The history of Swiss republicanism was memorably summed up by Orson Welles in the classic film The Third Man (1949): whereas the tumultuous and tyrannical politics of the Italian Renaissance produced a great cultural flourishing, Welles observed, “In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”Footnote ¹ Suggestive as it may be, Welles's contrast is as misleading as it is memorable. The Swiss were a fearsome military power at the beginning of the sixteenth century, admired by no less a Florentine than Niccolò Machiavelli, but by the eighteenth century they were no longer capable of defending themselves, and they were summarily occupied by the armies of revolutionary France in 1798.Footnote ² The nature of Swiss democracy was long contested, and in 1847 the Swiss fought a civil war over it. Finally, it must be said, cuckoo clocks were invented in the Black Forest region, on the other side of the Alps. As we shall see, the success of the Swiss watchmaking industry does in fact deserve a place in the history of liberty, but Jean-Jacques Rousseau turns out to be a more helpful guide for understanding its significance.

Two recent books, by Marc Lerner and Richard Whatmore, offer a much better starting point for considering the history of Swiss republicanism and placing it in comparative perspective. Both of their richly detailed accounts are primarily oriented around the political experience of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Swiss republicans. In this respect they follow in the footsteps of the eminent Italian historian Franco Venturi, and point the way toward a promising program of fresh research into the history of liberty in the pivotal decades before and after the French Revolution.Footnote ³ Most importantly, taking this approach enables them to avoid subsuming the thought of this critical period into either a search for the origins of liberalism, or an attempt to trace the fate of moral and civic values inherited from the Renaissance. However, Lerner and Whatmore focus on two very different parts of what became modern Switzerland and set out from two very different historical moments. Lerner concentrates on the cantons of Zurich, Schwyz, and Vaud, all parts of the old Swiss confederation, and his account culminates with the proclamation of a new federal constitution after the resolution of the civil war in 1848. Whatmore's book is about Geneva, which was long an independent city and only become a Swiss canton in 1815, and it revolves around the failed revolution of 1782, suppressed with French and Swiss help. Looking back from the settlement of 1848, it seemed that the Swiss had ultimately found a way to maintain their liberty by modernizing their republican inheritance. But looking forward from Geneva in 1782, it seemed that republicanism had finally reached a dead end, and that hope for a restoration of liberty could only be sustained by looking elsewhere for strategic guidance. Putting these two narratives together helps open up a highly varied picture of the emergence of “modern republicanism.”

Lerner's Laboratory of Liberty shows that the settlement of 1848 was the outcome of a long transformation of Swiss political culture. Thanks to the pluralism that made Switzerland “a laboratory of liberty,” and the generally pragmatic character of their public debate, the Swiss gradually forged a synthesis between “the rights-based political culture that emerged in Europe during the Age of Revolution” on the one hand and “older customary notions and rhetoric of self-rule” on the other.Footnote ⁴ Lerner emphasizes that the former entered Swiss politics through the short-lived Helvetic Republic that was established after the French invasion of 1798. He is critical of the enduring Swiss tendency to minimize the significance of that period by exclusively commemorating the 1848 settlement, because it obscures the character of the post-revolutionary debates that produced a modern republican culture. The abolition of cantonal sovereignty and the proclamation of a unitary republic in 1798 proved deeply unpopular, and in restoration Switzerland appeals to individual rights and national unity were tarnished by association. However, the enduring attractiveness of traditional understandings of liberty as self-rule was heavily qualified by the legacy of privilege. Restoring the traditional liberty and cantonal sovereignty of Bern, for example, meant restoring the dependence of the subject territories over which it had ruled, such as the Pays de Vaud. The old Swiss confederation had had “more subjects than full members,” and the restoration of what Frédéric-César de La Harpe called the “oligarchic yoke” faced formidable opposition.Footnote ⁵

