Revolution,Reaction, Restoration: The Meanings and Uses of Seventeenth-Century English History in the Political Thinking of Benjamin Constant,c.1797–1830

Comparisons, juxtapositions or analogies between France's recent Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary history and England's experiences of Revolution, Civil War and Restoration between the 1640s and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 were a common but controversial feature of political discourse dealing with France's contemporary situation in the decades following the Revolution of 1789. The present article probes this dimension of post-Revolutionary political debate, by tracking the shifting meanings and uses of seventeenth-century English history in the published and unpublished political writings of the leading liberal thinker and politician Benjamin Constant, from the 1790s through to his death in 1830. Such an analysis reveals the sometimes striking reversals and inconsistencies to which Constant was driven in his effort to adjust his historical readings to France's rapidly changing political conditions, but it also reveals underlying continuities in his historical and political thinking. The exemplarity of England's case lay, for Constant, less in the provision of a constitutional model that France might hope to appropriate than in the historical spectacle of a nation's struggle for liberty, and the value of this spectacle lay as much in its cautionary messages—focused on the sterile brutality of the Stuart Restoration—as in its eventually progressive outcomes.     

KOSELLECK,ARENDT, AND THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF HISTORICAL EXPERIENCE

This essay is the first attempt to compare Reinhart Koselleck's Historik with Hannah Arendt's political anthropology and her critique of the modern concept of history. Koselleck is well‐known for his work on conceptual history as well as for his theory of historical time(s). It is my contention that these different projects are bound together by Koselleck's Historik, that is, his theory of possible histories. This can be shown through an examination of his writings from Critique and Crisis to his final essays on historical anthropology, most of which have not yet been translated into English. Conversely, Arendt's political theory has in recent years been the subject of numerous interpretations that do not take into account her views about history. By comparing the anthropological categories found in Koselleck's Historik with Arendt's political anthropology, I identify similar intellectual lineages in them (Heidegger, Löwith, Schmitt) as well as shared political sentiments, in particular the anti‐totalitarian impulse of the postwar era. More importantly, Koselleck's theory of the preconditions of possible histories and Arendt's theory of the preconditions of the political, I argue, transcend these lineages and sentiments by providing essential categories for the analysis of historical experience.     

The "Trial" of Lee Benson: Communism, White Chauvinism, and The Foundations of the "New Political History" in the United States

Lee Benson was one of the first American political historians to suggest a “systematic” revision of traditional political history with its emphasis on narrow economic class analysis, narrative arguments, and over‐reliance on qualitative research methodologies. This essay presents Benson's contributions to the “new political history”—an attempt to apply social‐science methods, concepts, and theories to American political history—as a social, cultural, and political narrative of Cold War‐era American history. Benson belonged to a generation of ex‐Communist American historians and political scientists whose scholarship and intellectual projects flowed—in part—out of Marxist social and political debates, agendas, and paradigmatic frameworks, even as they rejected and revised them. The main focus of the essay is the genesis of Benson's pioneering study of nineteenth‐century New York state political culture, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy, with its emphasis on intra‐class versus inter‐class conflict, sensitivity to ethnocultural determinants of political and social behavior, and reliance on explicit social‐science theory and methodology. In what follows, I argue that The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy has its roots in Benson's Popular Front Marxist beliefs, and his decade‐long engagement and subsequent disenchantment with American left‐wing politics. Benson's growing alienation from Progressive historical paradigms and traditional Marxist analysis, and his attempts to formulate a neo‐Marxism attentive to unique American class and political realities, are linked to his involvement with 1940s radical factional politics and his disturbing encounter with internal Communist party racial and ideological tensions in the late 1940s at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.     

