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The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought ed. by Gareth Stedman Jones and Gregory Claeys (review)

Reviewing this final volume of The Cambridge History of Political Thought is a daunting task. By far the longest in the six-volume set (1,160 pages, twenty-seven individual essays), it covers an immense ground, extending from “French Revolution to fin de siècle,” in the title of Jose Harris’s fearsomely erudite epilogue. Eschewing an older canonical approach, it sets out to broaden the ground from which politics can be understood, seeking to analyze “the provenance and character of leading political ideas,” while contextualizing both their specific terms of emergence and the character of their resonance; it wishes “to trace the emergence of particular preoccupations and to delineate the development of distinctive forms and languages of political thinking.” Crucially in this regard, the editors deliberately engage those newly emergent domains of thought (political economy, changing conceptions of law and history, social and natural sciences, and aesthetics), whose impact was casting “so many inherited political categories . . . into disarray” (1). “In the face of this intellectual shift,” they rightly say, confining the volume “to a study of nineteenth-century political theory, narrowly defined, would have produced a lopsided picture of the character and range of political thinking in the period” (2). In those terms, this book mainly fulfils its own charge. However, some explicit attention might have been paid to explaining the thinking behind the chosen thematic architecture, which is organized around four unequal parts: “Political thought after the French Revolution” (seven essays, 247 pages); “Modern liberty and its defenders” (seven essays, 221 pages); “Modern liberty and its critics” (three essays, 123 pages); and “Secularity, reform and modernity” (nine essays, 289 pages). What exactly is intended by this fourfold division and its contents might have been clearer. Whether the opening section is meant to provide temporal foundations from early in the century or framing arguments for the century as a whole could have been explained, for example, and the choice of what to include seems partial and lacking coherence. In their own terms, counter-revolutionary thought, romanticism, nationalism, Hegel and Hegelianism, historians and lawyers, social science, and forms of revolutionism all make obvious sense as introductory treatments. But why not states and sovereignty, religion and the churches, the social question, or nature? The editors offer minimal insight into their thinking here. Greater self-consciousness on their part, along with some effort at mapping the larger historiographical landscape—say, by brief contextual introductions for each of the four parts—would have strengthened the volume’s usefulness as a handbook for teaching and reference. Too often the social science-style citations overload the exposition of a particular essay without giving any direct or critical access to the authors and literatures concerned. Only the occasional contributor (such as Cheryl B. Welch and Lucy Delap) pauses long enough to provide such guidance. The effect of these omissions is magnified as the volume goes on because the coverage necessarily stretches thin, whether topically or geographically. Even the longer fourth part can provide only selective access to the possible range of pertinent ideas and movements. If the whole remains regrettably less than the sum of its parts, the aggregate of contributions remains nonetheless imposing. The authors converge consistently to a