I engage with the history of political thought in a way that is more philosophically attentive than most current scholarship, which usually prefers political contexts to intellectual contexts. I am interested in the relationship between political philosophy and the philosophy of mind. We can see particular political philosophies as parasitic on the possibilities afforded to them by the philosophy of mind. Without understanding particular changes in the field, we will fail to understand the interplay between ideological foundations and political contexts which can produce different political philosophies. By virtue of this approach, we also begin to notice the implicit politics of superficially apolitical philosophy.

The best way to understand the changes of the forms of political philosophy are as disputes arising from the philosophy of mind. For example, the Wittgensteinian theory of mind sets the parameters for Anglophone political thought, c. 1950-1985, in such figures as Stuart Hampshire, Bernard Williams, Alasdair MacIntyre and Roger Scruton. My doctoral work explores how Scruton makes use of the Wittgensteinian theory of mind to put Hegelian political philosophy on new analytic bases. Elsewhere, I have written on political thought making use of Idealist philosophy of mind, such as in the work of Simone Weil, Herbert Butterfield, and Novalis. My present project, Yearning Like a God in Pain: A New History of Erotic Love in British Nineteenth-Century Thought, regards early Nineteenth-Century Romanic philosophy of mind, and its employment in subsequent British aesthetics and political thought. It is an attempt to excavate the conceptions in Romantic philosophy of mind in order to lay bare their implicit politics, which then underwrote the succeeding century’s competing political philosophies.

Biography

I grew up the son of Swedish and Australian emigrées to England. For my undergraduate dissertation, I excavated the trends in 1930s French Personalist philosophy, as a context to postwar economic policy. This was my attempt to understand the revolt of my generation, the departure of Great Britain from the European Union. When writing my master's dissertation during the summer of 2020, I developed my interest in personality and its conditions in the world. I wrote on the 'Bildung' philosophy of Novalis. Thereafter, I came to see the knowledge acquired in experience, rather than abstractly, in art or custom or in human relations, as the most urgent avenue of inquiry for philosophy. Ever since, I have been, above all, a scholar of Romanticism and its modern reincarnations, in the philosophy of aesthetics. The field of aesthetics, far from being of merely sentimental interest, seems to me to undergird the great majority of ruling political ideologies of the past two centuries.

Education

Publications

Books

The Philosophy of Roger Scruton: An Intellectual History, under contract (2026).

In progress: Yearning Like a God in Pain: A New History of Erotic Love in British Nineteenth-Century Thought.

Articles

J. Haughton, ‘Faith, Love, and Marriage: The Place of Christianity and Zinzendorf in Novalis’ Philosophy of the Higher Self’, Symphilosophie: International Journal of Philosophical Romanticism, vol. 4 (2022), pp. 413-439.

J. Haughton, ‘Roger Scruton’s theory of the imagination and aesthetics as a formulation of Aristotelian virtue ethics’, History of European Ideas, vol. 50, no. 7 (2024), pp. 1278-1293.

J. Haughton, ‘Dispelling “das Herbert Butterfieldproblem”: A rereading of The Whig Interpretation of History’, The Historical Journal, vol. 69, no. 3 (2026), pp. 656-675.

J. Haughton, ‘Sophocles with a Spanner: Simone Weil’s radical use of Paul Valéry’s thought for the dignification of labour’, French Studies, vol. 80, no. 1 (2026), pp. 93-108.

J. Haughton, ‘History and Tragedy in Stuart Hampshire’s Thought and Action and in Bernard Williams, c. 1959-1973’, History of European Ideas (published online, July 2026), pp. 1-20.

In review with History & Theory: J. Haughton, ‘Quentin Skinner’s attack on G. R. Elton and the tradition of analogising the historian to the literary critic’.

In progress: ‘Expression and the Erotic in Modern Painters and The Stones of Venice: John Ruskin’s philosophy of love’.

Books

The Philosophy of Roger Scruton: An Intellectual History

This is the first book to systematize, and the first book to contextualize, the philosophy of Roger Scruton. Scruton's works have served as a convenient larder of political slogans, such as: 'Oikophobia', 'philosophy of home', 'culture of repudiation', and even the 'somewhere-nowhere' language of David Goodhart is descendent from Scruton's News from Somewhere: On Settling (2004). Scruton is, therefore, widely quoted. But there is no work which examines his philosophy as a philosophical system. My work demonstrates how Scruton's aesthetics responds to the traditions of Wittgensteinian virtue ethics, contemporary Hegelian philosophy, and Soviet dissident political life. The philosopher who emerges is at once both an analytic, in the technical tradition of Cambridge, and a timeless Continental philosopher, in the Romantic-Hegelian tradition. My work on Scruton shows for the first time how the Wittgensteinian philosophy of mind undergirds Anglophone political thought in the later Twentieth-Century.

