David Boucher (academic)

Boucher's most recent book, Appropriating Hobbes: Legacies in Politics, Law and International Relations (OUP, 2018) begins with a justification of the approach taken in the book, focusing upon hermeneutics and particularly the concept of distanciation, incorporating Reinhart Koselleck’s distinction between the space of experience and the horizon of expectation. He argues that Hobbes’s texts do not stand independently of interpretation, and that each appropriation is a rewriting of the arguments sustained with different patterns of evidence, constrained by the conventions and settled norms of scholarship that enable people to differentiate between fiction and evidentially supported argument. Boucher and Paul Kelly have edited Political Thinkers: From Socrates to the Present.

Boucher is a professor at Cardiff University and a distinguished visiting professor at University of Johannesburg. He was vice-president (arts, humanities and social sciences) of The Learned Society of Wales from 2017 to 2020, and is chairman of the trustees of the Collingwood Society.

This book has been translated into six languages, including Spanish, Serbian and Polish. It has been re-issued following the death of Leonard Cohen and the conferment of the Nobel Prize for Literature on Bob Dylan. Boucher extended this research to explore the relationship with Bob Dylan, the Beats, and Dylan Thomas. Boucher's most recent work in this area has appeared in The Journal of Popular Music (2013) and Symbiosis (2016).

In 2000, Boucher became a professorial fellow at Cardiff University, and the university's first dean of the Graduate School in Humanities. He was head of the School of European Studies; acting head of the Centre for Continuing Adult Education; and deputy pro-vice chancellor for staffing and diversity.

Collingwood showed that the civilising process has three aspects: the elimination of force in relation to one’s fellow members of the body politic, between members of different bodies politic, and between humans and nature. The implications Boucher discussed in a number of articles, including The British Journal of Politics and International Relations (2000), "Collingwood, Tocqueville and the expansion of the moral community".

Boucher jointly authored two further books with Andrew Vincent, British Idealism and Political Theory (Edinburgh University Press, 2000), and The British Idealists: A Guide for the Perplexed (Continuum, 2011) in which they argued that Idealism is a living philosophy with contributions to be made to contemporary issues.

Boucher has been chairman of the trustees of the R. G. Collingwood Society since 1993, and is the executive editor of its journal British Idealism and Collingwood Studies. He has held fellowships at The History of Ideas Unit, Australian National University; Christchurch University, Canterbury, New Zealand; Sun Yat Sen University, Taiwan; and is a distinguished visiting professor, University of Johannesburg, South Africa (2016–2021).

From the late 1960s the study of political thought in the Anglo-American tradition became self-reflective in demanding a greater methodological self-awareness. This self-awareness drew very heavily on the work of continental hermeneutic theorists such as Wilhelm Dilthey, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur. Historian such as W. H. Greenleaf, Quentin Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock attempted to impose upon the discipline a preferred method of inquiry which excluded the intrusion of present philosophical, practical and moral considerations into an historical inquiry.

David Ewart George Boucher (born 15 October 1951, Ebbw Vale, Wales) is a Welsh political theorist and philosopher of international relations.

Boucher was born in Ebbw Vale, Wales, in 1951. He studied politics at Swansea University, the London School of Economics and Liverpool University before appointment to a tutorial fellowship at Cardiff University in 1980. He then worked at La Trobe University, Melbourne, and The Australian National University in Canberra, before returning to the United Kingdom to take up a senior lectureship at Swansea University in 1991.

When Sir Malcolm Knox edited Collingwood's The Idea of History in 1946 he effectively prohibited the further publication of manuscript material, a prohibition to which Collingwood's widow and daughter strictly adhered. In 1989, Boucher was the first person to be granted permission to publish manuscript material from Collingwood's unpublished papers since Sir Malcolm Knox. Essays in Political Philosophy includes extracts from the manuscripts. Boucher has since edited a revised version of Collingwood's The New Leviathan; The Philosophy of Enchantment (with Wendy James and Philip Smallwood); and An Autobiography (with Collingwood's daughter, Teresa Smith). Fred Inglis, the author of History Man: The Life of R. G. Collingwood maintains: "Boucher’s own dutiful fidelity makes an indispensable link in the very survival of the social history of a philosopher’s thought."