It remains to examine two more references transmitting material attributed to a Potamo. Due to the non-philosophical context of their source texts and their isolated nature, these references are more difficult to pin down in terms of origin than the material from Simplicius. As a result, I will limit myself to a brief examination of the potential implications and additional information that may be gained from what can only be a tentative attribution to Potamo the Eclectic philosopher from Alexandria.

A principal aim of this study has been to provide the basis for an assessment of what eclecticism meant for an ancient philosopher who was prepared to assume the term as a description of his own system or sect. The most obvious remark is that such a self-description for a philosopher is not paralleled in Antiquity, a uniqueness which makes Potamo's case all the more interesting and raises questions about why no other ancient philosopher proclaimed eclecticism in the same way, in contrast to frequent modern ascriptions of the term to a host of ancient thinkers. As ever, we have to rely almost exclusively on the information provided by Diogenes Laertius: we may now try to combine the results from the survey of the doctrines (ἀρέσαντα) associated with Potamo's sect with what can be gleaned from Diogenes concerning the sect itself and its status.

Potamo is one of the most intriguing figures in first-century bc philosophy. The limited information available on him comes mainly from Diogenes Laertius, who mentions Potamo almost as an appendix or afterthought to his lists of the various philosophical persuasions (αἱρέσεις), without attempting to fit him into any classification. In fact, immediately before the reference to Potamo Diogenes seems to be rounding off his general survey of philosophical sects: αἵδε μὲν ἀρχαὶ καὶ διαδοχαὶ καὶ τοσαῦτα μέρη καὶ τόσαι φιλοσοφίας αἱρέσεις (‘so these are the beginnings and successions of philosophy and this is how many parts and sects it has’, 1.20). Potamo is treated as an exceptional case because he did not subscribe to any of the systems listed by Diogenes and did not belong to any of the traditional successions, but introduced his own Eclectic sect by means of selection (ἐκλεξαμένου) from more than one existing sect:

The emergence and definition of the conservative tradition

Like so much of the vocabulary of modern politics and social science, the term ‘conservative’ can be traced back to the early nineteenth century (Vierhaus 1973, i, pp. 477–85). Its first use was apparently in the title of the weekly journal founded in 1817 by Francois René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848) and Louis de Bonald (1754–1840), Le Conservateur. Its declared mission was to uphold ‘religion, the King, liberty, the Charter and respectable people [les honnêtes gens]’. In Britain the term was first used as a synonym for the Tory Party in 1830. It rapidly became a part of the vocabulary of politics during the Reform Bill crisis of 1831–2. Daniel O'Connell, the political leader of Irish Catholicism, noted the new coinage in 1832: ‘Conservative – that is the fashionable term, the new-fangled phrase now used in Polite Society to designate the Tory ascendancy.’ It was being used pejoratively against conservatives in Germany by the late 1830s, but there, as elsewhere, the political formations opposed to change came to accept and employ the term themselves. By the middle of the nineteenth century the term was in universal use and it is the purpose of this essay to explain the different ideological positions, groups and individuals who were embraced by it. The essay will consider the different conservative reactions to the mid-century European revolutions and the emergence of mass politics. It will also examine the ways in which conservatism changed over time from the anti-revolutionary creed of 1848 to the more complex, intellectualised and yet irrational forms it had adopted by the end of the century. Because there was no single, dominant conservative thinker in this period the essay will examine different variants of the creed from the United States to the Russian Empire – from the South Carolina of John C. Calhoun to the St Petersburg of Dostoevsky. And because it will be argued that conservatism was more a set of attitudes generated by specific historical situations than a systematic ideology, the treatment will closely relate conservative thought to the history of the era.

