Dr Christopher Brooke
MA AM PHD
College position:
Director of Studies in Politics
Christopher Brooke is University Senior Lecturer in Political Theory in the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS), where he is currently Director of Undergraduate Education, and he is also Fellow and Director of Studies in Politics here at Homerton College. His book, Philosophic Pride: Stoicism and Political Thought from Lipsius to Rousseau was published by Princeton University Press in 2012; more recently he has co-edited with Elizabeth Frazer Ideas of Education: Philosophy and Politics from Plato to Dewey (Routledge, 2013), and edited Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan for Penguin (2017). Current projects include a book manuscript provisionally called The Idea of a European Union, a history of distributive political theory since 1700, and a general history of political thought in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Subject areas
Politics and International Studies
Teaching And Professional Interests
- The History of the History of Political Thought (PhD class, since 2014)
- The Political Thought of Michel Foucault (MPhil class, from 2021)
- The History of Political Thought (Part II, all periods)
- The Modern State and its Alternatives (Part I)
Links to online publications, articles or other work
- ‘Nonintrinsic egalitarianism, from Hobbes to Rousseau’, The Journal of Politics, vol. 82, no. 4, (October 2020), pp. 1406-17.
- ‘Robert Malthus, Rousseauist’, The Historical Journal, vol. 63, no. 1 (February 2020), pp. 15-31.
- ‘Wollstonecraft and Rousseau’, for The Wollstonecraftian Mind, Alan Coffee, Sandrine Bergès, and Eileen Hunt Botting, eds. (London: Routledge, 2019), pp.161-170.
- ‘Arsehole Aristocracy (or: Montesquieu on honour, revisited)’, European Journal of Political Theory, vol. 17, no. 4 (October 2018), pp. 391-410.
- Review of Keith Tribe, The Economy of the Word: Language, History, and Economics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), for Max Weber Studies (2017), pp. 108-12.
- Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Christopher Brooke, ed. (London: Penguin, 2017).
- 'Eighteenth-century Carthage', in Commerce and Peace in the Enlightenment, Bela Kapossy, Isaac Nakhimovsky, and Richard Whatmore, eds. (Cambridge University Press: 2017), pp. 110-24.
- '"The porch to a collectivism as absolute as the mind of man has ever conceived". Rousseau scholarship in Britain, from the Great War to the Cold War', in Avi Lifschitz, ed., Engaging with Rousseau (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 136-51.
- 'Isaiah Berlin and the origins of the "totalitarian" Rousseau', in Ritchie Robertson and Laurence Brockliss, eds., Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 89-98.
- Rawls on Rousseau and the general will’, in The General Will: the Evolution of a Concept, David Lay Williams and James Farr, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 429-46.
- Oscar Wilde, Edward Carpenter and the socialist eros, New Left Project, January 2014.
- [edited, with Elizabeth Frazer] Ideas of Education: Philosophy and Politics from Plato to Dewey (London: Routledge, 2013).
- ‘Introduction’, to Robert Wokler, Rousseau, the Age of Enlightenment and their Legacies, Bryan Garsten, ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), pp. ix–xiv.
- Philosophic Pride: Stoicism and Political Thought from Lipsius to Rousseau (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012).
- Affection in education: Edward Carpenter, John Addington Symonds and the politics of Greek love, Oxford Review of Education, vol. 37, no. 5 (2011), pp. 683–98.
- ‘Rousseau’s Second Discourse, between Epicureanism and Stoicism’, in Rousseau and Freedom, Stanley Hoffmann and Christie MacDonald, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 44–57.
- ‘“Locke en particulier les a traitées exactement dans les mêmes principes que moi”: revisiting the relationship between Locke and Rousseau’, in Locke’s political liberty: readings and misreadings, Christophe Miqueu and Mason Chamie, eds (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, SVEC, 2009:04), pp. 69–82.
- ‘In Roman costume and with Roman phrases: Skinner, Pettit and Hobbes on republican liberty’, Hobbes Studies, vol. 22 (2009), pp. 178–84.
- ‘Grotius, Stoicism and Oikeiosis’, in Grotiana, vol. 29 (2008), pp. 25–50.
- Review of Axel Honneth, Reification: a New Look at an Old Idea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), in Philosophy, vol. 84, no. 3 (July 2009), pp. 441–5.
- ‘Aux limites de la volonté générale: silence, exil, ruse et désobéissance dans la pensée politique de Rousseau’, Les études philosophiques, 2007–4 (octobre), pp. 425–44.
- ‘Light from the Fens?’, New Left Review, 2.44 (March–April 2007), pp. 151–60.
- ‘How the Stoics became atheists’, The Historical Journal, vol. 49, no. 2 (June 2006), pp. 387–402.
- ‘Rousseau’s political philosophy: Stoic and Augustinian origins’ in Patrick Riley, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau (Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 94–123.
