Evidence receipt / evaluation
Published · transcript-backedNiall Ferguson: evaluation
28 Jul 2021 Conversations with Tyler Niall Ferguson on Why We Study History
“That was the kind of thing that you could say in Cambridge in the early 1990s at high table to put some young upstart in his place. But Quinton’s a brilliant man, and I think he had a huge, an ultimately admirable influence on the way that Cambridge did political thought because he insisted on contextualizing the documents and insisted that we don’t read texts as if they are handed to us on stone tablets, that one has to understand Italian ideas of republicanism by delving deeply into the contexts in which someone like Machiavelli worked.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Niall Ferguson
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- evaluation
- Recorded
- 28 Jul 2021
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
Transcript context
…How so? Quentin once said to me, when I was a very young fellow at Christ’s College, that in the great chain of being, intellectual history was at the top and economic history was at the bottom, the bottom feeders. That was the kind of thing that you could say in Cambridge in the early 1990s at high table to put some young upstart in his place. But Quinton’s a brilliant man, and I think he had a huge, an ultimately admirable influence on the way that Cambridge did political thought because he insisted on contextualizing the documents and insisted that we don’t read texts as if they are handed to us on stone tablets, that one has to understand Italian ideas of republicanism by delving deeply into the contexts in which someone like Machiavelli worked. So I admire Quentin as a scholar, even if he was crushing when I was a young hopeful. Under constitutional monarchies, do you prefer kings or queens?…
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