We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
This chapter explores Schopenhauer’s views of the political systems in North America, Europe, and China. Schopenhauer understood the United States as a modern republic geared toward maximum individual freedom. He also took note of its high levels of interpersonal violence. Importantly, he repeatedly returned to US slavery as the most egregious example of institutionalized exploitation and brutality. In his treatment of the United States, he then connected republicanism to slavery and concluded that they were tightly associated. Schopenhauer’s argument against American republicanism does not, however, suggest that he endorsed traditional European monarchies. Against both North America and Europe, Schopenhauer instead held up the example of China as an advanced state that was hierarchical and imperial and yet resolutely nontheist. For Schopenhauer, China combined political stability and peacefulness with a philosophically sound atheism and thus demonstrated the realization of his political and his philosophical ideals.
Hume’s ‘Of Eloquence’ – in which Hume implores English orators to imitate the sublime style of Demosthenes – has long puzzled readers, for two reasons. First, it is rare for Hume to present ancient examples as suitable for moderns to imitate, particularly where politics is concerned. Second, in the essay’s conclusion, Hume seems to backtrack by encouraging English speakers to give up on sublimity and introduce more order and method into their speeches instead, inviting the accusation of incoherence. In this chapter, I show how reading Hume’s essay through the lens of ancients and moderns is limiting and that a comparison between the political cultures of England and France was central to his analysis. For Hume, the lack of sublimity in Parliament was a specifically English problem with roots in the English national character. If the revival of classical eloquence that Hume desired looked unlikely to him, I argue, this was due less to the unsuitability of sublime speech to a modern society than to the peculiar place of Parliament in Britain’s mixed constitutional order. I also demonstrate that Hume’s closing call for more order and method in English speechmaking was consistent with his earlier endorsement of the sublime.
This chapter traces the ways in which Hume’s ‘Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’ responds not only to Harrington’s Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) but also to Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws (1748). The large federal constitution that Hume proposed at the end of his Political Discourses turns out to have as much in common with Montesquieu’s understanding of modern monarchy as it does with Harrington’s vision for an equal republic. Indeed, there is reason to suspect that Montesquieu’s criticism of Oceana in his chapter ‘On the English Constitution’ prompted Hume to devise his alternative version of Harrington’s commonwealth. Hume adapted Oceana’s framework for uniform electoral districts and tiers of representation to the spirit of commerce and competition that he and Montesquieu associated with modern Britain. The result was a state with ‘all the advantages of both a great and little commonwealth’.
This chapter canvasses coalitions for and against pluralism that emerged with the foundation of the Republic of Turkey. It shows that while the early nation-builders pursued a unitary, ethno-nationalist project, Kemalism also entailed an “embedded liberalism” inherited from late Ottoman modernization, including resources for eventual democratization. Throughout the twentieth century, political actors sought to mobilize these resources toward pluralizing the political system across a series of critical junctures (e.g., the 1920s’ cultural revolution; the 1950 transition to multiparty democracy; successive coups in 1960, 1971, and 1980; and a 1997 “postmodern coup.”) Across these junctures, the chapter argues, there were only two pronounced periods of secularist/Islamist cleavages. More often, conflict was driven by significant, cross-camp cooperation and intra-camp rivalry. Tracing when and why pluralizing and anti-pluralist alignments succeeded or failed, the chapter captures a key dynamic: the installation of an ethno(-religious nationalist project – the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis (TIS) – as national project, even as ideas and actors invested in pluralization continued to mobilize.
Sophie de Grouchy was a political philosopher and activist practising at the centre of Revolutionary events in France between 1789 and 1815. Despite this, her contributions to the development of political thought are often overlooked, with Grouchy commonly falling under the shadow of her husband Nicolas de Caritat, the marquis de Condorcet. A Republic of Sympathy instead situates Grouchy as a significant figure among her contemporaries, offering the first complete exploration of her shifting thought and practice across this period of societal upheaval. Kathleen McCrudden Illert analyses texts newly attributed to Grouchy and examines her intellectual collaborations, demonstrating how Grouchy continued to develop a unique philosophy which placed sympathy as the glue between the individual and the political community. The study also explores Grouchy's connections with her peers and interlocutors, from Adam Smith and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to Thomas Paine and Jacques Pierre Brissot. In doing so, it argues powerfully for Grouchy's reintegration into the history of European political thought.
Plebeian Consumers is both a global and local study. It tells the story of how peasants, day workers, formerly enslaved people, and small landholders became the largest consumers of foreign commodities in nineteenth-century Colombia, and dynamic participants of an increasingly interconnected world. By studying how plebeian consumers altered global processes from below, Ana María Otero-Cleves challenges ongoing stereotypes about Latin America's peripheral role in the world economy through the nineteenth century, and its undisputed dependency on the Global North. By exploring Colombians' everyday practices of consumption, Otero-Cleves also invites historians to pay close attention to the intimate relationship between the political world and the economic world in nineteenth-century Latin America. She also sheds light on new methodologies and approaches for studying the material world of men and women who left little record of their own experiences.
