Reforming Ideas in Britain

Mark Philp is Fellow and Tutor in Politics at Oriel College and University Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of Oxford. He has written extensively on political thought and political movements in Britain at the time of the French Revolution. He is the author of books on Paine and William Godwin, is the General Editor of The Collected Writings of William Godwin and directed the Leverhulme-funded project digitising and editing Godwin's diary (available at: http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk). He has also written widely on political theory, specialising on political realism, methods, political corruption and political conduct. He is the co-founder of the research network 'Re-imagining Democracy 1750–1850'. He teaches and supervises widely in political theory and political sociology. He is a member of learned societies in history and in politics, held a BA/Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship from 1999 to 2000, and is an Officier des Palmes Académiques. From 2000 to 2005 he was the first head of the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford. He has been the chair of the Research Advisory Board to the Committee on Standards in Public Life since 2007.

• Introduction; 1. The fragmented ideology of reform; 2. Vulgar conservatism; 3. Disconcerting ideas: explaining popular radicalism and popular loyalism in the 1790s; 4. English republicanism in the 1790s; 5. Failing the republic: political virtues and vices in the late eighteenth century; 6. Paine's experiments; 7. Revolutionaries in Paris: Paine, Jefferson and democracy; 8. Godwin, Thelwall and the means of progress; 9. Politics and memory: Nelson and Trafalgar in popular song; 10. The elusive principle: collective self-determination in the late eighteenth century; 11. Time to talk.

'Reforming Ideas in Britain will transform the way in which political debate has conventionally been studied and interpreted during the years of the French Revolution and its aftermath. In place of the confrontation between opposed but settled traditions of thought or behaviour, what is highlighted is a developing process of polarization, whose features were as much experimental and theatrical as ideological and whose fragmentation and inconsistencies characterized both sides of the argument. This is not simply a new and exciting way of understanding the debates around the French Revolution; it is an approach to the understanding of the history of ideas which ought to be employed in the study of other periods of political contestation.' Gareth Stedman Jones, Director, Centre for History and Economics, King's College, Cambridge