Patrick Joyce (born 1945) is a British/Irish social historian, whose work also encompasses political history. Joyce is known for his theoretical work on the nature of history, especially on the relationship between history and the social sciences.
Consistently challenged academic orthodoxies, Joyce has been a radical voice in successive debates about the direction of social and cultural history since the 1970s. His research has ranged widely from the politics of class in Victorian England to the formation of the modern self, it has always shown a preoccupation with liberalism, governance, and the nature of freedom.
While Joyce’s work has concentrated on Britain, its influence has registered worldwide, in North America and beyond.
Books in order of publication:
Work, Society and Politics: The Culture of the Factory in Later Victorian England (Harvester Press, Brighton, 1980).
(Ed.), The Historical Meanings of Work, (Cambridge University Press, 1987).
Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class 1848-1914 (CUP, 1991).
Democratic Subjects: the Self and the Social in Nineteenth-century England (Cambridge University Press, 1994).
(Ed.), The Oxford Reader on Class, (Oxford University Press, 1995).
(Ed.), The Social in Question : New Bearings in History and the Social Sciences, (Routledge, 2002).
The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (Verso, 2003), translated into Greek and Chinese editions.
Joint ed., with T Bennett, Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn (Routledge, 2010).
The State of Freedom: A Social History of the British State since 1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2014)
Going to My Father’s House: A History of My Times (Verso, 2021)
Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World (Scribner, 2024)
Oak Lawn Library Friends 