HomeThe department currently has six members working in the field of political theory and the history of political ideas: Prof Jeremy Jennings, Dr Caroline Williams, Dr Madeleine Davis , Dr Mark Pennington, Dr Lasse Thomassen and Dr Patricia Owens. There are also a number of postgraduate students working in this area, on topics including ethics and politics in post-structuralist thought and the contemporary relevance of Spinoza's ontology and politics. The strengths of political theory in the Department lie mainly in the fields of the history of political ideas and continentally inspired contemporary political theory, with additional strengths in liberalism and in international political theory. The Department also has close links with the Centre for the Study of the History of Political Thought
History of political ideas
Jeremy Jennings works on the history of political thought, largely with reference to France . He has published on issues relating to political thought and ideologies from the seventeenth century to the present day. In addition, he has published two edited collections of essays devoted to the examination of the role of intellectuals in politics and, more recently, an edited collection of essays exploring themes associated with republicanism in theory and practice. In 2004 he published a four-volume edited collection of essays on socialism. His work is presently focused upon two projects: a study of political thought in France from the eighteenth century to the present day (for Oxford University Press) and a recently completed edition of the writings of the French liberal Alexis de Tocqueville on America (for Cambridge University Press). He has published extensively in a wide range of journals, including American Political Science Review , Review of Politics and The Journal of the History of Ideas . The latter explore subjects relating to political thought in eighteenth and nineteenth-century France : the debate about luxury, the significance of the American experience, democracy and representation, and French visions of England . Prof Jennings is one of the founding editors of the European Journal of Political Theory . He is also the Director of the newly-established Centre for the Study of the History of Political Thought at Queen Mary. This is a cross-departmental institute located within the Graduate School bringing together scholars from different disciplines with a research interest in the history of political thought.
Caroline Williams is currently working on the political philosophy of Baruch de Spinoza: Spinoza and Political Critique: Thinking the Political in the Wake of Althusser . This research places Spinoza in his own time and situates his philosophy and political thought within the history of ideas (particularly the thought of Hobbes and Rousseau). It also develops a novel reading of his philosophy, and argues that many of Spinoza's ideas find radical expression in Althusserian and post-Althusserian political philosophy. She has also recently published ‘Reading Spinoza Today' in Contemporary Political Theory (2002), ‘Spinoza: Politics, Power and the Multitude', in Terrell Carver and James Martin (eds), Palgrave Advances in Continental Political Thought (Palgrave, 2004), and ‘Thinking the Political in the Wake of Spinoza: Power, Affect and Imagination in the Ethics ' in Contemporary Political Theory (2007) .
Madeleine Davis ' main interest is in the history of political ideas, with particular reference to the assimilation of Marxist ideas in Britain in the post-war period, and the relationship between theory and practice on the political left. She is currently writing a book on The British New Left and its Legacy (for Pluto Press). This examines the New Left as a diffuse but coherent intellectual tradition, exploring its nature as a political and intellectual intervention, its reworking of Marxism, and its theoretical and political legacy. She has also recently contributed a chapter on ‘Labourism and the New Left' to Steve Fielding, Steve Ludlam and John Callaghan (eds), Interpreting the Labour Party: Approaches to Labour Politics and History (Manchester University Press, 2003), which examines the critiques of ‘labourism' offered by New Left thinkers including Ralph Miliband, John Saville and Tom Nairn; and she has recently published ‘The Marxism of the British New Left' in Journal of Political Ideologies (2006).
Continental philosophy and political thought
Lasse Thomassen 's research falls within contemporary political thought with particular emphasis on continentally inspired political theory. His current research is focused on three areas. First, he is doing research on the relationship between, on one hand, Jacques Derrida and deconstruction and, on the other hand, Jürgen Habermas, critical theory and deliberative democracy. The outcome of this research is so far The Derrida-Habermas Reader (Edinburgh University Press, 2006) and Deconstructing Habermas (Routledge, 2007). Second, he examines debates within radical democratic theory, for instance debates surrounding Laclau and Mouffe's work and debates between so-called theorists of abundance and theorists of lack in Radical democracy: Politics between abundance and lack (Manchester University Press, 2005). Finally, Dr Thomassen is embarking on a larger research project – ‘Deconstructing Tolerance' – where he examines contemporary theories and cases of tolerance, including the so-called Mohammed cartoons controversy.
Caroline Williams has strong research interests in contemporary theory, with a particular interest in continental political theory. Her work here has centred on philosophical issues around subjectivity and selfhood. Her monograph on poststructuralist thought and the question of the subject, Contemporary French Philosophy: Modernity and the Persistence of the Subject was published by Continuum in 2001. This work situates poststructuralism in relation to modern philosophical developments and focuses in particular on the work of Althusser, Lacan, Derrida and Foucault. It contests those postmodern critics who announce the disappearance or death of the subject, arguing instead that the subject persists even in those perspectives that seek to abandon it altogether. Dr Williams has written on the question of ideology in contemporary Marxist thought (from Althusser to Castoriadis), and here her interest has been in exploring ideas of the imaginary and imagination, and their contribution to a theory of agency. She also has a particular research interest in Althusserian and post-Althusserian political theory.
Liberalism
Mark Pennington has research interests in the field of classical liberal political theory with a particular focus on the Scottish Enlightenment of Smith, Hume and Ferguson and their contemporary manifestation in the work of Hayek. His current research examines the similarities between the conception of ‘the self' evident in these writers' works and contemporary developments in post-modern political theory. Building on previous work which has used Hayekian ideas to develop a critique of Habermas, Dr Pennington is now working on a synthesis between Hayek's epistemology and that of the later Foucault to outline the contours of a postmodern liberalism.
Jeremy Jennings also shares interests in the history of classical liberalism. He has written extensively on the history of liberalism in France from the eighteenth century to the present day. He has two chapters forthcoming on Benjamin Constant and on Constitutional Liberalism in France (both for Cambridge University Press), has completed a volume on Alexis de Tocqueville, and is presently writing a further essay on Tocqueville and a general essay on nineteenth-century liberalism (for Oxford University Press). In addition, he has been working extensively on the history of political economy in nineteenth century France and is presently editing Destutt de Tracy's Principles of Political Economy .
International Political Theory
Patricia Owens ' work in international political theory is inspired by 20 th century political thought. She has addressed a number of normative and ethical questions in her research. This includes joining with classical realists to challenge neo-conservative ideological thinking, challenging liberal and critical theory efforts to justify humanitarian military intervention and the post-structuralist blurring of the distinction between politics and war. She recently published Between War and Politics: International Relations and the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Oxford University Press, 2007). This is the first book length study of war in the thought of one of the 20 th 's most important and original political thinkers. Hannah Arendt's writing was fundamentally rooted in her understanding of war and its political significance. Yet, this element of her work has surprisingly been neglected in international and political theory. The book fills an important gap by assessing the full range of Arendt's historical and conceptual writing on war and introduces to international theory the distinct language she used to talk about war and the political world. It builds on her re-thinking of old concepts such as power, violence, greatness, world, imperialism, evil, hypocrisy and humanity and introduces some that are new to international thought like plurality, action, agonism, natality and political immortality.
