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Although the modern age is often described as the age of democratic revolutions, the subject of popular foundings has not captured the imagination of modern political thought. Early democratic theory, marked by the historical experience of the ancient Greek polis and enraptured by the Roman republican legacy, at least since the time of Niccolò Machiavelli and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, has elided the theme of collective foundings and democratic higher lawmaking. By confining the question of new beginnings to the instituting acts of mythical lawgivers and heroic founders, usually located outside the demos, democratic theory did not systematically address political and legal foundings on its own terms. Classical liberalism, meanwhile, has been inclined to emphasize juridical continuity, legality, and gradual political changes. Even in its social contract versions, with the prominent exception of John Locke, liberalism's focus has been more on a fictional natural state and the counterfactual notion of an original contract among equal and free persons and less on actual political ruptures, legal innovations, and new institutional beginnings. In fact, the idea of a social contract was predominantly used to explain political obligation, to justify obedience, to describe the consensual basis of authority, and, in a few cases, to legitimate resistance, rather than to account for those historical moments of genuine rupture and transformation. At a later stage, classical Marxism attempted to fill this gap by invoking the imminent possibility of a proletarian revolution, but its historical determinism and economic materialism has led Marxism to pay more attention to long-term social and economic mutations than to political, legal, institutional, and cultural changes, which were perceived as mere epiphenomenal effects of deeper structural developments unfolding in the realm of the material production of society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the chief ways in which states have tried to order, that is to limit, the violence of war is through law. The international law of war grew out of customary practices developed by armies as they clashed on the field. There were three great periods when these customs were codified into written law: the seventeenth century (done by individual writers, most notably Hugo Grotius), the late nineteenth/twentieth centuries (done by international conferences), and the late twentieth/twenty-first centuries (done by international conferences, judicial extension, the establishment of international courts, and of the International Court under international auspices). This essay examines the second period, when a fundamental disagreement occurred between Imperial Germany and most other Western states over whether war could be limited at all. That disagreement, which had profound effects on how war was actually prosecuted, hinged on the definition of military necessity. The term “military necessity” is a technical phrase of international law and custom coined to describe the spheres and circumstances in which lethal force or destruction may lawfully occur in time of war. Military necessity has a long history, yet it has been surprisingly little studied. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was especially controversial because, as nations codified custom into written law, they successively narrowed the meaning of military necessity. Imperial Germany battled against this development. It claimed wide latitude for military necessity – so wide as to cancel out law altogether, contemporary observers from other countries charged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[War] … is a true chameleon … because it changes its nature a little in each concrete manifestation. Introduction What is war? Until relatively recently, the answer was coined almost invariably in Clausewitzian terms (von Clausewitz 1982): the continuation of politics by other (violent) means. Then, two new notions challenged – apparently with success – the Clausewitzian canon, at least in regard to civil wars. On the one hand, Mary Kaldor (2001) described contemporary civil conflicts as “new wars” that exhibited a distinct set of features – rent-seeking, strong links with criminal networks, violence against civilians, etc. War, thus, is not what it used to be. “Modern conflict … challenges the very distinction between war and peace. It takes place typically not between armies, or even between an army of a state and its armed opposition in some easily defined guerrilla movement. The forces of both government and opposition, from Cambodia to Colombia, blend into illicit business and organized crime” (Cairns, quoted in Azam 2002, 131). On the other hand, rational-choice theorists came to the conclusion that, as Keen (2000) has aptly put it, “war is the continuation of economy by other means.” Individuals join insurgent groups as maximizers of expected utility, and those (the groups) offer selective incentives to lure the military “work force” into them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nihil quod est contra rationem est licitum – “Nothing that is against reason is lawful” – was a favorite maxim of Sir Edward Coke, the seventeenth-century Englishman's oracle of the common law and an authority still in colonial America on the eve of the Revolution. In slightly different form, the maxim