W. E. B. Du Bois is credited with debunking the social Darwinism pervasive in turn-of-the-century social and political theory, exposing the environmental causes of black disadvantage and undercutting claims regarding “inborn” racial deficits. This, however, misses the constructive role that Darwinism played in his account of racial advancement. This article shows how Darwinism, eugenics, and race science shaped Du Bois’s conceptualizations of race and of racial uplift. Darwinism, I argue, informed his analysis of the harms that slavery and segregation visited on black Americans. It also influenced his defense of democratic equality: setting aside its other virtues, democracy would remove “artificial” constraints on the competitive struggle, enabling the best of white and black races to succeed. It was, then, eugenically advantageous. Against the common view that Du Bois rejected social Darwinism and eugenics, I demonstrate that their relationship was far more ambivalent and that his racial politics appealed to them.

Montesquieu’s philosophy of moderate government offers only a qualified endorsement of commercial republics. Recent scholarship has increasingly recognized the extent to which he advocated a monarchy balanced by an aristocracy. This article explicates Montesquieu’s understanding of honor as a vital aristocratic motive and one more consistently favorable to liberty than mercantile self-interest. It then compares this argument to the constitutionalism of the American Federalists. Whereas Publius attempts to create a balance of powers on the basis of representing aggregates of individuals, Adams throughout his writings affirms Montesquieu’s assumption that the impulse for honor creates enduring hierarchies in society, which must be explicitly accounted for in constitutional design. It concludes by suggesting that, amid today’s concerns about oligarchy, inequality, and populism, Adams’s realism points toward a healthier relationship between elites and people.

In the early 1970s, Christopher Stone and Peter Singer influentially rejected the anthropocentrism of liberalism, contending that animals and nature deserved moral and legal consideration independent of humans. This article historicizes the emergence of nonhuman personhood by showing how they and other writers attempted to dismantle liberalism’s anthropocentrism at a dynamic time in humanist politics. Writers asserted nonhuman personhood as a continuation of 1960s liberation movements, employing the narrative of a “natural” extension of rights and equality from marginalized humans to nonhumans. This determinism, however, obscured nonhumans’ specific inability to make political claims. Drawing on the incipient 1970s human rights movement, writers circumvented this problem of political agency by emphasizing nonhumans’ capacity to suffer. Suffering allowed humans to see themselves in nonhumans and thus recognize their personhood. This turn to empathetic identification as the driver of historical change inaugurated an anti-anthropocentric humanism that extended personhood beyond humanity but reinscribed a more fundamental distinction between those able and those unable to make political claims. Drawing on both 1960s challenges to humanism and 1970s humanist preoccupation with suffering, anti-anthropocentric humanism preserved the very limitations of liberal politics into a new definition of personhood that effaced political agency from both personhood and history.

In 1955, André Siegfried wondered whether the planet was entering a new geological age, wrought by industrialism and evident in major geopolitical changes. In this article, I trace his intellectual journey towards this claim and his singular focus on the international politics of agriculture and environmental change. First, I trace Siegfried’s early ideal of French rural democracy and its prudential virtues amid inter-imperial competition and interwar debt crises. Second, after the Dust Bowl, I examine Siegfried’s shifting engagements with environmental arguments against mechanized monoculture, focusing on his fears of erosion, and, after 1945, the loss of soil fertility and ecological resilience associated with small-scale mixed farming. Doubled through a geopolitical lens, I show how Siegfried saw such shifts as existential threats to his idyll of France’s rural democracy and global power. To conclude, I reflect on how Siegfried’s environmental geopolitics can help us rebuild intellectual histories of Anthropocene politics.

