This chapter discusses Herder’s engagement with the French Revolution and his continuing debate with Kant, specifying the ways in which Herder sought to balance humanitarian and patriotic concerns in his political vision in the 1790s and early 1800s. Herder celebrated the French Revolution as an attempt to restore a ‘living constitution’ based on natural order in France. He initially also welcomed Kant’s ideas on human dignity, but soon came to reject his more specific conception of self-determination. His worries about the outbreak of the Revolutionary wars were reflected in his concern that Kant’s philosophy of history might unwittingly exacerbate republican moral absolutism and imperialism. In his view, Kant could not adequately resolve the gap between professed principles and action, law and ethics. Herder’s own understanding of a truly humanitarian philosophy of history was grounded in his Stoic-vitalist account of human self-determination. He further elaborated on the ways in which humans could cultivate their ‘sensus humanitatis’ through reflective engagement with history, criticising various instances of European colonial imperialism. His primary concern, however, was to guide European nations—above all, the German—in cultivating a new ethic to enable the simultaneous pursuit of domestic reforms and international cooperation.

Chapter 8 moves on to the French case study. As the nation with the oldest major right-wing populist party in Europe, a well-established electoral constituency of political Catholicism, and one of the strictest models of church–state separation, the French case study provides a unique opportunity to trace the historical development of the relationship between religion and right-wing populism. To study these phenomena, Chapter 8 begins by exploring how the historical antagonism between la France Catholique and la Republique laïque still shapes the relationship between politics and religion today, and how the hard-fought compromise between the two has recently been challenged by a return of political tensions surrounding religion and laïcité, in the context of the French far right’s identitarian rhetoric.

This chapter is primarily interested in exploring the origins and development of liberalism during the revolutionary and early republican period of nineteenth century Spanish America. It first considers the peculiarities of the Spanish crisis of 1808 in the context of the Atlantic crisis of the European monarchies and also evaluates the assimilation of the Enlightened agenda by the Catholic Spanish political culture. The second part the chapter introduces the relevance of the idea of emancipation and considers the characteristics it adopted in the Spanish World as a keystone of the constitutional cultures that flourished in the area. The last part of this chapter shows the limits of a theory of emancipation in Catholic societies and how the new republics (and the Spanish liberal monarchy as well) had to deal with limits to constituent power posed by the assumption that the Spanish were societies with a “national God.” Depending on the solutions proposed and adopted to the limits of emancipation different branches of liberalism developed, debated among them and very often went to civil wars.

The chapter looks at Virgil’s Aeneid and the American Western The Outlaw Josey Wales to identify a Roman and American shared founding narrative of a community of Strangers dislocated from history and place. What emerges from Virgil, and gives us insight into America’s founding experience, is that the connection between past and future hinges on a paradox. The community is defined neither by a lineage of a people nor by a place, but is forged by the experience of dislocation. The sense of a future, which for both Rome and America lie in the promise of a new age, does not rest on a continuity with the past but on the experience of discontinuity. The power of these narratives is that they provide a basis for the incorporation of new peoples and new territory. But the myth haunts the Roman imagination like it does the American. If there is nothing natural, fixed, or visible about who is included as Roman or American, then it is not clear what constitutes a We rather than a They.

Questions of the American founding are organized around debates about its republican, liberal, or religious heritage. I locate the founding not in a historical moment but in a mythology reenacted in the cultural imagination. In that narrative, which America shares with Rome, the community is continually reconstituted by ongoing refoundings of Strangers who are dislocated from their own place and past. Where foundings are usually placed in service to securing an identity, the Roman and American foundings unsettle identity.The Introduction provides an argument for how we can understand the tensions that lie in the formation of identity and narratives of belonging, and how we can, in turn, draw on Rome to explore these tensions in American culture and politics.

