Uploaded June 2026 | Updated September 2026, 10 hours ago
2026 marks 250 years since 1776, an inflection point in the intellectual history of classical liberalism and Enlightenment thought. The Founding Fathers signed the Declaration of Independence, whilst Adam Smith published his Inquiry into the Wealth of Nations. This was built upon hundreds of years of humanist, rationalist, political, and philosophical inquiries that came before, and served as the foundation for the liberal, tolerationist, and democratic treatises that defined the 18th century Enlightenment and beyond.
To mark this anniversary, we welcomed students to submit an essay appraising the intellectual history of Adam Smith and America’s democracy with an eye to their application to the Middle East and the Islamic world, a realm underrepresented in the scholarship and popular thought of Enlightenment. We wished for this competition to not just be backwards-facing but forward-looking, tracing elements of the past and assessing their relationship with the present. Students were encouraged to take a critical approach to contemporary scholarship, questioning academic consensus whilst using relevant literature to advance new arguments rooted in primary sources and historical context.
2026 marks 250 years since 1776, an inflection point in the intellectual history of classical liberalism and Enlightenment thought. The Founding Fathers signed the Declaration of Independence, whilst Adam Smith published his Inquiry into the Wealth of Nations. This was built upon hundreds of years of humanist, rationalist, political, and philosophical inquiries that came before, and served as the foundation for the liberal, tolerationist, and democratic treatises that defined the 18th century Enlightenment and beyond.
To mark this anniversary, we welcomed students to submit an essay appraising the intellectual history of Adam Smith and America’s democracy with an eye to their application to the Middle East and the Islamic world, a realm underrepresented in the scholarship and popular thought of Enlightenment. We wished for this competition to not just be backwards-facing but forward-looking, tracing elements of the past and assessing their relationship with the present. Students were encouraged to take a critical approach to contemporary scholarship, questioning academic consensus whilst using relevant literature to advance new arguments rooted in primary sources and historical context.
