Michael Sonenscher, "After Kant: The Romans, the Germans, and the Moderns in the History of Political Thought" (Princeton UP, 2023)
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today i'm very honored to be speaking with dr uh michael cementure dr michael sanancher is a fellow

of King's College at the University of Cambridge and his many books include Before the Deluge published by Princeton University Press. But today he's here to speak with us about his latest book called After Kant, the Romans, the Germans and the Moderns in the History of Political Thought published by Princeton in 2023. Michael, welcome to New Books Network. Thank you very much, Morteza. I'm very happy to have this opportunity to talk to you and talk about my book.

Before we start, I just do like to remind our listeners that there's another interview with Michael on New Books Network about his previous book on capitalism. So I do strongly recommend you to listen to that. And I'm sure this one will be just as interesting as the previous interview we had.

But before we start, can you please briefly tell us about the idea of this book? There are many, many books on Immanuel Kant, and I'm interested to know how this book approaches him differently. Is it in a way the historiography of political thought? To some degree, that's the right way to think about it. But I think...

The aim of the book was initially a little bit more straightforward. It was to sort of set the historical, historiographical and conceptual record straight by putting things in a more straightforwardly, chronologically correct setting. So one of the

things that I think I referred to in the very beginning in the preface to the book was that the aim was to get things right just straightforwardly chronologically. So we are often told that it was Marx who, in his famous 18th Brumaire of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, said that history first happens as tragedy and then as fast. In fact, the person who said this initially was Immanuel Kant,

And he did so, what, 50 years earlier in an essay entitled An Idea of Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View. And Kant makes the point in the context of talking about history and its relationship to the notion of justice, if history has something to do with justice.

improvement or progress, then it sort of looks, Kant says, as if the only people who really benefit from history are the ones who come last. So there's something rather funny about the idea of history itself. And it's that idea that Kant says means that history has something to do, first of all, with tragedy and later as fast.

That's one phrase. The other phrase that I picked out and again tried to put back into its original chronological setting was the notion of the death of God. We all think that the notion of the death of God comes from the mid or late 19th century and the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche. In fact, it's an idea that was circulating very widely in late 18th, early 19th century

Germany and all the German-speaking parts of Europe, and France, because it was a kind of joke of a rather sinister sort, made in, at the time, a fairly famous novel called Subyanska, written by a satirist and moralist named Jean-Paul Richter.

And the thing that Richter or Jean-Paul, as he was known to his contemporaries, did was to have the death of God announced by Christ, which is quite a

striking idea and many, many people noticed it, including one of the people I've written quite a lot about in the book, Germaine de Stael, who had the idea included in the famous book that she wrote about Germany published in the second decade of the 19th century.

So history is tragedy, history is farce, comes from Kant rather than Marx. The death of God, as announced by Christ, comes from Jean-Paul rather than Nietzsche. The distinction between negative and positive liberty, which is usually associated, well, now with Isaiah Berlin,

And most renditions associated with Bonne Romance Constant in the early 19th century is again an idea that is actually made coined by Kant. And similarly, the notion of romanticism is associated with the romance languages, the languages that developed Romanticism.

in the aftermath of the fall of the Roman Empire on the periphery between Italy and the German speaking world. Romanticism comes from this idiom. So the idea initially of the book is simply to say an awful lot of the assumptions that we have about what was going on intellectually and morally and politically happened

much earlier than we usually assume. And that raises a question about, well, what really was going on if all these things took place 50 years or more earlier than they are usually taken to be? And that's the sort of starting point of this book. And that's why this book is about

partly the history of political thought, partly just straightforwardly history, and partly the way in which both history and the history of political thought have been written about. So it's a kind of correction to received ideas, both chronological, but I hope also to some degree conceptual. That's what I've been trying to do in the book, or was trying to do in the book. Thank you very much. I hope that provides some information.

Yeah, it does. It does. As you mentioned in the interview, lots of these concepts that we normally associate with later thinkers have their origins elsewhere. And I guess it's sort of reflected also in the title of your book, the subtitling in your book, which is the Romans, the Germans and the moderns in the history of political thought.

