This article recovers a largely forgotten and quite surprising argument about the origins of political liberty in Britain: that the Norman Conquest, by making possible an extremely powerful absolute monarchy, paradoxically set in motion the historical process which would later lead to the emergence of limited constitutional monarchy. The article shows how the eighteenth-century writer Jean Louis de Lolme initially made this argument to explain the divergent constitutional orders of Britain and France. De Lolme's hypothesis was then taken up by numerous historians and political theorists. Francois Guizot and his fellow Doctrinaires, Alexis de Tocqueville, and John Stuart Mill were among the writers who further developed his historical explanation of the British constitution. The liberal philosophy of history in the nineteenth century sprang from De Lolme's account of how absolute monarchy leads paradoxically to constitutional liberty.

This article recovers Claude Lefort's engagement with the issue of populism, which was inspired by the emergence of Jean-Marie Le Pen as a major figure in French politics during the late 1980s. I show how Lefort developed both an analysis of populism as a pathology of modern politics and a new vision of representative democracy as the alternative to populism. In doing so, Lefort drew upon his more familiar theory of democracy and totalitarianism, his study of the history of French political thought, and his partnership with Pierre Ronsanvallon, who was also developing an analysis of populism in response to Le Pen. Lefort's approach to populism has outlived the context in which he first expressed it. Over the last decade, a number of prominent political theorists have drawn on Lefortian themes to formulate their own accounts of populism and democracy. In many cases, their arguments are quite similar to those that Lefort was expressing in the late 1980s and 1990s. A particular version of Lefortianism, which was foreshadowed in the writings of Lefort himself, has become one of the defining democratic theories of our political moment.

Previous article Book ReviewsKeegan Francis Callanan and Sharon Ruth Krause, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Montesquieu. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. Pp. 300. $34.99 (paper).William SelingerWilliam SelingerUniversity of Oklahoma Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Political Thought Volume 12, Number 4Fall 2023 Published in association with the American Political Thought organized section of the American Political Science Association and the Jack Miller Center Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/726893 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected].PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

In Feb. 2022 Sungho Kimlee passed away. In his memory, we present this revised and abridged version of a portion of his dissertation, Factions and Orders: from Machiavelli to Madison. Sungho summarized the work as follows: "Since antiquity, thinkers have held that every society consists of two hostile orders - the few and the many. But they have disagreed on the proper method for defusing this civic divide, and their various proposed remedies can be classified into three approaches. The first approach aims to eliminate the division between the rich and the poor by abolishing private property. Plato's Republic inaugurated this method, which was later embraced with ambivalence by Thomas More and vigorously defended by Karl Marx. The second approach merely aims to contain the harmful effects of the binary civic divide. Plato proposed two methods for accomplishing this in the Laws: Plutarch championed the first method, and Aristotle the second. My dissertation traces the genealogy of the third approach - the method of supplanting the binary civic divide with more numerous divisions. This oft-neglected method was pioneered by Rousseau, who prescribed the creation of artificial divisions by the state as a remedy for majority factions.

Like Karl Marx, Edmund Burke has remained a partisan figure, even though the specific partisan context in which he wrote is long gone. To a greater degree than Marx, however, Burke's partisan identity is itself frequently contested. Burke was a hero to the conservative writer Russell Kirk, who devoted his life to undoing the triumphs of twentieth-century American progressivism. But Burke was also a hero to Woodrow Wilson-whose presidency enacted and inspired so many of the progressive reforms that Kirk wanted to overturn-and to a number of the Victorian liberals who did so much to form Wilson's political mind-set.

At least since the French Revolution, the idea of constituent power has been used to indicate the power the people have to create legal-political orders.As such, the history of constituent power is deeply tied to the principle of popular power and, through it, to the history of democracy, to its theory and to its practice.Not only does constituent power point to the process through which a democratic polity is instituted via procedures of constitution-making.It also acts as a reminder that the source of constitutional normativity lies in the will of the people.As a result,

We have entered a revisionist moment in the study of the history of liberalism. In many respects this reorientation has been salutary. Scholars have corrected such unsupportable but tenacious simpl...

ConstellationsVolume 27, Issue 2 p. 231-243 ORIGINAL ARTICLE Populism, parties, and representation: Rosanvallon on the crisis of parliamentary democracy William Selinger, Corresponding Author w.selinger@ucl.ac.uk Department of History, University College London Correspondence William Selinger, Department of History, University College London, Gower St, London, WC1E 6BT, United Kingdom. Email: w.selinger@ucl.ac.ukSearch for more papers by this author William Selinger, Corresponding Author w.selinger@ucl.ac.uk Department of History, University College London Correspondence William Selinger, Department of History, University College London, Gower St, London, WC1E 6BT, United Kingdom. Email: w.selinger@ucl.ac.ukSearch for more papers by this author First published: 22 May 2020 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12497Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume27, Issue2June 2020Pages 231-243 RelatedInformation

For eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors such as Burke, Constant, and Mill, a powerful representative assembly that freely deliberated and controlled the executive was the defining institution of a liberal state. Yet these figures also feared that representative assemblies were susceptible to usurpation, gridlock, and corruption. Parliamentarism was their answer to this dilemma: a constitutional model that enabled a nation to be truly governed by a representative assembly. Offering novel interpretations of canonical liberal authors, this history of liberal political ideas suggests a new paradigm for interpreting the development of modern political thought, inspiring fresh perspectives on historical issues from the eighteenth to early twentieth centuries. In doing so, Selinger suggests the wider significance of parliament and the theory of parliamentarism in the development of European political thought, revealing how contemporary democratic theory, and indeed the challenges facing representative government today, are historically indebted to classical parliamentarism.

