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May 20, 2013

According to Reinhart Koselleck, the eighteenth century witnessed the gradual and permanent separation of concepts of "civil war" and "revolution". Placing these ideas in a longer perspective – a longue durée that goes back to republican Rome and comes forward to our own times – challenges this narrative by showing...


Apr 17, 2013

2013 sees the centenary of the birth of Douglas Young, one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century Scottish nationalism. Leader of the SNP from 1942 to the end of the Second World War, Young was imprisoned twice for refusing conscription – both military and industrial. He was also an eminent...


Mar 13, 2013

Ideas of historical distance have long been fundamental to Western conceptions of historical knowledge. In practice, however, distance seems to have dwindled into little more than a professional shibboleth - a way of defending the historian's labours against the simplifications of popular journalism or the shortcuts of...


Mar 5, 2013

One of the great surprises of modern thought is the survival of democracy. Today the victory of democracy continues to be associated with the American and French Revolutions. But democracy was for the most part castigated by reformers and revolutionaries across Europe during the enlightenment era. Attempts to...


Jan 23, 2013

 

Over the quarter of a millennium from the later seventeenth century to the Great War, the phrase 'civil and religious liberty' was a pervasive feature of English political language. How and why had the phrase come into being? In 1600 it would have been unintelligible. The alliance of religious with civil liberty...