Suchergebnisse

This article explores the significant yet neglected topic of environmental awareness in nineteenth-century French political economy, and the French school of "industrialism" in particular. It focuses on the work of the one-time Saint-Simonian and political economist Michel Chevalier (1806–79) as an interesting example of an environmentally sensitive political economy of "industrialism." The article reveals how Chevalier's political economy was informed by a sophisticated and environmentally conscious understanding of nature that came to mark scientific and engineering thinking in early nineteenth-century French academic circles. It shows how this understanding of nature was transmitted through publications and lectures of scientists and engineers within leading French academic institutions such as the Ecole polytechnique and the Ecole des mines. The article demonstrates that Chevalier's scientific and engineering education at these institutions shaped his understanding of nature and society as intimately interconnected and mutually impacting. The article then explores how his view of nature and society developed in a more decidedly Romantic direction during his time as a Saint-Simonian. The Romantic sensibility of this time was short-lived, but a keen environmental awareness dating back to Chevalier's student days remained a significant feature of his later reflections in political economy. It was this particular quality of Chevalier's political economy that set it apart both from the French liberal school of political economy, with its very low environmental awareness, and from the more fully ecological political economy of the kind advanced by his fellow Saint-Simonians Pierre Leroux and Jean Reynaud. Finally, the article shows what has not been widely appreciated: that an environmentally sensitive political economy, of which Chevalier's was a good example, was endorsed by a large body of nineteenth-century French scientific and administrative opinion.

Selon les auteurs néo-républicains — Quentin Skinner, Philip Pettit et Jean-Fabien Spitz — une conception appauvrie de la liberté serait à l'origine des malheurs du libéralisme. Ils soutiennent que les lacunes de la conception libérale de la liberté ne peuvent être corrigées que si celle-ci est remplacée par une conception plus rigoureuse de la liberté, dont les racines se trouvent dans l'humanisme républicain. L'objectif de cet article est d'analyser les critiques néo-républicaines de la conception libérale de la liberté, définie de manière exemplaire par Isaiah Berlin, puis d'évaluer dans quelle mesure elles sont ou non des critiques justifiées de la définition de la liberté négative.

A review essay on a book by Gustave de Beaumont, Ireland: Social, Political, and Religious (London and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). Notes.