The politics of historical economics: Wilhelm Roscher on democracy, socialism and Caesarism

Wilhelm Friedrich Georg Roscher (1817-94) is generally remembered as a significant nineteenth-century German political economist and a contributor to the “German Historical School of Economics.” His work is usually placed in the context of a larger narrative about the development of economic thought. Yet intellectual historians have rarely noticed that, for Roscher, Staatswirthschaft or Nationalökonomie were subordinate to a larger science of politics, and few have engaged with the substance of his political thought, as opposed to his political economy. The aim of this article is to provide an interpretation of Roscher as a political thinker, exploring his concern that nineteenth-century Europe’s economically-advanced societies, characterised by an unstable combination of democratic sovereignty, deep socio-economic inequality, and a centralised state apparatus, would soon find themselves at the mercy of “military tyranny” or “Caesarism.” It underlines the ways in which Roscher’s preoccupation with ancient history fed into his estimation of nineteenth-century politics, and also examines his comparative assessment of democracy’s prospects in Britain, France, and the United States. The argument has some wider implications for the nineteenth-century reception of classical thought and historiography, for the shifting preoccupations of German liberalism between Vormärz and the Kaiserreich, and for wider nineteenth-century assessments of the future of democracy

Constantin Frantz and the intellectual history of Bonapartism and Caesarism: a reassessment

The conservative German publicist and political theorist, Constantin Frantz (1817-1891), occupies an ambiguous place in German intellectual history. Some, such as Friedrich Meinecke, located him within the rich intellectual tradition of German federalism, highlighting his hostility to the idea of the “nation-state” and the traditions of nationalism, Realpolitik and militarism. Others, by contrast, have situated him within a long genealogy of German fascism, identifying his remarkable 1852 work, Louis Napoleon, as a kind of precursor or antecedent of twentieth-century fascist ideology. This interpretation raises broader questions about the historiography on Bonapartism and Caesarism, which has often been motivated by an interest in the intellectual origins of modern fascism. The present article supplies a reinterpretation of Frantz’s thinking about Bonapartism (Napoleonismus) and Caesarism by focusing on a much broader range of his intellectual output and by tracking the development of his view of Bonapartism’s significance between 1851 and the early 1870s. The main outcome is not just to question Frantz’s place in the “prehistory” of fascism, but also to show how deeply nineteenth-century debates about Bonapartism were connected to concerns about liberalism, democracy, nationalism and imperialism

Unsocial sociability in the Scottish enlightenment: Ferguson and Kames on war, sociability and the foundations of patriotism

This article reconstructs a significant historical alternative to the theories of ‘cosmopolitan’ or ‘liberal’ patriotism often associated with the Scottish Enlightenment. Instead of focusing on the work of Andrew Fletcher, Francis Hutcheson, David Hume or Adam Smith, this study concentrates on the theories of sociability, patriotism and international rivalry elaborated by Adam Ferguson (1723–1816) and Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782). Centrally, the article reconstructs both thinkers' shared perspective on what I have called ‘unsociable’ or ‘agonistic’ patriotism, an eighteenth-century idiom which saw international rivalship, antagonism, and even war as crucial in generating political cohesion and sustaining moral virtue. Placing their thinking in the context of wider eighteenth-century debates about sociability and state formation, the article's broader purpose is to highlight the centrality of controversies about human sociability to eighteenth-century debates about the nature of international relations

Representative democracy and the "spirit of resistance" from Constant to Tocqueville

The role of resistance in the politics of modern representative democracies is historically contested, and remains far from clear. This article seeks to explore historical thinking on this subject through a discussion of what Benjamin Constant and Alexis de Tocqueville had to say about resistance and its relationship to “representative government” and democracy. Neither thinker is usually seen as a significant contributor to “resistance theory” as this category is conventionally understood. But, in addition to their more familiar preoccupations with securing limitations on the exercise of political authority and averting majority tyranny, both thinkers wrote extensively on the nature and meanings of resistance in “representative governments” or democratic societies. Both thinkers are examined in the context of revolutionary and Napoleonic discussions about the legitimacy of resistance or “right to resist” oppression, and against eighteenth-century discussions of the “spirit of resistance” since Montesquieu. The article notes conceptual distinctions between resistance, revolution and insurrection in the period, and addresses the broader question of the extent to which early nineteenth-century French liberals sought to “institutionalise” principles of resistance within modern constitutional frameworks

[Introduction] Resistance in intellectual history and political thought

No description supplie

[Review] Nicholas B. Miller(2017) John Millar and the Scottish enlightenment: family life and world history

No description supplie

Aerodynamic Interactions of Reaction Control System Jets on Mars Entry Aeroshells

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/97062/1/AIAA2012-1013.pd

Interactions of Single-Nozzle Supersonic Propulsive Deceleration Jets on Mars Entry Aeroshells

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/90635/1/AIAA-2011-138-807.pd

Investigations of Peripheral 4-Jet Sonic and Supersonic Propulsive Deceleration Jets on a Mars Science Laboratory Aeroshell

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/90686/1/AIAA-2011-1036-531.pd

Investigation of the Interactions of Reaction Control Systems with Mars Science Laboratory Aeroshell

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/83545/1/AIAA-2010-1558-704.pd