In your book, there are a number of concepts that you define. One of them that is a key one is Kant's concept of unsocial sociability. What did Kant mean by this? Yes. Again, it's a matter of revising and, to some degree, correcting ideas

received ideas because usually I think this phrase is taken to mean that Kant thought that

people are sort of unsocial and standoffish and prone to having arguments and coming into conflict and that the emphasis in other words falls on the adjective rather than the noun, on the unsocial side of the phrase rather than the sociable side of the phrase. And I think that what Kant actually meant followed on from Rousseau's thought

And the emphasis fell on the sociability side of this phrase. In other words, what Kant wanted to emphasize was that people form societies too early and in too limited and particular a set of ways. They form societies among those with whom they have something to do. They form societies that are limited and partial and

particular and because each of these societies then has its own particular institutions arrangements, governments states and what have you

Each of these societies has a particular set of more than individual requirements, more than the requirements of its members, but requirements of these supra individual entities, states, governments, laws, needs, in other words, resources in order to be what they are and to provide a setting for the lives of its members.

And so there is a kind of competitive relationship built into the existence of each of these societies from the very moment at which they're established. That's, I think, the point of Kant's phrase, that it's sociability that's the problem rather than the unsociability. The unsociability is a derivative effect of the sociability.

People associate for their own reasons too soon, too quickly and too partially. That's the problem. It's a problem about sociability rather than a problem about unsociability. And it's that that means that the world is, from Kant's perspective,

radically divided world, a world in which you can't expect and this is again a kind of continuation of a big argument that took place a little bit earlier in the 18th century between Rousseau and his friend, frenemy Denis Diderot

and the degree to which, well, there is something unitary about humanity or there isn't. Diderot argued that there is, and he did so on the basis that, well, humans have needs and these needs are pretty comparable wherever they are, whatever they are.

Rousseau said, well, no, that's not quite right, because among the needs that people have are needs for one another. And the needs that they might have for one another are local, partial and likely to bring them into an antagonistic relationship with the members of other societies. So sociability in that respect is important.

unsocial because sociability gives rise to states and governments and laws and states and governments and laws need resources in order to be what they are and that's a problem. I hope that provides a little bit of an understanding of or an idea of what Kant's phrase was intended to mean and it means just to finish it means that well

There's a problem because if it is the case that states and governments and laws are the setting in which human societies are formed, it's very, very difficult to see how to get out of them. And you have to think of then ways of dealing with this more or less ineradicable problem. There is no single humanity and find ways of dealing with multiple humanities, multiple societies, multiple states and all the problems associated with them.

I hope that provides a little bit of an answer. And I'm also interested to know about how this idea is related to collective choice or action, this idea of unsociable sociability. I suppose because, well, collective choice and collective action is sort of agonistic, that we owe our allegiances to the institutions and states of which we are members.

And these states and their institutions and agencies are the means by which collective choices and collective actions are possible. But because they are always in a certain kind of sense, or they're always radically separate from those of other states, there is

a built-in problem to collective choice and collective action because the collectivities will necessarily be subordinate to or subject to or concerned with the interests and the imperatives of a world made up of states. There is another idea as well, the key idea that you come back in several chapters in your book, palingenesis. What did you mean by palingenesis? Yes.

Well, Kant didn't mean very much by palingenesis because palingenesis is an older 18th century and probably older than that concept that began to circulate very widely in the last quarter or so of the 18th century in the light of developments in what we would now think of as biology and chemistry and physiology.

and the degree to which, well, some living creatures do seem to be able to reproduce themselves without necessarily doing so by means of sexual generation. It can happen. And the idea that it can happen gave rise to a very widespread interest in natural forces, natural powers that

could comparably be thought of as arising in human history and human affairs. So the concept of palingenesis is simply the idea of rebirth, that a society can die but can come back in a different form. It's like, in a sense, as I think I tried to describe it, a phoenix. It's dead, but the phoenix is something that will be reborn out of the ashes of the fire that consumed it,