appeared in Coke's report of Doctor Bonham's Case, cited by James Otis in the 1761 Massachusetts Writs of Assistance Case that began the constitutional argument for Independence: “when an Act of Parliament is against Common right and reason, or repugnant, or impossible to be performed, the Common Law will control it, and adjudge such Act to be void.” Alexander Hamilton references neither Bonham's Case nor Otis's argument in Federalist No. 78, where he develops the reasoning behind judicial review of legislation, nor is either of the cases mentioned in John Marshall's opinion in Marbury v. Madison. But both insist on the power of courts to void legislation repugnant to the Constitution as a matter of simple logic: Hamilton writes of “the nature and reason of the thing,” and Marshall of the “theory … essentially attached to a written constitution.” There is little doubt that the recourse to “reasonableness” in the judicial evaluation of regulatory legislation in the nineteenth century draws upon the legacy of this now-ancient maxim, nor perhaps that the “rational relation” test of the twentieth century is a modification of that tradition, too. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gladstone in his old age seems to partake of the super-natural. I have seen him intimately during the last week, and I am daily more and more impressed with the greatness of his mind and character. The budget was a fair budget. It was an honest Budget – it paid its way. It laid down the important and far-reaching principle that extra taxation ought to fall on those who can afford to pay. It removed the unjust privileges which landlords have possessed in the past. support the party which carried this democratic budget. Liberalism must re-unite itself with the Labour interest. Until that is done we cannot look for much success … The programme of the Liberal party must, therefore, be so altered as to include those items of legislation for which the industrial classes are striving. Radicals parting ways Although Chamberlain was rapidly marginalized within the radical left after 1892, his ‘materialist’ approach to politics – the priority of social reform – and emphasis on parliamentary centralism, in the conviction ‘that the day of Local Parliaments and of small nationalities is past’, were to have enormous impact on twentieth-century radical politics. If ‘modern’ radicalism was about ‘the social question’, and if poverty was to be reduced by government action, then the country needed the rational reconstruction and empowerment of the imperial executive at its centre, rather than legislative devolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nothing expresses the precarious modality of historiography more than worries about the historian's vocabulary. What might seem to be matters of ‘mere’ semantics, housekeeping, sectarian infighting or signs of intellectual under-employment, may be much more than any of these. Although historians do not enjoy a specialized and insulating vocabulary, they do have a variable sense of being engaged in a distinctive activity. This means that while they can borrow from elsewhere to enrich their work, by doing so they risk eroding or reforming their awareness of disciplinarity. One can identify two problematic sets of relationship for historiography: the discourse of neighbouring academic disciplines and subject areas, such as anthropology, economics and psychology, and the forms of discourse of daily moral and social commitments. The history of historiography may be seen as an interplay between these webs of association. None of them are totally entrapping, or amenable to neat patterns of change, but they make it difficult to see any static essence of intellectual integrity to which all historians adhere, or towards which they have struggled. Certainly a concern with anachronism provides a robust thread of continuity, but it remains an underdetermined criterion of judgment and demarcation. Additionally, its saliency is more clearly tied to the narrative and descriptive functions of historiography than to the explanatory. As these are easily entangled the results can be decidedly messy: little wonder that when evoked in criticism, accusations of anachronism can seem suggestive of double standards or lack of reflexivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hobbes's work had been associated with many features of political and cultural life in the early 1670s; atheism, libertinism, authoritarian churchmen and seditious dissenters. But as the crown appeared to drift towards what critics like Marvell would characterise as popery and arbitrary government, Charles's policies began to look more like the Hobbism condemned by Harrington and Lawson. Although Hobbes's absolutism had always been condemned, this feature of Hobbes's argument had drawn less attention in the early Restoration period. Partly this was because Hobbes had been successfully recast by Royalist propaganda as a seditious contract theorist, but a connected reason was that most parties had good reasons to magnify royal authority in a manner sometimes not unlike that described in Leviathan. Parliamentarians, Anglican churchmen and dissenters, for example, all sought royal support for their causes; if Eachard found nothing exceptional in chapters 18–20 of Leviathan, Marvell, as we have seen, could also appeal to Charles's absolute authority in a Hobbesian fashion as a possible means of bringing about a more moderate approach to dissent. As the decade wore on, however, the king's absolute authority started to seem less benign. The increasing (and to a large extent justified) suspicion that the court favoured popery and absolutist France began to motivate political opposition. The court's attachment to foreign arbitrary absolutism took centre-stage as a danger to law, property and religion. In this context, Leviathan's earlier reputation as the textbook of despotic absolutism could be fitted into more general anxieties about the court. