The Thompson-Chesson family represent how, across three generations, nineteenth-century reformers cultivated habits of performance critique to improve the efficacy of their political work. Across various domains, and utilising many organising techniques and expressions, liberal activism was forged in this milieu. By investigating how men and women built networks and forged more effective practices, liberal convictions take form as activist practices.

Without falling into the Keynesian trap of implying the entire settlement was created in President Wilson’s ‘hot, dry room’, this chapter acknowledges the central role of the Big Four at the Paris Peace Conference in providing a decision-making forum to which many of the most contentious issues were referred. Their ideas, conflicting ambitions and interactions helped to shape the peace. Wilson and Lloyd George, who largely shared a Gladstonian liberal philosophy, advocated self-determination, disarmament, trade and a new international order based on a League of Nations, though this did not prevent significant clashes between them over reparations and naval construction. Clemenceau pursued a more traditional, though potentially incompatible, policy of alliances and territorial adjustments to counter what he perceived to be a continuing threat from a neighbour with larger resources and a more dynamic demographic. Orlando’s vision was focused more closely on Italy and its European context, though not without imperial aspirations. Keynes dismissed him in a sentence and footnote but Italy had an important part in the negotiations and compromises, which moulded the settlement drafted by the Four and their colleagues. The extent, however, to which a ‘New Diplomacy’ had overtaken the old remained moot.

This chapter compares and contrasts the thought of three philosophers – Bernard Williams, Charles Taylor, and Martha Nussbaum – who developed influential and idiosyncratic ways of reforming Anglo-American moral philosophy. Their positions substantially overlap inasmuch as they hold that the goods of human life are necessarily multiple and persistently in conflict, which has implications for the structure and content of ethical life everywhere. All three are of interest to anthropology because they hold that history, culture, social relations, and biographical experience make a difference to the goods and values that inform human life, and therefore that moral philosophy needs to be, to at least a very large degree, an empirical, descriptive, and comparative discipline. The different, sometimes even rival, ways in which they pursue that project offer anthropologists of ethics the chance to reflect on how and why they might develop an anthropology that would fulfil these authors’ different visions of moral philosophy.

This chapter locates the link between slavery and capitalism in the mundane transactions between and the financial plans of white southerners that were adjudicated following the Civil War. Decisions in these suits helped ensure that the relationship between slavery and American economic development remained undisturbed, and reveal an underappreciated aspect of the incompatibility of liberal capitalism with abolition.

The advantages of power-sharing arrangements as a tool of peacemaking are gradually being substantiated in practice and research, but have not yet gained normative legitimacy, nor have they been properly incorporated into either the human rights framework or international and regional law. When power-sharing arrangements utilize predefined ethno-national groups as a central feature of the constitutional structure, they are widely seen as illiberal (and unjust) and as violating individual rights to equality and nondiscrimination. This conflict between power-sharing and human rights is generally viewed as a dilemma between peace and justice, and the main justification given to support the maintenance of the arrangements is that they are an indispensable political compromise to overcome violent conflict and are preferable to the continuation of bloodshed. However, this justification is not always enough, as the European Court of Human Rights ruling in the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s constitution illustrates. But is this “peace versus justice” framing of the tensions between power-sharing and human rights accurate? Does it properly account for the meaning and requirements of justice in loci of deeply divided places?

The previous chapter demonstrated how politicians and voters in southwest Nigeria value accessibility as a form of accountability: in order to be accountable, leaders should maintain spaces for direct face-to-face communication with their constituents. This chapter builds on further empirical examples to give a theoretical account of accountability as accessibility and argues that it helps reveal the ontological limits of dominant scholarly approaches to accountability, namely, principal–agent models. It starts by asking what makes communication an intrinsically valuable part of accountability. Theories stressing the power of communication in the public sphere to confer recognition and dignity on citizens are considered and found to capture part of the lived experience of accessibility. However, they neglect the way accessibility draws on social sanctions to constrain rulers in the context of unequal power relations. A review of the historical roots of the principal–agent models in liberal theory explains why dominant theories struggle to accommodate the sanctioning power of communication. More generally, the assumed desirability of an anonymous and impersonal modern state leads to a neglect of the more socially embedded aspects of governance. In contrast, Yoruba political vocabulary fluently expresses the political importance of social sanction via the concept of olá (social honour).

Even if populism is not simply an illiberal ideology, it is bad for democracy. Because populists are not constrained by power-seeking party elites, they are more likely, on average, to erode civil liberties and judicial and legislative constraints on their authority. At the extreme, populists so erode these constraints that they cross the threshold into authoritarianism. The best defense against this democratic rollback is not to be found in policy alone. Rather, institutional changes are needed that incentivize power-seeking politicians to create and sustain bureaucratic parties. The conditions that produced the mass membership parties of the twentieth century have essentially passed. But a new generation of programmatic political organizations could sustain democracy well into the future, taking advantage of new tools to map how we live and work, integrating people across space, and forging new civil and political spaces.

Beginning with the mysterious problem of the so-called “caste system,” this introduction questions the ubiquitous scholarly understanding of the monarchy as a cabal of lawmakers determined to legislate every detail of vassals’ lives. It introduces a very different perspective – namely, that subjects submitting gobierno or administrative-legislative petitions not only prompted the vast majority of the empire’s dizzying thousands of royal decrees – including those concerning novel categories of human difference. It explains how both liberal-era and Habsburg mythologies of Spanish imperial rule envisioned the king as the primary author of these texts, and proposes a labor-oriented, Actor-Network Theory-inspired alternative explanation. It introduces the petition-and-response system, explaining that early modern participants sought intimate lord–ruler dialogue, in which vassals and lords endowed their writings with voluntad or volition, in order to save the consciences of all involved. It also argues that in order for this communication to thrive, a number of legal fictions – including the transfer of voluntad across the globe – was necessary. Also lurking in the distance was violence against the saboteurs of this ruler–ruled dialogue. Lastly, this segment introduces the source material and book structure.

