This article argues that the muted and often negative responses to the American historian Richard Hildreth’s six-volume History of the United States published between 1849 and 1852 resulted from his embrace of a secular, utilitarian philosophy of history emphasizing individual freedom as the main source of human happiness and social progress. Tracing the origins of these ideas to Hildreth’s early exposure to liberal religion, democratic party politics, and antislavery thought, the article shows that Hildreth’s historiographical approach rejected providentialism in favor of secular causation, rooted in human agency and historical contingency. Hildreth’s liberal utilitarianism is offered as at least a partial solution to what has been called the “problem” of defining his place in American intellectual history.

This article seeks to enrich discussion of Catholicism and liberalism by recovering the intellectual trajectory of Charles Forbes René, Comte de Montalembert (1810–70) and his work in the drafting of the Falloux Law of 1850. The article shows how Montalembert served as a key bridge figure in the translation of liberal Catholic political discourse into legislative reality, emphasizing a liberalism of jurisdiction and constitutionalism that he wielded against both French anticlericals and reactionary Catholics. Although often seen more as a Catholic figure than as a liberal tout court, Montalembert’s thought as evinced in his political interventions on education placed him comfortably in the core of nineteenth-century liberalism, perhaps more than he himself would have cared to realize. As the article shows, Montalembert bridged political theory and practice, and his relatively unappreciated legacy ramified far beyond his own career.

This article examines the trajectory of two Native American songs transcribed by French Jesuits in the seventeenth century, their subsequent inclusion in printed books in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and their use by historians and entertainers in the twentieth century. The study focuses on how these songs, initially part of Native American oral and aural tradition, were transformed into primary-source evidence for historical research and racialized entertainment. This is an intellectual and cultural history that uses history-of-the-book and bibliographical methodologies to understand the discipline of history’s formation in the academy. The article argues that converting these songs into written musical notation inherently altered their meaning and context. It highlights how transcribing music by ear involves subjective interpretation and the loss of crucial performative elements. Furthermore, reproducing these songs in printed form further distanced them from their original cultural context, making them susceptible to misinterpretation and appropriation. The fact that these changes occurred as history was founded as a discipline is crucial to understanding the argument. The study employs a multidisciplinary approach, drawing on historical documents, musical scores, and popular-culture materials. It examines the role of women scholars, such as Emma Helen Blair and Edna Kenton, in making these sources accessible to a broader audience through their work on primary-source anthologies. However, it also points out the unintended consequences of this accessibility, as the songs were increasingly decontextualized and used to perpetuate romanticized and inaccurate portrayals of Native American culture. The work of Blair and Kenton is central to the formation of history as a discipline in the academy, especially as they worked with and for men like Reuben Gold Thwaites and Frederick Jackson Turner. The research concludes that the transformation of these songs into historical sources and entertainment props reflects the complex relationship between scholarship, popular culture, and the representation of Native American culture in the twentieth century. It raises critical questions about authenticity, ownership, and access to Indigenous cultural expressions. Finally, this study emphasizes the importance of considering notated music as a historical primary source, acknowledging its limitations and potential for misinterpretation.

Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West) gave expression to a pervasive feeling of cultural crisis in early twentieth-century European intellectual life. Perhaps unsurprisingly given his reactionary politics and nationalist sympathies, Spengler’s work met with a muted reception in metropolitan France. More open to his message were members of imperial France’s modest colonial intelligentsia; Spengler’s French translator was Mohand Tazerout (1893–1973), an Algerian-born World War I veteran, schoolteacher, and aspiring sociologist. This article tells the story of The Decline of the West’s initial appearance in French before exploring Tazerout’s own intellectual project, which both built on and reached beyond Spengler’s thinking. Contemporary and subsequent North African intellectuals were no less drawn to themes of cultural decline and renewal; however, the unique circumstances that pushed Tazerout to embrace Spengler’s ideas were quickly swept away in a vortex of postcolonial contention.

