In 1955, André Siegfried wondered whether the planet was entering a new geological age, wrought by industrialism and evident in major geopolitical changes. In this article, I trace his intellectual journey towards this claim and his singular focus on the international politics of agriculture and environmental change. First, I trace Siegfried’s early ideal of French rural democracy and its prudential virtues amid inter-imperial competition and interwar debt crises. Second, after the Dust Bowl, I examine Siegfried’s shifting engagements with environmental arguments against mechanized monoculture, focusing on his fears of erosion, and, after 1945, the loss of soil fertility and ecological resilience associated with small-scale mixed farming. Doubled through a geopolitical lens, I show how Siegfried saw such shifts as existential threats to his idyll of France’s rural democracy and global power. To conclude, I reflect on how Siegfried’s environmental geopolitics can help us rebuild intellectual histories of Anthropocene politics.

The fiduciary conception of political power that the republican tradition adopted in its struggle against absolutism was dissolving during the late eighteenth century and the nineteenth. However, in the mid-nineteenth century, some attempts appeared that represent a reemergence of the fiduciary democratic (or proto-democratic) scheme. One of them was the case of Spanish federalism and its greatest exponent, Francisco Pi y Margall. This article shows that the core of Pimargalian federal republican thought is based on a fiduciary conception of sovereignty, which is grounded in a recovery of the language of revolutionary natural law. By arguing that the fiduciary principle applied not only to his concept of public authority, but also to his comprehensive proposal for the federal reorganization of the state, this article contributes to a better understanding of the specific contribution of Pi’s work and to contemporary discussions on the foundations and scope of republicanism, federalism, and fiduciary relationships.

In the late 1740s and the 1750s the Jacobite exile James Steuart began to compose the work that became his Principles of Political Oeconomy. This article shows how the political principles of this work were shaped in two contexts neglected by earlier scholars: the networks that shaped Steuart’s formation as a Jacobite, and the debates about absolute monarchy that he encountered in France early during his exile starting in 1746. It demonstrates that Steuart’s vision of an economically active, interventionist state chiefly developed not from German debates about administration, as is often assumed, but from long-running Scottish currents of opposition to British government policy and radical French ideas about how monarchical reform can secure equal rights for all. This article thus uncovers the Jacobite and French origins of Steuart’s variety of interventionism, which troubled Adam Smith, inspired French revolutionaries, and influenced Hegel, Marx, and the broader history of political economy.

Using previously uncited archival evidence from the US, the UK, and Czechia, we highlight Bohuslav Ečer’s significant impact on the Charter of the International Military Tribunal held at Nuremberg from 1945 to 1946. A politically motivated jurist from Czechoslovakia, Ečer proved a key innovator in international criminal law, pushing for bold new precedents at Nuremberg. We highlight multiple legal arguments that Ečer innovated and championed. These include the prosecution of individuals for the crime of aggression, the forfeiting of sovereign immunity during wartime, a broader definition of war crimes that included “crimes against humanity,” and the collective responsibility of certain “criminal” Nazi organizations as a means of streamlining individual-level prosecutions. We trace Ečer’s political thought and activism, including how his arguments joined with those of other prominent legal thinkers outside the US, including Hersch Lauterpacht and Aron Trainin. The article thus adds an important, yet often overlooked, voice to Nuremberg’s intellectual history and helps remedy the Anglo-American bias of dominant histories of international criminal law.

This article examines Adam Smith’s concept of the federative: the double-facing constitutional power to conduct international relations today called the treaty or foreign-affairs power. We reconstruct Smith’s account of the federative from his major and minor works and demonstrate its importance in his account of law and empire. We first examine Smith’s early “internal federative,” where the power grows from the internal constitutional organization of the state. What starts as a democratic right to wage war and make peace becomes concentrated over time in the sovereign and its advisers as a “senatoriall” power. We then turn to the “external federative” in Smith’s later works, where the federative is redesigned as a power to unify colonial legislative bodies, connecting the familial sentiments of Britain and America, and forming a model for moving, slowly, towards the conditions Smith deemed necessary for international justice.

