Firm Heart and Capacious Mind: The Life and Friends of Etienne Dumont is the first full-length biography of a Renaissance man, the statesman/publicist/jurist/political writer/man of letters who was hailed by Goethe, Macauley and Stendhal as one of the great intellects of his time. Among other activities he advised Mirabeau (he leader of the National Assembly) in the French Revolution, introduced Jeremy Bentham to the world by publishing ten volumes edited and rewritten from Bentham's notes, and led the political struggle that turned Geneva into a democracy. Dumont also played a direct role in such social reforms as the abolition of slavery, corresponding with and advising Samuel Romilly, William Wiberforce and others. A confirmed bachelor, he was admired and at times loved by some of the most prominent women of his time: Lady Holland, Madame de Stael and Maria Edgeworth. There has been no other full-length work, and no book at all in English, on this remarkable man.

The first study of how Genevan Etienne Dumont, and his traumatic experience of the French Revolution, shaped the reception and presentation of 'Benthamism' and masked the true face of Jeremy Bentham, one of the architects of modern society who visualised a new world based on the values of transparency, accountability, and economy.

A sweeping exploration of revolutionary ideas that traveled the Atlantic in the late eighteenth century Nation-based histories cannot do justice to the rowdy, radical interchange of ideas around the Atlantic world during the tumultuous years from 1776 to 1804. National borders were powerless to restrict the flow of enticing new visions of human rights and universal freedom. This expansive history explores how the revolutionary ideas that spurred the American and French revolutions reverberated far and wide, connecting European, North American, African, and Caribbean peoples more closely than ever before. Historian Janet Polasky focuses on the eighteenth-century travelers who spread new notions of liberty and equality. It was an age of itinerant revolutionaries, she shows, who ignored borders and found allies with whom to imagine a borderless world. As paths crossed, ideas entangled. The author investigates these ideas and how they were disseminated long before the days of instant communications and social media or even an international postal system. Polasky analyzes the paper records--books, broadsides, journals, newspapers, novels, letters, and more--to follow the far-reaching trails of revolutionary zeal. What emerges clearly from rich historic records is that the dream of liberty among America's founders was part of a much larger picture. It was a dream embraced throughout the far-flung regions of the Atlantic world.

Following the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807, a group of politicians began to agitate for reform of England's "bloody code" of criminal statutes. This examines the politics and propaganda of criminal law reform from 1808 to the Whig succession to power in 1830.

As Britain and France became more powerful during the eighteenth century, small states such as Geneva could no longer stand militarily against these commercial monarchies. Furthermore, many Genevans felt that they were being drawn into a corrupt commercial world dominated by amoral aristocrats dedicated to the unprincipled pursuit of wealth. In this book Richard Whatmore presents an intellectual history of republicans who strove to ensure Geneva's survival as an independent state. Whatmore shows how the Genevan republicans grappled with the ideas of Rousseau, Voltaire, Bentham, and others in seeking to make modern Europe safe for small states, by vanquishing the threats presented by war and by empire.

This book is the fifty-first volume of Current Legal Problems and contains the now customary selection of high quality essays by a group of outstanding scholars. The volume provides a particularly valuable and broad-ranging set of contributions for a stimulating study of legal theory at the end of the millennium.