Past Speakers

2019-2020
Karuna Mantena (Columbia University)
Three Faces of Gandhian Non-Violence

2018-2019
James Harris (University of St. Andrews)
The Most Difficult Question of Any: Political Obligation in 18th-century British Political Thought

2017-2018
Kinch Hoekstra (University of California, Berkeley)
Thomas Hobbes on History, Politics, and Philosophy

2015-2016
John Robertson (Cambridge)
The Sacred and the Social: 1650-1790

2014-2015
David Wootton (University of York)
Shakespeare Skirmishes

2012-2013
Julia Annas (Arizona)
Virtue and the Rule of Law in Plato and Beyond

2010-2011
Istvan Hont (Cambridge)
Rousseau and Smith: Political Theorists of Commercial Society

2009-2010
Danielle Allen (Institute for Advanced Study)
Why Plato Wrote (published as Why Plato Wrote. Malden, MA: Wiley, 2010)

2008-2009
Susan James (Birkbeck College)
Narrative as the Means to Spinozist Freedom (delivered as part of a conference on Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus)

2007-2008
Carla Hesse (Berkeley)
Enlightened Women and the Origins of Feminism (delivered as part of a conference on Enlightenment and the Origins of Feminism)

2007-2008
Michael Rosen (Harvard)
The Shibboleth of all empty headed moralists: the place of dignity in ethics and political philosophy (published as Dignity: Its History and Meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012)

2003-2004
Quentin Skinner (Cambridge)
Thomas Hobbes: Freedom, Representation, and the State (published as Hobbes and Republican Liberty. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008)

2003-2004
David Armitage (Columbia)
The Foundations of Modern International Thought (published as The Foundations of International Thought. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012)

2002-2003
Janet Coleman (London School of Economics)
Public Rationality in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

2001-2002
Richard Tuck (Harvard University)
Hobbes and Rousseau

1989-1999
Margaret Jacob (UCLA)
The Culture of Politics in Early Modern Europe

1997-1998
David Gauthier (Pittsburgh)
Rousseau: The Social and the Solitary (published as Rousseau: The Social and the Solitary. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006)