Curated playlist
English political philosophers
- George OrwellGeorge Orwell was a pen name, chosen from a shortlist in 1932. He was born Eric Arthur Blair in British India.
- John MiltonJohn Milton sold Paradise Lost for five pounds. The blind poet handed it to a publisher in April 1667.
- John LockeJohn Locke's phrase "long train of abuses" appears word for word in the Declaration of Independence.
- Joseph PriestleyJoseph Priestley isolated oxygen but never accepted what it meant.
- John Stuart MillJohn Stuart Mill was reading Greek at age three. His father was deliberately raising a genius.
- Herbert SpencerIn 1937 the American sociologist Talcott Parsons asked a pointed question about Herbert Spencer: "Who now reads Spencer?" The question carried a sting. Spencer had once been called "the single most famous European intellectual in the…
- Thomas MoreThomas More taught his daughters Greek when almost no one did. He also approved burning heretics.
- Thomas HobbesThomas Hobbes, the English philosopher born in 1588 at Westport in Wiltshire, liked to say that his mother gave birth to twins: "myself and fear." He arrived early, because news had just reached the household that the Spanish Armada was…
- Jeremy BenthamJeremy Bentham, the English philosopher, jurist and social reformer who lived from 1748 to 1832, is on public display at the entrance of the Student Centre at University College London. Visitors find a seated figure in a glass case,…
- Christopher HitchensOn the 8th of October 2011, Christopher Hitchens collected the Richard Dawkins Award at the Texas Freethought Convention. It was his final public appearance. Christopher Eric Hitchens, a British and American author and journalist, had been…
- Quentin SkinnerQuentin Skinner turned down a knighthood offered with a Cambridge professorship. His republicanism would not allow it.
- Roger ScrutonRoger Scruton was standing in the Latin Quarter of Paris in May 1968, watching students overturn cars, smash windows and tear up cobblestones. The English philosopher later said that for the first time in his life he "felt a surge of…