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 2026/2027:

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.

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.

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).

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.

World in Crisis: Rethinking Politic al Ethics [POL7013P]

This module examines the global ethical dilemmas challenging state sovereignty and the contemporary international order. Students will explore how existing political structures and conventional ethical thinking are strained by shifting power dynamics, technological innovation, and the increasing interconnectedness of our material and natural worlds. Module content will vary each year, but indicative topics include the ethical challenges presented by the legacies of colonialism, the transformation of war by new violent technologies, and the existential threat of the climate crisis.

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.

Latin America in Global Intellectual History [INU7066] – Convenor: Prof. Nicola Miller

In this MA option, students will have the opportunity to test the claims and approaches of global intellectual history on the rich material created in Latin America about key questions of the modern era. We will explore how best to understand the intellectual history of Latin America: does it suffice to focus on outstanding individuals and canonical texts, or do we need to assemble a far broader range of evidence? We will test the purchase of terms such as global and transnational, and seek to identify what really happens when ideas are translated from one society to another, especially when they move from more powerful to less powerful societies (in this period, mainly ideas from Europe). We will analyse how political systems first developed in Europe – such as modern republicanism, liberalism, nationalism or Marxism – were interpreted and reinvented in Latin America, and also look at the extent to which Latin American experiences and ideas contributed to debates in Europe and elsewhere.

From Hume to Darwin [INK7045] – Convenor: Dr Niall O’Flaherty (KCL)

Selfhood and Sensibility in the European Enlightenment  [INK7094] Dr Adam Sutcliffe (KCL)

Metropolis: The Making of the Modern City [INU7006P] Dr Simon Macdonald

Birkbeck, University of London, elective/s: .

The Philosophy of Nietzsche [INB7021] – Convenor: Professor Richard Elliott

 

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