The article examines the 1941 Ventotene Manifesto, one of the most celebrated—yet widely misunderstood—documents in the history of federalist Europeanism. Written by Ernesto Rossi and Altiero Spinelli while confined on the island of Ventotene for antifascist activity, the text diagnosed Europe’s collapse as the consequence of sovereign nation-states operating in an anarchic international order and called for the creation of a supranational government imposed by a revolutionary elite. This article situates the manifesto within interwar and wartime socialist, liberal–socialist, and antifascist debates, showing how Rossi and Spinelli elevated federalism as the primary criterion of political progress, displacing class struggle and national liberation. I argue that the manifesto’s revolutionary aims have been obscured by postwar narratives of European integration, which retrospectively recast it as a program for the gradual development of what became the present-day EU. Rather than being a blueprint for incremental unification, the manifesto advocated for a revolutionary federalism that fused socialism with a Jacobin conception of political power. This study challenges teleological readings of Europeanism, offering a historicist account of wartime federalist ideas as shaped by crisis, exile, and revolutionary expectations.

In 1952, Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith published one of his earliest best sellers, American Capitalism. Despite impressive traction among the public, the book sparked controversy among mainstream economists. Not only did Galbraith attack the failure of neoclassical economics to capture reality, but he also offered an alternative: the theory of countervailing power. Galbraith’s vision of an economy of competing aggregates was cast aside, but the political and methodological grounds for this rejection merit a closer look. In this article, I reconstruct the academic debate sparked by the book’s publication to demonstrate how thoroughly Cold War conformist politics influenced American economics in the postwar period. This had consequences both for Galbraith’s theory and for the trajectory of economic methodology thereafter. As this episode suggests, a “neoliberal” economics shorn of ethical and social context congealed in the early 1950s—a historical hinge point with powerful reverberations into our present day.

Cedric Robinson is often invoked for his account of racial capitalism forwarded in his 1983 book Black Marxism. Yet much of what Robinson meant by the term has been lost in its posthumous revival in the wake of Black Lives Matter. What accounts for this belated reception, and what has that delay obscured? Like many thinkers associated with the cultural turn, Robinson theorized racial capitalism to critique economic reductionist accounts of race and culture. Unlike his contemporaries, however, Robinson understood culture as the expression of world-historical peoplehood. Rather than an account of historical difference or the contingency of meaning, Robinson theorized culture as emergent from civilizational struggle. This article argues that Robinson’s distinctive account of culture explains both the lack of attention he generated in his own moment and its sudden canonization today.

What could be timelier than a forum on Caesarism?1 Had this collection of articles been published only a few years earlier, I would have introduced the topic quite differently. Recently, Caesarism has become the keyword of US (and therefore, to a certain extent, global) politics, being used to explain both internal and external political–ideological dynamics.2 As such, Caesarism is increasingly replacing that much-used (and abused) concept of recent years: populism. Only time will tell whether it will be a permanent or temporary replacement, or whether another type of conceptual relationship (possibly a symbiotic one) will develop.

This article takes as its organizing principle Napoleon’s relationship, first, to the legacy of Julius Caesar in the French Revolution, and then to the legacy of Octavian, which guided his rise to power. It concludes with an analysis of Napoleon’s legacy in the concept of Caesarism as it developed in the nineteenth century, and the extent to which his own relationship to the classical heritage of the first Caesars actually failed to influence this legacy. The French revolutionaries lived in dread of Julius Caesar: he was the powerful general who turned his army on Rome, seized dictatorial powers, and sparked the events that led to the fall of the Republic. Napoleon had to share these fears if he was to avoid Caesar’s own fate. Throughout the years of his rise to power, Napoleon was dogged by the legacy of Julius Caesar, rather than inspired by it. Conversely, once in power, he drew direct inspiration from the example of Octavian, who “appropriated the Republic, rather than overthrew it”: Napoleon took absolute power gradually, declared that “the Republic was entrusted to a hereditary dynasty” and, above all, kept the army and his commanders firmly away from political power during his rule. He sought his power base not in the masses, but in the propertied classes—his “masses of granite.” It was the antithesis of Peronism. The Consulate and Empire were resolutely civilian regimes, even if their ethos was militaristic. Only at the very outset of his rule, through the plebiscites, and during the desperate period of the 100 Days, did Napoleon deploy a style of government that directly foreshadowed future Caesarism. Rather, it was in hindsight that late generations were able to fashion Napoleon as a Caesar, from the example of a general who took power.