Beginning in the late 1990s, a debate emerged whether Edmund Burke might be read as a significant critic of empire because of his impeachment of Warren Hastings. The debate that ensued, I argue in this article, revealed ambiguities and paradoxes in the category of anti-imperialism. Rather than imperialism and anti-imperialism representing a clean binary, anti-imperial projects, events, and figures may embody the very sorts of politics that many disciplinary debates about anti-imperialism wish to critique. Foregrounding “anti-imperialism” in the history of political thought, I conclude, may obfuscate as much as it illuminates—even when examining the twentieth-century experience of decolonization.

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.

Civil religion has been imagined as a bloodless rationalism or a baptized patriotism, but rarely as a fully fledged religion. This article argues that a strain of civil religion emerged out of deism in the 1770s and 1780s that aspired to be an authentic religion complete with public prayer. This “practical civil religion” looked to spirituality and social ritual as a means of taming the passions and achieving national regeneration. One of the first to imagine such a religion was the journalist and novelist Louis-Sébastien Mercier. The dissenting minister David Williams went beyond Mercier’s dream, in 1776 opening the world’s first deist chapel at Margaret Street in London. Maximilien Robespierre’s short-lived cult of the Supreme Being in revolutionary France represented the apogee of the tradition of practical civil religion. Robespierre proposed the cult as a means of effecting national regeneration and completing the Revolution.

Murray Bookchin (1921–2006) is best known today for pioneering a novel synthesis between social anarchism and ecology in the 1960s. Both his writing and his activism had a substantial impact on the young New Left and the radical ecology movement, and were in polemic dialogue with radical environmentalists, anarcho-primitivists, and deep ecologists. This article explores the development of Bookchin’s early political thought within the framework of a “postwar environmental moment” and uncovers how he uniquely politicized ecological science in the 1950s. I argue that Bookchin’s early writings were a critical response to both the dire environmental issues of his time and the limitations he perceived in Old Left politics. Furthermore, I demonstrate that Bookchin’s understanding of ecological science was not simply a product of a turn to anarchism, but was directly linked to debates among 1950s ecologists, typically overlooked in the recent scholarship on Bookchin.

This article examines the role of legal argument in late eighteenth-century antislavery thought by subjecting Granville Sharp’s legal writing to detailed scrutiny. Much scholarship on law and antislavery in the British context justifiably focuses on the meaning of Lord Mansfield’s 1772 ruling in Somerset’s Case. Adopting a different approach, this article reads Sharp’s antislavery jurisprudence expansively, as an effort to fashion legal and political ideals. In so doing, it shows that Sharp’s legal writing was part of a broader project aimed at associating antislavery with a particular conception of national identity. Examining Sharp’s wide-ranging analysis of statute and common law, the article further argues that Sharp developed a form of natural-rights constitutionalism, melding the radical cause of abolition with the notion of tradition. Finally, the article explains how Sharp’s jurisprudence promoted an ideologically important vision of abolitionism as a distinctively modern form of progress. In short, the article argues that Sharp’s legal writing should be read not only in relation to Somerset but also as a means of understanding the character of antislavery thought and its relation to wider currents in eighteenth-century radicalism.

This article examines the influence of Spinozism on Leszek Kołakowski’s humanist Marxism between 1953 and 1968. After historically exploring Kołakowski’s early Stalinism and his later belief that Hegel’s historical theodicy, in eradicating the contradiction between totality and particularity, abolished individual moral responsibility, it examines Kołakowski’s interpretation of Spinoza’s alternatively ahistorical and ambiguous relationship between substance and its modes, which Kołakowski admired despite finding it metaphysically contradictory. It shows that this interpretation contributed to Kołakowski’s Marxism, which focused on the moral freedom of the individual by accepting the permanence of contradiction between subjectivity and totality. His interest in Spinoza also changed Kołakowski’s understanding of modernity, which he increasingly identified with the seventeenth century, especially those forms of thinking that contradictorily blended elements of religious and rationalist thought. While Kołakowski abandoned Marxism, this interest in the relationship between religion and secularism defined much of his thought after 1968.

