H. S. Jones

The French State in Question: Public Law and Political Argument in the Third Republic

Introduction 1. Political culture and the problem of the state 2. Law and the state tradition 3. Administrative syndicalism and the organization of the state 4. Public power to public service 5. Civil rights and the republican state 6. From Contract to Status: Durkheim, Duguit and the state 7. Maurice Hauriou and the theory of the institution Conclusion.

Space and belonging in modern Europe: citizenship(s) in localities, regions, and states

Does citizenship exist beneath the level of the nation-state? An enduring historiography insists on the essentially national character of modern citizenship, but this article argues on the contrary that locally defined identities have continued to exercise an important influence on the social and political rights of citizens. These local identities are not just relics of composite states with different membership criteria; rather, spatially complex citizenship is the norm.

The Idea of the National in Victorian Political Thought

This article contests the argument that British political thought in the 19th century was exceptional in European perspective in lacking a strong concept of nationhood and nationality. On the one hand it argues, with reference to Mazzini, Michelet and Renan, that continental European theories of nationality were by no means as dependent on a strong concept of race as a focus on Germany might imply. On the other hand, it identifies the Liberal Anglican tradition (Thomas and Matthew Arnold, F.D. Maurice, Arnold Toynbee) as a current of thought which generated an important but certainly non-racial concept of nationhood, as part of a general rehabilitation of community in the face of what these thinkers took to be utilitarian neglect.

Civil Rights for Civil Servants? The Ligue Des Droits De L'Homme and the Problem of Trade Unionism in the French Public Services, c . 1905–1914

The law of 21 March 1884, which legalized the formation of syndicats for the defence of ‘economic, industrial, commercial and agricultural interests’, was not intended to apply to civil servants. They were not thought to have such interests. There was, it is true, some dispute as to which categories of public employees were covered by this legal prohibition, and the Chamber of Deputies maintained in 1894 that the law applied to workers in industrial enterprises run by the state. But governments steadfastly refused to allow postal officials or schoolteachers, for instance, the right to form syndicats . They did not, however, contest their right to form associations under the law of 1 July 1901, and conflict became acute in the period after 1905 as these associations began to transform themselves into syndicats or to claim rights associated with the syndicat The postal strikes in Paris in 1909 and the rail strike of 1910 were particular causes celebres

John Stuart Mill: Law, Morality, and Liberty

Ever since the resurgence of the sub-discipline in the 1960s, the foremost achievements of the history of political thought have dealt with the early modern period. The classics of the genre—Lasletts edition of Locke, Pococks Machiavellian Moment , Skinners Foundations —have all dealt with that period, and it is hard to think of any works on the nineteenth century that have quite the same stature. Of all the canonical political thinkers, John Stuart Mill is perhaps the one who has proved resistant to the contextualist method. There is a vast literature on Mill, and many historians have written penetratingly about him—Stefan Collini, William Thomas, Donald Winch—but there has hitherto been no historically grounded study of his thought to rival, say, John Dunn on Locke or Skinner on Hobbes, or even a host of learned monographs. Before Varouxakiss book, no study of Mill had been published in Cambridge University Presss flagship series in intellectual history, Ideas in Context. But all that has changed. In these two works, published more or less concurrently, we have two triumphs for contextualism. They demonstrate in impressive detail just why it matters in reading Mill to get the history right.

Positive Political Science and the Uses of Political Theory in Post-War France: Raymond Aron in Context

Summary This article approaches post-war debates about the relationship between normative political theory and empirical political science from a French perspective. It does so by examining Raymond Arons commentaries on a series of articles commissioned by him for a special issue of the Revue française de science politique on this theme as well as through an analysis of his wartime dialogue with the neo-Thomist philosopher, Jacques Maritain. Following a consideration of Arons critique of contemporary approaches to this issue in France, we discuss his own distinctive attempt to draw normative theory and empirical science into the same orbit by tracing the interaction of these two elements in his work from the late 1930s to the mid-1960s.

A Pluralist History of France

What makes France different? More than two decades have elapsed since Francois Furet, Jacques Julliard, and Pierre Rosanvallon published a much-debated book which argued that the ‘French exception’ had come to an end. Writing in the wake of President Mitterrand’s re-election, they maintained that the advent of ‘the republic of the centre’, enjoying consensual legitimacy across the political spectrum, marked the end of the political divisions that had afflicted France ever since 1789.1 They predicted that this ‘banalization of French politics’ would also slowly erode the other central characteristics that made France different: the dirigiste centralized state; France’s sense of its universal mission as the depository of the values of enlightenment rationalism; and the republican model of citizenship, which recognizes only individual and not communal identities in the public square. Their book was written with an eye to the imminent celebrations of the bicentenary of the French Revolution, in which Furet, in particular, would play a leading role: indeed, in one sense La Republique du Centre simply reiterated the key message Furet had propounded in a famous work published a decade before: the Revolution is over.2 But, a generation on, the nature of French exceptionalism continues to be debated by political scientists and commentators on both sides of the Channel and on both sides of the Atlantic, which suggests that Furet and his collaborators were at best premature in their analysis.3

The Victorian lexicon of evil: Frederic Harrison, the positivists, and the language of international politics

‘The world is freed from one of its greatest powers of evil’, wrote the historian and polemicist E.A. Freeman on the death of Disraeli in 1881.1 For Freeman, one of the leaders of the public agitation over the ‘Bulgarian atrocities’ in 1876, it was Britain’s support for the Ottoman Empire which constituted, more than anything else, ‘the evil cause’.2 That campaign represented one of the moments when British public opinion was most polarised over questions of international politics, and when extravagantly moralistic rhetoric was most common. These debates were often framed in the language of ‘barbarism’ and ‘civilisation’. Thus Freeman defended the Bulgarians and other peoples of Eastern Europe from denunciations of their degraded backwardness: the nations of Western Europe would have been in a similar state, he argued, if they had languished under a ‘barbarian yoke’ such as that of the Ottoman Empire.3

Constitutions éphémères, structures sociales durables? A propos d'un paradoxe français

Constitutional Transience and Social Stability? Perspectives on the French Paradox This article argues – against a widespread interpretation – that constitutions have been more than merely superstructural phenomena in modern French history. First, if constitutional texts have often been short-lived, the same is not true of the constitution more broadly understood. Secondly, even the texts reveal much more continuity than we usually imagine. Thirdly, constitutional texts have often stood at the heart of political conflict because of the historical baggage attached to them. In the nineteenth century it was, typically, liberals who tried to shift the political agenda away from an obsession with constitutional texts: it was a culture of civility that France lacked, they argued.

Early Political Writings: Contents

Introduction Notes on text and translation Chronology Biographical notes Bibliographical note 1. General separation between opinions and desires 2. Summary appraisal of the general character of modern history 3. Plan of the scientific work necessary for the reorganization of society 4. Philosophical considerations on the sciences and scientists 5. Considerations of the spiritual power 6. Examination of Broussaiss Treatise on Irritation.