István Hont

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István Hont (born April 15, 1947 in Budapest ; died March 29, 2013 ) was a British political scientist of Hungarian origin specializing in the history of political thought.

Life

István Hont attended Sankt-Stephan-Gymnasium in Budapest and began an engineering education. He then studied history and philosophy at the University of Budapest , where he received his doctorate in 1974 with a thesis on the Scottish Enlightenment , a topic that determined his further academic career. He got a position as a research assistant at the Historical Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences . With the help of the British historian Michael Postan , he and his wife left communist Hungary in 1975.

Hont received his second doctorate under Hugh Trevor-Roper at Oxford University and was given a research position at Wolfson College in 1977 . In 1978 he was elected a Fellow at the King's College of the University of Cambridge appointed and was Reader history of the political thought at the University. With Michael Ignatieff , he led the newly founded research project Political Economy and Society 1750-1850 . After its expiry, he worked as an assistant professor at Columbia University between 1986 and 1989 and then returned to Cambridge. In 1993 he helped set up the Collegium Budapest in Budapest as a visiting professor . He was visiting researcher at Princeton and Harvard. In 2010, as part of the Schiller Professorship at the University of Jena , he gave four lectures on the history of political ideas in the late 18th century. An appointment to Harvard University in 2002 failed due to the veto of the then university president Lawrence Summers , who considered Hont's scientific output to be too low.

In 2005 a collection of his essays, supplemented by an introductory, fundamental study, was published under the title Jealousy of Trade ; in 2007 the book received the “Spengler Prize”. In 2015 another collection of six “Carlyle Lectures”, which he had given in 2009 at Oxford University, was published posthumously.

Fonts

  • with Michael Ignatieff (Ed.) Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment . Cambridge University Press, 1983
  • Free trade and the economic limits to national politics: neo-Machiavellian political economy reconsidered , in: John Dunn (Ed.): The Economic Limits to Modern Politics . Cambridge University Press, 1990.
  • The Permanent Crisis of a Divided Mankind: "Contemporary Crisis of the Nation State" in historical perspective , in: Political Studies 42 (1994)
  • Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective . Harvard University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-674-01038-8 .
  • The Early Enlightenment Debate on Commerce and Luxury , in: Mark Goldie, Robert Wokler (Eds.): The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought , Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 379-418
  • Politics in commercial society: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith . 6 lectures. Edited posthumously by Bela Kapossy and Michael Sonenscher. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2015

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ István Hont (1947–2013) , at King's College
  2. ^ Duncan Kelly: Enlightenment in common , review, in: Financial Times , August 1, 2015, p. 7


personal data
SURNAME Hont, Istvan
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Hungarian-British political scientist
DATE OF BIRTH April 15, 1947
PLACE OF BIRTH Budapest
DATE OF DEATH March 29, 2013