In addition to taking the core course, students select from a menu of specialist options.

Below is a list of courses that will be running in 2025/2026:

Capitalism and Political Thought [HST7703] – Convenor: Dr Waseem Yaqoob (QMUL)

This course examines the pivotal role that capitalism has played in political thought from the early twentieth century to the present. It shows how a range of philosophers, intellectuals and activists as well as economists have blurred the boundaries between political and economic analysis to reformulate key political concepts and to argue, variously, for the maintenance, transformation or overthrow of capitalism. We begin with a number of thinkers grappling with the imperial and racial dimensions of the global market system, before exploring how these arguments were transformed by total war, revolution and decolonisation. We then turn to the ways in which financialisation, inequality, automation and climate crisis came to shape how capitalism has been understood. Thinkers studied include Rosa Luxemburg, John Maynard Keynes, Eric Williams, Friedrich Hayek, Silvia Federici and Thomas Piketty.

State, Law and Decision: Political and Legal Thought of Carl Schmitt [HIST0898] – Convenor: Dr Samuel Zeitlin (UCL)

This module looks at the ideological origins of the Nazi state through the early writings of one of the most salient Nazi lawyers and political writers, Carl Schmitt (1888-1985). Students will develop their understanding of the intellectual and ideological origins of German National Socialism through close reading, source analysis, and source criticism with intellectually challenging primary source material.

The course will conclude with Schmitt’s more famous works like Political Theology (1922) and The Concept of the Political (1927/28/32/33) seen anew through the lens of the earlier work.

Nationalism, Patriotism, and Cosmopolitanism in Political Thought, Nineteenth – Twentieth Centuries [HST7708] – Convenor: Professor Georgios Varouxakis (QMUL)

This course provides students with an in-depth command of what some of the most important political thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (before the emergence of what is called ‘contemporary political theory’ since the 1970s) thought and wrote about the phenomena and concepts referred to as ‘nationalism’, ‘patriotism’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’. Thinkers focused upon include Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Giuseppe Mazzini, John Stuart Mill, Walter Bagehot, John [Lord] Acton, George Eliot [Mary Ann Evans], Alexis de Tocqueville, Ernest Renan, Francis Lieber, Alexander Crummell, Karl Marx, Fukuzawa Yukichi, Rosa Luxemburg, Otto Bauer, Ziya Gökalp, Jessie Fausset, Alain Locke, Frantz Fanon, W. E. B. Du Bois, Rabindranath Tagore, José Vasconcelos, Simone Weil, Richard Wright, Hannah Arendt, John Plamenatz, Isaiah Berlin. The emphasis of the module is not on ‘nationalist’ or ‘cosmopolitan’ thinkers as such, but on what political thinkers thought and wrote about the nation, patriotism, nationalism, internationalism, and cosmopolitanism from the Napoleonic wars to the Cold War.

Political Thought in Renaissance Europe A [HIST0626] – Convenor: Professor Angus Gowland (UCL)

This course explores the contribution of Italian humanism and republicanism – especially in Florence – to the political thought of the European Renaissance. It focuses on the letters of Petrarch; Leonardo Bruni’s orations and History of the Florentine People; Niccolò Machiavelli’s Prince, Discourses on Livy, and Florentine Histories; and Francesco Guicciardini’s Dialogue on the Government of Florence. Students are encouraged to read these texts closely, to connect the ideas in them to their authors’ political and intellectual contexts, and to relate their understanding to the main interpretations of Renaissance humanism, republicanism, and early modern political thought more generally, in modern scholarship. There are no formal prerequisites for the course, but some familiarity with early modern intellectual history, particularly political thought, is strongly advised.

Architecture and Space in Modern Intellectual History [HST7711] – Convenor: Dr Chris Moffat (QMUL)

What role do built environments play in the history of ideas? How might the tools and methods of intellectual history be calibrated to engage architecture and space as ‘sources’? Can architects themselves be studied as thinkers? In this module, students will explore how buildings have both staged and prompted key debates in twentieth century political and social thought. They will move across the globe from the ‘primitive hut’ to the prison, the housing estate to the hospital, and the shopping arcade to the slum, reading philosophers and political theorists (Heidegger, Benjamin, Lefebvre, Massey and beyond) alongside architects and planners (from Le Corbusier to Marina Tabassum).