As the paragon of Chicago school macroeconomics in the late twentieth century, Robert Lucas is closely associated with the collapse of Keynesian hegemony in the 1970s and with neoliberalism more generally. This article explores Lucas’s changing political commitments using previously unexploited archival evidence. It shows that although he often articulated his views in the form of anti-Keynesian polemic, he had a deeply ambiguous relationship with the Keynesian project. Lucas upends interpretations of neoliberalism that emphasize ignorance in the face of the market, as his research program is premised on the hope that states and scholars can make the economy visible, and hence controllable, through stable policy rules. He was impressed by Keynesian successes and the technocratic worldview they made intelligible, but he remained suspicious of economists’ close collaborations with government.

This article traces the emergence of a new type of economist in interwar France—the conjuncturist—through a study focusing on Alfred Sauvy and Robert Marjolin. We argue that these neglected figures helped to shape a new, autonomous, field of expertise that consisted of diagnosing and forecasting the economic situation to guide public decision making. As we show, the history of the conjuncturists is closely linked to that of the Popular Front in general, and to its emblematic law on the forty-hour week in particular. By becoming the most vocal opponents of this law, the conjuncturists fomented an open mutiny against the very government that had given them their first prominent position, in order to obtain the repeal of the forty-hour week, which Sauvy achieved in November 1938. Although the Popular Front was by then a thing of the past, and a future war with Germany had become the most likely outcome, the figure of the conjuncturist had succeeded in firmly occupying the institutional landscape of 1940s France—a form of economic expertise that was henceforth inseparable from political activity itself.

In 1917, the US Department of Labor launched a new section: the Division of Negro Economics (DNE). Established to study black labor in the context of the Great Migration and staffed completely by black social scientists and social workers, the division offers a window onto the origins and meaning of black economics in the United States. During an age of pervasive scientific racism, the division’s leaders leveraged the language and tools of academic economics to assert black Americans' fundamental humanity, particularly by rendering black migrants as economic agents. The history of the division reveals how black economic thinkers made the economic study of the Great Migration into an egalitarian intellectual project, even if they could not escape institutional bias and prejudice. It stands as a lesson on the potential of economics, both as a tool of oppression and as one of political claims-making.

This article analyzes the relationship between living systems theory (LST) and the army's military doctrine in the 1980s. General Donn Starry, Colonel Mike Malone, and Major James Cary worked with James G. Miller, the founder of LST, to make the army more efficient at fighting a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. LST conceptualized that living organisms organized matter and energy and that its components could function because they worked as a part of the whole to adapt to their environment. The article reveals how these officers employed LST as a framework to model a reciprocal relationship between individual agency and collective unity in the army's hierarchical organization. Situating this doctrinal reform in the years after the end of the draft and the mainstreaming of neoclassical economics in the 1980s, it finds that the army officers were using LST to replace Robert McNamara's mechanical strategic paradigm used in the Vietnam War.

The literature on the introduction of modern Western philosophy in the late Ottoman Empire is predominantly ethnocentric. This is because it reduces the Ottoman version of modern Western philosophy to the philosophical discourses of Muslim/Turkish intellectuals at the expense of non-Muslim Ottomans’ philosophical activities in languages other than Turkish. This article challenges such ethnocentrism and offers an alternative narrative from the perspective of Ottoman Armenian thinkers in the late nineteenth century. With this aim, it analyzes the philosophical thoughts of Madatia Karakashian, Nahabed Rusinian, Kalusd Gosdantian, and Yeghia Demirjibashian.