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’.

The North Atlantic is best considered as an increasingly integrated economic and social region during the late nineteenth century, and this approach helps to clarify Ireland’s geopolitical place during the ideologically tumultuous 1880s. Using this framework, this chapter explores the place of Henry George and of the Irish Land War in this fractious period, detailing how technological and political developments reshaped long-standing assumptions. It explains how the Land War became an international event, with significance extending far beyond Ireland itself. The chapter also recounts George’s intellectual biography, setting the scene for the development of his most famous work, Progress and Poverty. The reaction to this book is assessed, particularly the most common arguments made by critics, and the ways in which these critiques developed commonalities across the political spectrum.

Derek Offord surveys the clashing ideological movements building towards cataclysm in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century: the revolutionary currents (idealisms, socialisms, populisms, terrorisms) that flourished in the years leading up to the assassination of Alexander II in 1881, and the reactionary elements of conservative nationalism that gained ground under Alexander III. Offord considers Chekhov’s non-ideological but politically charged writing within this context.

Gary Saul Morson provides an overview of the ideological ferment of the Russian intelligentsia, the quasi-religious devotion that Russian progressives brought to new dogmas of nihilism, populism, atheism, and scientism, while emphasizing Chekhov’s status as the most steadfast of major Russian writers in his rejection of the ideological fanaticisms of his contemporaries among the intelligentsia.

Svetlana Evdokimova explores the enigma of the Russian intelligentsia itself as a cultural body that has been defined in highly disparate ways. Evdokimova reviews the ambiguity of the term in Russian society while staking out Chekhov’s own tormented relationship with this group as its harsh critic and devoted champion. How could Chekhov both fault the intelligentsia for its multiple perceived flaws and use the terms intelligentnost’ and intelligentnyi approvingly as a marker of refinement and culture? Evdokimova identifies the reason for this seeming contradiction not so much in any inconsistency on Chekhov’s part, but in the instability and varying usage of the term “intelligentsia.”

In Chapter 1, I read the first two acts of Byron’s Swiss lyrical drama, Manfred, as an allegory of the above passage from “ancient” to “modern” liberty, showing how Romantic-period writers could represent the Swiss myth both sympathetically and skeptically in order to maintain a link between classical republicanism and liberalism. Byron’s sympathetic portrait of the chamois hunter, in particular, offers one of the last radical interpretations of Swiss-style republicanism. I then review the historical and ideological origins of the Swiss myth in Switzerland itself, going back to the Renaissance but focusing on eighteenth-century writers whose ideal of a free and happy alpine republic I contrast with the Old Confederacy’s historical realities. While the Swiss myth could express a range of ideological positions before the French Revolution, I show how post-revolutionary authors such as Staël and Karl Ludwig von Haller helped crystallize it as an expression of customary Freiheit rather than of rational liberté.

Chapter 3 explores the genre of travel writing to illustrate the transformation of the Swiss myth from a progressive to a more conservative narrative. After briefly reviewing the Whig ideology of the Grand Tour, I look at how William Coxe’s various editions of his Sketches of Swisserland responded to two French translations by the republican writers Louis Ramond de Carbonnières and Théophile Mandar, and to a competing travelogue by the radical British expatriate Helen Maria Williams, all of whom struggled to redefine the meaning of republicanism. I argue that these three works exploited the contradictions in Coxe’s text in order to modernize his Whiggish ideal of liberty, and in Williams’s travelogue at least, to make the case for revolution in Switzerland. Centering my analysis on the aristocratic republic of Bern and on the rural democracies of central Switzerland, I look at the various textual strategies that enabled these writers to make Swiss liberty a Whig, then radical, and finally Tory political trope.

Black nationalism has featured prominently in twentieth-century African-American social and political thought and refers to a set of ideologies that concern the relationship of people of African descent to the US nation state. This chapter tracks the emergence of modern Black nationalism in the mid-twentieth century and exposes how it is a discourse concerned with redefining both racial and gender identity. Paying particular attention to the work of Black women writers, the essay illustrates how the interface of literature and politics under the aegis of Black nationalism becomes a space for exploring and disrupting gender ideologies. Gender politics provides a foundation for some articulations of Black nationalism through the hierarchical rhetoric of the ‘promise of protection’, in which women ostensibly trade safety for social power and agency. Through an analysis of Alice Walker’s short story collection In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women (1973), the essay illuminates the artistic engagement of nationalist thought and showcases the danger and falseness of the promise of protection, showing both the potential and limits of the influential social logic of nationalism.

