Michael Sonenscher is one of Britain's most distinguished intellectual historians, Fellow and Director of Studies in History at King's College, University of Cambridge, where he has taught for several decades. His work has reshaped how scholars understand the political, economic and moral thought of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, and the deep intellectual origins of the categories such as public debt, commercial society, the division of labour and capitalism itself through which we still try to make sense of the modern economy.
Sonenscher's early work focused on the social and economic history of the French ancien régime, including The Hatters of Eighteenth-Century France (1987) and Work and Wages: Natural Law, Politics and the Eighteenth-Century French Trades (Cambridge University Press, 1989). He went on to publish two major studies of the intellectual origins of the French Revolution with Princeton University Press: Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (2007), which traced how eighteenth-century debates about sovereign borrowing and inequality fed directly into the upheavals of 1789, and Sans-Culottes: An Eighteenth-Century Emblem in the French Revolution (2008). He has also edited and translated the political writings of Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès for Hackett, and published Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Division of Labour, the Politics of the Imagination and the Concept of Federal Government (Brill, 2020).
His most recent books speak directly to current debates in political economy and political theory. In Capitalism: The Story behind the Word (Princeton University Press, 2022), Sonenscher recovers the surprising origins of the term "capitalism", first coined in early-nineteenth-century France as a fusion of two distinct sets of ideas, one about public debt and war finance, the other about the division of labour, and shows how this prehistory continues to shape contemporary arguments about markets, welfare states and inequality. In After Kant: The Romans, the Germans, and the Moderns in the History of Political Thought (Princeton University Press, 2023), a sweeping 567-page study, he traces the genealogy of modern political ideologies, from liberalism to nationalism to communism, through the long European argument that followed Immanuel Kant's question about how the lives of individuals relate to the whole of human history.
Sonenscher is also a regular contributor to the London Review of Books, where he writes on European politics, constitutional thought and the intellectual roots of contemporary political conflicts.
Jiří Zatloukal, financial journalist at Seznam Zprávy and contributor of PFI Talks, talked with Michael Sonenscher.