Here’s the transcript of an interview I did with the communications office at Trinity College Cambridge after I was invited to meet the President of Ireland back in December, but which they forgot to publish online.
- You seem to have wide-ranging scholarly interests. Why are these particular areas of interest to you and what can their intersection reveal or help us with today?
‘I would answer that question first by invoking a maxim of the late Istvan Hont, formerly the Professor of Political Thought here at Cambridge, that the historian should not engage with the past for purposes of mere antiquarian interest. Historians ought to approach history, and the histories of political thought and philosophy specifically, in the assurance that they stand to provide a wealth of potential insight to enable us, on the one hand, to delineate and explain the long-term historical processes that have led us to our present moment and, on the other, to extend our intellectual vocabularies via the critical re-appropriation of neglected ideas from the past. History, in this respect, offers a source of enlightenment as much as a tool to the sceptic. It helps us to understand the world around us and why it came to be that way, while also providing the stable basis required for developing a reasoned critique of our circumstances. History, as understood by the Anglo-Irish philosopher Edmund Burke, acts as a ‘preceptor of prudence’; one requires an appreciation of history, and the fact that we, our cultures, and our political institutions, are all products of history, in order to change them effectively in line with where history has deposited us.
My own background is in philosophy and history, and Irish history specifically. Yet, it would be difficult to find two disciplines that are more antithetical if not hostile to one another in an Irish context. This has had a deleterious effect on Irish studies and has unnecessarily constrained the reach and potential of Irish history itself. The purpose of my doctoral research here in Cambridge, building off the work of prior historians in treating Ireland within a nexus of transnational European contexts, is to demonstrate the many potential dividends that lie with a more concrete integration of Irish history with the type of intellectual history pioneered in Cambridge. One component of that broader project lies in demonstrating how certain neglected intellectual traditions from Ireland’s may be able to provide the resources and inspiration that will prove essential if we seek to address the major political, cultural and social questions that will gradually re-define Ireland’s condition and what it is to be Irish going forward.
- Why are you meeting the President of Ireland?
‘It is probably safe to say that unlike most heads of state today, the Irish President, Michael D. Higgins, is a cultivated intellectual. His tenure as president, although significant in many ways, will be memorable overall for his re-defining the role of the presidency in Irish public life. Officially a ceremonial position, Higgins recognised the neglected potential of the office on his first election in 2011. A sociologist by training, he has from the very beginning of his political career in the 1970s been a persistent advocate for the causes of social justice, civic inclusivity, and national reconciliation in Ireland. Ireland was lucky, I think, to have Higgins as head of state during the Decade of Centenaries (2012-22). This was a period of successive centenary commemorations for such pivotal episodes in Ireland’s recent past as the Easter Rising (1916), the War of Independence (1919-21), partition between Northern Ireland and the South (1921), Irish independence from the United Kingdom (1922), and the calamitous Civil War (1922-23). It provided an opportunity for people in Ireland from all backgrounds to assemble and discuss these formative events, for they together have shaped Ireland’s internal condition, its place in the world, and its relationship with its nearest neighbour. It also encouraged Irish historians, philosophers, policy advisors, politicians, artists, and the general public to reflect broadly on the failures and achievements of a century of Irish statehood. The desired goal of this was that we would gain a better sense of ourselves of a nation today by ruminating on our recent history in a spirit of critical reappraisal. That goal wasn’t met to the extent that many had envisioned. Brexit, in threatening the hard-won peace settlement in Northern Ireland and reviving a host of historic enmities, was a transitional moment. The past decade, however, has ultimately gone to show that the wounds of modern Irish history are still raw, and that the divisions set down by that history still run deep. Discussion alone won’t solve them, but it still remains a vital first step. Higgins recognises this, and has done his utmost in recent years to approach the divisions of Irish history and political reality through a perspective of humane empathy, inclusivity, and scholarly impartially. He acknowledges the vital role of historians, philosophers, and artists in helping us to navigate the Irish past and prepare for the future. This agenda provided the basis for a series of televised reflections moderated by the President and involving some of Ireland’s leading academics. Originally aired between 2020 and 2022, the Machnamh seminars offered an impartial setting for experts to commemorate and critique the course of Irish history and its reception. Though available online, the seminars are now available in print. I was invited by the President to attended the launch of this edition, which also served as retrospective assessment of the Machnamh project itself on its completion. The seminars themselves will stand; they mark the highpoint of a decade of scholarly reappraisal and revision that has enhanced our knowledge of recent Irish history and demonstrated the importance of approaching the past as a heterogeneous entity with many layers and no dominant narrative. But we still have a great deal to learn from the past, while there are various areas which have been insufficiently explored. Ultimately, however, we have yet to properly realise the value of history in aiding of course going forward. That the future in Ireland is growing more difficult to predict, as the Irish political landscape becomes steadily more volatile, is clear. If the violent protests in Dublin on 23 November 2023 do not necessarily provide an indication of what awaits us, they do provide a warning and a wake-up call. But Irish political imaginaries suffer from a pervading stasis. New political principles and ideals are called for. The civic-democratic tradition of Irish republicanism in the eighteenth century, I think, provides such a repository of political value, once we reappropriate the ideals of that period and mould them onto our own historical circumstances. The President has a keen eye for new trends in Irish intellectual life, and is warmly receptive to those with novel ideas to advance.
- Who was W.E.H. Lecky and why was he important?