In the late 1740s and the 1750s the Jacobite exile James Steuart began to compose the work that became his Principles of Political Oeconomy. This article shows how the political principles of this work were shaped in two contexts neglected by earlier scholars: the networks that shaped Steuart’s formation as a Jacobite, and the debates about absolute monarchy that he encountered in France early during his exile starting in 1746. It demonstrates that Steuart’s vision of an economically active, interventionist state chiefly developed not from German debates about administration, as is often assumed, but from long-running Scottish currents of opposition to British government policy and radical French ideas about how monarchical reform can secure equal rights for all. This article thus uncovers the Jacobite and French origins of Steuart’s variety of interventionism, which troubled Adam Smith, inspired French revolutionaries, and influenced Hegel, Marx, and the broader history of political economy.

The fiduciary conception of political power that the republican tradition adopted in its struggle against absolutism was dissolving during the late eighteenth century and the nineteenth. However, in the mid-nineteenth century, some attempts appeared that represent a reemergence of the fiduciary democratic (or proto-democratic) scheme. One of them was the case of Spanish federalism and its greatest exponent, Francisco Pi y Margall. This article shows that the core of Pimargalian federal republican thought is based on a fiduciary conception of sovereignty, which is grounded in a recovery of the language of revolutionary natural law. By arguing that the fiduciary principle applied not only to his concept of public authority, but also to his comprehensive proposal for the federal reorganization of the state, this article contributes to a better understanding of the specific contribution of Pi’s work and to contemporary discussions on the foundations and scope of republicanism, federalism, and fiduciary relationships.

Using previously uncited archival evidence from the US, the UK, and Czechia, we highlight Bohuslav Ečer’s significant impact on the Charter of the International Military Tribunal held at Nuremberg from 1945 to 1946. A politically motivated jurist from Czechoslovakia, Ečer proved a key innovator in international criminal law, pushing for bold new precedents at Nuremberg. We highlight multiple legal arguments that Ečer innovated and championed. These include the prosecution of individuals for the crime of aggression, the forfeiting of sovereign immunity during wartime, a broader definition of war crimes that included “crimes against humanity,” and the collective responsibility of certain “criminal” Nazi organizations as a means of streamlining individual-level prosecutions. We trace Ečer’s political thought and activism, including how his arguments joined with those of other prominent legal thinkers outside the US, including Hersch Lauterpacht and Aron Trainin. The article thus adds an important, yet often overlooked, voice to Nuremberg’s intellectual history and helps remedy the Anglo-American bias of dominant histories of international criminal law.

Attending to our responsibility to the dead in our present historical moment of danger, this lecture stages three distinct reading experiments in “living together with the dead” with special attention to Palestine and Algeria. The first scene contemplates the times of war and death that constitute what Jalal Toufic refers to as “the withdrawal of tradition past a surpassing disaster.” The second scene explores artistic resurrection in literature by examining antiphonic burial during colonial war while juxtaposing philosophical conceptions of the relationship between death, burial, and history writing. I thus elaborate a concept of death as non-secular and theological, and of history writing as a form of anamnesis that inhabits the isthmus between the Terrestrial realm and the realm of the Unseen. The final scene is a meditation on poetry under conditions of colonial and postcolonial catastrophe. Throughout, theology and poetry serve as provocations to the discipline of history.

This article examines Adam Smith’s concept of the federative: the double-facing constitutional power to conduct international relations today called the treaty or foreign-affairs power. We reconstruct Smith’s account of the federative from his major and minor works and demonstrate its importance in his account of law and empire. We first examine Smith’s early “internal federative,” where the power grows from the internal constitutional organization of the state. What starts as a democratic right to wage war and make peace becomes concentrated over time in the sovereign and its advisers as a “senatoriall” power. We then turn to the “external federative” in Smith’s later works, where the federative is redesigned as a power to unify colonial legislative bodies, connecting the familial sentiments of Britain and America, and forming a model for moving, slowly, towards the conditions Smith deemed necessary for international justice.

