The Triumph of Protestant Truth

For these curricula, the Reformation is the great watershed in human history, because biblical truth triumphed. They focus on England as the preeminent site of the Reformation. To tell this story, these textbooks revert to an explicitly English Protestant historiography and largely neglect the context of the Reformation. They do not acknowledge theological distinctions, disputes, or schisms among Protestants: there is only biblical truth. These textbooks tie Protestantism to political liberty, the former a precondition of the latter. But they restrict liberty to the terms of Luther’s The Freedom of a Christian: freedom does not sanction dissent and the Reformation had no political ramifications. The defeat of the Spanish Armada reveals God’s providential care for His new chosen people. The curricula’s treatment of the Reformation is more meager and ahistorical than one might expect. The Reformation is less a historical development than the confirmation of evangelical beliefs purged of Catholic heresy.

‘Disfigurations’ of Democracy? Pareto, Mosca and the Challenge of ‘Elite Theory’

Considering recent re-assessments of Pareto and Mosca, I discuss whether these thinkers’ socio-political orientations contribute to the ‘disfiguration’ of democracy (in: Urbinati, Democracy disfigured: opinion, truth, and the people, Harvard, Cambridge, MA, 2014) or provide a resource for the renewal of democratic institutions. Femia (Pareto and political theory, Routledge, Abingdon, 2006) presents Pareto as being in the “Machiavellian tradition of sceptical liberalism,” revealing the liberal potential of Pareto’s realist political theory. Finocchiaro (Beyond right and left, Yale, New Haven, London, 1999) ameliorates the conservative consequences of Mosca’s thought by reinterpreting him as a ‘democratic elitist,’ who holds a conception of political liberty “as a relationship such that authority flows from the masses to the elites.” Highlighting the significance of internal tensions within each thinker’s work foregrounded by these readings, between the causal primacy of psychic states and the ‘mutual dependence’ of social factors (Pareto), and between the elite principle and ‘balanced pluralism’ (Mosca), I ask whether the ‘sceptical liberal’ Pareto or the ‘democratic elitist’ Mosca elude Urbinati’s unpolitical, populist and plebiscitarian ‘disfigurations’ of democracy.

The Eurocentrism of neo-Roman republicanism and the neglect of republican empire

Republicanism is an approach within political theory that seeks to secure the values of political liberty and non-domination. Yet, in historical practice, early modern republics developed empires and secured their liberty through policies that dominated others. This contradiction presents challenges for how neo-Roman theorists understand ideals of liberty and political freedom. This article argues that the historical practices of slavery and empire developed concurrently with the normative ideals of republican liberty. Republican liberty does not arise in the absence of power but is inherently connected to the exercise of power.

The Madness of these Deluded People

This chapter evaluates how loyal Britons struggled to strip rebellious Americans of their Britishness. Their counternarrative, a British common cause, was crafted in the days after the thunderclap that the First Continental Congress sounded all across the British Empire. Popular understandings of loyalism celebrated a renewed defense of monarchy and legal government, and remained committed to basic Protestant Whig principles like free trade, political liberty, and religious freedom. But the promulgators of this cause also continued to argue that their opponents were nothing more than deceived subjects who were misled by a few self-interested colonists — mostly New Englanders — into war against their own nation. Loyal subjects thus failed to make rebellious Americans into dangerous enemies. This failure presented real problems for loyal subjects across the North Atlantic. If American Patriots were just misguided Britons, then it stood to reason that the Patriot cause presented no real threat to popular understandings of Britishness. In part, this explains why so many loyal subjects were reluctant to support the war in the early years.

The Rise and Fall of Peace on Earth

In the twenty-five years after 1989, the world enjoyed the deepest peace in history. To be sure, wars took place in this era, but less frequently and on a far smaller scale than in previous periods. The peace ended because three major countries – Vladimir Putin’s Russia in Europe, Xi Jinping’s China in East Asia, and the Shia clerics’ Iran in the Middle East – put an end to it with aggressive nationalist policies aimed at overturning the prevailing political arrangements in their respective regions. The three leaders had a common motive: their need to survive in a democratic age with their countries’ prospects for economic growth uncertain. The key to the return of peace lies in the advent of genuine democracy, including free elections and the protection of religious, economic, and political liberty. Recent history has shown, however, that democracy cannot be imposed from the outside, leading to a paradox: the world has a formula for peace, but the world has no way to put it into practice.

Liberty, Equality, and Popular Sovereignty

This chapter documents the role of appeals to the liberty of the people in Roman political discourse, as evidenced in the writings of Sallust and Livy as well as Cicero’s. Liberty’s relation to contested notions of equality is discussed at length, particularly as it is explored in Livy and in On the commonwealth. Finally, the chapter turns to On the commonwealth’s conception of popular sovereignty: of the res publica as the property of the people, over which it must be able to exercise rights of ownership, if political liberty is to be secured and maintained.