The John Robert Seeley Lectures 2024
Professor Eric Nelson (Harvard)
Democracy as Meritocracy: Post-Classical Greek and the Early-Modern Rehabilitation of Popular Rule.
The biennial Seeley Lectures return in May, all starting at 5.00pm in the McCrum Lecture Theatre in Bene't Street.
Eric Nelson of Harvard University will be giving the lecture series, Democracy as Meritocracy: Post-Classical Greek and the Early-Modern Rehabilitation of Popular Rule.
The individual lectures are:
Wednesday May 15: “That best of all constitutions”: Reimagining Democracy from Isocrates to Dio Cassius.
Thursday May 16: “It is certainly a very ignorant thing to leave words in Greek”: (Mis)translating the Post-Classical Democrats in Early-Modern Europe.
Tuesday May 21: “Israel was a Democracy”: James Harrington, Philo of Alexandria, and the Rule of the Best.
Thursday May 23: “The wisest and most intelligent will always rule”: Democracy from Harrington to Tocqueville
The John Robert Seeley Lectures are given biennially by a distinguished visitor to Cambridge, on a topic in Political Thought and its History. The lectures are given in alternating years, dovetailing with the Faculty of History's other major lecture series, the George Macaulay Trevelyan Lectures. The Seeley Lectures are generously supported by the Cambridge University Press, and are subsequently published by them. For a list of previous Seeley lecturers, see 'Previous Lectures'.