Conceiving the Republic of Mankind: The Political Thought of Anacharsis Cloots

During the French Revolution, Jean-Baptiste “Anacharsis” Cloots (1755–1794) developed a theory of the world state as the means to guarantee perpetual peace for mankind. Though his ideas have largely been misunderstood, Cloots's political writings were in fact an extensive plea for a more cosmopolitan understanding of the French Revolution. His system adapted institutions and concepts of the French revolutionary republic for a world state, the republic of mankind. This essay recovers his political vision and connects it both to the heritage of eighteenth-century political thought, especially Rousseau, and to revolutionary political culture. The goal is to retrieve the meaning of Cloots's universal republic, and with it a chapter in the history of cosmopolitan thought.     

Illusions of revolution: François Furet's critique of Marx

In this article it will be argued that François Furet's attempt in Interpreting the French Revolution to provide a conceptual history of the French Revolution through a synthesis of Tocqueville and Cochin's historical and sociological accounts fails methodologically. It does so in two ways: Firstly, in its aim to distinguish between conceptual, explanatory history and empirical, narrative history, and secondly, in its distinction between revolution as process and revolution as act. Drawing on Claude Lefort and Paul Ricoeur's interventions in the historiographical debate, I demonstrate that these seemingly methodological concerns, conceal a deeper historical and political question concerning the nature of the ‘event’ of revolution. In response to Furet's oblique turn to Hegel in his later work, this article traces the nature of the ‘conceptual inversion’ Furet claims to find in Hegel and Marx's accounts of the French Revolution. In relation to Marx, it is argued that Furet's critique fails to capture the allegorical nature of the political in Marx's thought, and underplays the significance of revolution as the basis for both the separation of the social and the political and their attempted unity. The article ends with some remarks on the importance of language and culture in rethinking the relationship between Hegel and Marx.     

Kypros,Tourkia kai ellinismos

Gianrinaldo Carli was a central figure in the origin of the Milanese Enlightenment of the late eighteenth century. Carli's political career as well as his works connected him both to the mid-century reforms by Pompeo Neri and to the times of Beccaria and the Verri brothers—the heyday of Lombard intellectual life in Europe. Not originally from Lombardy, but from the Venetian periphery, Carli became an erudite scholar of witchcraft and magic and an influential functionary of the Habsburg administration in Milan. He remains most famous for his works on money and his contributions to the journal Il Caffè. Most of his later political writings, which were widely circulated in Italy following the American Revolution, originated in debates with Pietro Verri over the nature of Natural Law, of the Social Contract, and the relationship between patriotism and cosmopolitanism. They illustrate key aspects of Lombard political culture of the 1780s: a culture that was critical of Rousseau, trustful of the reformist experience and supportive of Enlightened Absolutism. Within this context, Carli's works have traditionally been difficult to place.     

THE DIALECTICS OF JAMESON'S DIALECTICS

This review essay attempts to understand the book under review against the background of Jameson's previous writings. Failing to do so would invite misunderstanding since there are few contemporary theorists whose writing forms so much of a unity. Jameson's book can be divided into three parts. The first and most important part deals with dialectics, the second with politics, and the third with philosophy of history. In the first part Jameson argues that dialectics best captures our relationship to the sociocultural and historical world we are living in. The second part makes clear that Jameson is not prepared to water down his own Marxist politics in order to spare the liberal sensibilities of his political opponents. In the third part Jameson develops his own philosophy of history, mainly in a dialogue with Ricoeur. Dialectics is his main weapon in his discussion with Ricoeur, and it becomes clear that the Spinozism of dialectics allows for a better understanding of history and of historical writing than does Ricoeur's phenomenological approach. The book is an impressive testimony to the powers of dialectical thought and to its indispensability for a proper grasp of historical writing.     

Property and personal development: An interpretation of T.H. Green's political philosophy

This paper considers T.H. Green's theory of property in relation to recent studies of late nineteenth and early twentieth century liberal democratic thought. It is argued that neither the ‘Marxist’ spectacles worn by C.B. Macpherson nor the ‘Whiggish’ ones of Melvin Richter, Peter Clarke and Stefan Collini produce very clear or accurate images of Green's political philosophy. Macpherson's Green appears on close examination as yet another possessive individualist, while the ‘Whigs’ take a turn of the century standpoint and describe Green as holding positions that are ambivalent and fit awkwardly into the categories of individualism/ collectivism. In the remainder of the paper it is argued Green's property theory is best understood by focussing on his interest in the relationship between social life and personal development. By drawing on Green's published and unpublished writings it can be shown that Green's idea of personal development could be expressed in other language than that of economic individualism and that it cut across the individualist/collectivist categories in terms of which it is often discussed.     