The object of this essay is to explore the main philosophical features of Jeremy Bentham's (1748–1832) radical thought and to identify those aspects which were later accepted or rejected by John Stuart Mill (1806–73) in his conception of philosophic radicalism. It is a study in the development and transmission of a set of ideas that helped to define the nature of philosophy and its application to politics in Britain and elsewhere in the first decades of the nineteenth century. It was believed and argued that truth in numerous fields, from politics to logic, possessed great utility (see Mill 1974, CWM, vii, pp. 11–12). The enhancement of understanding could lead to the relief of human suffering and the advancement of happiness. It would be wrong to see these fundamental beliefs as simply a development of a universal rationalism associated with the Enlightenment. Although Mill could write that ‘if there were but one rational being in the universe, that being might be a perfect logician’ (Mill 1974, CWM, vii, p. 6), neither Bentham nor Mill expected everyone to philosophise or seek the truth. But the recognition of the utility of truth led to a new kind of politics, theoretically open to all and inspired by a philosophical concern for truth, which dared, however gradually, to transform the lives of everyone. This transformation was to be achieved through a critical vision of society, released from oppression and ignorance to find security and happiness in new laws, institutions and practices.

Law and political thought

How is law related to political thought in modern European history? There are three different answers to this question that apply here. One derives from what may be called the legislative or statutory model of legal philosophy, which, following good classical precedent, identified law with the will of the sovereign, whether located in a monarchical or in a republican form of government. In the eighteenth century the legislative paradigm can be seen in the theory and practice of enlightened despotism and especially in the codification movement, which touched many European states, including Prussia, Austria and France (Tarello 1976; cf. Wisner 1997). European codes, modelled largely on the Corpus Juris Justiniani (ad 529–33), were intended to organise all private law (especially the law of persons and property) into a single system and in this way, whether directly or indirectly, to politicise it. This agenda was realised most famously in the Napoleonic Code, but it can also be seen in monarchists such as Joseph de Maistre, Louis de Bonald, and Friedrich von Stahl and Utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham and John Austin, who defined law simply as a command of sovereign power.

In the early decades of the nineteenth century European intellectual life was enriched by the works of composers, painters, poets and writers who were influenced in a variety of ways by the spirit of ‘romanticism’ (Porter and Teich 1988; Schenk 1979). Romantic ways of thinking had deep roots in early modern culture but between about 1800 and 1850 they played a particularly significant role in theoretically framed statements on fundamental political questions. Issues of definition and taxonomy bedevil the study of romanticism, but at the risk of some oversimplification it is possible to identify three concerns that were shared by a range of prominent exponents of political romanticism. These writers were all preoccupied with the epistemological and moral importance of feeling and imagination; they developed a distinctive notion of the individual; and they stressed ideas of community.

Conventionally German liberalism is held to be one of the main reasons why Germany in the nineteenth century never managed to break the fetters of an authoritarian political system and why it eventually came to be the breeding ground for extremist movements on the right, notably radical nationalism and finally National Socialism. The history of German liberalism has always been seen as an aspect of the so-called German Sonderweg, a departure from the path towards modernity and liberal government which had succeeded elsewhere in Western Europe. In this approach, the failure of liberalism to impress German society with its values was considered a key factor. Recent research has shown, however, that this was at best a partial view. First, the parallels in the development of German and British liberalism are considerable. Secondly, the achievements and the failures of German liberalism ought to be compared with those of other European countries, notably Italy, Austria and Hungary. Such a comparison produces a far more diversified picture of German and European liberalism (Langewiesche 1988b).

From Hegel to Hegelianism

In The Communist Manifesto completed just before the outbreak of the 1848 revolutions, its joint authors, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, depicted communism as a theory which explained how the development of industrial capitalism would lead to a proletarian revolution. In that revolution, private property in the means of production would be abolished, the political state would be superseded, and humanity would enter into a higher state of freedom. Twentieth-century commentators, following the Manifesto's characterisation of modern communism, attempted to relate its genesis to the industrial revolution and the emergence of the working class.

Today we deliberately refer to social sciences in the plural. For much of the nineteenth century, however, writers more characteristically spoke of social science or la science sociale in the singular. Although there was perhaps as little consensus then as now on either the meaning of ‘social’ or the methods of its ‘science(s)’, there was an often unspoken agreement about the relationship of social science to politics: la science sociale would provide the master plan for a new political order. My purpose in this essay is not to canvas all the uses of social science as political blueprint, but rather to reconsider some key debates about the relationship of social science to political argument in France and England from the French Revolution, when the term science sociale became current, to the 1880s, when ‘positivism’ had come to prevail on both sides of the Channel. To this end, I will contrast the reach and resonance of the idea of ‘social science’ in two political milieux.

