Tim Hochstrasser

Associate Professor Hochstrasser studied at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and gained his degrees from Cambridge University. He has also worked in a teaching and research capacity at Downing College, Cambridge and Keble College, Oxford and held a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellowship.

Associate Professor Hochstrasser's research focuses on the two-way relationship between intellectual life and political action in the history of early modern Europe, and above all on the use made of contemporary historical and philosophical writing to legitimate and defend changing concepts of sovereignty and political structure. The major case study for this research is the European Enlightenment (c. 1680-1830), with a particular focus on France and Germany. His research has developed three linked pathways: the development of natural law discourse in the early German Enlightenment, which provided the focus for his first book, the scope and limits of eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism which he is exploring through his continuing work on the Huguenot Diaspora, and the interface between political economy and practical politics in France in the era before the French Revolution. 

Publications: 

Hochstrasser, T. J. Natural Law Theories in the Early Enlightenment. of Ideas in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

T.J.Hochstrasser and P.Schröder (eds.), Early Modern Natural Law Theories: Context and Strategies in the Early Enlightenment, (Kluwer: Dordrecht, 2003).

‘Welfare for Whom?’ The place of poor relief in the theory and practice of the Enlightened absolutist state’, in Ideas of Poverty in the Age of Enlightenment edited by Niall O’Flaherty & R.J.W.Mills, University of Manchester Press, 2024, pp.17-35.

More long-lasting than bronze?': statues, public commemoration, and representations of monarchy in Diderot's political thought. In: Cuttica, Cesare and Burgess, Glenn, (eds.) Monarchism and Absolutism in Early Modern Europe. Political and popular culture in the early modern period. Pickering & Chatto, London, UK, pp. 201-14 & 262-63

Carlyle and the French Enlightenment: Transitional Readings of Voltaire and Diderot', Working Papers on the Nature of Evidence, no 21, 'The Nature of Evidence: How Well Do FACTS Travel?' (November 2007), 1-20

'Physiocracy and the Politics of Laissez-Faire', in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought edited by Mark Goldie and Robert Wokler, (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2006), 419-442. 

The Institutionalisation of Philosophy in Continental Europe' [Section 1(e)] in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth Century Philosophy, (ed.) Knud Haakonssen, (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2006), 69-96. 

'"A College in the Air": Myth and Reality in the Foundation Story of Downing College, Cambridge', History of the Universities, 17, (2002), 81-120.