Dr Elad Carmel
Daiches-Manning Memorial Fellow in 18th-Century Scottish Studies, May - July 2023
Home Institution: Hebrew University of Jerusalem
I am an intellectual historian, and author of Anticlerical Legacies: The Deistic Reception of Thomas Hobbes, c.1670–1740 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2024). Anticlerical Legacies offers the first thorough analysis of the relationship between Thomas Hobbes and the English deists and freethinkers. It traces the reception of Hobbes by various writers including Charles Blount, John Toland, Matthew Tindal, Anthony Collins, and Thomas Morgan, as well as their leading critics, showing how they engaged with Hobbes consistently and used various Hobbesian ideas while developing their own political and religious thought. I have published articles and book chapters on aspects of Hobbes’s deistic and Whig reception, on Hobbes’s conception of reason and utopianism, and on the political thought of Anthony Collins, for example, in History of European Ideas, Intellectual History Review, and Hobbes Studies.
I completed my DPhil at the University of Oxford in 2016. Since then, I have held a number of postdoctoral and research fellowships at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Library of Congress.
Project Title: A Moderate Radical: Robert Wallace on Liberty, Equality, And Slavery
My research at IASH focuses on the thought of the Church of Scotland minister Robert Wallace (1697–1771). Wallace was a leading figure in the Kirk as well as in the Scottish Enlightenment who nevertheless remains significantly neglected in the scholarship. Many of his papers, with which I work, are found in the Laing Collection of Edinburgh University Library, including various essays by Wallace which have never been published.
My research examines the tensions between moderation and radicalism in Wallace’s writings, focusing on his ideas of liberty, equality, and slavery. It is part of my current project on conceptions of freedom of thought in England, Scotland, and colonial America in the eighteenth century and the relationship between them and ideas on race and gender.
Wallace was a clergyman who self-identified as a ‘moderate freethinker’—not a common phenomenon in mid-eighteenth-century Britain—and who went further than most of his colleagues in his defence of freedom of conscience. He developed an egalitarian utopian vision and opposed slavery but also thought that slavery had contributed positively to the increase in the population of the world in ancient times. By exploring Wallace’s moderate radicalism and its influence, this research aims to enrich our understanding of the nuances of the Scottish Enlightenment more broadly as well as its complex treatment of human diversity, race, and slavery.
Latest publication:
Anticlerical legacies: the deistic reception of Thomas Hobbes, c.1670-1740 (Manchester University Press, 2024)