Review of J. L. Talmon, Political Messianism: The Romantic Phase (London: Secker & Warburg, 1960)

Wight noted that in an earlier book, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, Professor Talmon identified Rousseau as the ‘main source’ of ‘the totalitarian messianism of the French Revolution’. In this sequel he examines ‘the vast effervescence of utopian political thought between 1815 and 1848, which produced modern nationalism and Communism’. He aims to place the genesis of Marxism ‘in a wider historical setting than histories of socialism usually supply, against a background not only of Owen and Fourier, Fichte and Hegel, but of the whole romantic range of the Saint-Simonists and Lamennais, Michelet, Mazzini, and Mickiewicz’. The complex outcome is ‘the world we still live in, where national particularities seek to justify themselves in the service of a universal ideal, but revolutionary war makes national frontiers irrelevant; where national uniqueness is the strongest adversary of international revolution, nationalism finds its fulfilment by turning socialist, and socialism cannot establish itself except within national boundaries’.

Religion and Revolution in Europe

The French Revolution and Napoleonic Empire altered the religious landscape of France, Europe, and the wider world. Revolutionaries reduced religion to a matter of opinion in the 10th Article of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789), legitimizing their seizure of Catholic lands and disavowal of the religious and political hierarchy of Old Regime France and its empire in the process. This in turn ignited a dechristianization campaign, local conflicts between Catholics, Protestants, and Jewish communities, and counter-revolutionary war in France. The violence reverberated well beyond France’s borders, both throughout Europe and in imperial and non-imperial spaces. From Prussia to Portugal to Port-au-Prince, revolutionaries inspired violence against and in defence of religion, drove les religieux across borders and into the borderlands, and sparked debates over secularization (laïcization, in France) and the rights of individuals and collective, religious bodies for generations.

American Intellectual History: A Very Short Introduction

American Intellectual History: A Very Short Introduction provides an introduction to the history of American thought from the sixteenth century up until the present. Long before the United States was a nation, it was a set of ideas, projected onto the New World by European commentators and explorers. American thought grew from this foundation of expectation and experience, both enriched and challenged over the centuries by developments including the Revolutionary War, westward expansion, the rise of capitalism, the proliferation of diverse religions, immigration, industrialization, and the emergence of the United States as a superpower. This introduction provides an overview of some of the most compelling episodes and abiding preoccupations in American thought, while showing how ideas have been major forces driving the course of American history.

2. America and the transatlantic Enlightenment

‘America and the transatlantic Enlightenment’ explores how America played an important role in the making of the Enlightenment. The New World offered a startling new picture of the natural world and all the living things in it. America catalyzed new ideas about science, natural history, and human nature, which both shaped and were shaped by Enlightenment thought. British Americans drew on classical republican thought and contemporary ideas about natural law and this coalesced into a revolutionary republicanism—the nexus of ideas that animated the Revolutionary War. Though many of the ideas to emerge out of eighteenth-century America promised a radical new world of freedom and human possibility, they were also blinkered by long-standing racial and gender prejudices.

Somerset’s Case: The Unsung Verdict and Its Legacy

The paper is a comparison between the English court case Somerset v. Stewart(1772) and the infamous American suit Scott v. Sandford(1857), both of which deal with the issue of a slave’s freedom and seeks to analyze the reason why the judges overseeing these cases rendered different verdicts. The paper specifically explains the verdict of Somerset, which freed the slave in question, and Scott, which did not, in a socio-economic lens, pointing to the American dependency on slavery as a factor in the disenfranchisement of African-Americans, which was less of a factor in England that contributed to an early end to slavery in that country, including through the inclusion of black men in the Royal Army and Navy during Britain’s conflicts with the United States of America. Although a misinterpretation of Somerset’s Judge Lord Mansfield’s verdict, a wide-spread, broad understanding of his decision led to the acceptance of legal freedom for slaves throughout Britain, reinforcing American attempts to resist runaway attempts of slaves for British-controlled territory during the Revolutionary War and later the War of 1812. The paper finally renders the American Revolution as a hypocritical one that did not immediately contribute to equality, and notes Mansfield’s overlooked role in the abolition of chattel slavery.