The Interaction between Political, Economic and Religious Ideas 1750-1950

2008-

Structures and Transformations in Modern British History (CUP, 2011)
David Feldman and Jon Lawrence (eds.)
Inspired by the work of Gareth Stedman Jones

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 and Benjamin 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 which was held at the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge in July 2011. 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 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.

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.

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