Maistre emerges from this deeply learned book as the crucial bridge between the Enlightenment and the historicized thought of the nineteenth century.

The Idea of History is the best known work of the Oxford philosopher and historian RG Collingwood. Published posthumously in 1946 it is, in effect, two books: a historiography and a philosophy of history. Students look to Collingwood for a history of thinking about history, and to discover his ideas about the nature of historical understanding. It is an indispensable text for historians and philosophers yet it is also highly challenging and many of Collingwood's innovations have been seriously misunderstood. The primary focus of this book is on Collingwood's actual arguments, especially the most radical of these, with the aim of elucidating their construction and appraising them in the clearest possible way. This guide is the ideal companion to Collingwood's classic text both for students coming to it for the first time and for those wishing to consider its arguments afresh. It offers clear and concise accounts of the book's composition; the intellectual context of Collingwood's ideas; its central arguments concerning the nature of history; and its reception and influence.

How scientific is economics? This question has often been framed by analogies and correspondences made between economics and other, seemingly more well-established scientific disciplines, starting with classical mechanics. At the same time economics is likely to be seen in opposition to or in contrast with history, where the reliance upon generalizing rules, thought experiments, and model construction in economics is set against the amassing of particular facts intended to create narratives in history. In this new volume, Turk explores the relationship between economics and history, including the often fraught one between economics and economic history, making the case that economics does in fact require the proper grounding in history that has so often been ignored. This work challenges the attempt to link economics with other, more clearly ‘scientific’ disciplines as flawed and fundamentally wrongheaded. A key element of this book is its examination of the gaps and associations that exist in, or are seen through, linkages with thermodynamics, classical mechanics , biology, literature, mathematics, philosophy, and sociology. This exploration is frequently undertaken through study of the work of one or more major figures in the history of economic thought, ranging from Quesnay and Smith, through Walras and Max Weber, to Robinson, Krugman, David, and Arthur. Through the possibility of an alternative to the gaps noted in each such comparison, the underlying, necessary connection between economics and history can be brought out. The book concludes by exploring the basis for the positive construction of a historical economics. This book is suited for those who study history of economic thought and philosophy of economics.

The title of this book is, of course, inspired by the famous opening words of General de Gaulle's Memoirs of the Second World War: All my life I have thought of France in a certain way. Wesseling brings together his essays dealing with a great variety of subjects such as culture, society, politics, and diplomacy, with one section devoted entirely to French historians. The first section contains an chapter on the famous painter Ary Scheffer and the France of his time, that is to say the first half of the 19th century. The second chapter continues this theme and deals with Émile Zola and the Paris of the Second Empire. Two other chapters discuss aspects of the Third Republic, sports and students, respectively. The second section is devoted to French intellectuals. It offers the first in-depth analysis of the group of intellectuals that supported Zola and Dreyfus. Chapter six deals with one of the great literary figures of the interwar period—and later a notorious collaborator—Robert Brasillach. Chapter seven contains a vivid sketch of the life and work of the famous French intellectual Raymond Aron. The third section is devoted to politics and diplomacy. French foreign policy is discussed both in its long-term perspective as well as more specifically in the period of Charles de Gaulle. De Gaulle's idea of France is compared with that of an author by whom he was greatly influenced, Charles Péguy. Finally, there is a section on French history writing, including two biographical essays, one about Gabriel Hanotaux, the once famous but now nearly forgotten historian who became Minister of Foreign Affairs, and another on Fernand Braudel, the great contemporary French historian and close friend of Wesseling. Of particular interest to scholars, students, and other researchers involved with French history, the history of ideas, and European historiography.

