This article challenges the notion of French “influence.” It traces a network of like-minded reformers in France and the Balkans that came together in the early nineteenth century to further popular education. Examining interactions between actors in a cultural, scientific, and political center (France) and their allies on the periphery (in present-day Greece and Romania), the article reassesses these relationships, revealing the extent to which French individuals and organizations depended on such partnerships. Conceiving of joint Franco-Balkan reform agendas as programs of development, it offers a model and a vocabulary for the study of French soft power in post-Napoleonic Europe.

Historians have recently begun to gather round imperial, and lately “global,” contexts in which Western political thought might be better understood. John Locke has been pulled along behind them; the contours of his account of private property have increasingly been explained by his personal connections to the colonies. But in his case, the imperial context does less interpretive work than it appears to. This article attempts to show why: it tells a different, more explicitly intellectual, story about why Locke's depiction of property took the shape that it did. It does so by underlining the extent to which seventeenth-century property debates took place in the spatial and temporal dimensions inhabited by sacred history. It then tries to explain why this might have mattered to Locke.

At a critical moment during the Napoleonic era, the stockbrokers of Paris were summoned before the Council of State to defend the marché à terme, or futures contract in public debt. Surprisingly, despite official disdain and ample legal opportunity for prohibition, the brokers’ argument was successful, and the marché à terme escaped repression. The defense of the marché à terme turned on the nature of property. To critics, it divided property from possession, severing property from any concrete anchors. Advocates, by contrast, pointed to the inherent abstraction of property encoded in legal norms. These debates helped shape a concept of property in which economic utility, legal validity, and moral grounding converged. As a central pillar of the new regime, this concept of property also constrained political authority. The successful defense of the marché à terme shows that property was a right that not even authoritarian regimes could restrict arbitrarily.

The Victorian historian E. A. Freeman (1823–92), following Thomas Arnold, promoted the innovative idea of the “unity of history,” according to which history was a linked, recurring cycle without the artificial boundary of periods. In recent research, however, it is little noticed that, along with this “unity” theory, Freeman also emphasized the ruptures and the divisions in history. It is even less noticed that Freeman devised a unique periodization, which abolished AD 476 as the date marking the fall of Rome. Thus the very idea of the “unity of history” seems to contradict the use of periods. The former stressed a historical continuum while the latter denoted historical ruptures. This article argues that Freeman's notion of “race” could, in most cases, solve the apparent tension between these two “divergent” ideas (unity versus periods). Nevertheless, it is also argued that in some exceptional cases Freeman identified other factors besides race (e.g. religion) as transforming the innate racial belonging and the predestined course of history.

Recent literature on the moral economy of nineteenth-century German historiography shares with older scholarship on Leopold von Ranke's methodological revolution a tendency to refer to “the” historical discipline in the third person singular. This would make sense as long as historians occupied a common professional space and/or shared a basic understanding of what it meant to be a historian. Yet, as this article demonstrates, in a world sharply divided over political and religious issues, historians found it difficult to agree on what it meant to be a good historian. Drawing on the case of Ranke's influential pupil Georg Waitz, whose death in 1886 occasioned a debate on the relative merits of the example that Waitz had embodied, this article argues that historians in early imperial Germany were considerably more divided over what they called “the virtues of the historian” than has been acknowledged to date. Their most important frame of reference was not a shared discipline but rather a variety of approaches corresponding to a diversity of models or examples (“scholarly personae,” in modern academic parlance), the defining features of which were often starkly contrasted. Although common ground beneath these disagreements was not entirely absent, the habit of late nineteenth-century German historians to position themselves between Waitz and Heinrich von Sybel, Ranke and Friedrich Christoph Dahlmann, or other pairs of proper names turned into models of virtue, suggests that these historians experienced their professional environment as characterized primarily by disagreement over the marks of a good historian.

The Third Earl of Shaftesbury has been celebrated for his commitment to free public discourse regulated only by standards of politeness, a commitment exemplified by his defence of the freedom to ridicule. This article complicates this picture by tracing Shaftesbury's response to the early eighteenth-century crisis of public speech precipitated by the demise of pre-publication censorship and growing uncertainty about intellectual property in the print trade. Shaftesbury, the article shows, was a determined opponent of pre-publication censorship through licensing, but he was also aware of the dangers posed to religious liberty by, in particular, clerical attacks on toleration, and sought ways to curb them that included corrective action by the state. When the Whigs opted to impeach the High Church cleric Henry Sacheverell, whose supporters had capitalized on an unregulated print market to disseminate his sermons ridiculing Whig principles, Shaftesbury expressed satisfaction with this use of state power to silence him. But he did not stop there. The article reads Shaftesbury's 1710 Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author against the backdrop of the Sacheverell controversy, and shows how the earl used it to undercut Sacheverell's claim that clerical speech enjoyed special status.