‘W.E.H. Lecky was a significant figure in his own time, with the highpoint of his literary career stretching from the 1860s to the 1890s. He was an Anglo-Irish historian, philosopher, and politician who gained wide renown among his mid-Victorian bourgeoisies readership after the publication of two pathbreaking works of intellectual history in the 1860s, History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe (1865) and History of European Morals from August to Charlemagne (1869), and cemented his reputation as the leading ‘philosophical historian’ of his generation with his enormous History of England in the Eighteenth Century (1879-1890). What is particularly interesting about this work is that it was the first product of its kind to approach Irish history from a position uncontaminated by the distorting influence of party obligation. Lecky was the first historian to treat Irish history impartially, to discriminate between the ‘light and shade’ of Ireland’s tumultuous eighteenth century and assign praise or blame appropriately. What is important to recognise is that Lecky, alongside his nineteenth-century contemporaries and eighteenth-century precursors, did not purport to scholarly objectivity, but to impartiality: he advanced a particular position that coloured his presentation of Irish history, but not disproportionately. Lecky was a classical liberal who opposed democracy and defended ‘enlightened’ aristocratic government when set in harmony with the mood and tenor of middle-class public opinion. His critique of Irish constitutional arrangements in the nineteenth century, as the product of decisions taken in the eighteenth with the Act of Union of Britain and Ireland (1801), was set in these terms. They also led him to oppose, from the 1880s, the prospect of a devolved Irish government being instituted in Dublin on the successful passage of a Home Rule bill through this British Parliament. Such an event augured, for Lecky, not only the future dissolution of the British empire but the triumph of democracy over liberty in Ireland. What is remarkable about Lecky, and which hasn’t been developed satisfactorily by previous scholars, is that he saw himself as working within a continental frame of reference: his focus lay with charting the rise and development of European liberalism and secular liberal morality from the early modern period as a philosophical historian who saw history as providing the material for philosophical theorisation. The impoverished condition of Ireland by the mid nineteenth century, being one constitutive component of what was then regard by all intellectuals of the period as the most civilised and liberal nation yet bequeathed to the world by history, represented a strange aberration. Lecky recognised that the key to interpreting the cause and character of that aberration lay with the patient distillation of Ireland’s historical course and how that history had set the conditions of social, political, and intellectual life in Ireland by the 1880s. In this respect, Lecky appealed to the example of Irish history as a source of political guidance and instruction for liberal politicians in his own day. Rather than decry him for advancing a political position to the detriment of scholarly rectitude, it is much better to try and understand Lecky as operating within a context where history was employed to justify and substantiate political arguments. In this respect, given his wide interest and diverse publications, Lecky was operating on several levels of intellectual debate simultaneously, and within three sperate but inter-related contexts: the Irish, the British, and the European. Knitting these various strands together is not a straightforward task, and the desirability of this approach has not often been recognised for Lecky was rarely aligned with the tradition of philosophic historiography represented by such figures as Montesquieu, Adam Smith, or Edward Gibbon. The achievement of doing so will not only occasion a delayed re-assessment of a significant figure in nineteenth-century European intellectual history, but would provide greater incentive to scholars of Irish political thought to situate and re-interpret the development of Irish intellectual formations within diverse collections of transnational discourses. The immediate relevance of Lecky for us today, however, apart from offering a sophisticated critique of popular democracy, is that he conceptualised Irish history and English or British history as being inextricably entwined. This was indicative not only of his Anglo-Irish background, but of his conviction that the course of British constitutional development is simply unintelligible without an appreciation of Ireland’s significant place in that story. To think otherwise would be to forego historical reality, and to act on that basis would be to misunderstand the complex nature of that history and risk the ensuing consequences. Brexit seems to have vindicated Lecky, but there is much more to learn from him.
- What do you get out of writing for non-academic outlets, including the media? And what do you hope to achieve?
‘I have always enjoyed writing for media outlets, and my purpose in doing so has been less about advancing my specific research preoccupations than about advancing arguments founded on the core theoretical and methodological presuppositions of that research. Complacency, as Edmund Burke would be the first to note, is a leading danger faced by modern political communities. Commentators will always be required to shift opinion by exposing contradictions in public deliberation. I have done so from a historicist standpoint, and one that recognises the history of political thought as providing a source of critique and inspiration for contemporary politics. But this holds only so far as we refrain from looking to the past in search of ‘answers’ to our problems. There are no answers to be found in history, only intimations, faint clues for how we might approach a situation that possess only a vague resemblance to a similar event or state of affairs from the past. History can offer instruction, but we must always recognise that the past is past.
- What is your experience of Trinity and Cambridge so far?
My experiences of Trinity and Cambridge have so far been extremely encouraging. For someone interested in the relation of history to philosophy and the location of Irish history within broad European developments, the cosmopolitan atmosphere provided by Cambridge accommodates my research perfectly. The sheer intellectual vibrancy of the city, and Trinity especially, has been invigorating; and my luck in meeting a wide-array of likeminded scholars and graduate students has given me a sense of purpose and belonging in Cambridge that I have found difficult to locate elsewhere. I happen to be autistic, also, which on occasion can inhibit my performance in social settings. That my condition has not proven overly obstructive to my social or academic engagements in Cambridge thus far is a real source of relief. People here are more considerate and appreciative of the incompsocious manifestations of my condition than I had anticipated. My Trinity colleagues have proven most inclusive, in this respect, and I have no doubt that my research will thrive in such a supportive and convivial environment.