Yuchen Sun

Yuchen joined the Department of Political Economy in October 2019. A student of early modern political and social thought, he is particularly interested in how eighteenth-century political thinkers conceived themselves as moderns and how they diagnosed the political predicaments of their own time. His doctoral project, focused on David Hume’s awareness and analysis of modern politics, investigates Hume’s account, among his contemporaries’, of why politics in eighteenth-century Britain and Europe was different from the politics of all previous times and all other places, how that mode of politics originated and functioned, what dangers that mode of politics was susceptible to, how those dangers could be avoided, and where that mode of politics tended to approach.

History of modern political and social thought, especially 17-18^th century

Hume, Smith, and the Scottish Enlightenment

Sociability and the modern state

Natural jurisprudence and natural right theories

English historiography