In his biography of James Mill, Alexander Bain made a number of claims with regard to Mill's essay “Government” (1820). First, the essay was a catalyst in the movement for reform, making “in all probability . . . our political history very different from what it might otherwise have been.” Second, the essay provided a unique opportunity for Mill to expound on “the whole theory of Government in a compact shape.” Third, as far as his “Logic of Politics” was concerned, Mill depended on the deductive method—the method of geometry—having quickly discarded the applicability of inductive logic in politics. In this article, I take issue with the last claim.

Britons viewed speculative thinking as a primary cause of the French Revolution and the disorders that followed. In this context, Edmund Burke and others identified a form of enthusiasm that was theoretical, not religious, in nature, but which also corrupted reasoning to disastrous effect. This article investigates how this accusation was made against David Ricardo and his political economy, and the variable defences that he deployed. The result is to uncover the language that was used to appraise political economy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, along with the intellectual disciplines that were prescribed to protect economic reasoning from falling into fantasy.

“Rationalism” became the subject of intense debate in nineteenth-century Britain. This article asks why this was so, by focusing on the usage and implications of the term in contemporary argument. Rationalism was successively defined and redefined in ways that reached to the heart of Victorian epistemological and religious discussion. By treating rationalism as a contextually specific term, and examining how its implications changed between the 1820s and the early twentieth century, the article brings new perspectives to bear on the development of nineteenth-century freethought and countervailing religious apologetic. It underlines the importance of history, and constructions of intellectual lineage, as ways of establishing the relationship between rationality and religion in a progressively wider-ranging Victorian debate about the sources of knowledge and value.

This article explores the significant yet neglected topic of environmental awareness in nineteenth-century French political economy, and the French school of “industrialism” in particular. It focuses on the work of the one-time Saint-Simonian and political economist Michel Chevalier (1806–79) as an interesting example of an environmentally sensitive political economy of “industrialism.” The article reveals how Chevalier's political economy was informed by a sophisticated and environmentally conscious understanding of nature that came to mark scientific and engineering thinking in early nineteenth-century French academic circles. It shows how this understanding of nature was transmitted through publications and lectures of scientists and engineers within leading French academic institutions such as the Ecole polytechnique and the Ecole des mines. The article demonstrates that Chevalier's scientific and engineering education at these institutions shaped his understanding of nature and society as intimately interconnected and mutually impacting. The article then explores how his view of nature and society developed in a more decidedly Romantic direction during his time as a Saint-Simonian. The Romantic sensibility of this time was short-lived, but a keen environmental awareness dating back to Chevalier's student days remained a significant feature of his later reflections in political economy. It was this particular quality of Chevalier's political economy that set it apart both from the French liberal school of political economy, with its very low environmental awareness, and from the more fully ecological political economy of the kind advanced by his fellow Saint-Simonians Pierre Leroux and Jean Reynaud. Finally, the article shows what has not been widely appreciated: that an environmentally sensitive political economy, of which Chevalier's was a good example, was endorsed by a large body of nineteenth-century French scientific and administrative opinion.

Wilhelm Friedrich Georg Roscher (1817–94) is generally remembered as a significant nineteenth-century German political economist and a contributor to the “German historical school of economics.” His work is usually placed in the context of a larger narrative about the development of economic thought. Yet intellectual historians have rarely noticed that, for Roscher, Staatswirthschaft or Nationalökonomie were subordinate to a larger science of politics, and few have engaged with the substance of his political thought (as opposed to his economics). The aim of this article is to provide an interpretation of Roscher as a political thinker, focusing especially on his account of the modern European state between the 1840s and the 1890s. In particular, it explores Roscher's concern that nineteenth-century Europe's economically advanced societies, characterized by an unstable combination of democratic sovereignty, deep socio-economic inequality and a centralized state apparatus, would soon find themselves at the mercy of “military tyranny” or “Caesarism.” It underlines the ways in which Roscher's preoccupation with ancient history fed into his estimation of nineteenth-century politics, and also examines his comparative assessment of democracy's prospects in Britain, France and the United States.

