This book offers an examination of responses to Edmund Burke from the last decades of the eighteenth century to the present day, ending with the question whether there is still a role for him to play in post-Thatcher England. It includes a chapter asking the same question about America. The sharp focus on Burke’s legacy permits the author to cover a great many years while remaining quite concise. Written in an accessible style, modest in length, covering major debates in England over the course of two centuries and more, this book aims to reach out to as many potential readers as possible.

In 1955 Louis Hartz published a volume titled The Liberal Tradition in America, in which he argued that liberalism was the one and only American tradition. Since then scholars of New Left and neoconservative persuasion have offered an alternative account based on the notion that the civic notions of antiquity continued to dominate political thought in modern times. Against this revisionist view the argument of From Classical to Modern Liberalism is that we need to study America in comparative perspective, and if we do so we shall discover that republicanism in the modern world was distinctively modern, drawing upon ideas of natural rights, consent, and social contract. Rather than a struggle between liberalism and republicanism, we should speak about liberal republicanism. Rather than republicanism versus liberalism, we should address liberalism versus illiberalism, the true issue of our age.

In 1955 Louis Hartz published a volume titled The Liberal Tradition in America, in which he argued that liberalism was the one and only American tradition. Since then scholars of New Left and neoconservative persuasion have offered an alternative account based on the notion that the civic notions of antiquity continued to dominate political thought in modern times. Against this revisionist view the argument of From Classical to Modern Liberalism is that we need to study America in comparative perspective, and if we do so we shall discover that republicanism in the modern world was distinctively modern, drawing upon ideas of natural rights, consent, and social contract. Rather than a struggle between liberalism and republicanism, we should speak about liberal republicanism. Rather than republicanism versus liberalism, we should address liberalism versus illiberalism, the true issue of our age.

Of all the critiques of the Enlightenment, the most telling may be found in the life and writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This searching, long overlooked auto critique receives its first full treatment by Mark Hulliung. Here he restores Rousseau to his historical context, the world of the philosophes, and shows how he employed the arsenal of Voltaire, Diderot, and others to launch a powerful attack on their version of the Enlightenment. With great intellectual skill and rhetorical force, Rousseau exposed the inconsistencies and shortcomings of the Enlightenment: the psychology of Locke, the genre of philosophical and conjectural history, the latest applications of science to the study of society and politics, and the growing interest in materialist modes of thought. As the century moved on, Hulliung shows, the most advanced philosophes found themselves drawn to conclusions that paralleled Rousseau's an agreement that went unacknowledged at the time. The Enlightenment that emerges here is richer, more nuanced, and more self-critical than the one reflected in many interpretations. By extracting Rousseau from personal entangle-ments that stymied debate in his time and that mislead critics to this day, Hulliung reveals the remarkable and remarkably unacknowledged force of Rousseau's accomplishment. This edition includes a brilliant new introduction by the author.

Machiavelli has been viewed as the forerunner of the humanists of our day, liberals and socialists, who have discovered that moral ends sometimes require immoral means. Against this interpretation, Mark Hulliung argues that Machiavelli's "humanism," was rooted in classical notions of grandeur and greatness, and that his prime reason for admiring the ancient Roman republic was that it conquered the world. In short, Machiavelli was at his most Machiavellian precisely when he voiced his "civic humanism." Hulliung argues that Machiavelli's embrace of fraud and violence cannot be justified by patriotism or a professed concern with the common good. He indicts Machiavelli's use and abuse of history in the service of his cynical agenda the quest for power. Hulliung sees Machiavelli as a republican imperialist, embracing the heroic pagan virtues and consciously subverting the humanistic tradition of Cicero, and the religious morality of Christianity, with an intentionally skewed interpretation of republican Rome. By inverting the Stoical and Christian elements of the classics, Machiavelli made the humanistic tradition give birth to Machiavellism, its terrible child. Hulliung's thesis is convincing, and his book is a valuable contribution to the debate on Machiavellian thought.

