Upcoming Speaker
Alan S. Kahan, Professor of British Civilization, Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines
Topic: “Freedom from Fear: An Incomplete History of Liberalism”
Date: Wednesday March 19, 2025
Alan S. Kahan is an historian, political theorist, translator, travel writer, and resident of Paris. He is Professor of British Civilization at the University of Versailles/St. Quentin. Kahan received his PhD in history from The University of Chicago in 1987. Having previously taught at Florida International University in Miami, he has been living in France since 2007 and is a connoisseur of croissants.
Kahan is the author of Aristocratic Liberalism: The Social and Political Thought of Jacob Burckhardt, John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville (Oxford, 1992); Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century Europe: the Political Culture of Limited Suffrage; Alexis de Tocqueville Palgrave, 2003); Mind vs. Money: The War Between Intellectuals and Capitalism (Transaction, 2010, Routledge 2017); and Tocqueville, Democracy, and Religion (Oxford, 2015). He is also the translator of Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution (Chicago, 2 vols. 1998, 2001) and Benjamin Constant’s Commentary on Filangieri’s Works (Liberty Fund, 2015).
His most recent work, Freedom from Fear: An Incomplete History of Liberalism, was published by Princeton University Press in 2024.
From 2021 to 2023, Kahan served as a visiting scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy at the Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization at the University of Colorado at Boulder. View Kahan’s 2020 CU Boulder lecture at the following link: Tocqueville, Democracy, and Religion.
