In the previous chapter the fragmentation of the modern age has been discussed. In this chapter I will show that for the Romantics this fragmentation is a form of stagnation of time, where the transformative power proper of Becoming is missing and where, therefore, freedom is not deemed possible. How can the transformative power be re-introduced into history without falling into the illusion that the self could be the sovereign agent of such a transformation? The Romantic answer to this question deals with three key concepts: critical thinking, humanity, and utopia. Critical thinking is viewed as a creative act that detects in the present signs of a better future, humanity as the future non-sovereign subject of history, and utopia as the imagination of a possible future that, at the same time, does not imply a concept of history as ‘progress’. Together, as will be analysed at the end of the chapter, they allow us to think the relationship between history and nature neither as opposition nor as identity, providing thought-provoking and original perspectives on the actual debate in environmental philosophy.

Classic studies of English fiction and social life often depict romantic marriage and marriage novels as rising in tandem, with each propelling the other all the way to the moment of Jane Austen or even to the early twentieth-century era of modernist experiment and legal divorce. Capitalizing on this collection’s attention to micro-chronologies, this chapter, however, engages with a set of domestic fictions, by William Godwin, Amelia Opie, Maria Edgeworth, and others, that for a brief interval consciously dispensed with the premise that marriage was crucial for narrative completion. Widening the collection’s geographic focus, I consider this set of English works alongside the novels of the Swiss-French Germaine de Staël, an inclusion that helps underscore how some of the challenges posed in the 1800s to the narrative grammar of the novel originated with the French Revolution and with revolutionary jurists’ liberalization of the laws regarding marriage and its dissolution.

This chapter continues the discussion of eighteenth-century representations of Lady Macbeth as a monstrous wife and mother, examining how this was depicted in a series of paintings that portray Lady Macbeth as dominating and exerting control over her timid spouse. After the French Revolution, British caricaturists cast Jacobin sympathizers as the witches in Macbeth, and visual artists such as Johan Zoffany, Henry Fuseli and William Blake invoked the figure of the witch to fuel fears regarding dangerous female sexuality and the horrific consequences of giving women social and political power. Mary Wollstonecraft, who embodied these fears for Fuseli and Blake, along with Germaine de Staël and Sarah Siddons, responded by emphasizing the psychological elements of Macbeth and representing Lady Macbeth as a sympathetic character.

The Introduction situates Romanticism Bewitched within current historicist scholarship on gender and witchcraft, feminist political theory and recent scholarship on misogyny and women’s anger. In addition, it traces the trajectory of witchcraft belief from the seventeenth century down to the Romantic era, exploring the eighteenth-century fascination with Shakespeare’s Macbeth and the gendered politics of representations of Lady Macbeth. During the Romantic period, Siddons’s powers of enchantment in that role, and the effect it had on her audience, is an example of how the figure of the Romantic witch opened a space to imagine and explore the constructive and destructive uses of female magic. While some Romantic witches confirmed the worst fears regarding female magic and its pernicious influence, other Romantic witches invited more positive reactions, ranging from sympathy to the deep admiration bordering on awe that Siddons inspired.

Chapter 3 demonstrates how Blake’s biological myth, though obscure, was deeply embedded in contemporary revolutionary discourses. Reading the Urizen books against Blake’s neglected, unpublished The French Revolution (1791), this chapter puts Blake in intimate dialogue with Burke, Sieyès, and other revolutionary and reactionary writers who evocatively updated the body politic metaphor to describe a radically changing political landscape. Having discussed Blake’s critical attitude towards political self-organisation, this chapter discusses the further connotative development of the word “organization” in The Four Zoas, which picks up on the use of the term in British responses to France’s imperialist military project in the Revolutionary Wars. The chapter ends with a discussion of how after a turbulent revolutionary decade of utopian miscarriages, Blake came to envision political change in terms of regeneration and rejuvenation instead of gestation and birth.

Wollstonecraft, like most philosophers of the enlightenment period, had a deep trust in the power of reason to change the course of human history, and thought that religion, provided it was not dogmatic and allowed for dissent, was a crucial element of what it meant to be a good human being. Yet she was also an applied philosopher who engaged with revolutionaries proposing social and political reforms. In this chapter, I look at how her work was shaped by the political acts that took place around her, and how it in turns attempted to help shape the new social and political frameworks that were developing at the time – the French Revolution, which she commented on in her Moral and Historical View of the French Revolution.

