This article examines the role of legal argument in late eighteenth-century antislavery thought by subjecting Granville Sharp’s legal writing to detailed scrutiny. Much scholarship on law and antislavery in the British context justifiably focuses on the meaning of Lord Mansfield’s 1772 ruling in Somerset’s Case. Adopting a different approach, this article reads Sharp’s antislavery jurisprudence expansively, as an effort to fashion legal and political ideals. In so doing, it shows that Sharp’s legal writing was part of a broader project aimed at associating antislavery with a particular conception of national identity. Examining Sharp’s wide-ranging analysis of statute and common law, the article further argues that Sharp developed a form of natural-rights constitutionalism, melding the radical cause of abolition with the notion of tradition. Finally, the article explains how Sharp’s jurisprudence promoted an ideologically important vision of abolitionism as a distinctively modern form of progress. In short, the article argues that Sharp’s legal writing should be read not only in relation to Somerset but also as a means of understanding the character of antislavery thought and its relation to wider currents in eighteenth-century radicalism.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

In the early nineteenth century, parliamentarians in Britain debated whether the Crown’s prerogative could be used to exclude and deport aliens. These arguments were later expanded in litigation about the immigration practices of the British colonies. On behalf of the colonies, some lawyers proposed that the executive powers of colonial officials were informed by the writings of Samuel Pufendorf and Emer de Vattel, who had claimed that the state could forbid the entry of foreigners. But across three disputes, from Mauritius (1830s), Australia (1880s), and Canada (1900s), lawyers in the colonies and in London revealed several doubts about this line of thought. In doing so, they expressed a more general skepticism about the relevance of sovereignty to immigration control.

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.

The literature on the introduction of modern Western philosophy in the late Ottoman Empire is predominantly ethnocentric. This is because it reduces the Ottoman version of modern Western philosophy to the philosophical discourses of Muslim/Turkish intellectuals at the expense of non-Muslim Ottomans’ philosophical activities in languages other than Turkish. This article challenges such ethnocentrism and offers an alternative narrative from the perspective of Ottoman Armenian thinkers in the late nineteenth century. With this aim, it analyzes the philosophical thoughts of Madatia Karakashian, Nahabed Rusinian, Kalusd Gosdantian, and Yeghia Demirjibashian.

Alfred Marshall used an evolutionary theory of race to ground individual psychology and explain economic behavior. The psychological theory, drawn from Herbert Spencer, explained British and US industrial leadership by the innate excellences of Anglo-Saxon workers and entrepreneurs, without invoking colonialism or other uses of state power. It also asserted the internal solidarity of Anglo-Saxons. Because they were inclined to help each other, argued Marshall, Anglo-Saxons could handle laissez-faire. The paper situates Marshall in conversation with Anglican liberals like F. D. Maurice, and argues that a shared racial consciousness worked as a common ground among Coleridgean Romantics and radicals like Mill and Spencer who needed a category of the nation that did not rely on the state.

This article offers a reading of the intersections of ancient and modern imperialism in Alfred Zimmern's 1911 monograph The Greek Commonwealth: Politics and Economics in Fifth-Century Athens. The first section looks at Zimmern's use of ancient and modern comparisons and shows that, far from modernizing the ancient Greeks, as scholars have argued, he in fact insistently drew attention to the differences between the ancient and modern worlds. The second section examines the complexities of Zimmern's narrative of the Athenian empire, in particular the tension between politics and economics intimated by the book's subtitle and foregrounded by its structure. The article as a whole sets Zimmern's account in the context of Edwardian reflections on ancient and modern imperialism and shows, with the help of his own reflections, that his use of historical parallels was designed to encourage thought about modern political and economic problems as well as action to remedy them.

This article investigates the intellectual and cultural history of homeownership in the United States. Focused on the work of the economist Richard T. Ely, it argues that this history should move beyond Ely’s intellectual influence on the real-estate industry in the 1910s and 1920s to incorporate his critique of laissez-faire economics, his ideas about “social property,” and his visions of managed hierarchy, all of which originated in the late nineteenth century. The essay tracks Ely’s connections to Progressives like John Dewey—with their visions of a coming social self to displace possessive individualism—and his influence on Herbert Hoover’s 1931 National Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership—which prefigured the New Deal’s housing policy. Following Ely’s work reveals how homeownership institutionalized what Dewey called “social values,” but did so by naturalizing a persistent rhetoric of autonomy and individualism that relied on divisions of race, class, and gender for its power.

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.

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.

This article traces the emergence of a new type of economist in interwar France—the conjuncturist—through a study focusing on Alfred Sauvy and Robert Marjolin. We argue that these neglected figures helped to shape a new, autonomous, field of expertise that consisted of diagnosing and forecasting the economic situation to guide public decision making. As we show, the history of the conjuncturists is closely linked to that of the Popular Front in general, and to its emblematic law on the forty-hour week in particular. By becoming the most vocal opponents of this law, the conjuncturists fomented an open mutiny against the very government that had given them their first prominent position, in order to obtain the repeal of the forty-hour week, which Sauvy achieved in November 1938. Although the Popular Front was by then a thing of the past, and a future war with Germany had become the most likely outcome, the figure of the conjuncturist had succeeded in firmly occupying the institutional landscape of 1940s France—a form of economic expertise that was henceforth inseparable from political activity itself.

In postwar France a proliferation of thinkers sought to move away from the dialectic of negation and synthesis. Two such writers turned to Jean-Jacques Rousseau as the source of a non-dualistic reflection. In 1962, Claude Lévi-Strauss laid claim to him as the “founder of the sciences of man,” and, inspired in part by his contact with Buddhism, he created a non-dualist version of the philosophe as a foil to Sartre. In 1989, Monique Wittig would also take up Rousseau, but in order to challenge Lévi-Strauss's notion of the exchange of women. In her hands, Rousseau also became a non-dualist through whom she could formalize the insights of gay and lesbian community life as a theory of sex abolition: “the science of the oppressed.” With archival materials, close readings, and historical contextualization, this article explores the genesis and interactions of both interpretations and situates them on the broader horizon of postwar thought.

In 1917, the US Department of Labor launched a new section: the Division of Negro Economics (DNE). Established to study black labor in the context of the Great Migration and staffed completely by black social scientists and social workers, the division offers a window onto the origins and meaning of black economics in the United States. During an age of pervasive scientific racism, the division’s leaders leveraged the language and tools of academic economics to assert black Americans' fundamental humanity, particularly by rendering black migrants as economic agents. The history of the division reveals how black economic thinkers made the economic study of the Great Migration into an egalitarian intellectual project, even if they could not escape institutional bias and prejudice. It stands as a lesson on the potential of economics, both as a tool of oppression and as one of political claims-making.

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.