Professor Mark Goldie

My field is politics, religion, and ideas in early modern Britain.

I took my first degree at the University of Sussex (1970-3), and then came to Cambridge, to Corpus Christi College, to study for a PhD, under the supervision of Quentin Skinner. After a Research Fellowship at Gonville and Caius College, I went to Churchill College in 1979 as a College Lecturer. Later I was appointed to a University Lectureship, then Readership, then Professorship in Intellectual History. I have been editor of the Historical Journal, departmental chair of the History Faculty, and Vice-Master of Churchill College.

I retired in 2019, and became Honorary Professor of History at the University of Sussex.

Research Interests

Among the themes in my work are ideas of religious tolerance and intolerance, the reception of Hobbes and Locke, Tory and Whig ideologies, the rise of the Enlightenment critique of priestcraft, the practice and theory of officeholding, and the political theory and political lives of Locke.

I have published seventy articles and chapters and a dozen books, including edited collections of essays and editions of primary texts. My edition of Locke’s Political Essays has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, and Portuguese. I co-edited two volumes of The Cambridge History of Political Thought, and led a team that published an edition of Roger Morrice’s Entring Book, the richest English political diary of the 1670s to 1690s.

My principal current project is an intellectual biography of ‘post-Revolution Locke’: his public face in the aftermath of the English Revolution and the publication of his major works in 1689.

I have supervised 33 PhD students, half of whom have published their theses and hold university posts, in three continents. I no longer take on new students.

In Part I of the History Tripos I taught the History of Political Thought and Early Modern British Political History. In Part II I taught courses on the English Revolution; The Politics of Locke; Governance and Community in Early Modern England; and Press and Society in Early Modern England.

I no longer undertake undergraduate teaching.

I am chair of the editorial board of the Clarendon Edition of the Works of John Locke. I sit on the editorial boards of History of Political Thought and Locke Studies. I am a member of the international advisory board of the St Andrew’s Institute for Intellectual History. And I have served on the intellectual history panel of the Academy of Finland.

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Key Publications

‘The Roots of True Whiggism, 1688-1694’, History of Political Thought, 1 (1980)

‘John Locke and Anglican Royalism’, Political Studies, 31 (1983)

‘The Civil Religion of James Harrington’, in The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe, ed. A. Pagden (1987)

The Politics of Religion in Restoration England (co-editor, 1990)

The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450-1700 (co-editor, 1991)

‘The Reception of Hobbes’, in ibid.

‘The Political Thought of the Anglican Revolution’, in The Revolutions of 1688, ed. R. Beddard (1991)

‘The Theory of Religious Intolerance in Restoration England’, in Persecution and Toleration, eds. O. P. Grell et al. (1991)

‘Priestcraft and the Birth of Whiggism’, in Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain, eds. N. Phillipson and Q. Skinner (1993)

John Locke: Political Essays (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, 1997)

The Reception of Locke’s Politics (editor, 1999)

‘The Unacknowledged Republic’, in The Politics of the Excluded, ed. T. Harris (2001)

The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought (co-editor, 2006)

The Entring Book of Roger Morrice (general editor, 2007)

Roger Morrice and the Puritan Whigs (author, 2007)

John Locke: A Letter Concerning Toleration (editor, 2010)

‘The Ancient Constitution and the Languages of Political Thought’, Historical Journal, 62 (2019)

Other Publications


 ‘The Scottish Catholic Enlightenment’, Journal of British Studies, 30 (1991)

John Locke: Two Treatises of Government (Everyman Library, 1993)

‘The Hilton Gang and the Purge of London in the 1680s’, in Politics and the Political Imagination in Later Stuart Britain, ed. H. Nenner (1998)

John Locke: Selected Correspondence (editor, 2002)

‘Mary Astell and John Locke’, in Mary Astell: Reason, Gender, Faith, eds. W. Kolbrener and M. Michelson (2007)

Corbusier Comes to Cambridge: Post-War Architecture and the Competition to Build Churchill College (booklet, 2007)

Censorship of the Press, 1696-1720 (co-editor, 2009)

‘Annual Parliaments and Aristocratic Whiggism’, in The First Earl of Shaftesbury, ed. J. Spurr (2013)

‘Absolutism’, in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Political Philosophy (2013)

John Locke: Second Treatise of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration (Oxford World’s Classics, 2016)

‘Marvell and his Adversaries’, in The Oxford Handbook of Marvell (2019)

‘Francois-Paul de Lisola and the English Opposition to Louis XIV’, Historical Journal, 63 (2020)