Lerner claims that the 1848 settlement does not simply represent the triumph of liberalism over republicanism, any more than it represents the timeless continuity of the Swiss republican tradition. In the wake of the 1830 revolutionary wave, eleven cantons representing two-thirds of the Swiss population had adopted constitutions that proclaimed the principle of popular sovereignty and individual rights. The resulting shift in the federal balance of power made the 1847 civil war a highly lopsided affair. It took less than a month for federal troops to defeat the Sonderbund, the league of seven conservative Catholic cantons that had banded together to resist what they considered to be federal violations of their confessional rights and encroachments on their cantonal sovereignty. Yet Lerner stresses the pragmatic blending of political cultures that took place over the course of these conflicts. For example, the 1832 constitution projected for Ausser Schwyz, the breakaway subject territory of the canton of Schwyz, “followed a typically liberal program” in its appeals to popular sovereignty and equality under the law. However, Lerner observes, “it also remained true to the Schwyzer tradition of Freiheit” and “honored the Schwyzer commitment to Catholicism and the armed defense of its self-rule and a classical, martial conception of citizenship.”Footnote ⁶ Similarly, the 1848 settlement articulated a cultural synthesis that was acceptable to “all sides of the republican spectrum.”Footnote ⁷ The constitution finessed the principle of popular sovereignty in typical nineteenth-century fashion, proclaiming cantonal sovereignty while at the same time limiting it by a federal constitution.Footnote ⁸ Such a reconciliation was possible, Lerner surmises, “because there were pre-existing threads of a common political culture.”Footnote ⁹ Victorious liberal elites “allowed accommodation with direct democratic elements of the Old Confederation” while also employing “the language of older forms to make a new political culture palatable.”Footnote ¹⁰

Two further important aspects of Swiss political experience emerge from Lerner's account and link it to Whatmore’s. The first is the nature of Switzerland's position in Europe and the effects of the pressures exerted by international relations on Swiss political culture. As Lerner extensively demonstrates, the political conflicts that arose in the Swiss cantons not only implicated the balance of power on the federal level, but also repeatedly raised the specter of international intervention, since the constitution of the Swiss confederation (and Swiss neutrality) had been guaranteed by all the great powers in 1815. The 1847 civil war nearly blossomed into a Europe-wide crisis because Metternich and others saw the prospect of Swiss constitutional reform as a dangerous portent of a wider revolutionary wave. The Sonderbund received weapons and credit from both Austria and France and appealed to both powers to intervene more directly on its behalf: indeed, Lerner observes, its “main hope of success depended on foreign intervention.”Footnote ¹¹ This intervention failed to materialize in part because Austria, Prussia, and France were soon fully preoccupied by revolutions at home. However, as Lerner also notes, Britain also played a vital role in shielding the Swiss from intervention, delaying it until the rapid military collapse of the Sonderbund ended the crisis.Footnote ¹² As this episode suggests, and as Whatmore's story also reveals, it was not only the French invasion of 1798 that shaped Swiss political debate and affected the transformation of Swiss political culture from the outside: Britain, and the European state system as a whole, also played major roles in shaping the history of Swiss republicanism.

Another important question that emerges from Lerner's book has to do with the socioeconomic context of Switzerland's contested political culture. The impact of socioeconomic change is reflected in Lerner's account of rising opposition to the ancien régime legacy of social privilege, and it is also implicit in his references to “proto-industrialization” as a factor in the emergence of new elites bent on political reform.Footnote ¹³ However, as his account of the Sonderbund war again helps illustrate, in some important respects these changes did not take the same form in Switzerland as they did elsewhere. Otto von Bismark memorably observed that the war was a mere Hasenschiessen or hare hunt: a series of battles between militias that lasted merely twenty-seven days and cost the lives of fewer than 150 soldiers.Footnote ¹⁴ The contrast to the kind of warfare that the states of the American federal republic experienced not long afterward is rather striking. Despite their rapid economic development, and unlike the American states, the Swiss cantons had evidently not developed the fiscal capacity to wage war on an industrial scale. How, then, was socioeconomic change experienced by the various participants in the political debates discussed by Lerner, and what were the implications of that experience for their views of liberty and what was required to maintain it in Switzerland?

These questions about political economy and international relations greatly preoccupied the Genevan republicans who are the subject of Whatmore's book. From their perspective, heavy speculation in French debt had turned Geneva into an oligarchy that was increasingly dependent on France, corrupting the Protestant and democratic character of the Genevan constitution and raising fears of both moral decline and economic collapse. Whatmore's book traces the efforts undertaken to reassert Genevan independence and restore its constitution by the représentants, or reformers who sought to assert the sovereignty of the Genevan General Council (specifically its right to judge alleged violations of the law) against the smaller executive councils dominated by wealthy families. As Whatmore shows, the représentants saw the possibility of constitutional reform as bound up with both the political and the economic sides of the rivalry between France and Britain. This entanglement was much more intense in eighteenth-century Geneva than it was after 1815, given the elimination of the French debt during the Revolution, and the much reduced scope for French foreign intervention. In the eighteenth century, représentant hopes for a revolution were repeatedly disappointed because they implicated French interests, while Britain appeared either indifferent to Geneva's fate—content to leave it in a French sphere of influence—or else as a brutal competitor prepared to destroy Geneva's economy for the sake of its mercantile empire. In the aftermath of the failed 1782 revolution, Whatmore shows, the représentants increasingly shifted their attention to external strategies for restoring Geneva's liberty. They embarked on a series of wide-ranging discussions of how small states like Geneva could find a home in a world dominated by rival great powers with access to large domestic markets as well as imperial ambitions. The représentants sought, in effect, to make this world “safe for small republics”: whether by founding a new republican enclave within a large state (such as the Waterford venture in Ireland) or, more ambitiously, by transforming either Britain or France into a cosmopolitan protector of the liberty of small states.Footnote ¹⁵ They were also involved in discussions in the 1780s of whether it might be possible to bring about “perpetual peace” by forging an Anglo-French alliance that would stabilize the European balance of power, making it compatible with free trade and thereby opening up a space for republics to survive economically.