Based on newly available archival records, this article examines the life and thought of Andre Gunder Frank from his years as a graduate student in development economics to the publication of his first and most influential book. A closer look at the evolution of Frank's thought provides new insight into the relationship of his brand of “neo-Marxist” development theories with both classical Marxism and modernization theory. Frank interpreted Marxist political debates according to the categories of thought of 1950s American development economics, and in doing so he both misinterpreted fundamental aspects of Marxism and simultaneously generated lively theoretical debates that remain relevant today.

The First World War is often alluded to as “the war to end all wars,” a phrase credited to H. G. Wells at the outbreak of the conflict. Rather than a self-proclaimed product of war enthusiasm in 1914, his declaration represented a consistent vision of warfare that Wells circulated in much of his work: that a major war would cause the collapse of the nation state and facilitate the rise of a utopian, technocratic world state. Although partly a cultural product of his own times, Wells mythologized himself as a misfit in all times: a sociopolitical critic antithetical to the madness of his own society. This study asserts that rather than an attempt at prophecy, it is this misfit image that informed his declaration in 1914 and societal responses to it.

Freud's most sustained account of the power of sexual sublimation to fuel scientific and artistic genius is found in his Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, published in 1910. This article argues that Freud chose Leonardo as the perfect example of sublimation because of his close reading of the then quite popular historical novel Leonardo da Vinci, written by a poet and author of the Russian Silver Age, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii. The central point of Freud's theory of sublimation, that sexuality is at the root of human knowledge and creativity, is developed by Merezhkovskii, but from the religious-philosophical perspective of Silver Age symbolism. Freudian sublimation, as a psychological theory, was developed in dialogue with a Russian religious understanding of Eros and its power. Freud essentially rewrote Merezhkovskii's story of Leonardo, reducing Merezhkovskii's philosophy of Eros to the more “scientifically” grounded theory of sexual sublimation.

This article situates francophone anticolonial thinkers—including Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Frantz Fanon—within the “humanism debate” in postwar French thought. Drawing on their poetry, prose, speeches, and interviews, this article reconstructs their critique of the humanist tradition that had identified the capacity for reason as the essence of “man.” It then traces their dialogue with approaches to this critique, including existentialism, phenomenology, and surrealism, that circulated in the metropole. The particular ways in which anticolonial thinkers built upon such approaches merit our attention because they force us to revise our understanding of the politics motivating the turn to so-called “antihumanism” in the 1960s. Drawing on recent studies that have highlighted proposals for federalist alternatives to empire entertained prior to national independence, this article suggests that the “federalist imagination” helped to inspire the distinctive mode of criticism developed by certain anticolonial thinkers and taken up by later scholars.

This article examines the intersection of interwar debates about the scientific study of politics and international order, two fields which are often studied in isolation. It does so through an analysis of the political and international thought of the British political scientist and advocate of Anglo-American union George Catlin, one of the few political thinkers who made important contributions to each field. Catlin was one of the earliest proponents of the scientific study of politics, and his work prefigured the subsequent advent of public-choice theory. He was also the most vocal British advocate of Anglo-American union in the 1930s and 1940s. Catlin believed that international peace could be attained through the equilibrium of regional blocs based upon shared cultural identities. He saw Anglo-American union as the most feasible first step towards such international organization, given what he identified as the existing close bonds of “Anglo-Saxony.”

Castigated as theoretically naive by Perry Anderson, or praised as culturally sensitive by later writers, the political thought of the “first New Left” has often been understood in relation to F. R. Leavis's cultural criticism. This article seeks to reframe the writings of E. P. Thompson, Stuart Hall, Charles Taylor and Alasdair Macintyre from this period as interventions in a fundamentally sociological debate about the nature of capitalism in the managed economy of postwar Britain.

Historians of pragmatism have long overlooked Kenneth Burke and Richard McKeon. This has not been without good reason. At first glance, the two read more like critics than adherents of the tradition. Yet placing Burke and McKeon's writings from the 1920s to the late 1950s in the context of their development reveals a shared project aimed at reforming pragmatism. While pragmatists such as John Dewey and Sidney Hook alleged a conceptual fidelity between the scientific method and democratic processes such as public debate, Burke and McKeon questioned this link. Metaphors drawn from science, they believed, blinded pragmatists to the nature of communication. Due to this oversight, pragmatists ignored the ideological ambiguity that surrounded terms like “science” and “democracy” during the mid-twentieth century. Burke and McKeon sought to fix this omission. Pragmatists, they argued, needed to trade the language of science for a terminology drawn from a source more attuned to the power of communication: the arts. By advancing this case, Burke and McKeon crafted an aesthetic form of pragmatism—a variant of the philosophy that, ultimately, contemporaries would barely recognize as such.