Alex Tebble
Associate Lecturer

Profile

Biography

Alex joined the Politics Department as an Associate Lecturer in 2021. His research and teaching interests are in political theory and the history of political thought. He is currently making corrections to his PhD thesis on 'Three Histories of Liberalism', following his viva in December 2020. Alex has also completed an MA in Political Theory and a BA in PPE from the University of York.

Research

Overview

My current research is on the history of liberalism. My research looks at the historical development of liberalism and the ways in which its history has been rewritten and presented as an intellectual tradition. My PhD thesis focused on the works of L. T. Hobhouse, Isaiah Berlin, and John Rawls, exploring their approaches to both liberalism and its history, and tracing how the idea of 'liberalism' and 'the liberal tradition' changed and evolved over the twentieth century. I am interested in the shifting and ambiguous meanings of 'liberalism', the ways its history has been interpreted and used, and the differing characterisations of its canonical heroes and villains. In my approach to this research, I draw on the work of R. G. Collingwood, Michael Oakeshott, and Alasdair MacIntyre.

My research interests include the history of liberalism and its critics; ideas of 'tradition', 'modernity', and the 'political'; the works of Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche, among others in the nineteenth and early twentieth-century thought; pluralism and realism in contemporary political theory; the roles of rationality and language in politics; the development and reception of ideas.

Teaching

Undergraduate

• Introduction to Political Theory
• Contemporary Political Philosophy
• Topics in PPE

Publications

Selected publications

'Where Liberalism Begins and Toleration Ends: Locke on atheism and Rawls' 'unreasonable'' in Toleration and Religious Freedom in the Early Modern and Contemporary World (2021), 123-146.

(Forthcoming with Peter Lang as part of the Histories of Religious Pluralism series)

Book Reviews:

'Hayek's Market Republicanism by Sean Irving' - Global Intellectual History (2020)

'The Lost History of Liberalism by Helena Rosenblatt' - LSE Review of Books (2019) [Online]

 (reprinted as 'Liberalism in world history' in The Journal of Liberal History vol.104 and included in 'Top Twelve Book Reviews of 2019' - LSE Review of Books [Online])

'Marx's Inferno by William Clare Roberts' - Political Studies Review, Vol.16 (1) (2018)