Agents of knowledge: Marxist identity politics in the Revisionismusstreit

To be Marxist at the turn of the twentieth century was highly contested. During this crisis of Marxism, identity politics were acute, exemplified by the private and public debate between Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky. With Bernstein's celebrated turn away from the Marxist theory of his day, the grounds for being Marxist were at stake. Was it possible to criticise Marx's analysis of industrial capitalism, his account of historical change and his hard-nosed class politics, and yet still be in a position to carry his name forward? Moreover, the springing-up of another identity, Revisionist, suggested that being Marxist was ambiguous. If one accepted Bernstein's and the Revisionists' point that Marxists had become too orthodox, leaving Revisionists as the true heirs of Marx's critical socialist spirit, then the Marxist identity was so open as to be meaningless. In this article, I contend that the name-calling of this period, the Revisionismusstreit, should be seen as creative. In contrast to politico-ideological perceptions of the Streit, which construe the clash of Marxist and Revisionist as representative of foundational Social Democratic party political realities, I highlight the manner in which being Marxist—the veneration of Marx's and Friedrich Engels's word into a Marxology of sorts by Marxists and Revisionists alike—held a certain epistemic value in its own right.     

Caught between Realities: The American Revolution,the Continental Congress and Political Turmoil in the Bahama Islands

The American Revolution had a profound political, economic and social influence on the periphery colonies of the British Atlantic world, particularly in the Bahama Islands. The Continental Congress's imposition of a trade embargo against the British Empire drove island colonies, such as Bermuda and the Bahamas, to the point of starvation. Consequently, Bermudians and Bahamians petitioned the Congress for relief, offering military supplies in exchange for provisions, which led Congress to exempt both colonies from the embargo and form a general trade policy towards them. The American naval invasion of Nassau in March 1776, coupled with the ongoing trade between the islanders and the rebels, fuelled Governor Montfort Browne's fears of an internal conspiracy to bring the colony into the rebellion. These fears increased tensions between the governor, the Bahamian government and the inhabitants. Ultimately, the breakdown of the colonial government facilitated a planned coup d’état by the council to overthrow Governor Browne, a short-lived dictatorship by the governor and the end of the Congress's trade policy towards the islands. The effects of the American Revolution on the Bahamas demonstrate that the imperial conflict influenced the periphery colonies of the British Atlantic.     

Lord Falmouth and the Parallel Political Worlds of Ultra‐Toryism, 1826–32

The parallel political worlds of ultra‐toryism were those of Westminster and the provinces. Hoping to defend the protestant constitution from what they regarded as ruinous attacks, between 1826 and 1832 many ultra‐tories were unrelenting parliamentary opponents of constitutional change. However, far less is understood about their simultaneous involvement in the political world away from Westminster, apart from analysis of the duke of Newcastle's electoral activities and several county studies. This article examines the 1st earl of Falmouth's dogged ideological defence of the protestant constitution, as well as exposing his political pragmatism in Cornwall, thereby highlighting the lengths to which some ultras were prepared to go in pursuing their beliefs. Falmouth also exemplifies those ultras who, from March 1827 when Lord Liverpool resigned, became far more prominent in the struggle against ‘Revolution by due course of law’, beginning with their opposition to Canning becoming prime minister. Furthermore, a study of Falmouth's career between 1826 and 1832 at Westminster and in Cornwall, also highlights several of the ideological tensions within ultra‐toryism at this time.     