And this could be a way of thinking about how societies can be regenerated and brought back into a better set of arrangements and moral capabilities. That was what this idea of palingenesis was meant to indicate. It was a fairly prominent feature

of one of Kant's students. And again, as with Rousseau and Diderot, the relationship between Kant and Herder was a very complicated and antagonistic one. And Kant was not particularly impressed by the way in which Herder picked up this concept of palingenesis and used it to describe

the course of human history as something which involved recovering, restoring and bringing back something which looked as if it belonged to the remote past. Can't argue that, well, you know, it might apply to moths. Caterpillars change into moths and so on and so forth. It isn't actually a rebirth. It's just a transformation or a metamorphosis. And so, you know,

Kant was very, very scathing about Herder's thought. Herder was equally scathing about Kant. And many of the readers of these two people did tend to opt rather more for Herder than for Kant, particularly among readers of Herder in France in the first, what, 30, 40 years of the 19th century.

And my suggestion is that this concept of palingenesis was a kind of precursor of what by 1848 came to be the modern concept of revolution. Revolutions in some sort of sense destroy everything, but also in another sense create everything. And that's what the idea of palingenesis was designed or was used to indicate. Revolutions are

deaths and rebirths in the way that palingenesis was once taken to mean in relation to, first of all, natural life and then events in human history. I hope that gives you some idea of the difference between Kant and Herder and the difference between palingenesis and metamorphosis. Yeah. And I was speaking to someone else

just an hour ago, we also talked a little bit about Kant. And the idea was that did Kant really have a philosophy of history? Because this idea of polygenesis seems also to interact with the idea of history and politics. Did Kant really have an idea of the philosophy of history? I think the short answer is yes. And it had something to do with...

human capacities and human capabilities and the degree to which human capacities and capabilities developed and changed, but did so within the framework of a rather more durable set of institutions and arrangements and moral concerns, rather than one in which everything, in a sense, was transformed from one

period of time to another. So a different kind of philosophy of history from the kind of philosophy of history that could be found in the thought of Herder and one which is very compatible with the kind of philosophy of history that

began to be developed in the early 19th century by Hegel. So I would argue or suggest there's quite a lot of continuity from Kant to Hegel, rather less continuity from Herder to Kant or Hegel. And how did his political vision, Kant's political vision, try to establish that relationship between history and politics?

Well, it's about something to do with mitigating the consequences of unsociable, sorry, unsocial sociability. I'd say that for Kant, history is the other side of unsocial sociability, just as unsocial sociability was or is the other side of the human inability to define and establish the content of

abstract concepts like goodness or justice or freedom. Everyone has an intuitive sense that there are such things, but it's not obvious that they apply straightforwardly in any real sense at all.

And so one solution is to try and get these concepts right, which is the kind of Herder solution. The other solution was to try and find ways of mitigating or circumventing these problems and trying to identify indirect means of improving human life, either by raising the stakes so high that the risks of

transforming or choosing to opt for revolution seemed to be so dangerous that the risk was too great, or by highlighting the importance of things like

aesthetics or conventions or imitations or other kinds of ways by which people might interact without necessarily having to deal with these subjects politically in a direct and straightforward sort of sense. So there's a kind of dualism that is a feature of Kant's thought between the political and the non-political.

And this kind of dualism was a feature of the kind of thinking about states, governments and laws on the one side and ordinary everyday life on the other side. That was a feature of the people I was writing about in my book. So it's a matter of thinking about the relationship between history and politics on the one side, but

history and life, if you like, on the other side and how the politics and the ordinary everyday life are related to one another. That was, I think, the insight that I think Kant established and provided as a basis for thinking about some of the problems that his own thought had raised.

When we started the interview, you mentioned a number of ideas that we normally associate with later thinkers, but they have their origins there. One of them was negative and positive liberty, which we normally associate with Isaiah Berlin.

And there are a lot of thinkers in your book, and I wish we had enough time to talk about all of them. But there was one group that I was really interested in, and I guess mainly because I knew Jermaine de Stael, that was a member of the group. And that's Coppett's group. It would be great if we could talk about them, and also the problem of combining negative and positive liberty, which was a part of

political concerns of this group. Yeah, so certainly part of what got me interested in the whole subject matter of the book was finding out rather more about the

The membership of the Copé group. Copé is just a place near to Geneva, which is where Germain de Stael's father, Jacques Necker, happened to acquire property. And so she grew up there before she moved to Paris. So Copé is a place where she...