Whatmore's story extends well beyond Geneva as it traces the several trajectories of the exiled représentants, some of whom became major players in reform debates in England and France, particularly in the circle that formed around William Petty, the Earl of Shelburne, who served as prime minister in 1782–3, as well as in connection to the future revolutionaries Honoré-Gabriel Riquetti de Mirabeau and Jacques-Pierre Brissot. It is one of the merits of Whatmore's book, in fact, that it shows how closely these English and French debates were intertwined with each other as well as with Genevan reform politics. The other major axis of Whatmore's book is a nuanced account of the dialogue that developed between the représentants and another famed Genevan exile, namely Rousseau: another of the chief merits of Whatmore's book is that it helps reposition Rousseau's thought by focusing on his engagement with Genevan politics in the 1760s, in the crucial period after the publication of Emile and the Social Contract.Footnote ¹⁶ Rousseau shared the criticisms of the Genevan magistrates leveled by the représentants, but at the same time he emerges from Whatmore's account as the most discerning critic of représentant hopes for constitutional reform. To their consternation, Rousseau told the représentants that Geneva's liberty could not be restored by reviving the democratic spirit of Calvin's original reform. According to Rousseau, Geneva's liberty was in fact the product of a historical accident that pre-dated Calvin, the unintentional consequence of its Catholic bishop's rivalry with the Duke of Savoy.Footnote ¹⁷ If they made the General Council into the dominant branch of the government, and increased the power of the Church to impose moral reform, Rousseau warned, the représentants would merely replace “harsh aristocracy” with “abuse of democracy,”Footnote ¹⁸ and Rousseau notoriously announced in his Letters Written from the Mountain (1764) that he would prefer no religion at all to the revival of an intolerant one with a license for imposing theological orthodoxy.Footnote ¹⁹

As Whatmore shows, Rousseau effectively ruled out the various strategies developed by the Genevan représentants for restoring Geneva's constitution and recovering its independence. For Rousseau, the goal of constitutional reform had to be to reassert the distinction between sovereignty and government, so that the people remained distinct from the public officials whom they appointed to govern, and were therefore available to judge the legality of their actions. Indeed, Rousseau held up Geneva as a model for the rest of Europe because at least this distinction remained a constitutional principle there, despite the failure of both the government and its would-be reformers to heed it.Footnote ²⁰ However, Rousseau's contemporaries were struck by his skepticism that Geneva, let alone the large commercial monarchies, could manage to contain and stabilize the social dynamics that, as he famously set out in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1754), pointed toward the decline and fall of modern European civilization. Rousseau wrote to the Marquis de Mirabeau in 1767 that he saw “no tolerable mean between the most austere Democracy and the most perfect Hobbesism”;Footnote ²¹ Geneva's entanglement in French finances, as well as French culture, luxury, and fashion, had already proceeded well beyond the point where it could still be taken for the former. Ultimately Rousseau's practical advice to the représentants was to accept the reality of French dominance and above all to make peace and avoid foreign intervention. The only hope for a restoration of liberty that Rousseau left alive seemed to depend on the possibility of a long-term cultural retrenchment. This, in turn, seemed to depend on the further historical contingency that a post-apocalyptic Europe after the collapse of the great commercial monarchies would be more conducive to the revival of republican politics. Not surprisingly, this message proved unsatisfying, particularly to the next generation of Genevan reformers. As Whatmore notes, “it became common to describe Rousseau as someone for whom tranquility was more precious than liberty.”Footnote ²²