During the Interregnum, figures such as Thomas Hobbes, James Harrington, and John Milton produce substantial works of political philosophy. As can be seen in their titles, Hobbes’s Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civill (1651), Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656), and Milton’s Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), each set out to describe a commonwealth. For Hobbes, Harrington, and Milton, the question after 1649 is how to understand – and, in some cases, how to reconstitute — the “one” that is at the Greek root of monarch. None of the proposals created, under the great pressures of the moment, could be implemented; however, they offered models for English-language political philosophy for decades, even centuries, to come. Later generations had a reservoir of English-language republican actions, rhetoric, and philosophy on which to draw, including in Ireland.
Kant's main work in the philosophy of law – the Doctrine of Right (1797) – is notoriously difficult for modern readers to understand. Kant clearly argues that rightful relations between human beings can only be achieved if we enter into a civil legal condition taking a defined constitutional form. In this Element, we emphasise that Kant considers this claim to be a postulate of practical reason, thus identifying the pure idea of the state as the culmination of his entire practical philosophy. The Doctrine of Right makes sense as an attempt to clarify the content of the postulate of public right and constructively interpret existing domestic and international legal arrangements in the light of the noumenal republic it postulates. Properly understood, Kant's postulate of public right is the epistemological foundation of a non-positivist legal theory that remains of central significance to modern legal philosophy and legal doctrinal method.
Chapter 2 discusses the adaptations that Grouchy made to her initial draft of the Letters on Symapthy between 1786 and 1789. It explores her interest, during this period, in the affair of the trois roués, a court case that had captured the attention of her uncle Dupaty and Condorcet. This constituted her first sustained exposure to the political injustices of ancien régime. By engaging with the work of these two men, and the ideas of other eighteenth-century natural rights thinkers, Grouchy developed her own ideas as to how injustice could be combatted. This resulted in various additions to the Letters. Building on her original ideas about sympathy-based morality, she elaborated her own definition of natural rights. She went on to argue that these rights, and justice as a whole, could only exist in society when a minimal degree of social and economic equality was guaranteed by the state. This Chapter argues that this was the period when the Letters changed from a moral treatise to a text concerned with political theory.
The introduction sets the stage for a comprehensive exploration of how plebeian consumption shaped global and local interactions in nineteenth-century Colombia, challenging conventional historical narratives and offering new insights into the dynamics of global capitalism and popular citizenship. It does so by providing insight into the existing historiography and its limitations and by highlighting the need to challenge dominant narratives that perpetuate the perception of Latin America and its consumers as passive participants in global transformations. The introduction also explores the methodological challenges of writing histories of consumption “from below” and the need to adopt an interdisciplinary approach drawing from cultural history and anthropology to analyze popular consumption practices. After a historical exploration of Colombia’s place within the global nineteenth century, the introduction concludes with a brief outline of the book’s chapters.
Chapter 1 explores how the elites’ economic republican project, based on the modern science of political economy, was closely linked to ordinary people’s desire to consume foreign goods. It explores how for those in power as well as for those seeking recognition as political subjects, ideas and practices of citizenship were inevitably tied to participation as consumers in the marketplace – understood not as a mere container of economic transactions but as a node of complex social processes and a creator of cultural and political activity. By so doing, the chapter reveals that in nineteenth-century Colombia, politics was everywhere, and the marketplace was no exception.
As well as providing a brief biography of Sophie de Grouchy, the introduction sets out the aims of the book. It describes how A Republic of Sympathy is the tale of how thought could be produced by an eighteenth-century woman in a time of Revolution: with all the possibilities, limitations, and opportunities that this period offered. It outlines how over this period, Grouchy developed her own, unique form of republicanism, by appealing to sympathy as the glue between the individual and the republic. It emphasises that Grouchy’s thought consisted of a series of shifting, adapting ideas, which nevertheless consistently relied on this sentiment. It describes how Grouchy not only experiment with variations of her theory over this period, but with different mediums of expressing her ideas: including pedagogical treatise, journal articles, translated texts, commentaries, collaborative projects, or embodied in her lived relationships. It also highlights Grouchy’s key interlocutors: from Adam Smith, to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, from her husband, the marquis de Condorcet to Benjamin Constant, from Thomas Paine to Jacques Pierre Brissot.
The epilogue critically assesses how successful the ruling elites were in their republican project of turning peasants, laborers, and day laborers into modern citizens through consumption and economic integration. This critique proceeds by emphasizing the tensions between plebeian and elite attitudes toward consumption and citizenship by the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. It also invites global historians and historians of Latin America to ask new questions about capitalism and globalization “in the margins” by studying consumption from below, so as to interrogate the entrenched narratives of underdevelopment and dependency that still permeate our historical interpretations about Latin America today.
