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Traces the evolution of the political thought of Vacherot, who began his intellectual life as a Doctrinaire liberal and then converted to republicanism under the Second Empire, during which he wrote La Démocratie, one of the most successful republican works of the 1860s; in the final years of his life he became a monarchist.

In 1831 Gladstone denounced parliamentary reform at the Oxford Union. He rejected equality and liberty as ideals and dismissed contractarianism as the basis of political obligation, favouring instead a patriarchal version of monarchism. The major sources for this standpoint were Burke, the Bible, and Aristotle. In his exploration of political theory in the 1830s, Gladstone was bitterly opposed to utilitarianism, seeing it as a solvent of the bonds of society, but he incorporated in his thinking the desirability of making concessions to public opinion. Although his version of Conservatism was close to what has been called orthodox Anglican political theology, it already contained a liberal dimension.

After the military victories won by the Cossacks throughout 1648, the rule of the hetman of the Zaporozhian Host suddenly ceased to be purely military and extended to the civil, economic, judicial, and foreign-policy affairs of the entire territory that was now under Cossack control. The authority of the Zaporozhian hetman, to which post Bohdan Khmelnytsky was elected at the beginning of 1648, was no longer limited to the Zaporozhian Host. There was an urgent need to establish the hetman's legitimacy even among his ‘own’ Cossacks, as he customarily exercised absolute power during a military campaign, but not in peacetime. This chapter examines the evolution of hetman rule in Ukraine during the time of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, the Cossacks' support for monarchism under Khmelnytsky, the idea of Khmelnytsky's divine election, and the consecration of the hetman.

This chapter provides background on the inter-war Russian emigration, its numbers, geographic spread, demographic make-up, and political divisions. It explains that most Russian émigrés expected their exile to be short; this was particularly true of military émigrés. Russians of all sorts experienced both economic hardship and xenophobia during their years of exile. This produced a growing sense of isolation and of paranoia. The Russian emigration split into smaller and smaller political groups. The chapter describes various émigré political groups and their leaders, such as P. N. Miliukov, Smena Vekh, the Eurasian movement, monarchism, and the Mladorossy.

In order to avoid political divisions, during the civil war the White Armies had maintained a political position known as ‘non-predetermination’; this stated that the Whites would not predetermine whether the regime which followed that of the Bolsheviks would be republican or monarchist in nature. In exile, many émigrés urged that the army abandon non-predetermination and adopt the monarchist cause. Pressure mounted also on Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich to accept the political leadership of the emigration, especially after another Grand Duke, Kirill Vladimirovich, proclaimed himself emperor. As head of the army in exile, Wrangel attempted to resist these pressures and maintain non-predetermination. To this end in September 1923, he issued order no. 82, prohibiting Russian officers from becoming involved in politics. In September 1924, however, he agreed to cede the leadership of the army in exile to Nikolai Nikolaevich. However, the latter's efforts to unite the emigration, particularly the Zarubezhnyi S''ezd (Emigre Congress) of 1926, ended in failure.

This chapter explores the reasons for the recurrence of large-scale popular uprisings throughout imperial history. It considers how the idea of rebellion correlates with fundamental principles of Chinese political culture, such as monarchism and intellectual elitism. Moreover, the chapter looks at why the rebellions serve to support rather than disrupt the empire's longevity. These issues are then related to the broader issue of the political role of the “people,” here referring primarily, although not exclusively, to the lower strata, in the Chinese imperial enterprise. In answering these questions, this chapter focuses on ideological and social factors that both legitimated rebellions and also enabled their accommodation within the imperial enterprise.

This chapter examines the impact of the First World War on the tsarist elite, arguing that concerns over Russia's military performance and over Nicholas II fostered a desire for political change. The roots of this alienation from the monarchy lay in the 1905 revolution, which saw elites adopt new political methods: creating unions, congresses, and publications. After a disastrous start to the war, the formation of the Progressive Bloc, a coalition of conservative and liberal parties in the Duma, prompted huge arguments among elites in arenas such as the United Nobility over whether to support the Bloc's calls for political change. The feeling that only change would result in military victory, alongside a recognition that the war was dramatically affecting landownership and the composition of the officer corps, prompted the majority of elites to favour some degree of political change by early 1917.