Yearning Like a God in Pain: A New History of Erotic Love in British Nineteenth-Century Thought (in progress)

The Romantic movement, as Charles Taylor has shown, invented a fundamentally new conception of self-expression. What Taylor did not do, is show how these conceptions of expression, in British and German poet-philosophers, laid the bases for Hegelian, Marxist, and liberal expressivist political thought over the succeeding century. Thanks to advancements in the field of the History of the Emotions, which internalises Wittgenstein's philosophy of mind, it is now possible to approach aesthetics as a branch of the history of philosophy. This overcomes the essentially Freudian habit of construing the emotions, and therefore art per se, as without thought-content a priori. Far from being a sentimental irrelevancy, my work indicates the enduring importance of the Romantic movement for the great political traditions of Nineteenth-Century British political thought.

Articles

Faith, Love, and Marriage: The Place of Christianity and Zinzendorf in Novalis’ Philosophy of the Higher Self

German Romantic poetry was for a long time imagined as ecstatic and obscurantist, and not of much philosophical interest. Gradually, from the 1960s, these poet-philosophers were rehabilitated as brilliant students of epistemology, whose sensibilities miraculously prefigured those of the 1960s. In my work on Novalis, I show how the fantastical 'romantic' elements of his thought cohere with the Kantian theory of mind of late 1790s German philosophy. In short, I seek to unite the poet with the philosopher.

Roger Scruton’s theory of the imagination and aesthetics as a formulation of Aristotelian virtue ethics

Roger Scruton is primarily treated as a polemical political writer. A minority of scholars pay attention to his philosophy of aesthetics as being of technical but dry import. This article demonstrates how superficially bland arguments with regard to perception and imagination come to undergird an Aristotelian moral political philosophy.

Dispelling “das Herbert Butterfieldproblem”: A rereading of The Whig Interpretation of History

Herbert Butterfield became famous in 1931 on the publication of his The Whig Interpretation of History. Ever since its publication, scholars have universally agreed that this work condemns the tacit politicisation of historical narratives which span any significant length of time. My work demonstrates that, while Butterfield rejects a 'rationalist' political outlook [in Michael Oakeshott's sense], his conception of proper historical narrative still tacitly recommends a politics of institutionally-bound freedom.

Sophocles with a Spanner: Simone Weil’s radical use of Paul Valéry’s thought for the dignification of labour

Paul Valéry's thought continued the outlook of his master, Stefan Mallarmé, that the purpose of poetry was to encourage the 'disinterested' outlook of the Kantian-Schillerian philosophy. I demonstrate how Simone Weil repurposes poetry whilst maintaining its disinterested quality as an accompaniment not to leisure, but instead to a prayerful form of work. Weil's thought, on my account, represents a confluence of French Symbolism with the 1930s Christian Socialist movement.

History and Tragedy in Stuart Hampshire’s Thought and Action and in Bernard Williams, c. 1959-1973

The Wittgensteinian philosophy of mind provides, as my doctoral work shows, resources for Hegelian conservatism. It also contains elements which were employed at the end of the 1950s by liberal analytic Aristotelians. My article, for the first time, demonstrates how that philosophy of mind provided the foundation for mid-late Twentieth-Century liberal pluralism. In particular, I bring out the neglected political significance of Stuart Hampshire's Thought and Action [1959].

Quentin Skinner’s attack on G. R. Elton and the tradition of analogising the historian to the literary critic (in review)

The problem of competing, as opposed to alternative, contexts in intellectual history has received comparatively little attention relative to its sister concern, in Ethics, which Bernard Williams called tragedy. In paying attention to the (especially liberal) virtue ethicists' concern with tragedy, my paper indicates how the historian's imaginative treatment of evidence might become more sensitive to this difficulty. Quentin Skinner's method, whilst fruitfully receptive to Wittgenstein's conception of a language game, unwarrantedly plays down the open-endedness in his conception of 'following a rule'.

Expression and the Erotic in Modern Painters and The Stones of Venice: John Ruskin’s philosophy of love (in progress)

Scholarship on John Ruskin has been fixated by his string of failed marriages. As a result, whenever his works address the erotic, or anything approaching the erotic, commentators immediately understand this as the Freudian surfacing of a troubled life. In contrast to this, my work demonstrates how Ruskin's comments on love are best partially read as developments on Wordsworth's philosophy of expression and art.