Empire and Early Modern Political Thought [HST7702] – Convenor: Professor Andrew Fitzmaurice (QMUL)

European states raced to establish empires in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that would provide them with resources to assist in their struggles with each other to survive. As those states engaged in this process of expansion, various authors reflected on what it would mean to be the subject of such empires, thereby developing the concept of rights. At the same time, others used the tools of political thought, including concepts of virtue, greatness, interest, and reason of state, to animate the instruments of empire, including joint stock corporations such as the East India Company. These authors articulated modern understandings of the ways in which states project their power as well the rules of the international order.

The Black Radical Tradition [HST7706] – Convenor: Dr Leslie James (QMUL)

Black radical thought in the twentieth century drew on a long tradition of circulating ideas. It did so in order to formulate new readings of Enlightenment ideals that would address sovereignty and autonomy within the specific conditions of Black life. This module examines how Black thinkers stretched the category of ‘intellectual’ through combined thought and practice. Workers and educated elite formulated specific analyses of the combined working of capitalism and empire, grounded in the importance of New World slavery to the modern world’s political and social economy. Black women challenged the assumed distinctiveness of race, class, and gender and formulated distinctive visions of what ‘freedom’ might mean. In this module we will think with Black radicals’ ideas about empire, war and expropriation, work and social life and consider their strategies for realising alternative forms of social and political organisation.   

Patria and Cosmopolis: Nation, Country, and Humanity in Political Thought, from Ancient Greece to the Age of Revolutions [HST7704] – Convenor: Professor Georgios Varouxakis (QMUL)

 The module analyses the reflections on patriotism or love of country, cosmopolitanism or attachment to Humanity, and the nation or alternative groups commanding people’s loyalty, in the thought of a great range of thinkers from classical Greece to the Age of Revolutions at the end of the 18th century (American, French, Haitian). These include Greek thought from Socrates to the Stoics; Roman debates from Cicero to Augustine; Muslim thought and Ibn Khaldun; political thought from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, from Dante to Machiavelli; English/British thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Shaftesbury, Bolingbroke, Wollstonecraft, Price, Burke, Bentham); Montesquieu and Rousseau; the Scottish Enlightenment; Kant and Herder; New World patriotism, from Franklin to Toussaint Louverture; and the contributions of Mme [Germaine] de Staël and Joseph de Maistre.

Theories of the State [HST7712] – Convenor: Professor Andrew Fitzmaurice (QMUL)

Some political theorists locate the authority to make laws and exercise political control in the figure of the ruler or prince. The seminar will begin by examining the most celebrated example, Machiavelli’s The Prince (1513). Others locate these powers in the body of the republic or people. Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) and Machiavelli’s Discourses (c1519) offer contrasting examples. After examining these texts, the course will then turn to Bodin’s theory of sovereignty and Hobbes’s claim in Leviathan (1651) that power lies with the fictional person of the state. The module will also examine rival theories of bodies politic and political authority, notably in the corporation, and in the theories of the nineteenth century pluralists. The module will focus on thinkers and texts such as Machiavelli, The Prince; Thomas More, Utopia; Machiavelli, The Discourses; Jean Bodin, Six Books of the Commonwealth; Charter of the East India Company/ Charter of the Virginia Company; Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan; John Locke, The Two Treatises; Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract; F.W. Maitland, State, Trust, and Corporation; Harold Laski, Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty.

Infamous Writings: Controversies and Receptions in the History of Political Thought [HIST0396] – Convenor: Professor Peter Schroeder (UCL)

Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Rousseau are probably among the most notorious writers of the early modern period. Other lesser-known thinkers like, for instance, Pufendorf or Mandeville, could be added to this list. This course will analyse key arguments of their writings and some of the prominent contemporary responses to them. The underlying aim of this course is to re-establish some of the main aspects of the political and philosophical discourses of the early modern period. One underlying leading question is to assess how these texts and thinkers related to each other. We will explore how different arguments were taken up, reformulated, challenged or even (deliberately) distorted. It is highly desirable that students have already studied early modern European History at undergraduate level, and ideally, you should also have at least some knowledge of the history of political thought.

Liberty, Reason, and the State: British Moral and Political Thought in Early Modernity [7AAH2035] – Convenor: Dr Hannah Dawson (KCL)

The English Revolution seemed to turn the world upside down – the king, who believed himself appointed by God, was tried and executed for being an enemy to the liberty of the people. Political struggles continued to reshape the state, social relations, and self-understanding. The Enlightenment, with its own deep roots in antiquity and renaissance humanism, spoke anew about freedom and equality. Remarkable texts and ideas broke out of these unfolding contexts, and this module will explore some of the most exciting of these, including theories of republicanism, levelling, power, rights, gender, race, and selfhood, and the writings of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Mary Astell, Phillis Wheatley, Ottabah Cugoano, and Mary Wollstonecraft.