This volume focuses on the black family in the United States and the social forces and issues that affect it, including education, healthcare, racism, poverty, and politics. It examines the effects of these social forces on individuals as well as families. Contributions are varied. "A Biscuit for a Letter" examines education in the antebellum South. "Black Intellectuals on Trial" and "Africans' Perspectives on Race in the US" both analyse the role of race and racism in America. "Feminization of Poverty and the Black Family" illustrates the double burden of race and gender borne by black women. "It's Gotta Be Some Drama!" analyses the televised depiction of black colleges and universities. "African-centred Research Frameworks" studies the importance of cultural awareness in academia. "Work to Be Done" recounts the activism of black women in the Democratic Party. This volume offers an interdisciplinary approach to study of the black family in the United States, taking into account the forces of the larger society that influence it. The Black Family and Society is the most recent volume in Transaction's Africana Studies series.

In "Nausea," the 1938 novel that made Sartre famous, the protagonist is a historian who abandons the biography he is writing because he comes to believe that all histories are fictional, escapist, and useless. He sought the one and only truth of history; a truth that would revolutionize the world. By the time Sartre published his most mature works, he claimed to have written a biography that was perfectly true. This book examines how and why Sartre s position on the possibility and worth of historical knowledge changed so dramatically. In addition, it illuminates Sartre s unique contribution to the grand debate between Marxist and anarchist revolutionaries a debate that continues today."

In Nausea, the 1938 novel that made Sartre famous, the protagonist is a historian who abandons the biography he is writing because he comes to believe that all histories are fictional, escapist, and useless. He sought the one and only truth of history; a truth that would revolutionize the world. By the time Sartre published his most mature works, he claimed to have written a biography that was perfectly true. This book examines how and why Sartre's position on the possibility and worth of historical knowledge changed so dramatically. In addition, it illuminates Sartre's unique contribution to the grand debate between Marxist and anarchist revolutionaries-a debate that continues today.

This volume focuses on the black family in the United States and the social forces and issues that affect it, including education, healthcare, racism, poverty, and politics. It examines the effects of these social forces on individuals as well as families. Contributions are varied. "A Biscuit for a Letter" examines education in the antebellum South. "Black Intellectuals on Trial" and "Africans' Perspectives on Race in the US" both analyse the role of race and racism in America. "Feminization of Poverty and the Black Family" illustrates the double burden of race and gender borne by black women. "It's Gotta Be Some Drama!" analyses the televised depiction of black colleges and universities. "African-centred Research Frameworks" studies the importance of cultural awareness in academia. "Work to Be Done" recounts the activism of black women in the Democratic Party. This volume offers an interdisciplinary approach to study of the black family in the United States, taking into account the forces of the larger society that influence it. The Black Family and Society is the most recent volume in Transaction's Africana Studies series.

This volume seeks to capture Jean-Jacques Rousseau's astonishing contribution to our understanding of the dilemmas of modernity. For the contributors to this book Rousseau is present as well as past, because he was so modern and yet so ambivalent about modernity, a position with which we are quite familiar. Highlighted in this volume is the contention that Rousseau set the stage for many discussions of the good and bad of modernity. Previous efforts to deal with Rousseau and modernity have suffered from myopia. In the nineteenth century the Romantics claimed Rousseau as one of their own, pulling him out of his historical context, ignoring his full scale immersion in the debates of the French Enlightenment. In the twentieth century commentators have read into Rousseau the ahistorical and present-minded Cold War theme of "Rousseau the totalitarian." In this volume Rousseau is treated as a person of his age but also as someone who speaks to us today. The topics covered range from feminism, music, science, and political theory, to updating the classics, and to the search for and limitations to the quest for self-knowledge. Few if any figures can compete with Rousseau when it comes to forcing us to face up to the price we pay for "progress."

Machiavelli has been viewed as the forerunner of the humanists of our day, liberals and socialists, who have discovered that moral ends sometimes require immoral means. Against this interpretation, Mark Hulliung argues that Machiavelli's "humanism," was rooted in classical notions of grandeur and greatness, and that his prime reason for admiring the ancient Roman republic was that it conquered the world. In short, Machiavelli was at his most Machiavellian precisely when he voiced his "civic humanism."