`The overall conception of the volume is absolutely splendid, and the editors skilfully place the material in the context of disciplinary and post-disciplinary developments in sociology. This is a major contribution to the field, as well as a comprehensive and reliable guide to its main components′ - William Outhwaite, Professor of Sociology, School of European Studies, University of Sussex `It is hard to think of anything that has been left out in this masterly survey of contemporary historical sociology. The editors have done a superb job in the selection of both themes and contributors. We now at last have an up-to-date book to assign in our graduate courses on comparative historical sociology. There′s really nothing else like it out there.... The editors′ introduction is one of the best things I have read on how the field developed, and the problems it has encountered′ - Krishan Kumar, William R Kenan, Jr Professor of Sociology, University of Virginia ′The range of topics covered and the number of distinguished scholars who have contributed to the handbook is impressive, with leading figures such as Bryan S Turner, John R Hall, Gianfranco Poggi and Craig Calhoun among the contributors to a book that covers areas as diverse as post-colonial historiography and the historical sociology of the city... the handbook fills a void within the sizable literature on historical sociology and undoubtedly will be a useful addition to graduate reading lists′ - The British Journal of Sociology What is important in historical sociology? What are the main routes of development in the subject? This Handbook consists of 26 chapters on historical sociology. It is divided into three parts. Part One is devoted to Foundations and covers Marx, Weber, evolutionary and functionalist approaches, the Annales School, Elias, Nelson and Eisenstadt. Part Two moves on to consider major approaches, such as modernization approaches, late Marxist approaches, historical geography, institutional approaches, cultural history, intellectual history, postcolonial and genealogical approaches. The third part is devoted to the major substantive themes in historical sociology ranging from state formation, nationalism, social movements, classes, patriarchy, architecture, religion and moral regulation to problems of periodization and East-West divisions. Each part includes an introduction that summarizes and contextualizes chapters. A general introduction to the volume outlines the current situation of historical sociology after the cultural turn in the social sciences. It argues that historical sociology is deeply divided between explanatory `sociological′ approaches and more empirical and interpretative `historical′ approaches. Systematic and informative the book offers readers the most complete and authoritative guide to historical sociology.

Ideas of Englishness, and of the English nation, have become a matter of renewed interest in recent years as a result of threats to the integrity of the United Kingdom and the perceived rise of that unusual thing, English nationalism. Interrogating the idea of an English nation, and of how that might compare with other concepts of nationhood, this book enquires into the origins of English national identity, partly by questioning the assumption of its long-standing existence. It investigates the role of the British empire - the largest empire in world history - in the creation of English and British identities, and the results of its disappearance. Considering the ’myths of the English’ - the ideas and images that the English and others have constructed about their history and their sense of themselves as a people - the distinctiveness of English social thought (in comparison with that of other nations), the relationship between English and British identity and the relationship of Englishness to Europe, this wide-ranging, comparative and historical approach to understanding the particular nature of Englishness and English national identity, will appeal to scholars of sociology, cultural studies and history with interests in English and British national identity and debates about England’s future place in the United Kingdom.

The idea of the centralized State has played a powerful role in shaping French republicanism. But for two hundred years, many have tried to find other ways of being French and Republican. These essays challenge the traditional account, bringing together new insights from leading scholars.

The Concept of History reflects on the presuppositions behind the contemporary understanding of history that often remain implicit and not spelled out. It is a critique of the modern understanding of history that presents it as universal and teleological, progressively moving forward to an end. Although few contemporary philosophers and historians maintain the view that there is strict universality and teleology in history, the remnants of these positions still affect our understanding of history. But if history is not universal and singular, evolving toward an objective universal end, it should be possible to admit of multiple histories, some of which we appropriate as our own. An another important aspect of this book is that if provides an account of history that is itself both historical and rooted in attempts to narrate and explain history from its inception in antiquity. The book seeks to establish features or constituents of history that might be found in any historical account and might themselves be considered historical invariants in history.

This study examines how debates about history during the French Revolution informed and changed the nature of the British novel between 1790 and 1814. During these years, intersections between history, political ideology, and fiction, as well as the various meanings of the term "history" itself, were multiple and far reaching. Morgan Rooney elucidates these subtleties clearly and convincingly. While political writers of the 1790s--Burke, Price, Mackintosh, Paine, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and others--debate the historical meaning of the Glorious Revolution as a prelude to broader ideological arguments about the significance of the past for the present and future, novelists engage with this discourse by representing moments of the past or otherwise vying to enlist the authority of history to further a reformist or loyalist agenda. Anti-Jacobin novelists such as Charles Walker, Robert Bisset, and Jane West draw on Burkean historical discourse to characterize the reform movement as ignorant of the complex operations of historical accretion. For their part, reform-minded novelists such as Charlotte Smith, William Godwin, and Maria Edgeworth travesty Burke's tropes and arguments so as to undermine and then redefine the category of history. As the Revolution crisis recedes, new novel forms such as Edgeworth's regional novel, Lady Morgan's national tale, and Jane Porter's early historical fiction emerge, but historical representation--largely the legacy of the 1790s' novel--remains an increasingly pronounced feature of the genre. Whereas the representation of history in the novel, Rooney argues, is initially used strategically by novelists involved in the Revolution debate, it is appropriated in the early nineteenth century by authors such as Edgeworth, Morgan, and Porter for other, often related ideological purposes before ultimately developing into a stable, nonpartisan, aestheticized feature of the form as practiced by Walter Scott. The French Revolution Debate and the British Novel, 1790-1814 demonstrates that the transformation of the novel at this fascinating juncture of British political and literary history contributes to the emergence of the historical novel as it was first realized in Scott's Waverley (1814).