This chapter explores and interprets the long revolution of the 1860s (1862–1875): a ‘context-breaking liberal moment’ that featured a revolution, a Constituent Assembly, a change of dynasty, a new constitutional system and a crisis over defining the scope of parliamentary jurisdiction. During and after this moment political institutions were reconfigured and the monarchy was put on a new institutional footing. In short, the way of ‘doing’ politics was radically transformed. By paying due attention to ideas as drivers of political change and to the role of the jurists in forming these ideas, the chapter demonstrates that what ultimately made this crisis a legitimacy crisis – and indeed, gave the revolution its language – was the way in which the king’s rule increasingly came to be seen as a de facto usurpation of power that had unsettled the balance of the constitution and was breaking the contract with the nation. In other words, the critics of the monarchy were essentially building on the moderate liberal ideas that had developed in the preceding years.

Chapter 5 shows that the claim that the Greek Bavarian-led state was undermining the formation of the nation was further radicalised when scholars, and in particular Nikolaos Saripolos, took on international law and addressed directly the curtailed sovereignty that the Great Powers had imposed on Greece. The chapter argues that if we want to understand the Greek discussions on international law, we need to consider two things: first, the place of the Greek kingdom within the regional legal order that had been formed in the Eastern Mediterranean since the 1830s; and second, the ways in which from the late 1840s onwards (and especially during the Crimean War) this order was being redefined by European powers and in particular by Great Britain. In this context, a number of interventions in the domestic affairs of the state by the guarantor powers made people like Saripolos realise that the fictions on which the international position of Greece was based had to be revised. They also led to claims that the monarchical policies were jeopardising the already precarious place of Greece in the geography of civilisation, and possibly its very political existence.

The Conclusion offers a critical assessment of Greek liberalism and its two main currents by placing them within the European liberal landscape of the nineteenth century. As it shows, Greek liberalism was not just rich in ideas and syncretic in character. It was also rich in the institutional mechanisms through which these ideas were formed and diffused. What is more, in the fluid circumstances of Greece, it was endowed with a peculiar strength, rendering it a profoundly transformative force. Apart from offering a comparison with other liberal agendas across Europe, the Conclusion also advances an argument regarding the long-term effects of this liberal moment even after its end.

This chapter explores the formation of an early ‘constitutionalist’ liberal current, by concentrating on Greek political economy. It starts by discussing the diffusion in the Greek world of an economic idiom, inspired by J. B. Say and Saint-Simonism, that concentrated on values such as industriousness and frugality as the organising principles of economy and society. It shows how this idiom complemented that of ‘public economy’ that informed Bavarian policies. The chapter then turns to Ioannis Soutsos, discussing how, from the 1840s onwards, he raised concerns about the obsession with economic virtues and argued for the benefits of institutional change and political participation. Drawing on the republican thought of Simonde de Sismondi and Pellegrino Rossi, Soutsos related industrie to political rights, called for large-scale reforms (including land redistribution) and associated political economy with the science of government. These calls increasingly targeted the monarchy, as reforms ground to a halt and the issue of land took on explosive dimensions. The chapter shows that ideas about state intervention in the economy and the view of economics as a science of government remained in fashion long after 1848, when they had lost their appeal elsewhere.

The chapter explores what it calls the ‘Romanist’ or ‘contractual’ liberal current that was to dominate nineteenth-century Greek jurisprudence from the mid-1840s onwards. After exploring the intellectual sources (the historical school of jurisprudence, the French Doctrinaires, as well as the Idéologues) upon which the civil jurists (the ‘Romanists’ as the chapter calls them) drew, and their massive impact on legal thought and civil law, it discusses what the jurists tried to achieve and why they turned to Romanist jurisprudence. As the chapter shows, property reforms had central importance in this current and were strongly related to the transition from a pluralistic legal order (which centuries of Ottoman rule had imposed) to that of a modern and ‘civilised’ state. The chapter also shows that the emphasis on property makes sense only if the issue of the ‘national lands’ (i.e. former Turkish property that had been transformed into Greek state domain) is taken into consideration. It then discusses how, for reasons both economic and cultural/political, the Romanists subscribed to a subversive legislative agenda, conceptualised in the theory of the Rechtsstaat that had significant differences with that envisioned by the monarchical authorities.

The introduction situates the book at the intersection of two flourishing historiographical fields. One explores the rise of the modern territorial state, and the other the emergence of novel political ideas and in particular of liberalism. As the book argues, the formation of modern statehood was not only the result of wars and the global restructuring of territory. It was also the result of critical thinking about political and social arrangements and institutions, and the imagining of new ones. By drawing on recent works by historians working on contexts other than the core European countries, the introduction incorporates the Greek case in the ongoing discussions on nineteenth-century liberalism. At the same time, it challenges the reluctance of some historians of liberalism to link political thought to political change and the intellectuals they are studying to institutional contexts, by assessing for example how they thought about and were influenced by institutions (in this case institutions such as the judiciary, the university, the cabinet or the legislature with which the jurists were associated). Along with some methodological points and the general structure of the book, it offers a brief survey of recent scholarship on nineteenth-century Greece.

Chapter 4 demonstrates that the recommendations that favoured state intervention were coupled with a different way of thinking about political power: its nature, its sources and its organisation. The intellectual éminence grise behind this was Nikolaos Saripolos, who, after coming to Greece and being elected to the Law School in 1846, was to become the country’s leading constitutional and international law scholar. Being mindful of the revolutionary tradition and fusing together several different intellectual currents (Rousseau, Doctrinaires, the monarchiens, Benjamin Constant), Saripolos changed the terms of constitutional thinking by drawing on the revolutionary idioms of natural rights and national sovereignty. This was a liberal, governmental discourse that spoke in terms of sovereignty as self-rule and of the state as a moral person with rights in the international arena. As the chapter demonstrates, for Saripolos – as well as for the economist Ioannis Soutsos – the state in the form it then took had become an obstacle to the formation of the nation and was undermining social cohesion.

The chapter explores the state-building process that the Bavarian-led monarchy put into effect in Greece from 1832 onwards by agreement with the guarantor powers of Greek independence (Britain, France and Russia). By concentrating on the structures of power and the ideas that informed their formation – the Polizeiwissenschaft, the theory or technology of the police state and the administrative techniques of cameralism – the chapter situates the Greek case within a Europe-wide process of ‘Enlightened reforms’ from above. In so doing, it argues for the need to expand the chronological boundaries of reforms from above, as well as the legacy of the Enlightenment, and to move them well into the nineteenth century. The chapter explores the role in this process of the young, Western-educated jurists who flocked to the nascent state. By contextualising their thought, it aims to understand what their initial, even if still unsystematic, liberal interventions consisted of, how they facilitated the appearance of the ‘intellectual’, and the role they played in the formation of a language of opposition in the lead-up to the pronunciamento of 1843 and the convocation of the First National Assembly.