Michael Oakeshott and the Cambridge School on the History of Political Thought

Martyn P. Thompson is Associate Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Science at Tulane University, USA. His main fields of research and publication are the history of political thought since the Renaissance, literature and politics and contemporary German political theory. He was formerly Professor of English Literature and Intellectual History at Tuebingen University, Germany where his research and publications focused on English political and satirical literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well as German theories of literary history.

Professor Thompson has two doctorates, the first a Ph.D. in the history of political thought from the London School of Economics, the second (the Habilitation) in English literature and cultural history from Tuebingen University. He has been a faculty member in the universities of London, Tuebingen, Cambridge and Tulane. His honors include a Fellow Commonership (now a By-Fellowship) at Churchill College, Cambridge University; Fellowships at the Huntington Library and the William Andrews Clark Library in California; and honorary life memberships of the R.G. Collingwood Society and the Michael Oakeshott Association.

His publications include: Ideas of Contract in English Political Thought in the Age of John Locke (1987); an edited volume, Locke and Kant: Historical Reception and Contemporary Relevance (1991); and many book chapters and articles in major journals including the American Historical Review, Political Studies, Political Theory, Historical Journal, Journal of the History of Ideas, and History and Theory. He has been co-editor and contributor to the annual Politisches Denken Jahrbuch from its inaugural edition in 1991 to the present.