Irene Brown

Plekhanov refused to accept that Lenin's coup in October 1917 was a Marxist revolution. To him it was an anti-Marxist revolution that violated history's economic laws. By Irene Coltman Brown.

Irene Coltman Brown continues our series on the Historian as Philosopher - Hegel claimed to know the ultimate purpose of history in the universal sovereignty of reason which Marx – following Hegel – believed a liberated proletariat would establish.

Irene Coltman Brown continues our series on The Historian as Philosopher, arguing that Lord Acton foresaw that the course of modern nationalism, no longer subject to moral law, 'will be marked with material as well as moral ruin'.

Irene Coltman Brown provides an insight into Tocqueville, who, reflecting on the history of revolutionary France, thought that liberty alone was capable of struggling successfully against revolution.

Irene Coltman Brown continues our series on the Historian as Philosopher. History taught Hume that faction, next to fanaticism, is of all passions the most destructive of morality' and that the wise and just are never purely party men.

‘The Universities have been to this nation as the wooden horse to the Trojans’. An article by Irene Coltman Brown.

Irene Coltman Brown continues our series on the Historian as Philosopher. History taught Machiavelli that, as a prince must know how to act as a beast, he should be a fox to recognise traps, and a lion to frighten off wolves.

Irene Coltman Brown continues our series on The Historian as Philopsoher. 'The entire world is trifling and futile' wrote Ibn Khaldun, the medieval Muslim to whom history taught the fragility of political power and the recurrent cycle of achievement and decline within the social order.

Irene Coltman Brown continues our series on the Historian as Philosopher.

Irene Coltman Brown continues our series on the Historian as Philosopher, by looking at how the significance of the Peloponnesian war for its historian, Thucydides, was that it demonstrated that imperial power, to be used at all, has to be abused.