Lee Hall

The Lee Seng Tee Distinguished Lecture Series

This lecture series was endowed by Dr Lee Seng Tee in 2005 on the occasion of the College’s 40th anniversary.

Watching Prime Ministers

Peter John Hennessy, Baron Hennessy of Nympsfield FBA, an English historian of government and Attlee Professor of Contemporary British History at Queen Mary, University of London, gave the fourth lecture in the series on Thursday 12 May 2011, at 5.30pm in the Lee Hall.

See, hear, or download the full lecture in a variety of formats. You can also download the lecture notes here.

Looted art and its restitution: moral and cultural dilemmas for the twenty-first century

The third Lee Seng Tee Distinguished Lecture was given by Professor Richard J Evans on Monday 7 June 2010, at 5.30pm in the Lee Hall. Professor Evans, who became Wolfson's fifth President in October 2010, is Regius Professor of Modern History.

See, hear, or download the full lecture in a variety of formats.

The changing map of Europe, 1909–2009

The second lecture in this series was given by Professor David Reynolds on Wednesday 27 May 2009 at 5.30pm in the Lee Hall.

2009 was a year full of anniversaries: ninety years since the Paris peace conference, seventy from the start of World War Two, sixty since the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty and two decades after the Berlin Wall came down. In this lecture, David Reynolds, Professor of International History at the University and a Fellow of Christ's College, reflected on the changing map of Europe over the last century and on the human costs of historical change.

See, hear, or download the full lecture in a variety of formats.

What is the state? The question that “will not go away”

Professor Quentin Skinner, Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, delivered the inaugural Lee Seng Tee Distinguished Lecture in College on 24 October 2007. The Lee Hall was full to overflowing to hear a brilliant and scintillating lecture on ‘What is the state?’

In the lecture, Professor Skinner challenged modern notions that no single person or institution can any longer be taken to exercise state sovereignty. He argued that the contemporary sceptical view about the state was a “serious mistake”, and he laid the groundwork for his case by tracing the history of how the question had been tackled in Anglophone legal and political thought.

The state is the name normally assigned to the agency that wields sovereign power over some determinate territory. But this is scarcely a very illuminating definition, for what we basically need to know, in order to grasp the concept of the state, is whose actions properly count as actions of this agency, and hence as authentic expressions of the sovereignty of the state. The lecture proceeded by way of offering a genealogy of various rival answers that had been given to the question “What is the State?”. The earliest answer, the one we encounter among the parliamentarian and radical writers of the c17 English revolution, is that the power of the state can be equated with the power of the whole body of the people. This understanding was instantly challenged by Thomas Hobbes, whose Leviathan seeks to insist that the power of the state is that of a fictional Person distinct from both rulers and ruled. This conception of state power had a considerable influence in the course of the ensuing century. Notably, it is the understanding of the state that underpins William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England. With Jeremy Bentham's attack on Blackstone, however, and with the growing influence of utilitarian legal and political theory, this vision was in turn challenged by a purportedly commonsensical view, present in Bentham, John Austin and later utilitarians such as Henry Sidgwick, according to which the power of the state is nothing other than the power of an established government.

The lecture concluded with an assessment of the sceptical view of the state now prevalent in much contemporary political science. If, the sceptics argue, we take the state to be the bearer of sovereignty, and if we ask whose actions can properly be identified as actions of the state, we have to admit that there is no specific person or body of persons whose actions are equivalent to the actions of the state, simply because there is no specific person or body of persons who can any longer be said to exercise untrammelled sovereignty. The lecture ended by asking whether this marked the end of the road for the theory of the state. Professor Skinner’s case was that the issue is still very much alive, and indeed a question that “will not go away”. Such is the importance and nature of the debate, however, that how the question is to be answered in our times remains wide open.

See, hear, or download the full lecture in a variety of formats.