This article examines the concepts of revolution that political actors employed during the age of Atlantic revolutions (c.1760–1830) and how they used these concepts to analyze, compare, and connect the era's political events. The article begins by briefly recapitulating the evolving meanings of revolution in the seventeenth century and the early eighteenth. The capacious concept of a “revolution of government” that developed in the eighteenth century remained in regular use into the 1820s as a key conceptual tool to imaginatively connect otherwise disparate political movements/phenomena. Revolutionaries also created two new concepts, “total” and “limited” revolution, that were crucial to drawing political distinctions, especially between the American and French revolutions. These three concepts of revolution, I argue, all gave late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century actors an unusual degree of flexibility—which did not exist before or after the period—in describing the temporal and causal dynamics of revolutionary change.

The term science sociale was first employed by Mirabeau père in 1767, not Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès in 1789, as historians until now believed. Taking this discovery as its starting point, this article examines the ways in which the idea of a science of society was successively conceptualized in the late eighteenth century by Mirabeau, Sieyès, and Nicolas de Condorcet. Situating their ideas in the context of evolving discussions over the reform of the French state, it argues that they developed three different versions of social science, and that these reflected different attempts to answer the question of how to achieve collective prosperity, justice, and happiness under modern conditions. This article further highlights the changing modes of historical temporality that informed those approaches, which shifted from a focus on the social forms of a mythical past, to a concern with the prevailing norms of the present, to an emphasis, finally, on the likely developments of an ever-perfecting future. In doing so, it shows that the history of early French social science is best understood not as a process of gradual advancement, but rather as one of serial reinvention.

Few books on political economy have become as influential as Capital, volume 1. After Karl Marx, in 1867, published the first volume of Capital on the capitalist mode of production, the book was published again in Russian in 1872, in a second German edition in 1872–3 and in French—as Le capital—in 1872–5. The publishing process of the French edition started in December 1871 in the wake of the Paris Commune. This article aims to investigate the conditions that led to the initiation of this process. We specifically argue that by looking at the Paris Commune and its aftermath, we are in a better position to understand the new possibilities it created for publishing Marx's work in French, the connections it facilitated, and the way it shaped the publishing process of Le capital.

Ellen Gates Starr and Vida Dutton Scudder are not the best-known names of the Progressive Era. Yet they were at the forefront of progressive reform in the 1880s through the 1910s, and they helped to create the ideas and institutions that defined the settlement house movement. Their prominent historical role demands that we pay serious attention to their alternative visions of progressivism. Starr and Scudder were more politically radical, and more religiously traditional, than many of their peers. Each woman integrated a radical embrace of social transformation with High Church Christian cosmology, creating a Catholic socialist progressivism that contrasts to both other settlement workers and the male leaders of Christian socialism. This article explicates Starr's and Scudder's belief systems and argues for their importance to the history of progressive reform and to the intellectual history of American social change. Although each thinker had her own emphasis—Starr foregrounded art, while Scudder focused on uniting Marxism with Catholicism—Starr, Scudder, and their friendship represent a lost destiny of the progressive movement: a worker-led movement grounded in religious faith.

The political thought of Ireland's revolutionary generation has, in recent years, attracted increasing attention from scholars. However, the historiography of the Irish revolution and its aftermath remains marked by an enduring tendency to critique, rather than contextualize, the types of nationalist and religious motivations proffered commonly to justify political action in the early decades of the twentieth century. Focusing on the intellectual output of one highly original and conspicuously under-researched thinker, Aodh de Blácam, this article seeks to make some contribution towards redressing this historiographical deficit. In addition to highlighting the richness of the engagement with international debates in political theory that obtained among many members of Ireland's revolutionary generation, de Blácam's work illustrates vividly the heterodox range of influences that shaped Irish nationalism between the wars and the diverse conceptions of modernity that were formulated in response to the social and economic upheaval of the period.

This article examines the international thought of Charles Kingsley Webster, one of Britain's most important diplomatic historians of the twentieth century. Though best remembered as one of the first historians of the Congress of Vienna and a biographer of Lord Castlereagh and Lord Palmerston, Webster also served as one of the key planners for the United Nations Organization in the Foreign Office during the Second World War. His ideas concerning internationalism—particularly his belief in an eventual world state—as well as his views on British foreign policy and the nature of international politics, offer a unique insight into both the varieties of interwar internationalism and the intellectualism which contributed to British strategic planning in the early 1940s.

It is well known that the leading New Liberals L. T. Hobhouse and J. A. Hobson were critics of the British Empire, and their sympathy with China has been understood as an expression of their anti-imperialism. However, this article argues that this reading is at best one-sided. By examining Hobhouse's and Hobson's ethical and sociological thought, it demonstrates that their Sinophile position drew on a broader concern about the turn-of-the-century moral crisis. Informed by Idealist philosophy, positivism, and evolutionary biology, their quest for a post-Christian ethics led to an appreciation of the harmonic order of Chinese society and its secularism. The leading New Liberals’ earnest study of China on the one hand represented a departure from the Eurocentric position of British Liberals who had seen “stationary” China as a negative object lesson, and on the other anticipated a generation of Liberal/progressive thinkers who were attracted to Chinese culture.

