Senior lecturer in intellectual history
University of Sussex
Research expertise
The Scottish Enlightenment and especially Adam Ferguson; ideas of empire, war and peace, democracy and commerce during the Enlightenment; Caesarism and democracy in the long nineteenth century; nineteenth-century political economy; the conceptual history of ‘ochlocracy’; the history of historiography (especially in post-Napoleonic Germany).
Contributions
Concepts
Scottish Enlightenment
The Scottish Enlightenment is an epoch-making intellectual current within the European history of sociability. First, this is an exceptional blending of the theory and practice of sociable culture, which was rendered possible by refined urban settings in middle-scale cities, distinct from both London and Paris. Secondly, the Scottish Enlightenment unprecedentedly contributed to theorising sociability not only through systematic analysis of human social nature, but also writing philosophical or ‘conjectural’ histories of the development of human societies, which would at least partly be succeeded by historical sociology developed in the post-Enlightenment period.