This chapter explores the spectacles of gladiators, bare-knuckle boxing, and the early theater. Wild, violent bodies were banned in Rome and America: the gladiator excluded from civic participation and protections; boxing matches banned through much of the nineteenth century. Both bodies were marked by wounds, but even more by a brashness and ruggedness that was contrary to standards of elite decorum. These bodies were the object of elite condemnation as uncivilized, uneducated, and unrefined. And these bodies were the object of the gaze, put on display to perform to the expectations of the audience. The problem is that boundaries of exclusion prove to be permeable. And these boundaries prove to be permeable because the lawless, uncivilized bodies replay the role of violence in constituting a founding identity. The conquest of wild, lawless nature in the name of civilization required a type of body, one that could act with similar violent wildness. To the chagrin of certain elites, the taboo body comes to be valorized, grafted and grafting itself onto the rugged origins embedded in the founding ideal.

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.

The chapter begins by tracing the rise of the so-called ‘historicist’ approach to the study of texts in political philosophy. The example of Thomas Hobbes’s philosophy is discussed in such a way as to illustrate what is distinctive about the historicist approach. The chapter then turns to consider two objections frequently raised against this approach. One claims that ‘a tyranny of history’ has been allowed to develop, which has had the effect of cutting off the study of legal and political philosophy from a usable part. The other maintains that historicists fail to appreciate that some claims about political phenomena are transhistorical and universal in scope. After considering and largely rejecting these arguments, the chapter ends by examining the more recent objection that the history of political philosophy as currently written is an unduly parochial discipline, which now needs to concentrate on developing a more global approach. The chapter concludes with an assessment of this so-called global turn.

Chapter 2 examines the place of the Swiss myth in British Whig ideology, looking at its dual function as residual republican signifier on one hand, and as a form of oppositional discourse on the other. I first survey seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century texts to see the role that Switzerland played in the English republican tradition, then analyze the dialectic between virtue and commerce in a series of progress poems and historical sketches that compare the Swiss republics with France, Italy, and Britain. While earlier Whig writers such as Addison drew on classical republican language to legitimize a more modern, liberal idea of liberty, writers later in the century began to romanticize the democracies of central Switzerland in order to defend popular sovereignty, preparing the way for the century’s most elaborate but also politically radical interpretation of the Swiss myth, Wordsworth’s Descriptive Sketches. Written in the context of the ‘second’ French Revolution of 1792, the poem’s representation of the Swiss myth necessarily falls short of France’s modern democracy, pointing to the growing ideological rift between Freiheit and liberté.

The introduction argues for a relation between the Swiss myth, Romanticism, and the development of modern liberalism. I notably explain and define the terms used in the book, including negative versus positive liberty, republicanism versus liberalism, and Ancient versus Modern liberty. This brings me to a more detailed discussion of the concepts of liberty, popular sovereignty, and representation in the writings of liberal Swiss intellectuals Benjamin Constant, Germaine de Stäel, and, more briefly, Rousseau. His Letters Written from the Mountain, published half-a-century before Constant’s famous speech, already accepts the passing away of Ancient Liberty, and embraces a modern, representative system in which private virtues supersede public ones and not everyone can participate in the res publica. The Genevan Citizen’s demystification of his own native republic and of Swiss republicanism in general attests to the constructed, ideologically-marked nature of the representations that I explore in the rest of this book. The fact that readers and writers wanted to continue believing in Rousseau’s community of equals in the Alps long after he had stopped doing so speaks to the strength of this Romantic desire, and to the lasting power of the Swiss myth.

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 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.

This chapter considers the connections between modern Irish literature and the politics of nationalism, rebellion, partition, and sectarianism. It discusses key moments in the evolution of Irish culture and writing, including the 1798 rebellion, the revolutionary period of 1916–22, and the 1998 Belfast Agreement. James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) registered the decisive impact of the fall in 1890 of the parliamentary leader, Charles Stewart Parnell, on the country and its literature. W. B Yeats seized on this moment of political crisis in order to launch a movement for cultural revival. Yet most Irish writing in the independent Irish state after 1922, although hostile to Catholic hegemony and to the censorship of art, was counter-revolutionary rather than aesthetically or politically radical. While Beckett explored the legacies of an experimental Irish modernism from Paris, realist novelists, such as John McGahern and Edna O’Brien, dominated the domestic scene. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the generation of poets and critics that emerged from Northern Ireland after the 1960s, including Seamus Deane, Tom Paulin, and Seamus Heaney.