Tim Blanning, both in his book on Joseph II and in his Culture of Power, has held up the emperor as an example of a ruler who, like Frederick the Great and George III – though each in quite different ways – knew how to exploit the developing public sphere. Not only did Joseph change the Austrian Monarchy's censorship system so that anti-Catholic, progressive and critical writings could be published, but he had a ‘surprisingly deft touch for gesture politics’ – for example, when taking and driving a peasant's plough in Moravia in 1769, or when founding the Nationaltheater in Vienna in 1776. When the Danube burst its banks and flooded parts of Vienna in 1785, the emperor at once took charge of the rescue operation. He was determined that his very numerous decrees should be widely published, whereas his officials liked to keep them, as hitherto, semi-secret, partly no doubt so that they could interpret and apply them as they pleased. Ernst Wangermann has recently produced new evidence that Joseph and his ministers commissioned or rewarded some of the pamphlets that supported government policy, as had already been well known in the case of the vitriolic anti-Establishment pamphleteer Simon Linguet, who supported the emperor's claims on the Bavarian succession and over the opening of the Scheldt. Joseph actually offered asylum in Belgium to both Linguet and the radical Raynal, author of the anti-colonialist Histoire des deux Indes.

The idea of the philosopher king

The notion of the philosopher king comes from Plato’s Republic. After the Renaissance, Plato’s influence declined, and none of the authors writing about the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the previous volume of the Cambridge History of Political Thought found it necessary to mention this notion at all. But Hobbes concluded the second part of Leviathan (1651), in a characteristically sardonic passage, by placing the concept at the very heart of his political philosophy:

Mr Vice-Chancellor,

Mr Gladstone, who will play a large role in this lecture, wrote in his diary, while he was an undergraduate at Christ Church: ‘I wish I were duly convinced of the extreme importance of residence at Oxford.’ This University's dispiriting notice to a new professor explains that he need not give an inaugural lecture ‘in his first term or in his first year’, or at all. On such a time-scale it cannot be too late to applaud the readiness of another Christ Church man to leave Oxford, even at the cost of coming to Cambridge, albeit under an assumed name, Lord Dacre of Glanton. Historians ought not to quote out of context, and so I continue Gladstone's diary entry: ‘I wish’, he said, ‘I were duly convinced of the extreme importance of residence at Oxford, both as regards individual progress in religion, and influence exercised directly or indirectly on others’ – and then, as so often, he spoils it all by a qualification – ‘especially in a case where the individual has the reputation of possessing more [influence] than he actually has’. In my opinion all the electors to the Chair of Modern History wield an influence as powerful as it is beneficent; and no member of this formidable audience contributes more to my sense of inadequacy as I speak than Lord Dacre, who has furnished in his own inaugural and valedictory lectures incomparable models of the blend of wit, style and wisdom appropriate to such occasions.

Pre-eminent in the Liberal Calendar of Saints, alongside Oliver Cromwell, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln, stands Giuseppe Garibaldi. In Italy he was all but deified in his lifetime: some saw him as ‘Christ the Second’, artists depicted him crucified and ascending, and, according to one of his modern biographers, this expressed ‘no more than the feelings of the great mass of the Italian people, especially in the southern provinces’. ‘The People of Italy’, it was said, ’idolize Garibaldi, they have tabooed him, and no one ventures to touch him.’ The nuns of a Palermitan convent, promising to love him and pray to St Rosalia for him, compared him to St George, ‘sweet and beautiful as a seraph’; and a Milanese crowd gasped at his resemblance to St Ambrose. Many relics are preserved and venerated: for example, some of his red shirts, locks of his hair, the bullet that pierced his ankle at the skirmish of Aspromonte in 1862, and the stretcher, stained with blood, on which he was carried wounded from the field.

Italians, with their tradition of hagiolatry, might perhaps be expected to go to extremes in their devotion to their national hero. More surprising was – and is – the adoration of the English, especially as shown during Garibaldi's visit to England in 1864.