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By 1700 the cumulative effect of five decades of critical engagement with Hobbes's writings had produced the images of the philosopher with which I began this book. Hobbes had attained a possibly unique position in the English imagination of the time. He had become a household name, but one associated with atheism, immorality, selfish behaviour, a poor view of human nature and unacceptable political views. Taken together these views constituted ‘Hobbism’, a well-documented creed to be detested by all God-fearing people and a set of views associated with a minority of ‘Hobbists’. These debased disciples fell broadly into two categories; the libertine and the hypocrite. The libertine, typically young, always immoral and often drunk, is a stock figure by the later seventeenth century, a lively combination of Scargill and Rochester. Robert Dixon captures him in his Canidia: The brave young Hobbist scorns and flies The Inns of Court and Universities, He vilifies the Man in Black, Makes the poor Curate drunk with Sack. In 1688 Jane Barker spots him with his friends up to no good, exemplifying the corruption of the town, when they: Kick Tavern Boys, and Orange-Wenches wooe, Are Machiavellians in a Coffee-house, And think it wit a poor Street-Whore to chouse; And for their Father Hobbs will talk so high, Rather than him they will their God deny … The other kind of Hobbist is the similarly irreligious but more calculating hypocrite whose superficial conformity to social norms and values conceals his adherence to the controversial philosopher. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The disasters of plague, fire and war that affected England between 1665 and 1667 ushered in a new and potentially very dangerous period for Hobbes. They would also herald a new phase in the reception of Hobbes's work, one that would see an explosion of allusion to Hobbes and his works within popular culture, as well as the creation of the popular image of Hobbes as the archetypal atheist philosopher and Leviathan as the handbook of irreligion and amorality. If discussion of Hobbes and Hobbism had seemed to go into abeyance after the philosopher's struggles with his academic critics in the 1650s, the later 1660s undoubtedly saw a renaissance in critical discussion of Hobbes's work and a popular reconstitution of his public image in many different contexts. There were many connected reasons for the rise of Hobbesian discourse in the later 1660s, but there can be little doubt that it had an important relationship to the increasingly turbulent politics of the period. As earlier chapters have shown, the reception of Hobbes's work was often conditioned by the relationship between his ideas and the prevailing politics, and the situation in the later 1660s offers a complex example of this phenomenon. One factor central to the upsurge in Hobbesian discussion was the shift in the politics of the period. In the early Restoration period the basic alignment between crown, church and Parliament, fostered particularly by Clarendon and Sheldon, had allowed the suppression of the traditional centrifugal pressures that had traditionally plagued the Stuart polity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 1658–1660: COVERT HOBBISM AND ANTI-HOBBISM IN THE SETTLEMENT CRISIS Cromwell's death in September 1658 led to a period of political instability that provoked an outpouring of discussion about the political and religious direction of the state. Richard Cromwell, mistrusted by both the army and the republicans found it difficult to hold together the various interest groups on which the stability of the regime depended. Beset by debt he was forced to call the third Protectorate Parliament in January 1659, but its attempts to reduce the powers of the army led to its dissolution in April and the recall of the Rump, re-establishing the Commonwealth until the army again dissolved it in October. The army's Committee of Safety in turn dissolved itself in December, leaving England ungoverned until troops restored the Rump and, in February, General Monck restored the Long Parliament, paving the way for the Restoration of Charles II. This difficult period proved to be remarkably fertile in terms of political theory; between the ending of the Protectorate and the re-establishment of the monarchy there was a window of political opportunity and the chance to lobby for a new political order. There was also the danger of anarchy, and a need to provide some sort of political and religious stability. In these circumstances Hobbes occupied an unusual position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

