Research

The history of political thought

From the late eighteenth century onwards, and in particular the relationship between theology, ideas of social organisation and practices of government.

My interests in the history of political thought lie from roughly the eighteenth century to the present, and in particular in how ideas of social organisation have so often been bound up with theological and religious ones. This is perhaps clearest in our ideas of human nature and of moral life. Accounts of salvation, direct or indirect, have a way of lingering in the stories we tell about how politics ought to work: about the responsibilities and obligations we are owed by those around us and by the state, and about why political society, and the civil society within it, ought to function as it does.

These questions began with my doctoral dissertation, and have since grown into my first book, Administering Devotion. There I trace how soteriology became entangled with ideas of sociability in nineteenth-century France, and how, together, they gave rise to accounts of political obligation that borrowed heavily from ideas of religious devotion.

Catholic social thought

Catholic social thought is sometimes taken to be a collection of papal musings on society. It is not, and the popes themselves have not thought so for some time; nor have many of the faithful, Catholic and otherwise. Catholic social thought (by which I mean something broader than Catholic social teaching, or the Church’s social doctrine) is better understood as the way Catholics at every level try to make sense of, and live in, the world around them.

For me, this is intimately bound up with practice: not only in the sense that ideas are put into practice, but because practice itself, as a form of human activity, and one that I think largely defines it, is constitutive of what Catholic social thought says. The connection between what we do and what we think lies at the heart of Catholicism’s account of society. It shows itself in an intricate picture of how we relate to one another, and even to ourselves, when we associate. Catholic social thought construes this particularly well. It avoids some of the descriptive reductions found in other branches of political and social thought, while offering, however hard it might seem, more grounded normative defences.

My interest, then, is twofold. I want to make sense of Catholic social thought in and of itself, as a tradition that is continually interpreting and reinterpreting itself, and expanding as it does so. But I also want to show why it ought to be considered beyond Catholicism, and even beyond those interested in religion: as a worthwhile approach to political theory, to be engaged with on its own terms. Its particular contribution, I think, lies in how it accounts for practice and, relatedly, for association.

A further strand concerns solidarity, which I think can be understood as an operative mode not only of governance, but of how we actually live in association, in groups. Here I have learned a great deal from migrant workers: from trade unions, migrant worker communities and parishes in London and the South East, the Midlands, and Massachusetts.

The political theory of association

My interest in the political theory of association is broader, and perhaps more methodological. It draws on both my work in the history of political thought and my work on Catholic social thought, and confronts a set of questions about what it means for political theory, political philosophy, or even ethics, to engage with social reality, and with association in particular, for its own sake.

What kinds of bedrock justification must we give? Which questions must we be sensitive to? What is the nature of the normativity all of this implies? And what does it mean for the relationship between theory and policy, if association is something practised within groups, and often not immediately definable by, or approachable through, policy at all? What, in other words, does it mean to think practically about association?

As with Catholic social thought, this is closely connected to my organising, and to an interest in tethering theory to practice that runs alongside more traditionally theoretical work.