When the French Revolution erupted, political actors were confronted with the challenge of institutionalizing the power of the people. The debates that ensued were multifaceted as various conceptualizations of public opinion and popular sovereignty were considered. This chapter is not intended to provide a comprehensive study of the revolutionary deployment of each of these notions. Rather, the focus will be on Condorcet, Robespierre and key Montagnard theorists to illustrate how their shifting views on public opinion and popular sovereignty culminated in conflicting versions of “representative democracy” in the constitutional debate of 1793. For these theorists, “representative democracy” designated a mixed regime in which the people, in addition to electing representatives (representation), directly exercised popular sovereignty (democracy) between elections by frequently voting on political issues in citizens’ assemblies spread throughout the national territory.

Systemic change by means of hegemonic war amounts to a transformation of the parameters of political legitimacy. The war decides who rules and the content of legitimacy at the global level. As such, only the most extensive major-power wars – ones that end in a new phase of substantial capability re-concentration and global military-political and economic leadership – can be designated hegemonic wars. The history of international order and, therefore, of the Long Cycle started with the Italian renaissance and the West European maritime explorations of the late fifteenth century. I identify four hegemonic wars: the Italian Wars (1496–1559), the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792–1815), and World War II (1939–1945). To this list, I add one “failed” power transition, the end of the Cold War (1989–1991). A new Long Cycle began in 1991, with the United States serving as the lone World Power. This chapter explores each Long Cycle and all four phases therein. This discussion is comparatively brief for the first two long cycles, becoming more extensive for the three most recent cases, for they offer more “usable pasts” than the earlier cycles from which to draw relevant lessons for modern times.

The Conclusion explores narrative depictions of the Gordon Riots of 1780, in which many of the prisons outlined in this study were sacked. These narratives instance the four distinct prison types that this analysis has delineated, but they also demonstrate the prisons’ locus as a focal point for public unrest, nine years before the storming of the Bastille. This chapter summarises the reasons for the prison’s prevalence in the eighteenth-century novel, from the personal and biographical to wider philosophical imperatives, and argues that the prisons of the Georgian period overwhelmingly embodied the historical past. This was true architecturally, and it was true in terms of the law that these prisons enabled. It was fundamentally not the case with the New Model Prisons of the Victorian era, which, however malign or inefficient, were wholly contemporary cultural structures. The study ends by elaborating the causes of the novel’s move away from the prison as a fictional motif in later periods.

What was the American Revolution? More importantly, what wasn’t it? In the years following the independence of the United States, Americans thought through these questions alongside contemporary events shaking the foundations of the global imperial order. As revolutions gripped Ireland, France, Saint-Domingue, Poland, and elsewhere in the late eighteenth century, Americans began to wonder whether their own revolution was one among many radical attacks on global tyranny or if it was an unusually orderly event that deviated from other revolutions’ drift toward anarchy and terror. By the end of the 1790s, white Americans largely recognized that the American Revolution was fundamentally unlike the Haitian or French Revolutions. Yet for many decades to come, Black Americans held on to a more radical, expansive vision of the American Revolution that tied it to the legacy of the radical revolutions of the late eighteenth century.

Hume’s critique and English revulsion at the French Revolution dampened interest in social contract theorizing. The rise of utilitarianism was another factor. The cause of a universal franchise was taken up by Jeremy Bentham, a founding utilitarian who was dismissive of the social contract idea as an “anarchical fallacy.” The Chartists, who demanded universal manhood suffrage, held up both Bentham and Tom Paine as heroes. The Reform Act of 1832 expanded the power of the propertied in the burgeoning English manufacturing centers. The reformed Parliament passed the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, which introduced the hated workhouse system. The Chartists’ million-plus petition for universal manhood suffrage was finally received by Parliament, but ignored. John Stuart Mill, another utilitarian, dismissed Locke’s theory as a fiction but found a truth in the social-contract idea: a principle of reciprocity. Reciprocity requires government to benefit all. Mill advocated votes for women and an expanded electorate but retention of the property qualification until workers could be educated sufficiently not to vote for unwise laws favoring their class. As a safeguard, he proposed plural votes for the educated. On the European continent the social contract tradition succumbed to the idealism of Hegel and the materialism of Marx.

