The Ambiguity of Politics: Jon Wilson Inaugural Lecture

People who do or analyse politics usually think they know what they are dealing with. They assume they work in a world of stable objects – states and nations, national and local governments, fixed political hierarchies. In his inaugural lecture, Professor Jon Wilson shows how modern politics is always a murky business, in which the basic units of political life are poorly defined, and their identity up for grabs. Travelling across the globe over the last hundred years, from the birth of Pakistan to debate about the UK’s constitution now, Prof Wilson argues that we cannot understand the history of the modern world unless we take the essential ambiguity of modern politics seriously. He’ll suggest that a properly historical approach to politics shows how the most basic category of global politics, the nation state, is marked by its profoundly ambiguous twentieth century origins.

The lecture will be followed by comments from Humeira Iqtidar, Professor of Politics (King’s College London) and Michael Kenny, Director of the Bennett Institute of Public Policy (Cambridge University), a discussion, and reception.

Jon Wilson is Professor of Modern History, at King’s College London. His first two books, The Domination of Strangers and India Conquered focused on the practical of government in British-ruled India; he is currently writing a global history of the nation state during the twentieth century, Out of Chaos. Prof Wilson has combined teaching and research with political and administrative practice, as a local councillor and policy analyst, and in a range of leadership roles at King’s. He is currently Head of the History Department.

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Top Image: The Congress of Berlin: Disraeli as a tooth-drawer, assisted by Queen Victoria, operates on Sultan Abdul Hamid II of the Ottoman Empire, surrounded by political figures from France, Germany etc. Coloured lithograph by J.J. van Brederode after Jan Steen, 1878. Source: Wellcome Collection.