Profile

Senior Lecturer in Politics

Member of Political and Social Thought Research Group

Contact

Room: Rutherford N3.E6
Tel: 01227 (82)4826
A.Pabst@kent.ac.uk

Adrian joined the School in 2009 as a lecturer in politics. His teaching and research are at the interstice of political theory, political economy and international relations (including European politics). He has also a strong interest in the complex links between religion, politics and economics, with a special focus on questions of ethics.

After studying economics at Cambridge, European Studies at the LSE and political philosophy in Paris, he completed his doctoral dissertation on the philosophical question of individuation and the political problem of individuality at Cambridge. His first monograph, which is based on his PhD thesis and his post-doctoral research, is entitled Metaphysics: The Creation of Hierarchy. It was published by the US publisher W.B. Eerdmans in early May 2012.

From 2007 to 2009, Adrian held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Nottingham. His post-doctoral research was on democracy, capitalism and religion with a focus on rival sources of sovereignty. This has led to a variety of articles and book chapters in leading international journals and edited collections, including a volume of essays entitled The Crisis of Global Capitalism.

Currently, he is writing The Politics of Paradox, a book on alternatives to the logic of left/right and state/market that has been dominant since the secular settlement of the French Revolution. Conceptually, the book argues for the primacy of the social over the political and the economic. This argument draws on the political philosophy of Plato and Kierkegaard, notably the notion of paradox that outflanks the two dominant logics ofall the variants of monism, dualism and pluralism that characterise modern politics – binomial dualism and dialectics.

Practically, the primacy of the social translates into the pre-eminence of civil society (and its intermediary institutions) vis-à-vis the state and the market, both at the national and the international level. The alternatives that the book explores develop the early work of the English School of IR and also various traditions of mutuality and reciprocity such as associative democracy, civil economy, guild socialism and Christian social teaching.

His next research projects are, first, on ethics and economicsthe Political Economy of the Common Good and, second, on the European Commonwealth’s neo-medieval polity. The first project explores how notions of the common good, the good life and virtuous practices can be used to rethink and transform the economy, with a particular emphasis on banking and finance.

The second project focuses on alternative ideas for the European Union and the wider Europe that includes Russia, Ukraine and Turkey. The argument that will be developed is that Europe is really a neo-medieval polity that is primarily a commonwealth of peoples and nations rather than a union of states and markets.

Since 2007, Adrian has been an editorial associate of the journal TELOS and a Fellow of the Centre of Theology and Philosophy. In 2012, he joined the independent, non-partisan think-tank ResPublica as a Fellow, contributing, inter alia, to essay collections on House of Lords Reform and Moral Markets.

For the past seven years, he has also been writing regularly for the comment and op-ed pages of The International Herald Tribune, The Guardian, The Moscow Times, The National, The Huffington Post , ABC Religion & Ethics and and Les Echos on geo-politics, political economy, Europe and religion.