In this episode, Robin Mills talks to Dr Ross Carroll about his recently published book Uncivil Mirth – Ridicule in Enlightenment Britain (Princeton, 2021). Ross Carroll examines how leading Enlightenment thinkers thought about the purpose, possibilities and limits of public discourse in their search for an acceptable form of ridicule, one that supported religious toleration, the abolition of the slave trade, and the dismantling of patriarchal power. Focussing on Hobbes, Shaftesbury, Hume and Wollstonecraft among others, Ross Carroll’s book casts Enlightenment Britain in a new light, which speaks to our present-day debates about the lack of civility in public discourse.

One perspective on the classical utilitarians (Bentham, James and John Stuart Mill) is that they built their political philosophies on abstract reasoning and without regard for history. The charge has some weight, but it's also a charge they responded to, as Callum Barrell explains. Bentham et al – Barrell adds George Grote to the mix – were more interested in history than we give them credit for and this needs to be factored in when analysing their thought.

Dr Callum Barrell is Associate Professor of Political Theory at Northeastern University London

In this episode, Dr Jaume Aurell talks about the value of twentieth-century historians’ autobiographies as intellectual artefacts of historiographical and academic intervention. He traces a trend in autobiographies throughout the twentieth century to move from a documentary to an interventional perspective and uncovers what he means by the term “interventional historians”.

Dr Jaume Aurell is Professor at the Department of History at the University of Navarra in Spain. His research focusses on medieval and modern historiography. In 2019, he published his book Theoretical Perspectives on Historians’ Autobiographies: From Documentation to Intervention with Routledge.

Who can refute a sneer? asked William Paley of Edward Gibbon’s bitingly satirical account of the emergence of Christianity in the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1789). The plausibility of Paley’s characterisation indicates that maybe, Dr Hugh Liebert suggests, Gibbon’s acumen as a historian of religion has been ignored. An ironic philosophical historian he certainly was but Gibbon was also an astute psychologist of religion able to empathetically understand, even admire, early Christianity’s appeal and power. Gibbon’s insights into religion derived, moreover, from his own complicated personal engagement with religion as much as his erudition as a historian.

Dr. Hugh Liebert is an Associate Professor of American Politics in the Department of Social Sciences at the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York.

In this episode, Dr Cesare Cuttica re-examines the idea of democracy in early modern England in his latest book Anti-democracy in England 1570-1642 (Oxford University Press). The main premise of his original interpretation is that democracy did not exist, and in fact, it was seen as a threat to the way of life. Contemporary democratic ideas were dangerous, immoral and were associated with the uneducated commonalty.

Our guest this episode is Dr Matilde Cazzola who introduces us to the ultra-radical English thinker and activist Thomas Spence (1750–1814), famous for his “Plan” for the abolition of private land ownership. Often dismissed as an eccentric anachronistic figure, Spence is shown by Cazzola to be a fascinating political agitator aiming for the overturning of the ancien regime in favour of the “swinish multitude”. He is also, Cazzola contends, a subtle thinker with something to contribute to radical thinking about communal property today.

Is Adam Smith an apologist for capitalism who viewed it as the fourth and final stage of socio-economic development? Was Smith provoked into his moral and economic defence of capitalism by Rousseau’s Second Discourse? Much current Smith literature would suggest the answer to both questions is yes. But, perhaps, questions like these indicate that something has gone very wrong with our interpretations of Smith? Paul Sagar thinks so. We explore what needs to change and why in this conversation about his newly published and enjoyably iconoclastic Adam Smith Reconsidered: History, Liberty and the Foundations of Modern Politics (Princeton, 2022).

In this episode Prof Margaret Connolly talks about the post-medieval reception of medieval texts. Along a selection of eight manuscripts, Margaret traces how three generations of a sixteenth-century family from Middlesex read and used books from the fifteenth century. Examining their annotations of the fifteenth-century manuscripts, Margaret derives insights about the relevance of medieval contents for sixteenth-century readers and places the individual personae into the context of the English Reformation.