Although critics have tended to regard Hughes’s 1930s short fiction as less politically engaged than his poetry and drama of the same period, Hughes’s Great Depression–period short stories in fact engage in a form of literary radical activism. The stories expose racism as a form of nationalism that articulates interwar US imperialism and domestic fascism. With their understated and ironic tone, Hughes’s short stories are as stylistically effective as any of the most admired Harlem Renaissance–period short stories and as compelling as Black short fiction after the renaissance. Hughes’s short fiction is aesthetically forceful if one accepts the notion that Black fiction of the Great Depression through the civil rights period does not have to emulate modernist, canonical, universalist fiction, art that is allegedly free of ideological content. This chapter examines such stories as “Cora Unashamed” and “The Blues I’m Playing” for both their aesthetic and political distinction.

This new collection enables students and general readers to appreciate Coleridge’s renewed relevance 250 years after his birth. An indispensable guide to his writing for twenty-first-century readers, it contains new perspectives that reframe his work in relation to slavery, race, war, post-traumatic stress disorder and ecological crisis. Through detailed engagement with Coleridge’s pioneering poetry, the reader is invited to explore fundamental questions on themes ranging from nature and trauma to gender and sexuality. Essays by leading Coleridge scholars analyse and render accessible his extraordinarily innovative thinking about dreams, psychoanalysis, genius and symbolism. Coleridge is often a direct and gripping writer, yet he is also elusive and diverse. This Companion’s great achievement is to offer a one-volume entry point into his incomparably rich and varied world.

Chapter 3 pairs the expansion of liberal and religious solutions to working-class problems with increasing labor radicalism in Cuba. In the second decade of the twentieth century, the Catholic church and Cuban government created institutions to help domestic servants and to institutionalize education in domestic sciences for young women. The 1910s were also marked by phenomena that challenged these charity and education-based initiatives: rapidly increasing Caribbean migration to Cuba, growing labor unrest, and the feminist movement. These contradictory trends all found expression in the experiences of and discourse surrounding domestic workers. During the revolutionary upheaval of 1933, domestic workers acted in solidarity with other workers, helping to occupy mills and demanding increased formal attention to their labor. This chapter also considers the politics of the archives and how domestic workers were written out of stories of labor resistance at the very moment such resistance occurred.

The new century’s radical songwork takes in the victims of the Triangle Factory fire, Mother Jones, and the bards of the Industrial Workers of the World (with Joe Hill at their pinnacle). The IWW’s Italian songwriters – Arturo Giovannitti and Efrem Bartoletti – emerge as important voices, as do the Finnish songwriters of the Italian Hall Disaster in Calumet, Michigan, and the multinational corridistas of the Ludlow Massacre in Colorado. Other revolutionary arenas include the vaudeville stage and the drag club, where the cross-dressing of Julian Eltinge and Bothwell Browne challenges the tyranny of heterosexual norms. Charlotte Perkins Gilman emerges as a leading songwriter for women’s suffrage and joins the ranks of those opposing US entry into the coming European war. As the government clamps down on the proliferation of antiwar activism, Tin Pan Alley leads the shift from antiwar to prowar songwriting. With the US now at war, Black soldiers produce a powerful body of song reflecting the outrages of segregation in the ranks. Black composers James Reese Europe and Noble Sissle turn their wartime service into pioneering art-song, and Lakota warriors – formerly forbidden to sing – lend their voices to the war effort. The Armistice produces a wealth of song celebration, but a new musical menace arises in the form of the Ku Klux Klan and its vicious songs.

This chapter focusses on the early years of the first Mechanics’ classes, instituted at the beginning of the nineteenth century. These classes were formed out of well-meaning paternalism, aimed at educating, and reforming, disenfranchised labouring class people. Institutional leadership quickly dictated what was suitable, or not, for the men and women who became members of these institutes. Denied agency in what they read and discussed, members agitated for more say. Some split to form their own institutes, as in Glasgow in 1823 and Manchester in 1829. These new institutions, led by members, enabled the concerns of working-class communities on industrial pollution, breadth of education, and aspirations for goods, to emerge as subjects for discussion. Mechanics’ institutions therefore became places where political engagement, denied by an unreformed parliament and the Six Acts, took place. This is evidenced in the content of the new unstamped Mechanics’ magazines that were closely tied to Mechanics’ Institutes. These institutes were faced with much conservative opposition, particularly from the established church, fearing radicalism. Indeed, some mechanics were involved in publishing details on how to make bombs and bullets on the eve of the Reform Bill in 1831.

This chapter reconsiders the radicalization process of the May Fourth youth through the founding of the CYP in Europe and the collapse of the YCA in China. This chapter first highlights how the different material conditions in Europe laid a significant foundation for the emergence of different ideologies among those Chinese students working and studying in Europe. Subsequently, by examining the radicalizing political confrontations between the founders of the CCP and CYP in both Europe and China, this chapter demonstrates how the CYP founders became radicalized and set out for a national socialist revolution in 1923.