HOBBES AND THE PROTECTORATE Thus far Leviathan had attracted suprisingly little public comment. The Royalists had attacked Hobbes after his defection, and the Presbyterians and Episcopalians had launched minor attacks on his theology and ecclesiology from the autumn of 1652 onwards, but this hardly amounted to a major campaign. The relative silence was such that in 1654 John Davies commented that ‘On this side of the sea, besides the dirt and slander cast on him in Sermons & private meetings, none hath put any thing in Print against him, but Mr Rosse.’ However all of this would soon change, and the reasons were political. One of the most decisive political changes to affect the reception of Leviathan during the 1650s was the establishment of the Protectorate after the Nominated Assembly dissolved itself in December 1653. John Lambert's Instrument of Government envisaged the restitution of a triadic constitutional structure, with a Lord Protector, Council of State and Parliament. Cromwell's installation as Head of State was soon followed in the spring by implementation of religious reforms which created a tolerant national church along the lines proposed by John Owen's Humble proposals. If Hobbes's political and ecclesiastical vision was a rather uncomfortable fit with the republican and tolerationist agendas of the Commonwealth, Leviathan's absolutism and Erastianism were now highly relevant to the new political situation where Cromwell's authority was now publicly recognised and identified with a new settlement in the established church. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE ELEMENTS OF LAW Before 1640, Hobbes, secretary to the Earls of Devonshire, was known to the literate public as humanist scholar, a poet and a translator. Hobbes had been responsible for the standard English version of Thucydides' Eight bookes of the Peloponnesian Warre (1629), and he was also the author of De mirabilibus pecci (1627), an occasionally obscene country house poem that Hobbes ultimately despised, but which remained popular throughout the century. To a smaller circle of scientists associated with Hobbes's Cavendish patrons, the Earls of Devonshire and Newcastle, Hobbes was a respected natural philosopher, a former amanuensis to Francis Bacon who, although he had come late to the study of mathematics and natural philosophy, nevertheless promised much. Hobbes got his first taste of direct involvement in the politics of the 1640s as a politician rather than a political theorist, being proposed as prospective Member of Parliament for Derbyshire for the Short Parliament of 1640. The Derbymen were resolved, however, ‘to give no way to the election of Mr Hobs’, according to one contemporary, a rejection that invites the thought that the Derbyshire constituents were passing one of the earliest verdicts upon Hobbes's political outlook. But as so often when looking at contemporary reactions to Hobbes, one has to be careful to look at the context before assuming that any personal notoriety was at issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Like a prism, Shakespeare's plays are shot through with the political thought of his time; but like a prism, they omit no single ray, but refract a multitude of colours. In the much-cited 1993 volume, The Varieties of British Political Thought, 1500–1800, John Guy, Donald Kelley and Linda Peck delineate many of the recurring topics that informed political thinking before the Civil War of the mid-seventeenth century. The role of counsel in good governance, the proper education of a prince, the body politic as concept and informing metaphor, Tacitus, Ovid, and republicanism, resistance theory, Machiavelli and the new statescraft: these are but a few of the topics discussed throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and hardly one fails to make an appearance in Shakespeare's works. Of course, Shakespeare might not to everyone seem the most obvious source of political reflection on the Elizabethan stage. After all, it is Marlowe in The Jew of Malta who brings Machiavelli on stage, vaunting his free-thinking ways: To some perhaps my name is odious, But such as love me, guard me from their tongues, And let them know that I am Machevill, And weigh not men, and therefore not men's words But it is Shakespeare, in Richard III, who creates a villain hero who, ‘set[ting] the murderous Machiavel to school’, embodies the new philosophy as a means to power and a principle of rule and not just as the signature of an exotic Italian villainy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of political thought is too important to be left to political science and history alone. Of course, it would be odd if analysis did not start within these disciplines. However, the inability to establish more widespread, genuinely interdisciplinary modes of study has meant that ways of reading texts established by historians and social scientists have been accepted as the norm and then imported back into disciplines such as literary studies. Given that our understanding of the early-modern period has been transformed by the realization that people did not divide up the world and the books that represent it as we do, this is a seriously disabling problem for those concerned to reconstruct the past. If we are attempting to recover a world in which people read religious tracts, literary texts, scientific treatises, legal documents and other forms of writing alongside each other, we should recognize that our attempts to distinguish rigidly between subjects will not always yield fruitful results. A case in point is the question of early-modern republicanism, a subject that has had little impact on the analysis of literature before