She lived, people came and visited her, and it turned into a very extensive network of people writing and thinking about politics, morality, aesthetics, life, how to think about these kinds of things in the aftermath of the most dramatic times of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars.

So how to think about catastrophes and what to deal with the aftermath of catastrophes in ways that encompassed more or less every modern European country. So the membership of the COPPE group

the most famous members of course Germain d'Israël and Benjamin Constant but there were I don't know several dozen of these people Prosper de Barante who was a friend of them both in France

Charles Léronal, Simon de Sismondi, who's a famous political economist, but before he became a famous political economist, wrote about the Italian republics of the Middle Ages. This is what he began writing about. Sismondi wrote, I don't know how he managed to do it. He was a graphomaniac. The book on the Italian republics, I think it's 16 volumes. He then

moved on to a history of France, which I think is published in about 40 volumes. How the guy managed to do this is mysterious, but he must have had a lot of backup and a lot of help from people who he didn't perhaps give as much credit to like, well, among others, Mrs. Sismondi.

as might have been the case. Shismondi is also interesting because his brother-in-law was a British writer and political thinker named James Mackintosh, who was once supposed to be one of the most brilliant people in early 19th century Britain. He was a very clever fellow. He didn't write very much. He became famous by writing a big attack on Edmund Burke in the 1790s and then...

had second thoughts about this attack on Burke and became a very close ally of Burke's towards the end of Burke's life. Macintosh lived on into the third decade of the 19th century, was a close friend of Germain de Staël and Barent and married one of Sismondi's sisters. So he was Sismondi's brother-in-law.

and had a great deal more to do with thinking about what was going on in France, Switzerland, Germany, than is often assumed, as is also the case with the membership of the Copé group as a whole. It's usually taken to be a largely Franco-French group of people, but it's

capabilities, interests and familiarity, particularly with what was published and discussed in the German speaking parts of Europe, which of course includes parts of Switzerland, was perhaps a little bit more substantial than is often said to be the case in studies of the COPE group. One reason why this

hasn't come through is because in editions of Madame de Stael's correspondence

The editors, understandably, published only the letters that she sent rather than those that she received. So there isn't much indication of the very substantial correspondence and friendship that she had with the late 18th, early 19th century German moral and political thinker, one of the founders of the University of Berlin, Wilhelm von Humboldt.

And Humboldt's correspondence with Stahl appears in Humboldt's papers rather than in Stahl's papers and is not made as much use of as her correspondence with others. So there's a sort of German Kantian, Hegelian, well, not so much Hegelian, but a German...

dimension to the copy group which doesn't come through as much. It does to a substantial degree come through, but perhaps not as much as it might do.

And that does have a bearing on how we think about what these people were up to and what these people were up to was rather nearer to thinking about the range of problems that I've tried to describe in form Kant's concerns with history, morality and politics than might otherwise be thought of.

So they're a very interesting group of people. They say interesting things about not just what was going on in Germany, but what turned into Romanticism, because Romanticism is a kind of fusion of the legacy of the Romans and the discovery that, well, the legacy of the Romans was modified very substantially by the legacy of the Germans. So there's a kind of continuity there.

into the Coppe group between the thought of Montesquieu and Rousseau and Kant and this concern with, well,

how much of the ancients has been modified with what came later and how much therefore is what is modern, not entirely different from what was originally Roman, but also substantially modified by what is Germanic and different from Rome. Different in terms of the kinds of institutions, but also in terms of the relationship between

the individuals and the community or between what's inside the human individual mind and what's supplied by the laws, the community and the arrangements established on the outside. I hope that's a fairly helpful summary. It is, it is, yeah. And you mentioned Rousseau, which brings me to my next question here. One of the

You know, interesting parts of the book is that it is about, your book is about Kant, but also Jean-Jacques Rousseau features prominently in the book. And the way you also compare their ideas. So you have the idea of autonomy, the problem of autonomy in Kant's thoughts. And you have Jean-Jacques Rousseau's idea of perfectibility. Can you talk how Rousseau's related to Kant here?