The représentant engagement with Rousseau opens up a contrasting perspective on the trajectory of revolutionary and post-revolutionary debates about republicanism. What emerges from Whatmore's account is a series of diverse attempts to locate a less contingent foundation for liberty than Rousseau had described. In the case of Jean-Louis de Lolme, the Genevan exile who became renowned for his analysis of the British constitution, this meant reversing Rousseau's negative judgment of it, justifying hopes that Britain might develop “a foreign policy defending Europe's oppressed.”Footnote ²³ For Etienne Clavière, a leader of the 1782 revolution who became the French finance minister a decade later, as for many other participants in and supporters of the French Revolution, it meant retaining Rousseau's scathing indictment of England and English liberty while identifying a more direct path to a republican future: in part this meant using public credit in order to rebalance an economy distorted by luxury, eliminate the pernicious effects of social hierarchy, and foster an “egalitarian public culture” of industrious citizens.Footnote ²⁴ The failure of this project in the 1790s, and the French republic's turn to neo-Roman imperial conquest, prompted Clavière's former co-revolutionaries Jacques-Antoine du Roveray and François d’Ivernois to embrace an exclusively Anglophile model for commercial modernity. As Whatmore notes, in the Genevan context their position represented the end of représentant politics: their faith in England's moderation and reliance on it to stabilize the Genevan status quo from the outside mirrored the pro-French aristocratic position of the eighteenth-century opponents of the représentants. Footnote ²⁵

Elsewhere Whatmore has written about the political economist Jean-Baptiste Say, Clavière's former secretary, who was among those who sought to transmit the eighteenth-century critique of Britain's mercantile system into the nineteenth century and to hold on to the possibility of an egalitarian alternative to “aristocratic liberalism.”Footnote ²⁶ However, Against War and Empire ends instead with a brief but tantalizing discussion of how another représentant, Etienne Dumont, responded to the failure of the French Revolution. Though Dumont quickly came to think that revolutionary democracy would fail to restore Geneva's liberty, his response diverged significantly from that of du Roveray and d’Ivernois. When d’Ivernois returned to their native city in 1815, he joined the provisional government and helped draft the new constitution of the Swiss Canton of Geneva; when Dumont returned he joined the opposition and sought to revise the new constitution.Footnote ²⁷ Dumont had come to the conclusion that the ultimate solution to Geneva's predicament was to be found in the writings of the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, which he set about editing and translating for the “direct benefit” of his native city.Footnote ²⁸ Whatmore observes that the veneration of Bentham by a republican like Dumont “will of course strike modern scholars as rather odd.”Footnote ²⁹ Indeed, Quentin Skinner has described Bentham as the inheritor of the Hobbesian “counter-revolution” who scored an “overwhelming ideological victory” for liberalism over republicanism, after which the former became ascendant while the latter has remained “discredited.”Footnote ³⁰ However, Whatmore shows that, from Dumont's perspective, Bentham seemed to be “the successor to republican ideology,” which had already been discredited by the political instability and militarism exhibited by revolutionary democracy.Footnote ³¹

This glimpse of Dumont's journey through the revolutionary and post-revolutionary debates helps open up a much more varied picture of early nineteenth-century assessments of the future of liberty after republicanism.Footnote ³² Dumont considered Bentham to be the true heir of republicanism because his new science of legislation pointed the way to the emergence of a new political culture that could maintain the liberty of small republics like Geneva just as well as that of large states like Britain. Unlike the two rival cultures that figure in Lerner's account, the Bentham-inspired political culture that Dumont envisioned was not centered on an understanding of liberty as self-rule, nor did it value the rhetoric of individual rights and popular sovereignty (quite the contrary). In fact, Whatmore explains, Bentham's focus on the principle of utility was attractive to Dumont because it supplied a corrective to the political conflict that was caused by “too great a concern with liberty by legislators.” By providing a morally rigorous foundation for individual judgment, and guidance for how to regularize legislative procedure, Bentham offered a “means of calming the passions and establishing national characteristics that were capable of supporting liberty over time.”Footnote ³³ Dumont's ambition can be understood in terms of the post-Rousseauian search for a more direct and less historically contingent path to such a cultural transformation than Rousseau himself seemed to offer. For Dumont, as Whatmore puts it, Bentham showed that “it was the direct experience of particular rules, the product of reason rather than of history, and never any presumed or actual democratic history, which led to political moderation and justice.”Footnote ³⁴ Dumont's solution to Geneva's political instability was a new set of procedures for proposing, amending, and ratifying legislation, and for judging violations of the law, that aimed to replace the perennial conflict between the small and large councils with “a system of balanced and interdependent powers”: it “followed the British example,” Whatmore concludes, “in seeking to institutionalize compromise in the aftermath of reasoned, orderly, and public argument.”Footnote ³⁵

