Liberalism
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“I hope I need not warn you against Montalembert’s declamation about Poland—He has no idea about the insanity of nationality….” Acton to Richard Simpson (25 September 1861) The sixty-year period culminating in the First World War witnessed a momentous transformation in the European state system. Italian and German unification, the expulsion of the Ottomans from…
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“And this also has been one of the dark places of the earth.” Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1902) In early 1919, the British journalist Henry Noel Brailsford spent almost four months traveling through central and eastern Europe. His editor at the Herald, George Lansbury, had sent him there in the aftermath of World War…
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Historians usually trace the emergence of liberalism to England, France, and Germany, where in the early nineteenth century thinkers such as John Stuart Mill, François Guizot, and Wilhelm von Humboldt gave shape to a recognizable cluster of political ideas—but rarely to Italy. Yet in Carlo Cattaneo (1801–1869), Italy found a convincing and articulate spokesman for…