Merleau-Ponty and the History of Social Thought [HIST0750] – Convenor: Dr Iain Stewart (UCL)

Intellectual historians have paid little attention to the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-61), yet he was pivotal to several major developments of twentieth-century intellectual history. Though less well-known than other existentialist philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, he was a formative influence on the French reception of phenomenology, Marxism, and structural linguistics, and as political editor of the leading left-wing magazine Les temps modernes he made significant interventions in political debates over the Cold War, decolonisation and more. These innovations and interventions proved influential far beyond France. Yet the historical question of Merleau-Ponty’s contribution to modern social thought has been largely ignored. This will be the focus of our module.

In its classical formulation by the philosopher Edmund Husserl, phenomenology, the philosophical tradition in which Merleau-Ponty worked, was ill-equipped to account for the social dimensions of human experience because it grounded knowledge of the world in the constituting consciousness of the individual. Merleau-Ponty’s historical importance lies firstly in the way that he reoriented phenomenology towards the social.  In doing so, he drew widely on empirical research in neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, linguistics, psychoanalysis, and the arts. This makes him a particularly important and fascinating figure who paved the way towards a reorientation of French philosophy towards the human sciences while writing on a remarkably broad range of subjects, from art and literary criticism to sexuality and political theory.

Merleau-Ponty’s historical importance as a political thinker, broadly conceived, will be an important theme of the module. This subject has been so neglected as to lead some recent commentators to see the omission as resting on a tacit scholarly consensus.  Insofar as he is (mis-)remembered as a prominent apologist for Stalinism during the early Cold War, Merleau-Ponty’s politics did not fit well with the first wave of rehabilitative scholarship on him that developed at the end of the Cold War. And his eventual endorsement of parliamentary democracy and a “new liberalism” have often been ignored or downplayed by his recent admirers on the left. Merleau-Ponty thus seems to have a contradictory political heritage: at once emblematic of Marxist existentialism and the wider sympathy at a distance that many left intellectuals felt for communism in the early Cold War, his later writings and activism foreshadowed the “liberal moment” that transformed the politics of French intellectual life towards the end of the twentieth century.

Despite the diversity of his interests and the apparent contradictions of his politics, Merleau-Ponty’s social thought is grounded in a remarkably consistent philosophical project whose central preoccupation is to overcome the restrictive dualisms of modern philosophy, exploding dichotomies such as mind/body, materialism/idealism, individual/society. This makes him a particularly fascinating figure for the intellectual historian because he can be approached not only a public intellectual intervening in contemporary political debates, or as a major figure in the history of modern social thought, but also as a philosopher whose insights are methodologically relevant to the practice of intellectual history itself.

Selfhood and Sensibility in The European Enlightenment [7AAH2032 ]. Convenor: Professor Adam Sutcliffe (KCL)

This module focuses on the history of selfhood in the ‘long Enlightenment’ (c.1670-1800), looking at philosophical approaches to the nature of the self, literary and cultural explorations of human emotional responses to the feelings of others (‘sensibility’), and the political ramifications of these cultural and intellectual changes. Core readings will split roughly evenly between primary texts (mostly influential works of philosophy but including some fiction) and notable recent historiographical studies. Starting with some key late seventeenth-century texts by John Locke and Baruch Spinoza that were hugely influential in the following century, we then look at the emergence of materialist understandings of the self in the early eighteenth century, and at the explosion of interest in ‘sentiment’ in both fiction and in moral and economic thought in the latter half of the century. We will conclude with a consideration of the significance of changing concepts of the self in the political and cultural upheavals of the American and French Revolutions. Two themes will recur at various points in the course: the development of individualist approaches to ethics and belief as an alternative to traditional religion, and the formation of notions of selfhood in juxtaposition to ‘others’, whether across the gender divide or in contrast to non-Europeans or minorities such as Jews.

Birkbeck, University of London, elective/s: t.b.a.

 

Courses that have run in previous years:

 

The Public Sphere in Britain, 1476-1800

Theories of Empire: from Enlightenment to Liberalism

Selfhood, Sensibility and the Politics of Difference in the European Enlightenment

Enlightenment and Revolution: Political Ideas in the British Isles, 1688-1800

Signs, Mind, and Society: Early Modern Theories of Language

Visions of Capitalism

Crisis and Future in Nineteenth-Century European Thought

Political Thought in Renaissance Europe

The Invention of the Question: a History of European Thinking, 1100-1400

Adam Smith and the State