The pre-1750 Enlightenment fundamentally transformed political thought as it did every other aspect of western civilization and, here, Montesquieu has always rightly been identified as a key innovative thinker. Certainly no one had a greater impact than he on the discussion of political theory in mid-18th-century Europe. But while granting Montesquieu’s originality and incomparable impact, which remain undeniable, in the context of a general reassessment of the western Enlightenment such as this, it is requisite not to ‘isolate’ him, or leave the impression that he springs from nowhere, but rather adequately ‘situate’ him, which means we must view his oeuvre as a response partly to his own experiences but even more to his reading and to prior developments in French and French exile thought. This chapter examines the relationship between Montesquieu and Bayle’s monarchism, and the aristocratic republicanism of Boulainvilliers.

In the National Assembly of 1871–1875, conservatives hesitated between restoration of the monarchy and support for an authoritarian non-monarchical regime. The ‘Moral Order’ government of 1873 failed to restore the monarchy; then moderate monarchists helped established a conservative Republic. Both options were designed to preserve the leadership of the ‘elite’, but conservative factions understood the nature of the ruling class and its relationship to the ‘people’ differently. The conflict between the bourgeoisie and aristocracy still mattered, although understood as much culturally as sociologically.rleanists and moderate Legitimists envisaged elite rule through parliament, and distrusted all forms of populism. Ultra Legitimists mobilized Catholic women and men through pilgrimages. Bonapartists mobilized the anti-urban populism of the peasantry. Ultimately, some constitutional monarchists came to feel that the conservative Republic was the best antidote to the popular politics of both the Left and Extreme Right.

Monarchists soon regretted having helped establish the Republic, for it quickly set about removing them from positions of power. In the 1885 election, they set aside dynastic differences and embraced ‘conservatisme’, which was based on the premise that since the masses were fundamentally conservative and materialist, monarchists must demonstrate that they alone could defend order. Although conservatisme brought relative electoral success, monarchists feared that it would turn them into constitutional conservatives, and so they were open to Boulanger's secret offer to restore the monarchy.Monarchist and radical republican supporters of Boulanger found common ground in opposition to parliamentarianism. Furthermore, rank-and-file monarchist discontent with parliamentarianism helped push monarchist leaders into Boulangism. Monarchists and radicals met in the developing culture of commercialized leisure and in the evolving debate concerning citizenship and immigration. Boulangism permanently radicalized some monarchists and Catholics, and contributed to the emergence of Nationalism in the 1890s.

The failure of Boulangism, coupled with fear of socialism and radical republicanism, persuaded the Pope to order monarchists to defend property and religion within the Republic. Monarchists who had ‘rallied’ to the Republic increasingly cooperated with conservative republicans, especially under the leadership of Jules Méline, with whom they shared elitism, parliamentarianism, and an interest in organicist social and political science, notably crowd psychology. Yet tensions concerning the very nature of the social order that was to be defended undermined this alliance, which anyway barely extended into the country. Moreover, the Pope's simultaneous endorsement of democracy and Social Catholicism provoked the emergence of Christian Democracy, which combined social radicalism with militant religiosity. Christian Democrats attacked moderate republicans and Ralliés for social conservatism and for their weak defence of Catholic interests. Increasingly, Christian democrats and monarchists used anti-Semitism to attack the Republic, thus provoking the Dreyfus Affair.

This chapter provides a useful paradigm to analyse anti-secular alternatives. It outlines ways in which French and English Catholic writers seek to reimagine society and economics on a sacred basis. Cavanaugh's Eucharistic counter-politics has helped to draw out some of the governing dynamics at work in their writings. In spite of the religious shape of cultural and historic roots, the passionate neo-monarchism of the French Catholic writers—monarchism shaped more by Maurrassian influence than anything else—apes Republican State idealism, with its absolute confidence in monarchy as a panacea. The roots of such confidence arguably go back to the direction taken by the French monarchy under the influence of the divine right of kings, a paradoxically secular model—because conflating religion and politics and subjecting the former to the latter—in religious clothing.

