About

Gregory Conti is an Associate Professor of Politics at Princeton University. He is a political theorist and intellectual historian whose research focuses on the history of modern political thought, particularly on questions related to liberalism, democracy, and representative government. His scholarly work explores themes such as the history of political thought, democratic theory, representation, and freedom of speech. Conti's first book, 'Parliament the Mirror of the Nation: Representation, Deliberation, and Democracy in Victorian Britain,' was published by Cambridge University Press in 2019. His academic interests include the history of political thought and the development of democratic institutions, and he is actively engaged in teaching courses such as Modern Political Theory.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Law
• Computer Science
• History
• Philosophy
• Library science
• Political economy
• Economic history
• Classics
• Environmental ethics

Selected publications

• Tocqueville against Guizot? On Gianna Englert’s <i>Democracy Tamed</i>

  History of European Ideas · 2025-06-23

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• Kahan’s Liberalism

  American Political Thought · 2025-03-01 · 1 citations

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  This review essay analyzes Alan Kahan’s Freedom from Fear: An Incomplete History of Liberalism. In so doing, it draws some general lessons about liberalism and its historiography as well. It commends Kahan for offering a nuanced and thorough portrayal of liberalism’s variegated history. In particular, it applauds the book’s four-stage periodization of liberalism, its emphasis on liberalism’s simultaneous opposition to both oligarchy and democracy, and its account of liberalism’s ethical preoccupation. However, it criticizes Kahan’s framing of liberalism as primarily a quest to eliminate fear. It also rejects Freedom from Fear’s conclusions about the nature of the populist challenge to liberalism today.

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• Worlds of Liberalism

  History of European Ideas · 2025-10-06

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• On the Nadir of Natural Rights Theory in Nineteenth-Century Britain

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2024-11-28

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• Index

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-02-10

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  A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

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• In what senses should we see John Stuart Mill as a socialist?

  History of European Ideas · 2022-04-02

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• The English Utilitarians, Some Recent Reconsiderations

  The Review of Politics · 2022-01-01

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  In 1900, perhaps the greatest Victorian historian of ideas, Leslie Stephen, released his three-volume English Utilitarians . Coming to grips with the political thought of the century that had just ended, he believed, required considering the “dominant beliefs of the adherents of this school.” So privileged a point of access was offered by what we would now call “classical utilitarianism” that a study of it could serve as a “sequel” to his previous History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century . The utilitarians, Stephen was confident, could serve as a kind of synecdoche for a whole age. Further, if the utilitarians did not grasp the whole truth, there was no doubt that their “creed” would make up part of the “definitive system” that would arrive in due time.

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• A response to the roundtable: politics, history, and JS Mill in <i>Parliament the Mirror of the Nation</i>

  History of European Ideas · 2022-04-16

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• Rousseau on multiplying partial associations

  History of European Ideas · 2022-07-15 · 1 citations

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  In Feb. 2022 Sungho Kimlee passed away. In his memory, we present this revised and abridged version of a portion of his dissertation, Factions and Orders: from Machiavelli to Madison. Sungho summarized the work as follows: “Since antiquity, thinkers have held that every society consists of two hostile orders – the few and the many. But they have disagreed on the proper method for defusing this civic divide, and their various proposed remedies can be classified into three approaches. The first approach aims to eliminate the division between the rich and the poor by abolishing private property. Plato’s Republic inaugurated this method, which was later embraced with ambivalence by Thomas More and vigorously defended by Karl Marx. The second approach merely aims to contain the harmful effects of the binary civic divide. Plato proposed two methods for accomplishing this in the Laws: Plutarch championed the first method, and Aristotle the second. My dissertation traces the genealogy of the third approach – the method of supplanting the binary civic divide with more numerous divisions. This oft-neglected method was pioneered by Rousseau, who prescribed the creation of artificial divisions by the state as a remedy for majority factions.

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• Charles Dupont-White: An idiosyncratic nineteenth-century theorist on speech, state, and John Stuart Mill

  Global Intellectual History · 2021-07-22

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  Although he is little read today, especially by Anglophone academics, Charles Dupont-White (1807–78) deserves the attention of historians of political thought for two reasons. First, he was an original and powerful theorist of a more statist brand of liberalism that in several ways proved a harbinger of later liberal and social-democratic ideas. Second, he was responsible for the original translations into French of two of John Stuart Mill’s most important works, On Liberty and Considerations on Representative Government. Unlike most author-translator relationships, however, Dupont-White was anything but an uncritical admirer. This essay reconstructs Dupont-White’s general political-social theory as well as examines his specific differences from and criticisms of Mill, including his attempt to construct an alternative defense of freedom of speech. It also examines Mill’s response to Dupont-White and considers why Mill judged his translator to have espoused a philosophy ‘opposite’ to his own.

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Frequent coauthors

• David Raymond

  Datta Meghe Institute of Medical Sciences

  16 shared

• Kulsoom Abdullah

  Duke University

  14 shared

• John A. Copeland

  Georgia Institute of Technology

  11 shared

• Edward Sobiesk

  United States Military Academy

  10 shared

• John Stasko

  Georgia Institute of Technology

  10 shared

• Benjamin Sangster

  10 shared

• Erik Dean

  10 shared

• Thomas M. Cook

  8 shared