EHESS) delivered the 10th James H. Burnes Memorial Lecture on April 23, 2019 at the Institute of Intellectual History.

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Richard Whatmore (St Andrews) delivered this talk at the University of St Andrews on April 3, 2019. The talk was based on the Carlyle Lectures, which Professor Whatmore gave at the University of Oxford in the spring semester of 2019.

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Dr Iain McDaniel (Sussex) delivered the 16th István Hont Memorial Lecture at the Institute of Intellectual History (St Andrews) on April 2, 2019.

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