This interdisciplinary study discusses the political implications of three interrelated cyclical theories articulated in twentieth-century America: Walter B. Cannon’s notion of homeostasis in the human body, John K. Fairbank’s analysis of the dynastic cycle in Chinese history, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr’s view of cycles in American politics. By intertwining the theories with the trajectories of early-century progressivism, Cold War liberalism, and the postwar New Deal order, this article argues that these three liberal intellectuals expressed in common a faith in the vitality of American democracy during its successive crises. Their hopeful worldview rested on their understanding of democracy. Cannon, Fairbank, and Schlesinger upheld democracy not as a specific political system built in their country but rather as an endless and open-ended project by which individual women and men would reshape their common destiny.

In June 2021, the last of the eighteen tomes of Tocqueville’s Oeuvres complètes was published by Gallimard. This project had been instigated more than seventy years earlier by Jacob Peter Mayer, a German Jewish writer who had fled to England in 1936. Mayer believed that Tocqueville’s insights into democracy, fanaticism, and revolution were more relevant to the nation-states of the postwar era than those of any other writer, and so he embarked upon a mission to publish Tocqueville’s complete works to underscore their contemporary relevance. Utilizing many unpublished documents, this article tells the story of how Mayer came to direct the publishing venture, how he battled with the national commission that was set up by the French government to oversee it, and how he eventually lost control of the project after thirty years as editor in chief. His experience confirmed in his eyes that free states lacked democratic cultures sufficient to sustain them.

This article traces the creation of Eurocapitalism as a response distinct from neoliberalism to the challenges of the 1970s. By reconsidering the historical relationship between the European project’s competition law regime and its environmental policies, it suggests that the European Community has, since the late 1960s, constituted a unique form of Eurocapitalist development project, one that, in several fundamental respects, differed markedly from the neoliberal developments that characterized the American Leviathan. The article thereby also unearths the global origins of a Eurocapitalist ecology, demonstrating the long lineage of industrial programs like the EU’s Green Deal as tools to tackle climate change.

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.

Critiques of religion in Arab political life have long been framed as a project of the left. Since the uprisings of 2011, however, the most forceful critics of theology’s presence in politics have been conservatives. This article reconstructs the intellectual history of the Arab right through the work of philosopher Mohammed Jaber al-Ansari. Revisiting the intellectual and historical context of the 1990s, it advances a new genealogy of conservative Arab political thought, one that saw in all transcendental and religious identifications not only the dangers of revolution but also a forfeiture of politics itself. In decoupling conservatism from Islam, the article advances an understanding of conservatism as both contingent and structural, or permanent in its formal presence but not necessarily in content, to suggest that histories of conservatism not only provide resources for a better understanding of the present, but also can complement the task that radical and ecumenical accounts of the Arab past have long pursued in disputing the religious or cultural nature of conservatism. In that sense, intellectual history of secular conservatism is important not because it is more or less dominant than theologically inflected varieties of it today, but because of how it might help free the historian from the need to restrict her endeavour to the correction of essentialist misrepresentation and to write histories where contingency is assumed rather than histories whose burden it has been to prove it.

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 examines the egalitarian ideas and practices of Gamal al-Banna (1920–2013) during Egypt’s transition from postcolonial socialism to neoliberal Islamic revival. It highlights al-Banna’s efforts to recast egalitarian ideals within both Arab socialist and Islamic frameworks. I argue that during the height of Arab socialism, al-Banna Islamized the egalitarian principles of labor to conform with and popularize salient socialist objectives. As the socialist lexicon ceded to a global trend of neoliberalism, Islam became increasingly intertwined with the formation of an identity-centric Muslim world. Within this transformed sociocultural landscape, al-Banna developed an alternative vision that integrated egalitarian ideals into a liberal Islamic discourse. Through a critical reexamination of al-Banna’s writings and activism, this article uncovers a leftist, egalitarian origin within the broader spectrum of contemporary Islamic revival. I demonstrate that the contracted global perspective—from postcolonial to Muslim worlds—led al-Banna to reconceptualize the nation’s postcoloniality and social progress through a renewed framework of liberal Islam.

This article situates the work of famous “skeptical environmentalist” Bjørn Lomborg in current environmental debates, arguing that he represents a shift from a “market” to a “planning” orientation within promethean environmental discourse taking place since the early 2000s. Instead of seeing self-correcting markets as a panacea for all societal ills, “planning” prometheanism aims to address environmental problems such as climate change through public policy, state investment, and technology development. We investigate the genesis of Lomborg’s “planning” prometheanism and locate its key sources of inspiration in the works of American economists Julian Simon, William Nordhaus, and Thomas Schelling. Moreover, we argue that Lomborg’s approach is characterized by a technocratic skepticism toward democracy which derives from his reliance on rational-choice theory. Finally, highlighting the adaptability of promethean discourse, we suggest that Lomborg’s “planning” prometheanism represents a renaissance of 1950s promethean thought at a time when a post-neoliberal world is taking shape.

The New England Theology"-the tradition of American Reformed thought originating in the work of Jonathan Edwards (1703-58)-was, for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a subject of opprobrium and condescension. In the 1980s and 1990s a new wave of revisionist scholarship reassessed the New England theologians, arguing for their centrality to early American intellectual history. This article asks why, in the wake of these studies, almost no new work has been done on the New England Theology in more than a decade. It argues that the decline in the subfield is due to the capture of the subject by evangelical scholars at evangelical institutions, tying this phenomenon to the rise of the "new evangelical thesis" in academic history. Finally, the article seeks to chart a way forward for the study of New England Theology by going beyond evangelical readings of the sources.

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.

The republic is in peril—“the task at hand,” so reads the document, “is to reverse this tide and restore [it] to its original moorings.”1 “With freedom and liberty under siege as never before,” the state apparatus must be rid of corruption and venality, “a behemoth weaponized against American citizens,” while the value of “independence” should again be placed at the center of a philosophy of government.2

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 recent resurgence of exclusionary nationalism across the advanced capitalist world has caused historical scholarship on neoliberalism to reorient itself. Previous accounts of neoliberalism proved inadequate to theorize the hegemonic crisis that neoliberalism has been thrust into, prematurely rushing to declare neoliberalism dead. The task is to offer an interpretation of resurgent nationalism that can account for points of tension with hegemonic neoliberalism without underestimating the ways it lives on in the present. This essay critically reviews three books that offer distinct interpretations of neoliberalism’s enduring hegemonic crisis. If Melinda Cooper and Tehila Sasson’s respective works provide new critical perspectives on the history and present of neoliberal ideas, Jennifer Burns’s study offers an insider’s perspective on the pressures that neoliberalism is under from the nationalist right.

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.”