For nearly half a century John Stuart Mill was a major critic of the forms of electoral corruption prevalent in Victorian England. Yet this political commitment has been largely overlooked by scholars. This article offers the first synoptic account of Mill’s writings against corruption. It argues that Mill’s opposition to corruption was not accidental or temperamental, but sprung from fundamental principles of his political thought. It also shows that Mill’s opposition to electoral corruption put him at odds with other leading liberal thinkers of his era, who thought that the existing ways in which wealth influenced elections had positive effects – or at the very least that they did not impede a healthy electoral contest from taking place. Mill’s fervent intent to eliminate corruption also distinguishes him from many liberal theorists today, who either do not write about electoral corruption, or consider it an issue to be managed and lived-with. Reflecting on Mill’s political thought alongside other liberal thinkers raises the question of whether liberal states can draw a definitive line between prevalent forms of corruption and legitimate modes of political action, and eliminate the former, or whether we must regard corruption as among the constitutive dilemmas of a liberal politics.

In her well-known piece on Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt wrote that “posthumous fame… seems to be the lot of the unclassifiable ones.” It is achieved by “those whose work neither fits the existing order nor introduces a new genre that lends itself to future classification.” If she is right, then there may be some hope that Richard McKeon will one day have his moment. For McKeon (who was, in fact, a friend of Arendt) is eminently unclassifiable. Born in 1900, he studied philosophy both with the great French medievalist Étienne Gilson and with John Dewey. He was a twentieth-century American pragmatist who sought to revolutionize philosophy so that it could deal with the novel challenges of a technological age. Yet he was also a brilliant scholar of classical and medieval thought, who wrote such articles as “Poetry and Philosophy in the Twelfth Century,” “Rhetoric in the Middle Ages,” and “The Hellenistic and Roman Foundations of the Tradition of Aristotle in the West.”

ConstellationsVolume 23, Issue 4 p. 548-562 Original Article The Other Side of Representation: The History and Theory of Representative Government in Pierre Rosanvallon Gregory Conti, Gregory ContiSearch for more papers by this authorWilliam Selinger, William SelingerSearch for more papers by this author Gregory Conti, Gregory ContiSearch for more papers by this authorWilliam Selinger, William SelingerSearch for more papers by this author First published: 10 June 2016 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12220Citations: 7Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume23, Issue4December 2016Pages 548-562 RelatedInformation

Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism is a distinctively international history. It traces Nazism to a collapse of the nation-state across Europe, brought on by European anti-Semitism and European imperialism, rather than to specifically German developments. This essay recovers the political meaning of that methodological choice on Arendt's part, by documenting the surprising intersection between Arendt's involvement in political debates over postwar European reconstruction, where she made an intellectual alliance with Resistance groups across Europe and strongly argued for European federation, and her involvement in historiographical debates over the sources of Nazism. I show the explicit connection that Arendt drew between an internationalist historiography of Nazism and the need for an internationalist European politics, in a series of essays she wrote in the mid-1940s. I then argue that this connection continues to play a prominent role in Origins itself, sharply differentiating Arendt from other prominent theorists of Nazism.

During the years he was involved in French parliamentary politics, Alexis de Tocqueville was obsessed with the issue of political corruption. This article presents the first sustained analysis of Tocqueville's speeches and writings on French corruption. It examines Tocqueville's initial encounter with corruption during his run for parliamentary office, his sophisticated account of the sources of corruption, and his strategies for reforming French politics. The article contends that taking seriously Tocqueville's struggle against corruption has the effect of complicating several conventional interpretations of his thought. In his speeches and writings on corruption Tocqueville shows himself remarkably willing to compromise with, even to work with, centralisation. And he argues that in a nation like France which lacks substantial local self-government, a vibrant parliamentary politics could be an effective means for promoting energetic civic participation.

Joseph Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy1, first published in 1942, has been called “the most influential twentiethcentury approach to the democratic management of power relations.”2 In that text, Schumpeter famously denies that democracy has any intrinsic value. There is no necessary association between democratic government and the values of equality and liberty. Democracy is merely one method of political organization among many. It means nothing more than that “the people have the opportunity of accepting or refusing the men who are to rule them,” via “competitive elections” (CSD, 284-285).

A crucial commitment of nineteenth-century French and English liberalism was to parliamentary government. Liberal authors including Benjamin Constant, John Stuart Mill, Francois Guizot, and Walter Bagehot all specifically advocated constitutional structures in which cabinet officials sat as legislative representatives, and required the “confidence” of the legislature to remain in office. This dissertation offers a historical account of how liberal political thinkers came to favor parliamentary government. It elucidates the arguments and normative commitments that influenced liberals to embrace parliamentary institutions, and demonstrates their continuing relevance to political theory. One particularly important liberal value was deliberation. Liberal authors were convinced that parliamentary government was more conducive to political deliberation than other forms of representative government, including American “presidentialism.” The first half of the dissertation examines the origins of parliamentary liberalism in eighteenth-century Britain and France. In Britain, I argue, liberal theories of parliamentary government originated in debates over legislative patronage. Defenders of patronage, such as David Hume and Robert Walpole, argued for the value of the king’s ministers serving in Parliament. Opponents of patronage, such as Henry Bolingbroke, argued that Parliament had to be able to regularly and habitually force out ministers. Both sides of this debate found

Joseph Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, first published in 1942, has been called “the most influential twentieth-century approach to the democratic management of power relations.” In that text, Schumpeter famously denies that democracy has any intrinsic value. There is no necessary association between democratic government and the values of equality and liberty. Democracy is merely one method of political organization among many. It means nothing more than that “the people have the opportunity? of accepting or refusing the men who are to rule them,” via “competitive elections” (CSD, 284-285).