Well, as I say, it's a difficult question. Chronologically, of course, Rousseau's concept of perfectibility came before Kant's concept of autonomy.

But in conceptual terms, it looks as if perfectibility presupposes some kind of capacity for autonomy. In other words, that people have an imaginative ability to think of alternatives to the world in which they live or these surroundings in which they lead their lives. And it's this sort of imaginative ability

capability, which you could say is common to the concepts of both perfectibility, meaning essentially just changing things, improving things, creating something different, trying out something that hasn't been tried out before, doing things in ways that might be a little bit different or substantially different from how they've always been done. That's, I think, the idea of perfectibility. People change and they change,

both their environments and the resources that they have at their disposal, and possibly by doing so, they find ways of creating different ways of life. Autonomy, meaning what? Giving yourself your own laws, creating an idea of what you should do, a set of values that you ought to impose upon yourself.

In both cases, the initial idea is connected to this human ability to imagine something that isn't supplied by the senses or supplied by from external resources, the imagination. And this was one of Germain de Stael's big concerns.

creates things from within. It's a kind of magical power that can produce something new and different. And it's in this sense that these concepts of perfectibility and autonomy were connected to one another. And it was Rousseau who I think everybody recognised, who

highlighted this human capacity in a positive sense in his various publications. People noticed that about Rousseau and noticed that what he was doing was

substantially different from the standard way in which both the imagination and the concepts, well, perfectibility is Rousseau's own coinage, but this capacity for improvement and its relationship to autonomy were connected. Rousseau is the one who got it going, everybody said. I hope that manages to provide an answer to the question in the limited amount of time we've got. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chapter 8 is quite an interesting chapter. So you talked about Rousseau earlier. When we come to chapter 8, which is from Romanticism to Classicism, you give us this overview of the idea of humanitarianism. There is Hegelianism, Saint-Simonianism. And there are lots of thinkers you discuss again in this chapter.

But can you give us an overview of the argument in this chapter? Well, the overview is sort of connected to what comes a little bit later in the book, which is about the...

frequency with which everything that we talk about in the context of, well, politics seems to end in the phrase "ism". There's humanitarianism, senseimonianism, industrialism, and you can go on and on to a whole range of much more familiar terms like socialism, communism, nationalism, liberalism, and the like.

And one of the things that I was trying to do in the book was to show that these ism words are more interesting than they look, because they are a kind of shorthand or roadmap of a whole range of clusters of different sets of ideas, which brings them together as a single word.

And in some sort of sense, they've come to be part of political life. They've been around, of course, also for a much, much longer period of time than the period covered by this book. You know, if you think about, well, Protestantism or Arianism or Judaism or all sorts of terms which are related to

to differences in religion, confessional allegiance, national identity, all sorts of things that go back many, many hundreds and more years connected initially to Greek ideas, Greek concerns with, let's say, Stoicism or Platonism or cynicism and all the rest of it. So there's a vast degree of continuity

in words that end in "-ism". And one of the concerns that I had in writing this book was to try to show that a lot of the things that look as if they're sort of new and the product of relatively recent

economic, social, political changes have actually a much, much longer and older pedigree. And what we're dealing with is in that respect, a variation on this idea of metamorphosis, rather than anything to do with the idea of palingenesis. In other words, it's not a question of new beginnings, but of mutations and modifications and adjustments and rearrangements

of ways of thinking arguments uh conceptual um uh clusters that um uh are modified over the course of time and that applies of course to this notion of humanitarianism humanitarism which is it was a french word because there was an english word humanity

humanitarianism, which referred to something completely different, namely that God became a human in the form of Christ, rather than, as other people said, Christ was in some sort of sense, a divine part of the Trinity. So humanitarisme is a French word

word that refers to things pertaining to humanity rather than divinity and that's quite important i think because it is a variation on the broader idea of the difference between divine and human capabilities and the extent to which well you have to draw a line uh in ways that um uh

were connected to the thought of people like Kant and Fichte and Schelling and Hegel and all these Germans in the late 18th, early 19th century. Humanitarianism was connected to that because one of the things that these people were interested in talking about was something that in German was called, well, in English is called

translation of a German phrase about, well, the vocation of mankind was the literal translation of the German phrase. In other words, you know, why are there humans? Why are we here? What was the point of, you could say, the creation? What is the point of life, particularly in the light of Kant's rather

counterintuitive account of history and the content of history, in which it seems that whatever improvement there is in history, it has to be only the very final members of the human race who benefit from all the developments that have taken place over the course of time. And this concept of

