olivier higginsKing’s College oh258@cam.ac.uk |
Olivier earned his Bachelor of Humanities degree at Carleton University in Ottawa, completing an exchange at the University of Edinburgh and graduating in 2015. In 2017, he took an MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History at Cambridge. His MPhil dissertation, ‘Kant and Revolutionary Enthusiasm’, focused on the last text Immanuel Kant published (1798), showing how its commentary on German spectators of the French Revolution helps resolve longstanding controversies in Kant’s thought on politics and history.
Olivier’s PhD is about the power necessary to enforce political ideals. Focusing on German idealist political philosophy from Immanuel Kant to G. W. F. Hegel, his doctoral project, “Power, Progress and the Principle of Right (Recht), 1781-1821”, examines how these political thinkers projected a rational idea of justice or “Recht” onto shifting forms of political power after the French Revolution, from the might of absolute monarchies to the groundswell of the nation. This research examines in particular how Kant’s idealist successors, including J.B. Erhard, J.G. Fichte, Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, reimagined the idealism of perpetual peace from within a Prussian political culture that had begun to question the future of German political structures and the possibilities of enlightened monarchy. Olivier has conducted part of this research at the Interdisciplinary Centre for European Enlightenment Studies in Halle.