This conclusion draws together the central themes of the book, laying out how George and the Irish Land War helped to further drive liberals, conservatives, and socialists towards an organicist utilitarian politics. It also offers a brief summary of the subsequent trajectory of the land question and some of its orientating politics in Ireland, Britain, and the Unitec States. The conclusion discusses why the late nineteenth century remains such a critical moment for contemporary discussion of liberalism and democracy.

This chapter tracks the impact of George and the Land War on some of the central ideological currents of the period, revealing how the transatlantic Land War came to occupy its fractious place in liberal political thinking. It suggests the importance of George’s radical campaigns and the Irish land agitation in accelerating acceptance of the more technocratic sightlines of new liberalism and economic marginalism. Pressed by the destabilising threat of demands for access to land grounded in natural rights, liberal political thinkers discarded the last vestiges of the tradition’s democratic-republican heritage in favour of a statist and ostensibly ‘value-free’ perspective enunciated in a language of scientific authority. Henry George’s social and intellectual networks are examined, as well as the work of liberal political theorists dealing with the land question, George, and the Irish crisis. The chapter argues that the contradictions between liberty and property – between natural freedoms and private accumulation – that the Land War exposed forced liberalism to finally and more fully dispose of its older individualistic assumptions in order to protect social order, property, ‘progress’, and ‘civilization’.

Chapter 5 locates Montesquieu in an intellectual context he fashioned through his own choice of interlocutors in The Spirit of the Laws – his world of ancient political writers and lawgivers. Montesquieu turns to the classical world in search not of models for imitation but knowledge of the science of politics. This chapter considers the relationship between Montesquieu’s critique of the substantive ideals of classical politics and his significant debts to the Aristotelian mode of regime analysis.

This chapter clarifies the philosophic dimension of Montesquieu’s essay on Rome, which comes to sight when, in chapter 18, Montesquieu makes explicit that he is presenting here a preeminent case study vindicating the contention that “it is not Fortune that dominates the World”; there are “general causes, some moral, some physical, which operate,” and “all the accidents are subject to these causes.” This foreshadows the claim with which Montesquieu opens his Spirit of the Laws: “I have posed the principles, and I have seen the particular cases unfold therefrom as if by themselves; the histories of all the nations are nothing but the consequences.” These statements signal the emergence of the modern philosophy of history, as a major component of Enlightenment rationalism’s most ambitious project and hope: to show that human reason can provide a system of universal causal explanation that will leave no room for plausible evidence of governance by supra- and contra-rational providential and legislative divinity (which is profoundly opposed not only to revealed religion but to ancient political rationalism.)

How did Montesquieu, born into a noble family in rural Bourdeaux, become a world-historical figure? In what particulars was he a man of his own times? That he lived when he did and where he did is obvious. How he managed to escape the limitations imposed upon him by time and place is not. The volume opens with a chapter introducing the reader to the development of Montesquieu’s thought throughout his literary and philosophical career. The essay will situate this account within the relevant biographical and historical context. It will consider the relationship between the major works and pursue insights into Montesquieu’s intellectual development derived from the study of minor works such as his Reflections on Universal Monarchy in Europe and Pensées.

The Spirit of the Laws (1748) is often considered one of the founding works of political liberalism. Yet more recently, a series of interpreters have thrown doubt on this dominant reading. In order to revisit and assess this debate, this contribution delineates Montesquieu’s definition of political liberty as distinct from so-called “philosophical” liberty. It considers his “solution” to the threat despotism poses to all forms of government, namely, the distribution of state powers and the division of social forces, while evaluating the status of the “English model.” Finally, it probes the original distinction between political and civil liberty, while showing that Montesquieu’s political theory cannot be integrated into the tradition of republicanism conceived as a theory of participatory self-rule. In The Spirit of the Laws, the understanding of liberty fits neither a standard liberal view nor a civic republican one; it includes elements that reach beyond both, such as a political culture grounded on honor as much as on the love of liberty.

Chapter 10 picks up with an exploration of sovereignty. This chapter will offer an analysis of the meaning and practices of political sovereignty with a focus on Montesquieu’s seminal treatment of the English constitution, where sovereignty is ambiguous and divided in ways that are constitutively connected to liberty. The chapter considers Montesquieu’s treatment of sovereignty in the context of other major modern theories of sovereignty and its relevance for contemporary liberal democratic states.

This chapter explores the particularity of Montesquieu’s political vision that includes a commitment to traditional social orders alongside a defence of liberty. It demonstrates how later theorists associated with the liberal tradition develop at least one of three features largely derived from Montesquieu’s work that we now associate with modern liberalism once combined with a commitment to social and political equality. These features are: institutional and constitutional organization to guarantee political accountability and the rule of law; social pluralism and representative government as a structure for the aggregation, education and voicing of broad social interests; and an ethos of moderation and avoidance of cruelty in social and political life. They characterize broad aspects of the liberal tradition at the level of institutional design, the structure of civil society and the broad social ethos needed to sustain it. The chapter concludes with reflections on perceived threats to liberalism today.