Introduction

Perhaps no Victorian was more startled by the implications of evolution than Charles Darwin (1809–82). Transformations of nature through natural selection were considered in his private and, eventually, very public writings; but even as they flowed from his pen, these ideas disturbed him. He was perennially torn about their moral and ethical consequences. The imagery of struggle, selection and extinction in nature that Darwin did so much to fashion was also ready-made to describe the rough passage of arguments and beliefs through history, including the struggle for survival of the evolutionary idea itself. Darwin and his followers identified themselves with a cause, but they were not always so sanguine about the social and political repercussions of their intellectual battles. This chapter situates Darwin's struggle – and his concept of struggle – in a wider context of nineteenth-century evolutionary thought and explores political and religious consequences of the claim that species (human included) are not definitively fixed in form, but undergo change over time.

Looking back on John Stuart Mill, we see him as the most important English philosopher of his century. For us, he fits naturally into what we think of as a British empiricist tradition between Hume in the previous century and Russell in the next. Yet this is not how Mill himself would have thought of his work. ‘Empiricism’ was something he criticised and wished to avoid. Nor did he look back to Hume. Instead, he looked back to his father, James Mill. His father, he thought, provided the most advanced analysis of the human mind, which for Mill was the central key to all philosophy. And, again following his father, he looked back before him to the account of the mind in David Hartley, building on Locke.

The history of thinking about the structures of human association in Western Europe during the nineteenth century was marked by a remarkable resurgence of interest in questions pertaining to the conflicting and mediating relations between the spiritual and temporal, the transcendent and immanent, the sacred and secular dimensions of human experience, as well as to the institutional, ‘objective’ articulation of such ‘subjectively’ defined relations in the renegotiations, transformations, reforms and reconstructions of the relations between state and church. Between the defeat of Napoleon and the massive social and political transformations of the last quarter of the century, it was virtually impossible to formulate questions concerning the associative life of human beings outside the framework of the field of tension and reciprocity produced by religious and political agendas for transforming emancipated strangers into members of a community of consciousness, will and sentiment. It is difficult to find a significant political or social thinker before 1870 whose discourse was not framed in large parts by this polarity.

The aim of the nineteenth-century volume of the Cambridge History of Political Thought is to provide a systematic and up-to-date scholarly account of the development of the central themes of political and social thinking in the century following the French Revolution. Its purpose is not to reinforce a canon but rather to trace the emergence of particular preoccupations and to delineate the development of distinctive forms and languages of political thinking. As in the preceding volumes, the aim will be to analyse the provenance and character of leading political ideas, to relate them to the specific historical contexts within which they arose and to examine the circumstances in which their influence made itself felt. This thematic approach has many advantages. But we do not consider it appropriate in every case. In a few instances – those of Hegel, Marx, Bentham and Mill – we have largely devoted chapters to a single author. For in assessing such major thinkers, whose influence and reputations have reached down to the present, we have considered it important that readers be enabled to evaluate their work as a whole.

Introduction

When Madame de Staël wrote her Considérations sur la Révolution Française one of the central questions she raised was the following: ‘Did France possess a Constitution before the Revolution?’ (de Staël 2008, pp. 96–111). Her answer was that France had been ‘governed by custom, by caprice but never by laws’ and that of all modern monarchies France had undoubtedly been the one ‘whose political institutions had been the most arbitrary’. This is a portrayal that France's monarchs might have challenged – they certainly felt themselves to be constrained in their actions by a set of fundamental laws that they might not transgress – but the fact remained that by 1789 there existed a widespread demand for a written constitution that would set out clear limits to the actions of government and that would define the rights of all citizens. It was in this context that the meaning attributed to the idea of a constitution changed irrevocably, and with radical implications. Henceforth it was to be understood as the set of arrangements that were to determine the manner in which institutions of the state and of public authority operated. Moreover, given the descent of the monarchy into what was widely perceived to be despotism, the demand was increasingly made that these arrangements should correspond to the deliberate choice of the nation.