Keith Tribe's guest appearances

Keith Tribe

Lectures in Intellectual History

History & Policy

Benjamin Franklin

Ben Taylor

Sarah Richardson

Tom Jones

Ryan Hanley

James Harris

David Hume

David Weinstein

Philip Schofield

Jeremy Bentham

Tim Lewens

George Berkeley

Nick Phillipson

Richard Wilson

Jacqueline Rose

OwlTail

Henry Sidgwick was already something of an enigma in Cambridge less than six years after his death, and recent interest in his work has tended to compound this by re-inventing him as a modern moral philosopher. The Moral Sciences Tripos that Sidgwick led as Knightbridge Professor from 1883 had been reshaped in 1860 by John Grote, the successor in the chair to William Whewell; and so to understand the Tripos as Sidgwick first encountered it in the 1860s we need to understand quite what Grote had in mind – and Grote himself is an important figure, having in 1862 composed a running critique of John Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism. Furthermore, until the foundation of the Economics Tripos in 1903 the teaching of political economy in Cambridge was directed almost entirely to the Moral Sciences Tripos. Alfred Marshall’s strenuous efforts to detach the teaching of economics from the Moral Sciences Tripos have tended to distort subsequent understanding of “Cambridge Economics” from Marshall, through Pigou, to Maynard Keynes. In any case, Marshall’s own economics developed from his studies of John Stuart Mill. In this lecture, Keith Tribe examines the nexus between utilitarianism, ethics and political economy, to the construction of which Mill, Grote and Sidgwick made important contributions.

Keith Tribe - Utilitarianism, the Moral Sciences, and Political Economy: Mill-Grote-Sidgwick

Economic History Society annual conference, on 28 March 2015. The panel discussed Thomas Piketty’s book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Chaired by Professor Sir Rick Trainor, Rector of Exeter College, Oxford, the panel comprised Professor Martin Daunton, Head of the School of the Humanities and Social Sciences at Cambridge, Avner Offer, Chichele Professor of Economic History at Oxford, Jim Tomlinson, Professor of Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow, and Dr Keith Tribe, independent scholar.

Dr Keith Tribe - Historians reflect on Picketty

With the general loss of interest in Marx as an analyst of capitalism, argument over the development of his thinking, from his early writings to Capital Vol. I, has given way to a more or less uncritical acceptance of Capital as the centrepiece of his endeavours, and a neglect of its sources. However, in 1913 Lenin rightly noted that there were "three sources and component parts" of "Marxism": German philosophy, English political economy, and French socialism. Curiously, few readers of Marx have taken this point seriously; while some attention has been paid to "German philosophy", little attention has been paid to the importance of Proudhon and others, while almost none at all has ever been paid to Marx's debt to the writings of David Ricardo and Adam Smith. In this lecture, Keith Tribe seeks to readdress this imbalance in Marx scholarship.

Keith Tribe - Karl Marx: 'Ricardian Socialist'?