Dr Ariane Fichtl

Dr Ariane Fichtl

Honorary Research Fellow

Researcher profile

Email
avf2@st-andrews.ac.uk

 

Research areas

I am currently a postdoctoral researcher based at the School of History at St Andrews, and I am preparing a second book project on the history of the political thought of British abolitionism that combines more traditional methodologies from intellectual history with new methodologies from cultural and social studies (especially the histories of religion and emotions).

The project explores the evolution of the intellectual roots of two essential abolitionist “tools” that were intimately connected to the successful rise of abolitionism as a mass movement in early nineteenth-century Britain. The historiographical approach that I follow in the analysis of both is that of American historian Thomas Haskell, particularly his concept of a changed perception of the eighteenth-century British consumer and the subsequent development of new, or, from an abolitionist point of view, rather old, that is to say natural, uncorrupted, reformed cognitive techniques through what was, as I argue, partly a rejection, and partly an internalisation of the commercial law maxim caveat emptor (let the buyer beware) taken from Roman contract law and through which slave traders rid themselves of any moral responsibility from slave-trading, to put it instead on the shoulders of the purchasers of slaves and of slave grown products. The analysis will serve to develop the concept of mutual dependence, or interdependence, which was prominent in the most radical abolitionist texts and deeply connected to central concepts of ancient Greek and Hebrew moral and political philosophy that have been outlined in the works of the American political theorist Eric Nelson. Platonist, Aristotelian, as well as Kabbalistic concepts of divine justice intertwined in the Christian Kabbalah, which was, as this project aims to show, an intellectual tradition that was very attractive to those excluded from politics (mostly religious dissenters), but who were engaged in antislavery activism from the late seventeenth century onwards, and who laid the roots for the development of modern liberalism.

Next to a second book, I am also part of a team of researchers based at Helsinki University working on a project on changed notions of early modern democracy in eighteenth-century Europe.

After a period of conducting research in Paris as a Max Weber fellow at the German Historical Institute, I obtained my PhD at the Université de Lille in France on the radicalisation of classical republican discourse in the French Revolution, which resulted in a well-received book published by Classiques Garnier in Paris in 2020. During the pandemic I was able to spend a productive time preparing two book chapters and two articles as a visiting fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, and subsequently as a junior fellow of the Turin Humanities Programme in Turin, Italy.

Since coming to St Andrews, I have been engaged in strenghtening the collaboration with Bonn University, especially with the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies. The aim of this collaboration is to replace the predominant freedom-slavery binary in the history of political thought with a focus on questions related to dependency, which is why my project will make use of the BCDSS’s analytical tool of asymmetrical dependency.

I am a member of the international editorial board of the journal History of European Ideas (Routledge), and member of the British and Irish Association for Political Thought (BIAPT), as well as of the German Society of Pennsylvania based in the United States.

Selected publications

 

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