This Guide to the archive presents political theory’s engagement with American literature via a focus on the tension between the real and the imaginative as a source for politics.

ABSTRACTGiven Machiavelli’s fascination with ancient Rome’s plebeian tribunate, it is not surprising that he would take an interest in Cola di Rienzo, the Roman who declared himself Tribune of the Plebs in 1347. However, Cola appears just once in Machiavelli’s corpus, in a single short and enigmatic chapter in the Florentine Histories. This paper argues that Machiavelli nevertheless quietly elaborates on Cola’s legacy later in his Histories, when he introduces Stefano Porcari, another ‘Roman citizen’ whose reform efforts fail catastrophically. Though (...) Machiavelli never explicitly criticizes Cola, he does blame Porcari for exercising poor judgement. This blame, importantly, is entwined with Machiavelli’s allusions to the humanist writings of Francesco Petrarch. By placing these accounts of Cola and Porcari side by side, this paper aims to reveal the Florentine Histories’ complicated relationship with Petrarch, Italy’s most famous humanist. The web of cross-references among Cola, Porcari and Machiavelli himself indicates the latter’s vexation with the sort of rhetorical idealism that Petrarch’s famous endorsement of Cola’s revolution came to represent. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article traces the reception of Hume's ‘Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’ (1752) among a circle of Scottish Whigs supportive of the French Revolution. While the influence of Hume's essay on American Federalists like James Madison has long been a subject of debate, historians have overlooked the appeal that the plan held for Hume's intellectual heirs in Scotland. In the early 1790s, theorists such as John Millar, James Mackintosh, and Dugald Stewart believed European governments – above all France – (...) could progress in the direction of the ‘Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’. Hume modelled his plan after The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) by James Harrington. In so doing, he helped transmit a version of institutional republicanism to a generation of Scottish intellectuals searching for more explicit political reforms. Thinkers like Millar and Stewart interpreted Hume's essay as both a justification for idealist political ‘speculation’ and a ‘practicable’ plan for rebalancing political power in a large commercial state. (shrink)

Paul Sagar's The Opinion of Mankind serves as an excellent synthesis of the topics of sociability and sovereignty in the history of modern political thought. The main thrust of the book is to marshal David Hume's and Adam Smith's resources as first-rate philosophers on behalf of a first-rate political theory. According to Sagar, Hume's and Smith's rich accounts of human sociability, sentiment, and historical contingency provide the foundations for what Sagar calls "the state without sovereignty". By this, he means that (...) neither Hume nor Smith treat sovereignty as an a priori condition for state formation. Instead, Hume and Smith acknowledge states as modern political entities that manage themselves... (shrink)