Interventions | The Intellectual History Podcast

• African-American Ideas about Race (with Mia Bay)

  After the founding of the American Republic, African-American Intellectuals never accepted passively the narratives of racial difference maintained by the defenders of slavery and segregation. At a time when the belief in human equality was under attack from religious reactionaries and scientific innovators alike, Black thinkers succeeded in vindicating the unity of the human community as a divinely created whole, in constructing their own science of the races in opposition to white theories of human inequality, and eventually in brining about the demise of the idea of race as a legitimate object of scientific inquiry.Join Mia Bay, one of the most penetrating authors writing on American history today, as she leads us along the twisted paths which ideas of race have taken since the nineteenth century, pointing along the way to the place of Thomas Jefferson in Black American thought and the work of the great anti-lynching campaigner Ida B. Wells. 

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• Liberty as Independence (with Quentin Skinner)

  Sometime in the eighteenth century, a great transformation took place in the language of liberty. Since the days of the Roman Republic, to be free had meant to be independent of the arbitrary will of another. You enjoyed freedom if nobody could impose their will on you without your prior consent. You were free if you were your own master, and you were unfree to the extent that you answered to anyone else. This was the concept of liberty which dominated political discourse in England until the outbreak of the American Revolution and Revolutionary War. How it gave way in the wake of the Declaration of Independence to the idea of freedom as absence of restraint — to the concept of negative liberty — is the question that Quentin Skinner, the doyen of intellectual historians in the English-speaking world, attempts to answer. In doing so, he also questions whether the road that was taken was the right one for a democratic society to take. In order to be free, is it enough that we encounter no obstruction on our way, or is something more, and more fundamental, required? 

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• Abolitionist Ideas: Battling the Slave Trade in Britain

  If you visited Britain around 1700, you’d find hardly a single advocate of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. You’d hear the institution of slavery described as a moral evil, but no one would tell you that it could be done away with if only people put their minds to it. Slavery was supported by monarchy, government, church, and public opinion in general. Yet in 1807, the trade in enslaved Africans was abolished throughout the British Empire. How and why this momentous shift in public opinion took place remains a topic of heated debate, with the roles of material interest and lofty idealism proving difficult to disentangle. Join John Coffey, one of the finest historians of religious and political ideas working in Britain today, as he grapples with the question of British slavery’s dramatic, if incomplete, eclipse. 

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• Carl Schmitt: The Thoughtful Nazi (with Lars Vinx and Samuel Zeitlin)

  Why is Carl Schmitt one of the most widely read political theorists of the twentieth century? A lifelong antisemite, a petty careerist, a Nazi ideologue who only avoided being tried at Nuremberg because he wasn’t considered important enough, Schmitt was an unlikely candidate for canonical fame. And yet from today’s perspective, few other authors present as many opportunities to think through the struggles of the twentieth century. From the besieged cities of the First World War to the global delusions of the Cold War superpowers, the stuff of Schmitt’s thought both excites and repels, forcing us to face a world in which liberal democracy is the enemy and fool. Join Lars Vinx and Samuel Zeitlin as they travel in time from Schmitt’s early years in Catholic Westphalia to his spectral afterlife in today’s divided world, shedding light on his theories of dictatorship, the political, sovereignty, and law.

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• Indigenous Ideas: A Global Perspective (with Saliha Belmessous)

  In 1686, a French witness spoke openly of a Native American declaration of independence. ‘We have to assume’, he said, ‘that the Iroquois do not accept any master’. Claims such as this were made frequently throughout the history of European colonialism, forming a rich tapestry of indigenous ideas. Although often dismissed by historians as badly documented and politically irrelevant fictions, these ideas helped shape the destiny of peoples and polities across the globe, from New Zealand and New Caledonia to Ontario and Quebec. Join Saliha Belmessous, a leading light in the emerging field of indigenous intellectual history, as she looks at the legacy of the Treaty of Waitangi, visits the insulated offices of Victorian lawyers, and reflects on the interplay of colonial cooperation and violence. 

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