Conceptions of Reinhart Koselleck's Theory of Historical Time in the Thinking of Michael Oakeshott

In recent years students of politics have begun to recognise Reinhart Koselleck's practice of Begriffsgeschichte, the study of conceptual history, as a useful approach for investigating key concepts in political ideologies and the history of ideas. But his theory of historical time—the temporal dimension to his semantic project and his broader theorising of the historical discipline—is often overlooked and underused as a heuristic device. By placing the thinking of Michael Oakeshott alongside Koselleck's theory of historical time, this article brings his thinking on temporality to the forefront, fashioning a conversation between the two thinkers about the place for history and the formal criteria necessary for ordering the past properly. In doing so, it juxtaposes Koselleck's reflections on historicity and his theory of historical time with Oakeshott's philosophical enquiry on the historical mode of understanding. It identifies important convergences and divergences between the two thinkers' theories, focusing in particular on questions regarding the potential for representing the past as multilayered and plural historical times. The article then suggests that their respective thoughts on the theory of history are in part a reaction to the modern politicisation of historical time and comprise a shared critique of radical political change.     

Existential Failure and Success: Augustinianism in Oakeshott and Arendt

That Oakeshott and Arendt's political works contain Augustinian references is well known. What historians of political thought have had difficulty in is assessing the consistency and importance of the Augustinian themes within their work. It transpires that the traces of existentialism and personalism in Augustine are amplified and clarified by their use in Oakeshott and Arendt, to the extent that they form an important subtext to their work. One stumbling block for scholars attempting to link the ‘mature’ works of Oakeshott and Arendt to Augustine has been a sense of disparity between the eschatological character of Augustine's writings and the civic worldliness of Oakeshott's associations and Arendt's public realm. Returning to several strands of twentieth-century Augustinianism, from the personalist to the existentialist to the liberal, reveals an Augustinianism that is much more credibly linked to the whole of Oakeshott and Arendt's writings.     

Max Weber,charisma and nationalist leadership1

ABSTRACT. One of Max Weber's most well‐known achievements was the formulation of three concepts of legitimate authority: traditional, legal‐rational and charismatic. However, there are particular problems with the last of these, which is not historically grounded in the manner of the other two concepts. The charisma concept originated with Weber's sociology of religion, was pressed into service in pre‐war writing on the sociology of domination, shifted focus in his wartime political writings and changed meaning again in his post‐war writing on basic sociological concepts. To use the concept in historical‐political analysis, I argue, one must distinguish between a pre‐modern and modern form of charismatic domination. I argue that doing this enables us to understand features of the leadership of colonial nationalist and fascist movements.     

Between Discourse and Experience: Agency and Ideas in the French Pre‐Revolution

Experience has recently reemerged as an important analytical category for historians of the Old Regime and the French Revolution. Reacting against the perceived excesses of discourse analysis, which made political language independent of any social determinants, certain post‐revisionists are now seeking to contextualize political language by relating it to the experience of those who use it. Political agency, in these analyses, is understood to be the effect of particular formative experiences. This article suggests that the search for an experiential antidote to discourse is misconceived because it perpetuates an untenable dichotomy between thought and reality. Access to the phenomenon of historical agency should be pursued not through experience or discourse but through the category of consciousness, since the make‐up of the subject’s consciousness determines how he/she engages the world and decides to attempt changing it. After a brief discussion of an important study that exemplifies both the allure and the functionality of the notion of experience, Timothy Tackett’s Becoming a Revolutionary, the article focuses on the evolving political consciousness of a man who became a revolutionary agitator in 1789, J.‐M.‐A. Servan. Analysis of his writings between 1770 and 1789 shows that the way in which his perspective was constructed, rather than the lessons of experience per se, determined the shape of his revolutionary intentions in 1789.     

