Faculty of History
Professor Peter Ghosh
Retired Professor of the History of Ideas
01865 (2)74874peter.ghosh@history.ox.ac.uk I would call myself a historian of ideas, and conceive of this as a practically universal subject since ideas are present almost everywhere, except in the minority of cases where we deliberately override the categories of contemporaries. A second trait I would emphasise is my sense of the deep ambivalence of specialization. One of Max Weber’s most important lines was that specialization is absolutely necessary to academic work, but it is not enough. A geek is not a historian.
Research Interests
- The history of history from the Enlightenment to the present
- History of social & political theory, with particular reference to Max Weber
- The politics and culture of constitutionalism in Britain, particularly in the 19th century
My first research was on high politics in Victorian Britain (Gladstone and Disraeli), but I thought (and still think) that the best clue to understanding them lay in the basic ideas of the political class. My current research commitments focus on Max Weber and the history of history (a larger category than that of historical writing) from the Renaissance to the present day. The attraction of both fields lies in their combination of breadth and depth.