This article reverses prevailing scholarly assumptions according to which in Victorian Britain Caesarism was neglected in both theoretical parlance and public discussion. It shows how intellectuals as ideologically different as Bagehot, Seeley, and Maine, as well as other (less well known) commentators writing in newspapers and periodicals, theorized about Caesarism–Napoleonism primarily according to cultural considerations. This means that they looked at “democratic Caesarism” as a form of society rather than exclusively as a political phenomenon, emphasizing how a series of civilizational deficiencies attributed to the masses enabled Caesarist politics. Moreover, the article argues that these critiques were part of a broader (Arnoldian) antidemocratic discourse that targeted democracy as a cultural desert. Democratic Caesarism was thus seen as being characterized by the masses’ uncultured attitudes, ethical–political irresponsibility, and exaggerated care for materialistic interests. The main goal of this criticism was to expose the damaging consequences of democratic life for British politics and civilization.

Previous scholarship on Caesarism has focused overwhelmingly on continental Europe. Insofar as Britain has been mentioned at all, it has been as a mere foil to the latter: ostensibly, the kind of democratic dictatorship known as “Caesarism” was wholly alien to British traditions of limited, representative, and parliamentary government; as such, the British dismissed it out of hand; the concept never gained any purchase within British thought; indeed, the word itself was not even used in Britain until 1857 (according to the OED, cited by several scholars). By drawing on an array of periodical and newspaper sources, the proposed contribution will challenge this orthodoxy along three principal lines: first, it will demonstrate that Auguste Romieu’s L’ère des Césars (1850) was widely reviewed in Britain, with the result that both the word and the concept of “Caesarism” passed immediately into British usage; second, it will demonstrate that rather than merely dismissing the concept out of hand, mid-century British thinkers engaged seriously with it, formulating an elaborate critique of “Caesarism” as practiced on the Continent; third, it will demonstrate that, as the century wore on, above all due to the democratization of the British constitution that occurred as a result of the 1867 and 1884 Reform Acts, many British thinkers came to believe that Britain was in fact at imminent risk of collapsing into Caesarism, most likely through the emergence of a charismatic parliamentary leader such as Benjamin Disraeli. In this sense, the received belief that Britain was somehow “immune” to Caesarism might hold for the mid-nineteenth century, but it does not hold for the late nineteenth century.

The article investigates whether specific characteristics are associated with urbanist policies under Caesarism. It offers a brief account of Caesarism as such before mainly focusing on nineteenth-century France. The article asks whether Caesarism finds expression in urban planning and particular forms of architecture. It then proceeds to answer the question, focusing mostly on Paris under Napoleon III.

The goal of my article is to investigate the relationship between Caesarism and Elite theory across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In particular, I will focus on Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923), the older and, to a certain extent, most authoritative representative of the so-called Italian Elitism. By relying on a careful examination of a variety of texts, I will show how Pareto moves from an initial criticism of the Caesarist theory (conceived as a form of personalism) to a much more positive conception of it; that is, as a political tool able to save the state from the impending “catastrophe.” The analysis of Pareto’s reasoning is developed against the backdrop of a broader consideration of Elitist thinking as a whole, as well as with regard to the fin de siècle European culture—Pareto representing, therefore, the case study for the investigation of a wider political and intellectual movement.

This contribution explores the cultural foundations of the concept of Caesarism, from the late positivist naturalization of national characters up to Fascism. The first section argues that the ill-defined concept of Caesarism circulating in Italian political discourse was based on the assumptions of late Tainian positivism, naturalistic and organicist, intertwined with a nationalist discourse. The second section traces how this imprint, combined with wartime, radical, antisocialist patriotism, forged a conception of the people modeled on the hierarchical military structure, sealing the genetic link between Fascism and the Great War. The third section illustrates how, after Fascism came to power, the combination of warlike hierarchical organicism and the principle of leadership took shape during the debate on constitutional reforms, particularly in the thinking of Giovanni Gentile and Alfredo Rocco. The fourth section suggests that the mutual hybridization of Rocco and Gentile’s positions produced an original paradigm of “corporative Caesarism.”

As interest in the thought of Giambattista Vico increases worldwide, the completion of the critical edition of his Scienza Nuova, in its successive versions of 1725, 1730, and 1744, provides an opportunity to reassess the compositional, textual, and editorial history of the work, and to ask further questions about the work’s evolution. This article first outlines the course of the work’s composition, highlighting the complex history of the 1725 version, and the rapidity and extent of the rewriting which resulted in the version of 1730. It reviews the earlier editions of the Scienza Nuova by Ferrari and Nicolini, both of whom subordinated the 1730 version to that of 1744. The critical edition, by contrast, affirms the independence of all three versions: the article outlines the problems involved in editing each of them. It ends by opening up the question: what was Vico doing when he rewrote the work in 1730?