Personalia
Annelien De Dijn, born in Leuven, Belgium, 1977. Ph.D. from University of Leuven, Belgium. Assistant Professor in Political Theory at University of Amsterdam.
Fellow (1 September 2015 – 30 June 2016)
Freedom: An Unruly History
Research Question
Changing meanings of freedom from antiquity to the present.
Project Description
Today, most people think of freedom as the ability to do what you want without outside interference. But this has not always been the case. In the course of time, Europeans and their colonial offspring have given very different answers to the question of what it means to be free in a society or as a society. In my book project Freedom: An Unruly History, I investigate these changing meanings by surveying over two thousand years of thinking and talking about freedom in the West.
Selected Publications
1) Annelien de Dijn, French Political Thought from Montesquieu to Tocqueville: Liberty in a Levelled Society? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008
2) Annelien de Dijn, “On Political Liberty: Montesquieu’s Missing Manuscript”, Political Theory, 39 (2011) 181-204.
3) “The Politics of Enlightenment: From Peter Gay to Jonathan Israel”, The Historical Journal, 55 (2012) 785-805.