Chapter 4 studies the political, cultural, and economic impact of foreign machetes and other agricultural tools. It shows how popular men and women’s expert knowledge about these goods was not transferred from above or received from abroad but inherited and acquired in practice. Peasants and muleteers used machetes to clear the land, grow their crops, and travel the country; artisans, bogas, and smallholders, to defend their honor, their lives, and their property. As this chapter shows, over the course of the nineteenth century, foreign tools, especially the machete, reshaped these popular actors’ collective identities and underscored their contribution to the nation’s material improvement and progress – not only as part of the country’s labor force but as consumers themselves. Although these Plebeian consumers might have had limited choices due to their limited purchasing power, this did not preclude them from appropriating foreign tools, expressing dissatisfaction with certain agricultural implements, and seeking ways to access the ones they liked and preferred. Most important, machetes allowed them to shape and reiterate their citizenship on the ground. As such, Colombia’s popular consumers became not only critical agents in the global market but active and productive citizens of the new republic.
Chapter 4 explores Grouchy’s first elaboration of a specifically republican political philosophy during the French Revolution. It describes how, together with Condorcet, Paine, Brissot and others, she founded the first explicitly republican journal of the Revolution in 1791: Le Républicain. It explores the context for her declaration of republicanism: the flight of Louis XVI from Paris in June 1791. It demonstrates how, in the articles she contributed to this journal and other anonymously published pieces, Grouchy elaborated on the theory she had been developing between 1786 and 1791. She added an unambiguously anti-royal element to her thought, arguing that a king can never feel sympathy with his people, and can therefore never be a just ruler. This Chapter explores how she drew, in particular, on the ideas of Paine, but also describes a major intellectual and political fissure that developed between Grouchy and her ‘Brissotin’ allies during this period. While they advocated an offensive European war after 1791, she argued against one. Due to her reliance on mutual sentiment between ruler and ruled as the basis of political society, she opposed, on philosophical grounds, the sending of ‘armed missionaries’.
This chapter introduces the conceptual claim of this book that the idea of a competition-democracy nexus is grounded in a normative commitment to a republican conception of economic liberty as non-domination originating in ancient Roman thought. The chapter first shows how the existing ‘special interest capture’ and ‘conventional liberty’ accounts fail to make sense of the competition–democracy nexus. It then explores the republican conception of liberty as non-domination as an alternative explanation of the idea of a competition–democracy nexus. It shows that this republican understanding of economic liberty is the only explanatory variable that can explain why competition enhances and the concentration of economic power undermines democracy and why competition law is the right tool to address this problem.
This chapter introduces the republican conception of liberty as non-domination. It explains how unhoused persons experience two forms of domination because they lack private property rights. First, others exert control over unhoused persons’ opportunities to obey laws that govern public property. Second, unhoused persons must make non-egalitarian sacrifices (or trade-offs) to obey laws that regulate public space.
In Homelessness, Liberty and Property, Terry Skolnik establishes a novel theory about the government's duties to end homelessness, maintain public property's value, and legitimize laws that regulate public space. In doing so, Skolnik provides new insight into how the property law system and the regulation of public space limit unhoused persons' freedom and political equality. The book deepens our understanding of how various areas of law, such as constitutional law, legal philosophy, criminal law, and property law, approach the reality of homelessness and advances original arguments to provide new justifications for the right to housing. Skolnik concludes by offering a set of concrete proposals for how the government can reduce the incidence of homelessness and treat unhoused persons with greater concern and respect. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available open access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.
Among the dilemmas faced by labor, socialist, and other movements of the subaltern classes striving to change society over the past two centuries, three are discussed here: forms of ownership, bureaucracy and “big tent” formulas for both unity of the working class broadly defined, and alliances with movements of independent owners or undefined class status. Examples are drawn from various countries (France, Italy, Britain, the USA, Brazil, Korea) and from international programmatic discussions. Socialists, notably Marxists, shared the radical republican goal of a true democracy of equals, but differed on the extent of collective ownership (state, local, cooperative) needed in the economy, and the definition of privately owned personal goods that insured an individual’s dignity and independence. The rise and contraction of capitalist states with social services (“welfare states”) complicated the issue. Such movements also accumulated experiences with the growth of experts and/or bureaucrats, and the means to limit their privileges and transformation into a caste-type elite. Three environments which generate such phenomena are identified: social-democratic and big labor, post-capitalist states and, more recently, nongovernmental organizations. Finally, the author discusses alliances with broader social forces which include working-class and non-working-class interests, and the management of cross-class ideologies such as certain varieties of nationalism, feminism, environmentalism, and anti-tax movements.