Suchergebnisse

Elie Halévy became famous as a historian of England in the years before World War I, due to his lectures on England at the Ecole libre des sciences politiques, his three-volume analysis of utilitarianism published between 1901 and 1904, a 1906 article on the birth of Methodism, and the 1912 bookL'Angleterre en 1815. In these last two works he argued—in what became known as the Halévy thesis—that English Protestantism, and especially the evangelical forms of English Protestantism associated with Methodism, were a key element of Britain's sociopolitical stability. This deep-seated religiosity, he argued, was supportive of British liberalism and British philanthropy; it was responsible for an England that, in his own words, "governs itself, in place of being governed from above."

The history of French liberalism is undergoing a renaissance. For much of the twentieth century, it was viewed with disdain, as insufficiently "engaged," as too tentative in its demands for social reform, as overly optimistic concerning the progress of reason and science. Scholarship during the past three decades has challenged these views, though it is notable that there is still, to my knowledge, no general history of French liberalism that goes past the consolidation of the Third Republic in the late 1870s. Part of the ongoing reassessment has been the consequence of the decline of revolutionary illusions and of marxisant frameworks of analysis following 1968, reinforced by the more general decline of the left following the end of the Cold War in 1989 and the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991. Another element contributing to this reassessment has been the emergence of more nuanced definitions of "liberalism," ones that are not limited to legal (civil liberties), political (constitutionalism), and/or economic (free trade) dimensions. Equally important, scholars are insisting, are conceptions of science, of religion, of the role of the state, of solidarity, of sociability, of moeurs, of identity, of gender, of the self.

A review essay on a book by Martin Malia, History's Locomotives: Revolutions and the Making of the Modern World (New Haven: Yale U Press, 2006).