the eighteenth century. This means that historical and theoretical debate about the existence and substance of republicanism has concentrated on the question of whether it was a language or a programme, a means of articulating an alternative to monarchical government, or a plan of action designed to replace hereditary monarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The plays discussed in chapter 5 use the trope of erotic incontinence to figure favoritism as the representative symptom of tyranny, a perspective that re-imagines the favorite as the vehicle by which the king's unruly will asserts itself. This is why so many of the early modern English fictions dealing with corrupt favoritism as erotic desire are set in what to the English were the symbolic locations of absolutist excess: France, Muscovy, imperial Rome, Catholic Italian dukedoms, the Muslim east. Such stories can of course be intensely topical for English audiences interested in favoritism or absolutism, but they deal with imagined states that are understood to be crucially unlike England, with its native liberties and balanced constitution. The central native exemplum of passionate and corrupting favoritism, for late Elizabethan and early Stuart writers, is clearly the tale of the reign, deposition, and murder of King Edward II. The story is utterly ubiquitous in the period's controversial political writing, where it serves as a highly contested precedent for arguments about the nature and limitations of English monarchy, and it is perhaps the most frequently retold political fable of the era as well. The best-known version is of course Christopher Marlowe's (c. 1591–92) but we also have significant recastings of the story by Michael Drayton (who produced several long poems about Edward's reign in different modes), Richard Niccols (who added a narrative of the life of Edward II to the Mirror For Magistrates collection in 1610), Francis Hubert (whose long verse history of Edward's life and death underwent a number of significant revisions between its original composition in the 1590s and its eventual printing in 1628 and 1629), and Elizabeth Cary (who composed a Tacitean history of the Edward II story as a way to comment upon political controversy c. 1627). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is an early Stuart commonplace to laud Queen Elizabeth for her skillful handling of the ambitions of her most powerful courtiers. Fulke Greville, for instance, in his Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney, praises Elizabeth for avoiding “the latitudes which some modern princes allow to their favorites as supporters of government and middle walls between power and the people's envy.” As a result of this wise policy, “she never chose or cherished a favourite – how worthy soever – to monopolise over all the spirits and business of her kingdom.” As has often been noted, this judgment seems to have at least as much to do with Greville's hostility to James and his government as with enthusiasm for the late queen's famous memory. Likewise Sir Robert Naunton, in his posthumously printed Fragmenta Regalia (1633, printed 1641): “Her ministers and instruments of state … were many, and those memorable. But they were only favorites not minions, such as acted more by her own princely rules and judgment than by their own will and appetites.” It is by no means clear that Naunton – a former client of Buckingham, once described as the duke's “creature” – wanted to criticize early Stuart government by his praise for Elizabeth. But his widely read account of Elizabeth's reign nevertheless formed the basis for a strain of politicized nostalgia in which the corrupt favoritism and domestic tyranny of James and Charles was contrasted with an idealized vision of the Elizabethan past in which the management of faction helped ensure a healthy state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chapter 2 examined the tradition of legal thinking and historic practice with respect to the recognition of states. The rationale for that exercise was the claim, in part, that if the EC's recognition of Yugoslav republics was driven primarily by political and strategic considerations, one could not dismiss the relevance of international law altogether. The claim rested on two observations: first, that the EC consciously and deliberately considered the question of recognition within a legal framework, evident most notably in its establishment of the Badinter Commission; and second, that the legal framework, once invoked, both facilitated and constrained the EC in some of its actions. This chapter returns to the latter point. For to suggest that the EC's response was at all moulded by international law would not only seem to contradict the views of legal scholars and political analysts alike who maintain that the Community's actions were motivated largely, if not entirely, by extra-legal considerations; it also begs a number of fundamental questions about the relationship between international law and politics in general and the bearing that both have on the recognition of states in particular. For instance, how does one distinguish conformity to law from the fortuitous coincidence of law and politics? And if international law at times does indeed facilitate and constrain international behaviour, how does it achieve that effect? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Community's decision to recognise the republics of Yugoslavia seeking statehood was taken at a Council of Ministers meeting in Brussels on 16 December 1991, six months after the war began following Slovenia's and Croatia's declarations of independence on 25 June 1991. Initial confidence in the EC's capacity for effective mediation in the crisis had by that time been displaced by a conviction among some member states that more radical measures were urgently needed to stop the fighting. A few governments, notably those of Germany and Denmark, had spoken openly about recognising the break-away republics as a means to achieve that goal soon after the outbreak of hostilities, and as the war progressed Germany especially became more outspoken in support of recognition. But because of the importance attached to maintaining political consensus within the Community, persistent objections from other member states – particularly France, Britain and the Netherlands – meant that EC recognition would not be forthcoming until the opposing states finally yielded at the December foreign ministers' meeting. Numerous accounts have been written about the events leading up to the EC's fateful decision; these events, therefore, are discussed here only briefly. This chapter focuses instead on the content of the EC's recognition policy for what it reveals about thinking within the Community regarding strategies for achieving a peaceful settlement of the Yugoslav conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

… language serves to declare what is advantageous and what is the reverse, and it is the peculiarity of man that he alone … possesses a perception of good and evil, of the just and the unjust … and it is association in [a common perception of] these things which makes a family and a polis. In part because Aristotle was right, polities are at base regimes for the arbitration of contending claims to a wide range of valuable resources, from authority and prestige to access and control of capital and labor. An intuitively appealing view of arbitration regimes posits that their legitimacy ultimately rests on the contenders' conviction that the judges are not self-interested and that the rules are fair. But in fact, these particular strictures need not encumber a legitimate arbitration regime. People may well widely perceive a self-interested arbiter, so long as he or she stands for a greater righteousness, as their rightful judge. Moreover, rules that are just may be repudiated on the basis of their unfair application; and conversely, unjust rules may be accepted if they are perceived to be fairly applied. In sixteenth century Spanish America, arbitration hinged on the authority of the royal sovereign. The king unabashedly protected the interests of the Crown. But the Crown belonged to the king only because as sovereign he possessed specific, emblematic attributes, such as benevolence, wisdom, and Christian zeal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Having eliminated two candidates for explanation, and seeing intimations of possibility in others as the result of our test cases, we turn directly to theory development. Realpolitik as management of threats to the state and losses as signals of state vulnerability now occupy our attention. Realpolitik is understood as policies that preserve and strengthen the state, while loss is the experience of either (1) transfer of territory, population, authority, or some combination thereof to another political entity, or (2) military defeat or significant casualties in political violence (e.g., war) that either are about to be or have already been incurred. Concrete expectations of loss in the near term can yield outcomes similar to those of loss itself. In later analyses, I will find it useful to distinguish between threat and loss, whereby threat can be understood as the fear of potential loss. This understanding will be useful later in distinguishing between conflicts that result in ethnic cleansing, and those that proceed further to genocide. Brute force (imprudent) realpolitik entailing disproportionate responses to perceived provocation, to be defined more completely below, and prospect theory emphasizing the salience of loss are introduced as means of understanding the transformation of massacre into genocide within the context of earlier state losses and high risk. Prospect theory will also be described in more detail. Massacre, unfortunately, is not an uncommon occurrence. While massacre may originate in many different ways, its transformation into genocide is complex and therefore infrequent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

HISTORIANS AND THE ITALIAN NATION The mainstream of the political historiography of European states, from the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth (and often beyond), reads the history of the nation's past through the filter of the final outcome of the nation-state. The ‘Prussian school’ has attracted particular attention, and indeed it exemplifies the untroubled coexistence of a historicism that exalted the state and the affirmation of a ‘scientific’ historical methodology in tune with the gospel of positivism. But whether their approach to history was ‘Romantic’ or scientific, national pride and the certainty of progress constituted central elements in the cultural habitus of European intellectuals, which underpinned the writing of the history of the individual states, old as well as new. Although they were more marked in newly unified states, the historians of old national states shared the same convictions, and – like François Guizot or John Seeley – facilely read into them national missions. In a comparative European context, Italian historiography in this respect is in no way exceptional. From the earliest decades after unification until the fall of fascism, from Nicomede Bianchi and Alessandro Luzio to Pietro Silva and Gioacchino Volpe, historians interpreted the country's history as possessing an unbroken continuity across the centuries, expressed through the presence of an Italian nation, alongside and usually incorporated in the Savoy dynasty, culminating in pre-ordained fashion in a unified independent state (and, for Volpe, in fascism). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE LOSS OF THE INITIATIVE The London shrieval election of 1682 had brought the king and the Whigs to the brink of a confrontation unlike anything seen in the city since 1641–2, except the standoff between the Rump and the Corporation in 1659–60. Although the government believed it had begun the political reconstruction of the Corporation with the declaration of Tory sheriffs on 28 September, the London Whigs were reconciled neither to this result nor to the process that had achieved it. Moreover, the boundary dividing legal action and maneuvre from the outright defiance of authority had begun to dissolve as Whig anger mounted through the summer months of 1682. Whig citizens had accused Lord Mayor Moore of seeking to impose his “will” upon them, contrary to law. They claimed that unjust and unlawful force had been utilized in an electoral process and that a “military government” had been established over them. They accused loyalist magistrates of violating their oaths and their “trusts” to preserve the rights of citizens. Most ominously, Sheriff Pilkington had defended the people's right to “fortify” themselves in defense of their “Lives, Religion, and Liberty.” This was not the language of political acquiescence, and the London Whigs would have been surprised to learn that their contest with the crown was over. City and Country Whigs were, nevertheless, not entirely agreed about how best to proceed in response to the “imposition” of magistrates upon the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

INTRODUCTION: UNSETTLING THE STATE IN THE ERA OF DANBY'S ANGLICAN POLITY The future of the church establishment remained the most critical domestic issue confronting the Restoration regime in the 1670s. If the Conventicle Act of 1670 and the rejection of coercion by London dissenters left the church unsettled, the inability of Charles's governments to achieve religious accommodation thereafter left the state vulnerable to unsettlement as well. Recognizing this vulnerability, the ministry of the Cabal sponsored a royal indulgence for dissenters in 1672 that provoked both a parliamentary reaction and a strong parliamentary effort to find new grounds for Protestant accommodation. But parliament left the work of Protestant accommodation unfinished in 1673. Some historians have assumed that the Anglican settlement was impregnable in 1672–3, but urban dissenters and their parliamentary friends remained determined to free conscience from its cavalier shackles. Unfortunately for these advocates of conscience, however, the dominant ministerial agenda of the 1670s was not the search for accommodation but rather a strengthening of the confessional exclusivity of the Restoration state. After the Cabal dissolved in 1673, the political dynamics of the early 1660s reappeared. Thomas Osborne, who was soon made Earl of Danby, emerged as the king's principal minister. The new lord treasurer and his associates encouraged another Anglican reaction, claiming that the Protestant establishment was imperiled by papists and sectarians alike. By the spring 1675 parliamentary session, the ministry was, however, more focused upon reviving the sectarian alarms of 1659–60 than upon any perceived Catholic threat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the theatres reopened on 27 December 1593, only one new play seems to have been performed by the Lord Chamberlain's Men at Henslowe's Rose Theatre, Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus. The play was staged some four weeks into the season, on 24 January 1594, presumably because it took a month to rehearse and to make sure that it was ready for professional performance. Like Henry VI, Part One, Titus appears to have been a notable success, achieving the best takings of the season, and would undoubtedly have enjoyed a long run had not a restraining order, due to yet another outbreak of the plague, forced the theatres to close yet again. And, as with the Henry VI plays, Titus is almost certainly the product of co-authorship, a strong case having been made by Brian Vickers for the conspicuously classical George Peele as the author of the first and last scenes. Opinions differ as to whether Titus was specially written for the reopening of the theatres in late 1593, making it ‘the pivotal play in Shakespeare's early career’, as Jonathan Bate suggests, or whether it was a revival of a work first performed in the late 1580s or early 1590s, and then probably rewritten for the grand reopening. Either way, it is clear that Titus was considered to be a potentially popular work that was likely to entice audiences back to the theatre in the mid-1590s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]