Dr Mark Philp

Fellow and Tutor in Politics

Dr Mark Philp, MA, MPhil, DPhil (BA Brad; MSc Leeds).

I have been Fellow and Tutor in Politics of Oriel College and a Lecturer in Politics in the University since 1983. From 2000-2005 I was the first Head of the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford. My research includes work in political theory and political sociology, most recently on political realism, political corruption and issues relating to standards in public life, as well as in the history of political thought and British history at the time of the French Revolution. Recent work includes Napoleon and the Invasion of Britain with Alexandra Franklin (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2003); an edited collection of essays, Resisting Napoleon: the British Response to the threat of Invasion, 1798-1815 (Aldershot, Hants.: Ashgate, 2006), and essays on corruption.  Political Conduct, was published by Harvard in 2007, and Thomas Paine by Oxford in  2007 . From 2007 to 2010 I ran a Leverhulme-funded project editing and digitizing the diary of William Godwin which is available at http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/.   I am currently co-convening a project on the re-imagining of democracy between 1750 and 1850 with Joanna Innes of Somerville College. Further details are available on the Department website: www.politics.ox.ac.uk/about/staff.

I teach and supervise mainly in political theory and the history of political thought.  Recent graduates have worked on Corruption in Eastern Europe, Perfectionism in Political Theory, The Philosophy of Hobbes’s Leviathan, The Character of Market Society, and Challenges to Virtue in Political Office.

Recent papers include:

What is to be Done? Political Theory and Political Realism' European Journal of Political Theory 9(4) 2010, 466-84

‘Delimiting Political Accountability’ Political Studies (2009) 57, issue 1

The substance and the shadow: Tale of Two Cities and the French revolution, in C. Jones, J McDonagh and J. Mee Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, and the French Revolution (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2009)

 ‘Peacebuilding and Corruption’ in International Peacekeeping 15(3) June 2008, pp. 310-27

‘Political Theory and the Evaluation of Political Conduct’ Social Theory and Practice 34 (3) July 2008, pp. 389-410

‘Political Theory and History’, in D. Leopold and M. Stears, Political Theory: Methods and Approaches (Oxford University Press, 2008)

Disconcerting Ideas: Explaining Popular Radicalism and Popular Loyalism in the 1790s' in G Burgess and M Festenstein eds., English Radicalism 1550-1850 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007)