David James
My research interests include classical German philosophy together with responses to it, such as the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, and the tradition in social and political philosophy that can be traced from Rousseau through Kant, Fichte and Hegel to Marx.
Selected publications
Books
- Property and its Forms in Classical German Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2023).
- Practical Necessity, Freedom and History: From Hobbes to Marx (Oxford University Press, 2021).
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Fichte’s Republic: Idealism, History and Nationalism (Cambridge University Press, 2015).
- Rousseau and German Idealism: Freedom, Dependence and Necessity (Cambridge University Press, 2013; Chinese translation 2024).
- Fichte’s Social and Political Philosophy: Property and Virtue (Cambridge University Press, 2011; Chinese translation 2016).
Edited Books
- Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right: A Critical Guide (Cambridge University Press, 2017).
- (With Günter Zöller) The Cambridge Companion to Fichte (Cambridge University Press, 2016).
Articles
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‘Compassion, Egoism and Selflessness: Schopenhauer’s Problematic Debt to Rousseau’, in David Bather Woods and Timothy Stoll (eds.), The Schopenhauerian Mind (London: Routledge, 2023).
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‘The Relevance of Personality, Slavery, and Property to the Question Whether Hegel Seeks to Justify Colonial Oppression’, The Review of Metaphysics 76 (2023): 587–610.
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‘Situating the Enlightenment in Herder’s Philosophy of History’, Journal of the Philosophy of History 16(3) (2022): 247–270.
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‘The Idea of Universal Monarchy in Fichte’s Practical Philosophy’, in Ansgar Lyssy and Giampiero Basile (eds.), Kant and Fichte on Freedom and System (London: Routledge, 2022).
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‘Fichte’s Cosmopolitan Nationalism’, in Marina F. Bykova (ed.), The Bloomsbury Companion to Fichte (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).
- ‘Marx’s Genealogy of the Idea of Equality’, European Journal of Philosophy 27(4) (2020): 898-911.
- ‘From Kant to Sade: A Fragment of the History of Philosophy in the Dialectic of Enlightenment’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 26(3) (2018): 557-577.
- ‘Reading Rousseau’s Second Discourse in the Light of the Question: What is the Source of Social Inequality?’, European Journal of Philosophy 26(1) (2018): 238-260.
- ‘Self-mastery and Universal History: Horkheimer and Adorno on the Conditions of a Society “in Control of Itself”’, Philosophy and Social Criticism 43(9) (2017): 932-952.
- 'The Compatibility of Freedom and Necessity in Marx's Idea of Communist Society', European Journal of Philosophy 25(2) (2017): 270-293.
- ‘Practical Necessity and the “Logic” of Civil Society’, in David James (ed.), Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right: A Critical Guide (Cambridge University Press, 2017).
- ‘Fichte and Hegel on Recognition and Slavery’, in David James and Günter Zöller (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Fichte (Cambridge University Press, 2016).
- ‘The Political Theology of Fichte’s Staatslehre: Immanence and Transcendence’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 24(6) (2016).