Reconstructing an urban and regional political economy: on the state,politics, scale,and explanation

This paper begins from the premise that a number of now fashionable institutionally focused accounts of urban and regional political economy often begin at a point that is analytically flawed (or at least partial) in that the institutional ensembles themselves—whether analyzed as an urban `regime', regional `thickness' or a local `regulatory mode'—are automatically assumed to be a pre-given part of the explanation. However, the authors contend that for a deeper analysis of urban and regional political economy to be advanced, these institutions themselves need to be explained. In order to proceed with such an explanation three key factors require more serious consideration. These are: (1) the need to outline one's chosen research object of enquiry, and all that this entails in terms of research methodology, theory selection, and an uncovering of the `constitutive properties' of causation; (2) a greater readiness to analytically interrogate the relational interplay between economic development, political governance and scale; and (3) an obligation to pay due respect to the politics of representation and active processes of state restructuring and political strategizing through and around which economic development is itself constituted. In order to explore these themes, the authors draw, variously, on a methodological (re-) reading of the regulation approach, recent theoretical innovations on the `politics of scale', Jessop's state-theoretical writings and his recently developed neo-Gramscian methodology for analyzing urban economic governance, alongside Jenson's political sociological approach towards the `politics of representation'. Where appropriate, they explore, briefly, ways in which these theoretical themes may be deployed in empirical research, by considering certain restructurings in and of the political economy of Britain during recent decades.     

Johannes Althusius’ Politica : The Culmination of Calvin's Right of Resistance

Jean Calvin's writings on the resistance to a tyrannical ruler appear as an addendum to his Institutes of the Christian Religion, but despite their limited discussion, his followers based their own writings on his original discussion of resistance. The most celebrated of these Calvinist tracts on resistance was the Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos written as a result of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre. This article argues that, whilst the Vindiciae is an important example of Calvinist resistance, an even more significant, but forgotten, Calvinist resistance theory can be found in Johannes Althusius’ Politica Methodice Digesta, Atque Exemplis Sacris Et Profanis Illustrata. Furthermore, the similarities in the social, political and religious position of both Althusius and Calvin, as well as their geographical location in Emden and Geneva respectively, allows Althusius’ work to be seen as the natural culmination of Calvin's original work on the right of resistance.     

Socialist Geography in England: J. F. Horrabin and a Workers' Economic and Political Geography

This paper examines the life and geographical writings of the English socialist J.F.("Frank") Horrabin (1884–1962) and his attempts to construct a socialist geography. Horrabin was an active socialist in the Labour Party, Fabian Society, and other leftwing groups and very involved in working-class education through the Plebs League and National Council of Labour Colleges. He was also a journalist, cartoonist, and gifted cartographer. His 1923 text An Outline of Economic Geography , which sold in large numbers and was translated into nine other languages, attempted to provide workers with an account of economic (and political and historical) geography that used bourgeois "pure geography" but put it within a socialist and historical–materialist framework. Unlike Germany and some other countries, England did not have a strong Marxist theoretical tradition, and Horrabin's approach does not develop theory (though it did attract the admiration of the German Marxist Karl Wittfogel). Rather, it sets out to be engaged in practical political education. Horrabin's work was developed within a particular context, but his geographical writings (and pioneering political cartography) exemplify one way of linking geography with political practice, and this paper examines these relationships. Many of Horrabin's concerns find echoes in current radical geography, and his work deserves belated recognition and a place in the history of geography.     

FROM REVOLUTION TO MODERNIZATION: THE PARADIGMATIC TRANSITION IN CHINESE HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE REFORM ERA

Chinese historiography of modern China in the 1980s and 1990s underwent a paradigmatic transition: in place of the traditional revolutionary historiography that bases its analyses on Marxist methodologies and highlights rebellions and revolutions as the overarching themes in modern Chinese history, the emerging modernization paradigm builds its conceptual framework on borrowed modernization theory and foregrounds top‐down, incremental reforms as the main force propelling China's evolution to modernity. This article scrutinizes the origins of the new paradigm in the context of a burgeoning modernization discourse in reform‐era China. It further examines the fundamental divides between the two types of historiography in their respective constructions of master narratives and their different approaches to representing historical events in modern China. Behind the prevalence of the modernization paradigm in Chinese historiography is Chinese historians' unchanged commitment to serving present political needs by interpreting the past.