Humanitarism, humanitarianism, was in part a kind of response to that. It tried, in other words, to show that there was something within history and something about the capacities of human beings

arrangements and collective institutions that could be identified as offsetting this idea that progress benefited only those who come last. And that's what these people are partly using the term to refer to. They're also using the term to refer to something, again, that the copy group

emphasised quite a lot, which was the similarity and difference between what had gone into the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, namely the hollowing out of Roman institutions and their vulnerability to invasions from the north,

So in that sort of sense, it's a kind of spatial transformation. Things happen because the external world has erupted into the internal world.

what the people who were associated with the copy group were interested in thinking about was the degree to which, well, the time of the French Revolution and the eruption of popular politics was rather like that. But the explosion didn't come from without, from the outside world, but came from within and involved the assertion of the rights and entitlements of

of proletarians, ordinary people, people who had to work in order to live, their presence within political societies. So it's sort of like the ancients, but not quite like the ancients, because the eruption came from within rather than without. And the concept of humanitarianism was in part a kind of way of thinking about what could be done to

create something analogous to what had come out of the, um,

the fusion of the North and the South, out of which modernity had begun in the late Middle Ages and subsequently how to create, in other words, a new kind of fusion between instead of the North and the South, below and above, if you like, or the proletariat and the bourgeoisie that might give rise

rise to a new and different kind of culture, a new and different kind of politics, and a new and different set of human capabilities that could be set in place in

the 19th century and thereafter. That's what humanitarism, humanitarianism was initially taken to be, a kind of new culture, you could call it, comparable to the new culture that had emerged after the fall of the Roman Empire, but this time after the fall of the antagonism between social classes and between the proletariat and

and the bourgeoisie. And this is what people like Saint-Aubeuve and most famously, I suppose, Alphonse de Lamartine started to write about in relation to these people who came to be called Saint-Simonians, followers of the Comte de Saint-Simon in the 1830s and thereafter. And, well, the subject matter of their concerns, although

range of subjects that fell under this broad rubric of humanitarianism are the kinds of things that, well, we still think about the distribution of property, the part played by public finance and public credit in modifying or

rearranging the distribution of resources, the assertion of rights that were not part of earlier times, like most importantly, the right to work, and then a whole range of further putative rights and how to cater for these in ways that will not be a source of

further antagonism and conflict, but might provide a basis for a better and more equitable set of social and political arrangements. That's roughly what these people were thinking about in using this term. I hope that provides a little bit of an idea and a little bit of an idea also of how these ism words were connected to the earlier emphasis on unsocial sociability that Kant took over from Rousseau.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And as you mentioned earlier, there were a lot of thinkers that you mentioned in this chapter. And I was also myself interested in Saint Simonius, which you covered. There is another chapter, the next chapter, chapter 9, is the return of Rome.

And again, there are a number of thinkers there. One of them, Heinrich Arns, if I'm again pronouncing the name correctly. I'm interested to know what you mean by the return of Rome and how that Roman revival, according to this thinker that I just mentioned, and the idea of Roman liberty changed.

was kind of maybe led to imperialism. It would be great if you could talk about that chapter and the return of Rome. Okay, well, what the Coppe people were rather keen to emphasize was the extent to which

modern culture, modern values, modern politics were a kind of amalgamation of Roman culture, Roman arrangements and institutions, Roman law, and post-Roman, notably Germanic, customs and Germanic concerns with what

usually associated with a concept called the Genossenschaft, a community, a fellowship, the idea that we're all in it together. We have a joint responsibility for the arrangements that we have. We can't do anything individually without the prior authorization of the whole community. This kind of, the community comes first rather than the individual, if you like.

