Olivier Higgins

After completing my Bachelor of Humanities at Carleton University in Ottawa, I took an MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History at Cambridge, graduating in 2017. My MPhil dissertation focused on the last text Immanuel Kant published (1798), showing how its commentary on revolutionary enthusiasm helps resolve longstanding controversies in Kant’s thought on politics and history.



My doctorate examines how German idealists from Immanuel Kant to G. W. F. Hegel projected a rational idea of justice or “Recht” onto changing forms of political power after the French Revolution, from the might of absolute monarchies to the groundswell of the nation. I am especially interested in how Kant’s idealist successors, including J.B. Erhard, J.G. Fichte, Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, among others, reimagined the idealism of perpetual peace from within a Prussian political culture that had begun to question the possibilities of enlightened monarchy. I study how these thinkers adapted and historicised the ideal of right, investing it anew in alternative holders of political power, including the people (Volk), the papacy and even Napoleon. I have conducted much of this research in Halle, where I held a doctoral fellowship at the Interdisciplinary Centre for European Enlightenment Studies (IZEA) in 2020.