Hulliung argues that Machiavelli's embrace of fraud and violence cannot be justified by patriotism or a professed concern with the common good. He indicts Machiavelli's use and abuse of history in the service of his cynical agenda--the quest for power. Hulliung sees Machiavelli as a republican imperialist, embracing the heroic pagan virtues and consciously subverting the humanistic tradition of Cicero, and the religious morality of Christianity, with an intentionally skewed interpretation of republican Rome.

By inverting the Stoical and Christian elements of the classics, Machiavelli made the humanistic tradition give birth to Machiavellism, its terrible child. Hulliung's thesis is convincing, and his book is a valuable contribution to the debate on Machiavellian thought.

Of all the critiques of the Enlightenment, the most telling may be found in the life and writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This searching, long overlooked autocritique receives its first full treatment by Mark Hulliung. Here he restores Rousseau to his historical context, the world of the philosophes, and shows how he employed the arsenal of Voltaire, Diderot, and others to launch a powerful attack on their version of the Enlightenment.

With great intellectual skill and rhetorical force, Rousseau exposed the inconsistencies and shortcomings of the Enlightenment: the psychology of Locke, the genre of philosophical and conjectural history, the latest applications of science to the study of society and politics, and the growing interest in materialist modes of thought. As the century moved on, Hulliung shows, the most advanced philosophes found themselves drawn to conclusions that paralleled Rousseau's--an agreement that went unacknowledged at the time. The Enlightenment that emerges here is richer, more nuanced, and more self-critical than the one reflected in many interpretations. By extracting Rousseau from personal entangle-ments that stymied debate in his time and that mislead critics to this day, Hulliung reveals the remarkable--and remarkably unacknowledged--force of Rousseau's accomplishment. This edition includes a brilliant new introduction by the author.

Because most Americans believe that government requires the consent of the governed, the idea of the social contract may come as close to a public philosophy as we've ever had. And, as Mark Hulliung reminds us, we have frequently fought our greatest political battles by wielding one or another version of social contract theory.

Hulliung's book is the first to examine the role of the social contract across the entire sweep of American history, well beyond the Revolution and Founding periods. While he pays close attention to the contested versions of the social contract from 1765 to 1861, he also underscores its relevance after the Civil War, from late nineteenth-century land reform to the rights revolution of the late twentieth century.

By considering this lengthy timeline, Hulliung demonstrates the life and death of what may be the most expansive and persistent form in our country's political discourse, one that has figured in virtually all major controversies in American history. He shows how it has been enlisted by advocates of seemingly every major cause, from Henry George to Martin Luther King and Justice Clarence Thomas, whose view that constitutional authority rests in the consent of the people of each individual state, rather than of the nation as a whole, echoed the version of the social contract once held by southern slave owners.

Hulliung treats the social contract as not one theory but several, considering the Americanization of Grotius and Pufendorf as well as Locke. He examines alternative readings of the contract in the struggles between claims of alienable versus inalienable rights; between consent given once and for all versus consent reaffirmed with each generation; and between the sovereignty of the people in various states versus the sovereignty of the people of the nation.

Innovative and provocative, Hulliung's study clearly shows that, until we come to terms with the centrality of the social contract in American history--and the significance of its possible demise--something essential will be missing from our accounts of the past and our understanding of the present.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1976.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1976.

In a "tour de force" of comparative intellectual history, Mark Hulliung sharply challenges conventional wisdom about the political nature of the "sister republics," America and France.

Hulliung argues that the standard American account of a continuous Jacobin republican tradition--"illiberal to the core"--is fatally misleading. In reality it was the nineteenth-century French liberals who undermined the cause of liberalism, and it was French republicans who eventually saved liberal ideals. And comparison with France provides compelling evidence that the American republic was from the beginning both liberal and republican; Americans have been engaged in the "right debate, wrong country." Antiliberal intellectuals--New Leftists, neoconservatives, and communitarians alike--have disfigured much of the "republican" scholarship by falsely conjuring up a history of the United States wherein rooted and moral republicans once held sway where today we encounter uprooted and amoral liberals.

Lively, stimulating, and sure to be controversial, "Citizens and Citoyens" is a valuable contribution to the political culture debate.