And the assumption or the claim associated with the Koppe people is that, well, modern politics is a kind of combination of these two things, positive and negative liberty, you could call it, or negative and positive liberty, the negative side coming from the Roman side, the positive side coming from the Germanic side. And they argued that that positive side, the German side, had offset and

neutralized some of the more unprepossessing attributes of the legacy of Rome. Rome, they argued, was a highly centralized, highly

authoritarian society under Roman imperial rule, one in which property was highly individualized, in which possession and authorization to possess were associated with the Roman patriarchy.

And inheritance was very much centered on property passing, not so much property itself, but the idea of an individual will being transmitted from one generation to the next. So the will was passed.

Paramount, the distribution of resources was secondary. Modern society and modern arrangements, they argued, were different because of the legacy of the Germans. The Germans with this much more communal and collective orientation in their values had created something which was a kind of fusion of the two, negative and positive liberty, and

As a result, this was the basis of something which might in the future turn into something which would, as I tried to say in answering the earlier question, a kind of fusion of what came from above and what came from below. The proletariat and the bourgeoisie would at some point turn into a more integrated society, community.

And it was this preoccupation with, if you like, integration, overriding differences and conflicts,

that seemed to others rather incompatible with the existing divisions that were to be found in, well, for example, early 19th century France, but all over early 19th century, well, Western Europe or Western Europe and the United States as well.

the emphasis there was well you know the injustice in the inequality and the divisions are just insurmountable as they stand and we need to find ways of dealing with them and this is what some of the critics of the coppet circle

began to do in the 1830s and 1840s, some of whom were people like Victor Hugo, others of whom were this other historian, poet and philosopher, very creative writer, very terrifying figure to read, Edgar Kiné.

who certainly deserves a better or greater amount of historical and historiographical attention than I think he's been given, if only because of the power of his prose and the vividness of his imagination.

and some of the more scary things that came along with that. And what these people began to do was to show that many of the claims that in the late 18th, early 19th century, people like Sismondi or Stahl or Constant had made about the legacy of the Germans applied equally forcefully and equally powerfully to the legacy of the Romans.

So they began to, in a certain sort of sense, turn the Romans into Germans or alternatively to turn the Germans into Romans, depending upon the emphasis. And many of the qualities that were associated in the early 19th century with what we now think of as Romanticism turned into by the 1840s, 1850s, into qualities that were

taken to be well Roman or Neo-Roman or rather more to do with whatever once had been associated with the Germans. And one of the people who picked this up quite powerfully and interestingly was this law professor, who I've written a little bit about in the book, law professor who in most respects is not terribly interesting, called Heinrich Ahrens,

who initially was a kind of, well, he was a graduate student in Belgium and who then studied a little bit in Germany, taught a little bit in Brussels, had one or two altercations in Göttingen when he was a student there.

and eventually, after 1830, ended up in Paris, where he functioned as a kind of intermediary between German thinking, French and Belgian thinking, about law, history, politics, and things of that kind. And Ahrens...

became a follower of a rather strange German philosopher, a person by the name of of Klauser, who I've written about elsewhere, who argued, like many others, that well, modernity had to rely very much more on the legacy of the Germanic communities and possibly the German city-states

than it should rely on the legacy of Rome and Roman conceptions, particularly of property, particularly of individuality and the idea that the individual will was the thing that mattered in both domestic and public life. And Ahlens was in this sort of sense a very energetic promoter of

a kind of modification of this fusion of the Germanic and the Roman, which in the 1830s and 1840s acquired quite a large following in many parts of Europe. It then migrated to Spain and from Spain it migrated to South America.

and turned into what is still quite an important political ideology in parts of modern South America, classism still exists.

it doesn't have much of a presence any longer in Europe, a little bit in Spain, a little bit in Portugal, but not in anything like the sense that it had in the 1830s and 1840s in France or in Belgium and even to some degree in parts of Britain. So the claim that people like Quinet and

Hugo and therefore Michelet's, yeah, sorry, I'd forgotten about Jules Michelet, big, big early 19th century French historian, all began to emphasise the extent to which, well, this emphasis on the legacy of the Germans is just misplaced because all the qualities that had been associated with the northern peoples were as visible and as powerful

in medieval Spain, medieval Italy, and it was they which needed to be thought about because they would in reality turn out to be the conduit for a revival of the important features of Roman law and Roman republicanism in the modern world.

