Richard Whatmore

Etienne Dumont, the British constitution and the French Revolution

Etienne Dumont became famous in the early nineteenth century for taking Jeremy Benthams incoherent manuscripts and editing them into readable books which he translated into French. This article focuses on Dumonts earlier life, and specifically his Genevan background, to explain his work for Mirabeau in the first years of the French Revolution and his ultimate sense of the importance of Benthams system of legislation. The article explains why Dumonts Genevan origins caused him to promote reforms in France intended to establish domestic stability and international peace. Dumont believed that states across Europe needed to combine free government with moral reform, in order to stifle the growth of democracy. The extent of the danger posed by popular government to modern societies was, in Dumonts view, the major lesson of the French Revolution. An alternative reform project to democracy was necessary, but one that did not entail a return to monarchical or aristocratic despotism. The characteristics of Dumonts planned reform became clear by adopting a comparative perspective on events in France. In developing a comparative perspective, Dumont argued that the history of Britain since 1688 needed to be in the foreground. He was perplexed by the French rejection of Britains political and constitutional model, and explained many major developments at Paris in 1789 by reference to what he considered to be this peculiar fact. After the Terror, Dumont lost his faith in experiments in constitution building as a means of securing the independence of free states like Geneva. Benthams great achievement was to have provided an alternative system of legislation that would transform national character gradually, making reform politics compatible with domestic and international peace. For Dumont, Bentham established a bulwark against the enthusiasm and democratic excess, and this was the key to utilitarianism as a moral reform project.

Palgrave Advances in Intellectual History

The past three decades have seen a remarkable growth of interest in intellectual history. This book provides the first comprehensive survey of recent research in Britain and North America concerned with Europe and the wider world from the Middle Ages to the end of the twentieth century. Each chapter considers developments in intellectual history in particular subject areas, and shows the ways intellectual historians have contributed to more established disciplinary enquiries, from the history of science and medicine to literary studies, art history and the history of political thought. Several chapters provide an expert overview of the current practice of intellectual history, and scrutinize seminal writings by contemporary intellectual historians which have caused particular historiographical controversy.

Rousseau and the representants: the politics of the Lettres ecrites de la montagne

Rousseaus Lettres ecrites de la montagne have traditionally been cited as evidence of the influence on his thinking of Genevan traditions of democratic republican political argument, on the grounds that the Lettres were written on behalf of those members of the citizens and bourgeois in the city who were critical of the growing powers of the magistracy, the co-called representants. This essay proposes a different reading. It argues that the Lettres confirmed long-standing Genevan suspicions about Rousseaus politics and theology which were held both by the representants and the magistrates. The reason was that Rousseau had composed the Lettres as a critique both of representant plans for democratic reform and of magisterial usurpation of the sovereign rights of the citizens. The Lettres underscored Rousseaus commitment to the distinction between sovereignty and government outlined in the Contrat social. Rousseau believed that Geneva deserved to be a model for European states because the distinction between sovereignty and government characteristic of its constitution had such clear historical roots. He also recognized that growing uncertainty concerning the relative powers of the General Council, the smaller executive committees of leading magistrates, and the Consistory had created a political impasse. Accordingly the Lettres argued for a new political settlement, that would redefine the constitutional relationship between citizens and magistrates, as well as between church and the state. Rousseau emerges as a dedicated enemy of democratic political innovation in Geneva, and an advocate of renewed Reformation which would make religion the foundation of an anti-commercial morality. Rousseaus singular and heterodox perspective on Geneva and its history is outlined in the essay, which places Rousseaus Lettres in the broader local context of republican and magisterial reform politics.

