Cambridge In America

Video - Gareth Stedman Jones - 'A New View of the Origins of Contemporary Political Debate'

'Cambridge and the Transformation of the History of Ideas: A New View of the Origins of Contemporary Political Debate'
Gareth Stedman Jones (Fellow, King's)
Director of the Centre for History and Economics, Cambridge

Introduced by Dame Patricia Hodgson (Principal of Newnham College, Cambridge)

Cambridge in America Day 2008
San Francisco, Grand Hyatt Union Square
April 5, 2008

"Since the 1960s Cambridge University has been associated with a distinctive way of understanding intellectual history and the history of political thought. In this approach a text is understood as the intervention of an author within a particular discursive context which it is the task of the historian to reconstruct. In this talk, I will draw attention to its consequences for the understanding of more recent periods, and for economic as well as political thought. Having set this background, I shall go on to discuss my own work on conceptions of commercial society before and after the French Revolution."

Gareth Stedman Jones is Director of the Centre for History and Economics since 1991; Professor of Political Science, History Faculty, Cambridge University since 1997; and a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge University since 1974. His main works include Outcast London, 1971; Languages of Class, 1983; The Communist Manifesto, 2002; An End to Poverty?, 2005. He is currently editing the nineteenth century volume of the Cambridge History of Political Thought, and writing a biography of Marx.