With the crisis of legitimacy triggered by Napoleon’s invasion of the Iberian peninsula in 1808, different political projects emerged in the colonies. Chapter 7 provides a close analysis of commercial and political processes in the Rio de la Plata between 1810 and 1822 to illuminate the relationship between trans-imperial trade, sovereignty, and monarchism. Monarchism was intimately associated with the maintenance of trans-imperial networks of trade as well as the maintenance of the political and economic order of the colonial period. Monarchism represented the continuity of the old regime's legal principles, provided safety and stability for trans-imperial trade, and above all, prevented the economic, political, and social changes proposed by revolutionary projects.

Ethiopian dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam's fall from grace in May 1991 was as dramatic as his rise to power. From an obscure ordnance officer in his mid-thirties, Mengistu was installed to the highest levels of state power in the midst of a deep political crisis in 1974. His ascent signaled the end of feudalism and monarchism and ushered in an era of republicanism. Under his administration, however, Ethiopia was swept by a wave of militarization, terror, war, misery, and dislocation unprecedented in the country's history. This chapter analyzes the approximate causes of Mengistu's ouster and the legacies of the civil wars. It discusses the government campaign against Eritrean insurgency and how the revolution transformed the country's political, economic, social, and cultural environments.

This book examines political Islam in relation to Western ideologies of the past. It argues that political Islam, or Islamism, cannot be understood without reference to the broad ideology to which it is a reaction: secularism. Focusing on ideological contests in Europe and the Americas that stretched across countries and decades, the book outlines six broad lessons for policy makers and citizens trying to deal with the prolonged ideological travails in the Middle East. It also advances the claim that understanding the Islamist–secularist struggle requires that we understand the origins, dynamics, and ultimate end of similar ideological struggles in the history of the Western world. Finally, it describes the content of each ideology—Lutheranism, monarchism, liberalism, Islamism, and so on—and emphasizes the fact that each ideology was caught in a struggle with one or more alternatives.

This chapter considers the second lesson that is relevant to political Islam and secularism today: ideologies are (usually) not monolithic. It first considers the situation in Europe in the early nineteenth century, when European conservatives claimed that the divide between republicanism and constitutional monarchism was a distinction without a difference. It then examines the dilemma faced by the House of Habsburg in Europe during the early seventeenth century: since Protestantism seemed to be polylithic, should they try to exploit divisions among the Protestants? The chapter proceeds by discussing the fault lines separating communists and socialists in the twentieth century before concluding with some reflections on the lessons that can be drawn from Western history for the United States in dealing with Islamists today. It suggests that whether Islamism is monolithic or polylithic is a question that matters, especially for U.S. foreign policy.

This chapter considers the third lesson for Islamism and secularism: foreign interventions are normal. The United States is known to engage in various military interventions worldwide, including Afghanistan and Iraq, but it is not the only country that uses force to change other countries' domestic regimes or leaders. More than 200 such interventions have been attempted by great powers over the past 500 years. Indeed, Western history shows that such forcible interventions are a normal part of transnational ideological struggles. The chapter examines the dynamics at work in all three historic cases of ideological contests in Europe: the struggle between Catholics and Protestants, the struggle between monarchism and republicanism, and the struggle between communism, fascism, and democracy. It suggests that we should expect more foreign interventions as long as Muslims contend over the best way to order their societies.

This chapter considers the fifth lesson: the winner may be “none of the above.” In the prolonged contest between Muslim secularism and Islamism, a number of questions arise: Will one ideology and regime type eventually win? If so, what will the winner be? Or might there be no winner? Western history shows that transnational ideological contests such as that between secularism and Islamism can end in one of three ways: victory, transcendence, or convergence. The chapter explains each outcome in greater detail by focusing on the triumph of democratic capitalism in the late twentieth century, the Dutch Republic's creation of a tolerant constitutional regime, and the end of monarchism versus republicanism in the 1870s. It suggests that the signs at present point to convergence, a hybrid regime of Islamists and secularists that Westerners may find counterintuitive but that may just work in many Muslim societies.