St Edmund's

Isabel O’Connor (L6) is the winner of this year’s Thrupp Essay Prize for a superb response to the claim that ‘The story of history is the story of progress.’  In her detailed, articulate and scholarly essay, Isabel ranged over the thoughts of Marx and Engels, Hegel, Butterfield, Fukuyama and Derrida, identifying and juxtaposing the core ideas of each.  She concluded that ‘History is complex, unpredictable, and chaotic’ and that analysis reveals that ‘progress’ is neither inevitable nor even easily defined.

The field was very strong and excellent responses were submitted also by Max Visagie (‘Our political leaders should be role models’), Ella Wheadon (‘Freedom of speech should be defended at all costs’) and Yicong Hui, who also wrote on history as the story of progress.