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.