The historiography of liberalism has taken a theological turn. Many scholars now trace the origins of liberal thought to Christian orthodoxy, with its emphasis on the radical equality of humanity under the absolute sovereignty of God. Others trace it to the heresy of Pelagianism, with its emphasis on the radical freedom of humans to choose between good and evil under the rationalistic judgment of God. Focusing on a classic expression of early-modern liberalism, Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, this article questions the theological turn: Franklin’s thought, I argue, rejects both Augustinianism and Pelagianism, along with their underlying metaphysical presuppositions concerning human liberty.

Beginning in the late 1990s, a debate emerged whether Edmund Burke might be read as a significant critic of empire because of his impeachment of Warren Hastings. The debate that ensued, I argue in this article, revealed ambiguities and paradoxes in the category of anti-imperialism. Rather than imperialism and anti-imperialism representing a clean binary, anti-imperial projects, events, and figures may embody the very sorts of politics that many disciplinary debates about anti-imperialism wish to critique. Foregrounding “anti-imperialism” in the history of political thought, I conclude, may obfuscate as much as it illuminates—even when examining the twentieth-century experience of decolonization.

The recent resurgence of exclusionary nationalism across the advanced capitalist world has caused historical scholarship on neoliberalism to reorient itself. Previous accounts of neoliberalism proved inadequate to theorize the hegemonic crisis that neoliberalism has been thrust into, prematurely rushing to declare neoliberalism dead. The task is to offer an interpretation of resurgent nationalism that can account for points of tension with hegemonic neoliberalism without underestimating the ways it lives on in the present. This essay critically reviews three books that offer distinct interpretations of neoliberalism’s enduring hegemonic crisis. If Melinda Cooper and Tehila Sasson’s respective works provide new critical perspectives on the history and present of neoliberal ideas, Jennifer Burns’s study offers an insider’s perspective on the pressures that neoliberalism is under from the nationalist right.

This article revisits the scholarly consensus that historical discourse in nineteenth-century Spanish America was primarily focused on nation building and state formation. Without denying the interest of post-colonial intellectuals in the histories of their home countries, it argues that the most urgent matters of concern for Spanish Americans who wrote about history, at least from the 1830s to the 1860s, were how to dismantle the legacies of colonialism at a transnational level and how to position Spanish America as a pivotal agent of change in world history. Focusing on the writings of a series of intellectuals from today’s Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Peru, and Venezuela, the article analyzes the emergence of the lexicon of decolonization, Spanish American challenges to Eurocentric approaches to “universal history,” and the proposal of narratives on global historical development alternative to the ones promoted from Western Europe and the United States during the Age of Revolutions.

Civil religion has been imagined as a bloodless rationalism or a baptized patriotism, but rarely as a fully fledged religion. This article argues that a strain of civil religion emerged out of deism in the 1770s and 1780s that aspired to be an authentic religion complete with public prayer. This “practical civil religion” looked to spirituality and social ritual as a means of taming the passions and achieving national regeneration. One of the first to imagine such a religion was the journalist and novelist Louis-Sébastien Mercier. The dissenting minister David Williams went beyond Mercier’s dream, in 1776 opening the world’s first deist chapel at Margaret Street in London. Maximilien Robespierre’s short-lived cult of the Supreme Being in revolutionary France represented the apogee of the tradition of practical civil religion. Robespierre proposed the cult as a means of effecting national regeneration and completing the Revolution.

For a major liberal theorist of totalitarianism’s rise and early advocate for European unification, it is surprising how little Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset’s views on the Second World War have factored into studies of his political thought. In this article, I show that Ortega described the conflict as a “catastrophe” that motivated European unification. Rather than an ex post facto interpretation, this was for him the fulfillment of a prophecy. As early as 1930, Ortega had predicted an impending catastrophe that would represent both a consequence of and a corrective for interwar democracy. European unification, then, was only possible to pursue after such an event. Noting that Ortega’s casting of European unification as a response to the Second World War reflects common contemporary assumptions, I also argue that he exhibits how this logic can be enlisted in the service of constraining democracy.