Chapter 1 sets out the main questions and contentions in the book. It explores the concept of freedom and identifies it as a central concept in Athenian democratic ideology in both the private and public spheres. Scholarly debates on the concept of freedom are outlined, with an especial emphasis on Isaiah Berlin’s notion of positive and negative freedom and its application to Athens in subsequent scholarship. Distinguishing democratic freedom from negative and republican versions, I argue that Athenians understood freedom as the ability to do “whatever one wished,” which I classify as a modified version of positive freedom. The focus on citizen agency in accomplishing his will differentiates Athenian democracy from other constitution types and affects its institutional features. The chapter closes with a brief overview of the rest of the chapters.

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 collapse of traditional hierarchies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries forced political thinkers to wrestle with the practical implications of social and political equality, and gave birth to the liberal tradition of political thought. The liberal response to this development came in two overlapping stages. First, the democratization of public and private life made it clear that the power that we exercise over each other in modern societies is reciprocal, insidious, and pervasive, and gave new urgency to the problem of carving out a domain of nonresponsible conduct. Second, the rise of industrial capitalism exposed the tension between the dependence that we experience in our private lives and the independence that we are expected to display as citizens, and gave new urgency to the task of creating the conditions under which people become fit to be held responsible for what they do. Because these two projects are often at odds with one another, the characteristic note of liberal political thought is one of balance and compromise as we seek to strike an appropriate balance between republican and market freedom.

The chapter describes the emergence of the personal novel in the first decade of the nineteenth century and its subsequent evolution thirty years later in parallel with the rise of the historical novel in France. These developments were shaped by changes in book production and readership after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, leading in the 1830s to the increasing professionalization of writing. While maintaining a narrative focus on the experience of insoluble personal conflicts, the personal novel is as much concerned with the transformations and conflicts of post-Revolutionary life as with an altered private domain. Though eclipsed by the realist novel in the middle part of the century, it exerted a prolonged influence, formal as well as thematic, on fiction in Europe and beyond for 100 years or more. The kinds of motivations to which the protagonists of the personal novel appeal, because these imply a break with received belief systems, tend to be sources of scandal. The fictions themselves border on scandal in representing the reasons for these outcomes and also show how challenging it is for those who witness such actions to evaluate or respond to them. The forms through which fiction performs this role would prove to be adaptable to the representation of quite different subsequent social changes. Thus, from the 1830s the novel displays increasing ideological militancy, notably in the work of Sand.

La philosophie politique restaurée ne semble guère pousser sa réflexion au-delà de ce que les gestionnaires de l’État peuvent arguer sur la démocratie et la loi, sur le droit et l’État de droit. En bref, elle semble surtout assurer la communication entre les grandes doctrines classiques et les formes de légitimation ordinaires des États dits de démocratie libérale. Jacques Rancière, La Mésentente, 1995.

This chapter argues that Benjamin Constant’s greatest legacy to liberalism was his theory of parliamentarism, which revolutionized the way that the constitutional model was understood. Unlike previous authors examined in this book, Constant envisioned a constitutional monarch divested of executive powers–who reigned but not govern–and minsters who maintained their position entirely through the process of debate that unfolded within Parliament and the public sphere. Constant believed that this (seemingly) minimal framework of checks was sufficient to prevent Parliament from becoming tyrannical. It could achieve the great promise of the English parliamentary model–a nation being truly governed by a representative assembly–while at the same time overcoming the dilemmas long associated with that model, including the dilemma of corruption. The first part of the chapter examines Constant’s constitutional theory. The second part examines Constant’s involvement in French parliamentary politics during the Restoration when he tried and failed to enact this theory.

‘The king reigns but does not govern’. This formula, which according to Carl Schmitt was coined by Adolphe Thiers, a French liberal historian and politician, enemy of Bonapartism yet suppressor of the Paris Commune, has become today the most important formula in the study of liberalism. Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben both understand this formula as capturing something essential about liberalism as a form of governmentality that guides the conduct of individuals either in the absence, or beyond the reach, of the sovereign power and its legislation through normative and normalizing orders that escape democratic control. Although not discussed as such, this formula also underlies recent attempts by jurists and historians of political ideas such as Martin Loughlin and Richard Tuck to bolster the sovereignty of the state against new forms of governing without the state that emerge in neoliberalism. This chapter proposes a new reading of this formula by situating it on the terrain of constitutionalism, rather than on that of sovereignty. In so doing, it seeks to bring together in a meaningful exchange these two different critical approaches to neoliberalism, and the emerging debates they harbour. One debate is between those who advocate a Foucauldian and biopolitical and those who adopt an Agambenian and politico-theological analysis of neoliberal governmentality. The other is the one between advocates of a republican, constitutional approach to democracy and those who argue for the revival of popular sovereignty on the basis of new ‘democratic’ interpretations of Bodin and Hobbes.

Economic developments have long shaped what we think of as the main themes of global as well as national history, from the story of capitalism and the industrial revolution, to the age of empires-cum-nations. Yet peacemaking at the end of the Napoleonic wars brought onto the international scene financiers, rentiers, and bankers, funding the future of Europe. Their presence was indicative of the emergence of a new capitalist economic order shaped by industrialisation and imperialism. This chapter uses a focus on this rising class as a lens through which to survey the social and ideological influence of shifting economic relations, practices and identities on the politics of peacemaking and on political agendas, from their impact on foreign policies and questions of ‘security’, to the proposals for political consideration brought to the peacemakers by Benjamin Constant, Saint-Simon, and Robert Owen.