Kine, Michelet, and to some degree the people who followed them, changed the presence and the value of Roman culture in modern Europe. Its most obvious and most famous outcome is the 19th century concept of the Renaissance, which after all is the rebirth of Rome rather than the rebirth of Germany. And the Renaissance

came to have a very controversial presence in 19th and 20th century European cultural and intellectual life. And this is where it comes from. It's a kind of well, it's the Neo Roman version of Rome. I hope that provides a little bit of an answer to your question. Yeah. And speaking of these political ideas,

Can you explain, that's what you discussed in your last chapter, that many of these political ideologies were the products of French Revolution and also the impact of European industrialization. Now with the French Revolution, I guess more or less people are familiar with the concept that these political ideologies came from, French Revolution, but I'm interested to know more about it and more particularly the impact of European industrialization on these political ideologies.

Oh, it's a big, big question. The last chapter of the book was designed to sort of sum up the argument of the whole book and to try to indicate that in the last, whatever, quarter of the 19th century, particularly in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, 1871,

There was this very widespread interest in trying to find ways of reconciling or integrating the very different and until then rather antagonistic legacies of the Romans and the Germans, or the emphasis, as people very frequently did, the emphasis on the Romans as the, if you like, the progenitors of

the political theory of possessive individualism, competitive markets, centralized power, all the kinds of things that came to be associated with a certain kind of populism or Caesarism and the politics of

Imperial France and Imperial Germany after the Franco-Prussian War. So that was one current. And then the other side was the concern with the state and its military and financial power, how to find ways of using these kinds of capabilities in ways that were not oriented too strongly towards empire control.

authority and centralization. So the idea was to think about, again, the legacies of the Germans and the Romans or individuality versus community as something that could be transcended and overcome and turned into something which was a rather more viable

form of managing politics, I suppose. And it's in this sort of context, as I think I tried to show towards the end of the book, that this interesting words that ends in "-ism" and its relationship to party politics, competition between political parties and competitive elections came to be seen in very much more positive ways than had earlier been the case.

and gave rise to a whole range of ways of thinking about the relationship between nations and states and political parties and electoral politics that hadn't really been thought about or discussed as positively as they came to be discussed in the late 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. I think I used

the work of a French historian of political ideas, somebody named Henri Michel, to try to illustrate this and spent a bit of time towards the end of the book in writing a little bit about what Michel had to say about the political thought of the 18th century, how it had been rather forgotten about or neglected and overlooked

over the course of the 19th century as concerns about, on the one side, the power of the state, and on the other side, the impotence of the individual had come to occupy the center of people's attentions. And Michel's concern was to try to go back to some of the kinds of concerns that had existed towards the end of the 18th century in Rousseau and Kant, and to show how

These could be reapplied to the new setting of party politics in the late 19th and early 20th century as a basis for now thinking about politics in conditions of, well,

competitive elections, political organizations, but also in conditions of public finance and the resources that states require to maintain economic and financial stability as much as, for example, social and political stability. So the economics and the finances begin to play a big, big part in thinking about politics in ways that

had earlier uh been rather less the case so that's how I I think um the book ends and that's what the connection between the industrialization and the politics was intended to be thank you very much uh Professor Mike Elson and sure as usual it's been great speaking with you about your book and as I mentioned at the beginning of the interview there is another podcast

about your earlier book on New Books Network, which I strongly recommend our listeners to go and listen to. And this book, it's 400 pages, over 400 pages, if I'm not mistaken. And there are lots of thinkers that I've never heard about. So to me, it was really, really enlightening. And that's why I'm also encouraging our listeners to pick up the book and read it and go through the chapters and the content. They'll see which areas might be more interesting to them.

But hopefully we have managed to give our listeners an overview of the book. So thank you so much for your time to speak with us on New Books Network. Thank you. And I hope this will be of interest to your listeners.