Vattel, Britain and peace in Europe

This paper underlines Vattels commitment to maintaining the sovereignty of Europes small states by enunciating the duties he deemed incumbent upon all political communities. Vattel took seriously the threat to Europe from a renascent France, willing to foster an equally aggressive Catholic imperialism justified by the need for religious unity. Preventing a French version of universal monarchy, Vattel recognised, entailed more than speculating about a Europe imagined as a single republic. Rather, Vattel believed that Britain had to be relied upon to prevent excessive French ambition, and to underwrite the independence of the continents smaller sovereignties. Against those who saw Britain as another candidate for the domination of Europe, Vattel argued that Britains commercial interests explained why it was a different kind of state to the great empires of the past. The paper goes on to consider the reception of Vattels ideas after the Seven Years War. Although further research is required into readings of Vattel, especially in the smaller states of Europe in the later eighteenth century, the paper concludes that by the 1790s Vattel was being used to justify war to defeat the gargantuan imperialist projects of newly republican France, in order to maintain Europe itself, and the smaller states within it.

intellectual history and the history of political thought

R. G. Collingwood’s description of the difference between the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of an event had profound implications for historians of political thought in the 1960s, when it played a role in inspiring the articulation of the approach to intellectual history that has come to be known as that of ‘the Cambridge School’.2 Collingwood’s choice of the example of Ceasar’s death at the hands of assassins seeking to save the republic was fortuitous, in so far as the work of those associated with the Cambridge School has heavily contributed to a remarkable upsurge of interest in republicanism as an historical tradition of political argument.3 Much has been written about this development since the publication of John Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment in 1975 and Quentin Skinner’s The Foundations of Modern Political Thought in 1978; with the recent appearance of reassessments of historical republicanism by these authors, a re-evaluation of the subject is timely.

The attempts to transfer the Genevan Academy to Ireland and to America, 1782-1795

Early in 1782, republican rebels in Geneva removed the citys magistrates and instituted a popular government, portraying themselves as defenders of liberty and Calvinism against the French threats of Catholicism and luxury. But on 1 July 1782, the republicans fled because of the arrival at the city gates of invading troops led by France. The failure of the Genevan revolution indicated that while new republics could be established beyond Europe, republics within Europe, and more especially Protestant republics in proximity to larger Catholic monarchies, were no longer independent states. Many Genevans sought asylum across Europe and in North America in consequence. Some of them looked to Britain and Ireland, attempting to move the industrious part of Geneva to Waterford. During the French Revolution, they sought to establish a republican community in the United States. In each case, a major goal was to transfer the Genevan Academy established in the aftermath of Calvins Reformation. The anti-religious nature of the French Revolution made the attempt to move the Academy to North America distinctive. By contrast with the Irish case, where religious elements were played down, moving the Academy to North America was supported by religious rhetoric coupled with justifications of republican liberty.

Global possibilities in intellectual history: a note on practice

ABSTRACT Intellectual history, and especially the branch sometimes identified as the Cambridge school, continues to be criticized for not being sufficiently global in outlook. This article does not defend intellectual history. Rather, it underscores the extent to which the well-known intellectual historian John Pocock has opened specific avenues for the study of past intellectual matters in distinctly non-Western contexts. The article suggests that these openings spring directly from basic features of Pocock’s general and well-known conception of intellectual history. Pocock’s work beyond the West amounts not simply to incidental sallies but is the formulation and application of an overall strategy that readily encompasses a globalizing agenda of widening the empirical basis as required by a given subject.

Treason and despotism: The impact of the French revolution upon Britain

Trials for Treason and Sedition, 1792–1794, John Barrell, John Mee (Eds.), Part I: Vol. 1–5. Pickering and Chatto (2006). 2304 pp., £450.00/

Democrats and Republicans in Restoration France

795.00, ISBN: 978 1 85196 732 2; Part II: Vol. 6–8. Pickering and Chatto (2007). 1472 pp., £275.00/

Benjamin Vaughan and the consequences of anonymity: an introduction to Kenneth E. Carpenter’s Benjamin Vaughan’s Contributions Unveiled: A Bibliography

495.00, ISBN: 978 1 85196 811 4. The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s, John Barrell, Oxford University Press (2006). xiv + 278pp., £50.00/