We will have to wait for Whatmore's next book to develop this account of Dumont's perspective on the future of republicanism more fully: the very last paragraph of Against War and Empire merely hints that Dumont also saw Bentham's writings as a guide for identifying “a political economy for modern republics, and an international politics capable of establishing perpetual peace.”Footnote ³⁶ However, we can start to explore some of the implications of Whatmore's account for the history of liberty by turning now to an 1835 report on the condition of Swiss manufacturing prepared for the British parliament by John Bowring, another friend and admirer of Bentham's and, like Dumont, an editor of his works.Footnote ³⁷ As Béla Kapossy has noted, Bowring was one of several nineteenth-century observers who cited Switzerland's republican heritage in order to explain its success at implementing major political reforms while also maintaining both a relatively high degree of social stability and an impressive record of economic development. Since Switzerland still had no expensive standing armies or courts to pay for, it could remain free of debt and avoid the social and economic burdens of high taxation. At the same time, it could maintain traditional forms of poor relief while also investing in new institutions.Footnote ³⁸

Bowring's report placed particular emphasis on the significance of this republican background for “one of the largest and most interesting branches of Swiss industry,” namely “the watch-making trade.”Footnote ³⁹ Its workers, particularly the peasant artisans who lived in the mountains around Neuchatel, retained a strong sense of their independence. They took pleasure in their work while continuing to enjoy a simple, self-sufficient, family-centered way of life. A fluid labor market fostered a competitive spirit that encouraged constant innovation and ensured the rapid adaptation of new technologies. As one Neuchatelois watchmaker reported to Bowring, “If our watches have attained a certain reputation of superiority, it is in a great measure to be attributed to the independence of our workmen.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Bowring and his Swiss sources alike expressed some apprehension of the danger that the prospect of increasing mechanization posed to this “mode of life, half-pastoral, half-manufacturing,” which “is no doubt exceedingly friendly to happiness.”Footnote ⁴¹ However, Bowring remained confident that Swiss industry could adapt without undermining the sources of its flexibility and innovation. Since Switzerland's political institutions were increasingly responsive to the needs of society as a whole, the Swiss could be counted on to avoid succumbing to the temptation of protectionism. Casting a critical eye on the Zollverein, the Prussian-created customs union that had recently erected trade barriers around much of the German Confederation, Bowring observed that “one of the most remarkable consequences of the system which Switzerland has adopted is the facility with which labour and capital are transferred from one production to another.”Footnote ⁴² Provided that Britain used its clout to maintain a general peace, uphold Swiss neutrality, and ensure that expanding global markets remained accessible to Swiss industry (as well as, he urged, opening up its own market to Swiss manufactures), Bowring concluded that mechanization would not pose a mortal threat to Swiss industry:

The watchmaking industry occupied an important place in this projection because it could expect increasing—and increasingly varied—demand for its products. “This branch of industry contains within it the seeds of a firm and permanent prosperity,” Bowring claimed, because, as his Neuchatelois source observed, watches had become “an article of taste and fashion” that had come to suit a wide range of purposes both aesthetic and utilitarian.Footnote ⁴⁴ “A watch is no longer, as it was formerly, an object of luxury, destined exclusively for the rich; it has become an article of the first necessity for every class in society,” submitted one Monsieur Houriet. This process could be expected to extend to new markets around the globe:

In accounting for the success of the Swiss watchmaking industry, and of Swiss manufacturing more generally, Bowring's report cited the hallmarks of the economic strategy that Charles Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin have termed “flexible specialization.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Sabel and Zeitlin contest an assumption that they detect in discussions of “proto-industrialization” as well as much other economic history: they deny that the great productivity gains and extension of markets that are associated with the mechanization of production have always entailed the consolidation of demand in standardized products, the deskilling and routinization of labor, and thus the demise of craft production. Mechanization could also figure in an economic strategy that avoided competing solely on price, relying instead on constant reconfigurations of production to satisfy changing tastes (and to create new tastes to satisfy) in many differentiated markets. Flexible production made it possible, as Carlo Poni has explained in the case of the Lyon silk industry, “to use annual product differentiation as a strategic weapon to create barriers to entry, to capture important shares of the international market and to outmaneuver” the competition.Footnote ⁴⁷ Rather than regarding craft production as “either a traditional or subordinate form of economic activity,” then, Sabel and Zeitlin suggest that a “craft alternative to mass production as a model of technological advance” long remained viable in many of the key industrial regions of Europe.Footnote ⁴⁸