Economists began using models between the First and Second World Wars. The first econometric model of the United States was produced by Jan Tinbergen at the League of Nations. Modeling was a methodological solution to the political problems of the interwar period. International norms of cooperation and governance had to be reconciled with new demands for national autonomy in economic affairs, with a new understanding of the nation-state's capacity to make and remake the economy. Models possessed a composite, ambiguous character that appealed to both nationalist and internationalist sympathies. Models combined fact and theory, the particular and the general, the local and the global. The practice of modeling contrasted with and largely displaced an older, universalizing discourse of scientific law, predominant in the nineteenth century. Modeling reflected the nation-state's ascendance as a legitimate arbiter of economic policy, situated uneasily within a regime of international norms and institutions.

Over the last decade, a narrative centered around the rise of neoliberalism has become the dominant framework for explaining recent US, and often global, history. Although this neoliberal lens has repeatedly proven its value, it also obscures major continuities running across the twentieth century. This article highlights one striking example of continuity that becomes easier to see after taking off the neoliberal lens—namely the commitment to discretionary management of the macroeconomy, often short-handed as Keynesianism. It begins with a survey linking the development of a politics centered around managing the economy to the making of what Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek have termed a “policy state.” Next it considers the role of economists within the policy state, paying particular attention to what it calls the MIT school of economics. Then it uses the career of Lawrence Klein, an exemplary product of the MIT school, to illuminate the politics of the economy in a supposedly neoliberal age.

Ever since the publication of “The Imperialism of Free Trade” by John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson in 1953, “informal empire” has been a key term for historians. It has, however, always been contentious. The central issue was whether imperial historians were prepared to accept a new concept of empire. This article explains the paradox of informal empire by creating a stronger provenance for the term. Since the early nineteenth century, imperial metaphors have been used to characterize Britain's position in the world economy. Gallagher and Robinson—like their immediate predecessors, Charles Fay and Keith Hancock—wanted to understand British imperialism in the broader context of European expansion while also formulating an alternative to the radical liberal and neo-Marxist interpretations widely current after World War I. Ultimately, the difficulty of using “empire” as a single category led Gallagher and one of his most influential successors to choose an alternative term.

When you think of 1960s anarchism, community playgrounds and financial planning for tenants’ associations may not spring to mind, yet these, along with similar topics, were Anarchy's (1961–1970) staple fare. The A5 monthly, edited by British journalist Colin Ward (1924–2010), maintained a steady output of ‘anarchist applications’ in the spheres of education, housing, and community development. Although published during the 1960s, the origins and ethos of the journal lay in the previous decade. Responding to this heightened Cold War “moment,” Ward developed an idiosyncratic radical pragmatism prioritizing the practice of popular democracy over the theory of it. In reconstructing Anarchy's intellectual formation, this article contributes to revisionist scholarship acknowledging a more experimental radical culture in 1950s Britain than is usually granted, one that prefigured aspects of the later counterculture but also differed from it in important respects.

This article traces the influence of theories of Third World underdevelopment on Stuart Hall's understanding of the nature of historical transitions. I show Hall's notion of “articulation,” central to his social theory, is indebted to ideas about development originating in the global South, rather than to the thinking of “Western Marxists.” By arguing that Antonio Gramsci was a theorist of “articulation,” Hall read Gramsci as a thinker comparable to development theorists he was engaging with in the same period. This had important implications, I suggest, for Hall's “Gramscian” analyses of British politics in the 1980s. Specifically, I show that by describing Thatcherism as a form of “regressive modernization,” Hall adopted the idiom of several theories of economic development to argue that the uneven development of capitalist relations of production is the key to understanding how advanced forms of capitalist accumulation can accommodate seemingly archaic and reactionary social relations and institutions.

Three generations ago, intellectual historians wrote books in which central texts and intellectual figures were held to be the sources of entire bodies of thought. The metaphors of “influence” and “origins” were common; particular arguments associated with those texts and thinkers were imagined as shaping and creating traditions of thought. Adjectives like “Lockean,” “Jeffersonian,” “Nietzschean,” and “Kantian” attached themselves to whole strains and schools of philosophical, political, and social thought. Two generations ago, a wholesale shift in intellectual historiography, best represented by the Cambridge school historians Quentin Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock, but evident well beyond them, pushed historians away from the centrality of major figures and texts understood as shaping long traditions, and toward “languages” and “discourses” that were historically localized and bounded. Individual texts were to be understood not as the source of a stream of ideas, but as creatures of very specific discursive and ideological environments; understanding their history meant understanding authorial “intention” contextually, rather than “influence” and long-term consequence. Along with this turn was a commitment to historical discontinuity and an understanding of the alterity and “otherness” of past ways of thinking. Whatever our vision of Kant might be today, said this school of thought, it is not the Kant of the eighteenth-century world in which he thought, and we should be wary of projecting our contemporary understandings into that foreign world.