This chapter describes the American Revolution in its general development and underlying logics, with particular attention given to the traditions of political participation and their and transformations, and the ways in which they were fused – or not – with individual equality.

The concept of post-Kantian perfectionism clarifies the mutual polemics in the Hegelain School, contrasting Feuerbach’s naturalism, which combines pre- and post-Kantian motifs, with the more exigent Kantianism of Bruno Bauer; and it elucidates sharp disagreements with anti-perfectionists like Max Stirner. The concrete historical situation comes under scrutiny of post-Kantian perfectionist thinking. French Revolutionary factions and the contending parties in the German Vormärz express distinct views of freedom and follow different developmental trajectories. Civil society too reveals its inner dynamics. Rejecting Leibniz’s pre-established harmony and Wolffian mutuality, but also markedly differing from Kant and Schiller, the non-compossibility of interests in civil society is the theoretical innovation here. The irreconcilable opposition of interests, central to Marx, is not a view original with him. In Bauer, autonomy means divesting oneself of particular interests to the extent that they inhibit institutional transformation.

Totalitarian systems, marked by extreme violence, are fundamentally bound to an ideology, such as Marxism-Leninism, which is instrumental to their creation and persistence, from the Bolshevik revolution in Russia to modern China. The chapter examines the genesis of communist totalitarian ideology in early Christian communal equality, connecting it to Rousseau’s and Babeuf’s anti-property ideals, which ultimately influenced Marxism and its vision of a dictatorial society in the name of absolute equality. The enduring pull towards egalitarianism, when pushed to extremes, can encroach on private property rights, ironically culminating in totalitarian rule and unprecedented inequality.

This chapter argues that an adequate assessment of revolutions (and the role of law in revolutions) is often stymied by historical exclusions and theoretical myopia. Historical exclusions centralise certain experiences and present sanitized and one-sided narratives of the revolutionary experiences they centralise, especially with respect to violence, slavery, and colonialism. On the basis of such ideological uses of history, theoretical accounts paper over these social and political realities in order to legitimate particular revolutionary constitutions and to elevate them to the status of a paradigm or ideal type. This paradigm serves as the yardstick by which other experiences are assessed. The main feature of this paradigm is that it postulates a distinction between political and social revolutions. It presents the American Revolution of 1776 as an exemplar for the political revolution that concerns itself with the establishment of government under law. In contrast, the French Revolution of 1789 is presented as an exemplar for the social revolution that also seeks to tackle social injustice. The deficiency of this paradigm construction is not merely methodological, but also substantive and normative. It reduces the plurality of the revolutionary phenomena, it ignores the revolution’s dialectical nature, and it presents a certain type of revolutionary constitutions as ones that legitimate the polity.

Two recent trends in scholarship necessitate a reevaluation of the persistent myth of a unitary, teleologically secular Enlightenment. The first is the recognition that a unitary Enlightenment with a preordained set of goals is a later ideological construction. A second trend problematizes the relationship between religion and Enlightenment by pluralizing the Enlightenment, thus making more space for the “religious” motivations and inspirations of so many of the men and women typically denominated as “enlightened.” This chapter explores the ambivalent relationship between the popes and a “Catholic Enlightenment” that was engaged in theology, secular scholarship, and political and societal reform. On one hand, the papacy is often cast as the primary enemy of enlightened Catholicism. And yet Italy, and indeed Rome itself, boasted very significant enlightened Catholic intellectuals, rulers, and networks throughout the eighteenth century, including, arguably, certain popes. This chapter seeks to make sense of this seemingly paradoxical situation.

The Age of Revolutions marked the nadir in the fortunes of the papacy. Pius VI, despite his attempts to reform the Curia and embellish Rome, died a prisoner of the French in Valence in 1799. His successor, Pius VII, despite negotiating a groundbreaking concordat with Consular France in 1801, spent five years as the prisoner of Napoleon. This chapter examine the attempts at reform and survival of the Cesena popes in the face of the growing challenge of enlightened absolutism and revolutionary strife. The temporary loss of the Papal States from 1809 to 1814 was a grim harbinger of things to come in 1870. Although the papacy lost ground in temporal terms, ironically it gained a growing spiritual mastery over Catholicism globally.