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Dr Iain McDaniel

Teaching Fellow in the History of Political Thought

Office: 302, 23 Gordon Square
Office hour: Tuesday 2-3pm
External phone: 020 7629 3856
Internal phone: 33856
E-mail: i.mcdaniel@ucl.ac.uk

My main interests are in the history of political thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. My first book, Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Roman Past and Europe’s Future (2013), has recently been published by Harvard University Press. Situating Adam Ferguson in the context of Scottish Enlightenment debates about modern Europe’s future, the book reconstructs Ferguson’s thinking about ancient Rome’s collapse in empire and dictatorship and its relevance for understanding the prospects facing modern constitutional states. I am also interested in the intellectual history of republicanism, empire and democracy, in the role of classical history in shaping modern political thought, and in the relationship between political thought and the natural sciences. I have recently published articles on republicanism and empire, commerce, sociability and patriotism in late eighteenth-century British and European political thought. I am currently working on a book-length study of the idea of Caesarism in nineteenth- and early twentieth century political thought. This project focuses mainly on continental European material, and relates the issue of Caesarism to debates about imperialism, democracy, and the social question. Yet while firmly historical in focus, my research on this topic aims to shed contemporary debates about popular sovereignty and democratic legitimation.

At UCL I teach a number of courses in the history of political thought, including the full-year course “The History of Political Thought,” a half-unit course on “State, Sovereignty and Liberty in Eighteenth-Century Political Thought,” and an MA module “Political Thought in Renaissance Europe.” I was British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cambridge between 2005 and 2008, and worked as a research fellow at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, between 2008 and 2011.

Select publications:

“Philosophical History and the Science of Man in Scotland: Adam Ferguson’s response to Rousseau,” Modern Intellectual History, forthcoming, autumn 2013

Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Roman Past and Europe’s Future (Harvard University Press, 2013)

“Jean-Louis Delolme and the Political Science of the English Empire,” Historical Journal, 55 (2012), 21-44

“Enlightened history and the decline of nations: Ferguson, Raynal, and the contested legacies of the Dutch Republic”, History of European Ideas, 36 (2010), 203-16

“Adam Ferguson, Roman History, and the threat of military government in modern Europe”, in Vincenzo Merolle & Eugene Heath (eds.), Adam Ferguson: History, Progress and Human Nature (London, Pickering and Chatto, 2008), 115-130