The question of the connection between the viability of this economic strategy and the transformation of political culture remains open—and one that can also be posed in terms of a republican dialogue with Rousseau.Footnote ⁴⁹ The admiring portrait of the independent peasant watchmakers in the mountains around Neuchatel that appears in Bowring's report echoes Rousseau's famous description of the self-sufficient inhabitants of the same region in his Letter to d’Alembert (1758). “They all work for themselves, none for any body else,” Rousseau wrote. Among their many exports, “they even carry their ingenuity so far as to make watches; but what seems incredible is, that each man includes within himself, all the different branches, into which the watch-maker's business is divided; and fabricates the several tools himself.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Although Genevans were enmeshed in a much more developed division of labor, Geneva remained a society whose wealth was grounded in its industry: “Go to the suburb of St. Gervais,” Rousseau wrote, “and you imagine you see all the clock-work in Europe.”Footnote ⁵¹ Rousseau was concerned to explain to his compatriots that both prosperity and liberty were predicated on the preservation of an inward-looking and narrowly practical culture.Footnote ⁵² Should consumption patterns change and work cease to be the primary source of pleasure (as might happen with the establishment of a theater), the Swiss sense of independence would wither, destroying the foundation of both economic innovation and democratic sovereignty. As Rousseau warned, “a people who live at their ease, but who owe all their happiness to industry, upon exchanging reality for appearances, hurry themselves to destruction the moment they fall into luxury.”Footnote ⁵³

The possibility of maintaining liberty and prosperity under less dramatically restrictive conditions would depend on identifying a democratic form of luxury, or a way of ensuring that increasing consumption was socially inclusive and compatible with both individual independence and communal spirit.Footnote ⁵⁴ The problem of democratic luxury, and the broader question how to reconcile modern economic life with ancient politics, were hardly the exclusive concern of Swiss republicans. As Kapossy has suggested, what was distinctive about Switzerland was that it “successfully integrated the main tenets of the larger European debate on political economy into its own debates about republican reform.”Footnote ⁵⁵ If Switzerland was a laboratory of liberty, in other words, it was a laboratory that ran “the only sustained European experiment in the development of a modern republican political economy.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Both Lerner and Whatmore rightly emphasize the singularity of the Swiss republican experiment in a broader European context. However, it is also important to note that many contemporary observers sought, like Bowring, to see Switzerland as a model for Europe. The German political scientist Robert von Mohl observed in 1855 that the Swiss liked to describe their country as “the republican microcosm of Europe as against its monarchical macrocosm,” and liked to describe their role as “providing the latter with a counter-image of their conditions and ambitions.”Footnote ⁵⁷ This was not just a Swiss tendency: where Dumont had hoped to use Bentham's philosophy to reform Geneva, Bowring hoped to use the example of Switzerland's success to reform Britain and liberalize its economy (he was later involved with Richard Cobden and the Anti-Corn Law League). However, the contrasting fates of the Swiss and British watchmaking industries in the nineteenth century is indicative of the gulf that ultimately emerged between the Swiss republican microcosm and others elsewhere in Europe that found themselves more fully absorbed into a monarchical macrocosm.

Bowring was right about the rosy prospects of the Swiss watchmaking industry. By 1870, the Swiss were responsible for two-thirds of global watch production by value, and they went on to withstand a formidable challenge mounted by American mass production.Footnote ⁵⁸ By contrast, despite becoming the “workshop of the world” during the nineteenth century, Britain's once formidable watchmaking industry collapsed amid desperate calls for protection against Swiss competition, hobbled by “complacency” and “stubborn conservatism”: a “warning,” David Landes noted, “of things to come.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Sabel and Zeitlin have claimed that the ultimate demise of the “flexible specialization” strategy in many of the major industrial regions of Europe had less to do with differences in “the initial social arrangement of the local microcosm” and more to do with “the still largely unexamined process through which they were inserted into the larger political and economic macrocosm of national states.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Lerner and Whatmore have helped open up a fascinating prospect on the tensions between these two poles, and the intricately varied attempts to navigate them, by highlighting the distinctive Swiss path to a modern republican political culture. It is these tensions between microcosm and macrocosm, rather than the dichotomy between republicanism and liberalism, that ought to remain the focus of further investigations into the history of liberty in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.