The Interaction between Political, Economic and Religious Ideas 1750-1950
The Interaction between Political, Economic and Religious Ideas 1750-1950 is coordinated by Gareth Stedman Jones. The project follows on from research undertaken in ‘Coexistence, Religion and the Political Imagination’ and is supported by the Edmond de Rothschild Foundations.
The project will be concentrated upon a number of themes:
- The combined impact of the spread of enlightenment thinking
- The late eighteenth-century revolutions
- The fundamental challenge posed by the French Revolution to religious orthodoxy upon different areas in Europe and the wider world both immediately and in the succeeding century
The extent of the discontinuity produced around the turn of the eighteenth century, whether in economic, republican, democratic or religious thought has not been systematically considered. For example, natural jurisprudence, the idiom in which so much systematic thought had been conducted in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, went into irreversible decline. Conversely, there emerged a new form of political thought crossing existing religious, political and economic lines – what came to be called ‘socialism’. These were some of the enduring effects of this period of major disruption in world history.
As part of this project, Gareth Stedman Jones is Joint Programme Director of the Ariane de Rothschild Fellowship. This programme is connected to a Summer School to be held at the Møller Centre, University of Cambridge in August 2013. Further information is available on the programme web site.
The Centre for History and Economics provides the historical and intellectual components of the programme in collaboration with academics based at the Judge Business School, who provide the venue and the course in social entrepreneurship. The aim is to equip participants with an up to date and sophisticated knowledge of the state of debate about such issues as secularisation, toleration, coexistence in modern and pre-modern times, on the modern foundations of fundamentalism and other related topics.
1848 as a Turning Point in the History of Political Thought
11-12 April 2012
A two-day conference took place in King's College as part of the programme on The Interaction between Political, Economic and Religious Ideas 1750-1950. The aim of the meeting was to discuss the new project strand which examines 1848 as a turning point in the history of political thought. This will be a major investigation reconsidering the significance of 1848 both in Europe and the wider world. The events of the Arab Spring remind us how uncertain patterns, developments and successes of revolutions might be. Not only will we examine the Revolutions of 1848 in a global setting, but we shall also be applying the new approaches to the history of political thought, which have been developed in Cambridge and elsewhere since the 1970s. Click for the programme and participant list.
Politics, Faith and Reason
15-16 March 2010
The Centre supported Third Cambridge Graduate Conference in Political Thought and Intellectual History took place in King’s College, Cambridge on March 15-16 2010. This year’s theme was Politics, Faith and Reason and papers were invited for consideration which dealt with any period and tradition in the history of political thought from antiquity to the present. The aim of the graduate conferences is to provide an opportunity for outstanding graduate students to present and discuss their work in a collegial and supportive atmosphere. Click for the programme and report.