Richard Cobden (1804-65) rose from humble beginnings to become the leading advocate of nineteenth-century free-trade and liberalism. As a fierce opponent of the Corn Laws and promoter of international trade he rapidly became an influential figure on the national stage, whose name became a byword for political and economic reform. Yet despite the familiarity with which contemporaries and historians refer to 'Cobdenism' his ideals and beliefs are not always easy to identify and classify in a coherent way. Indeed, as this volume makes clear, the variety, diversity and malleability of the 'Cobdenite project' attest to the lack of a strict dogma and highlight Cobden's underlying pragmatism. Divided into five sections, this collection of essays offers a timely reassessment of Cobden's career, its impact and legacy in the two hundred years since his birth. Beginning with an investigation into the intellectual and cultural background to his emergence as a national political figure, the volume then looks at Cobden's impact on the making of Victorian liberal politics. The third section examines Cobden's wider influence in Europe, particularly the impact of his tour of 1846-47 which was in many ways a defining moment not only in the making of Cobden's liberalism but in the making of liberal Europe. Section four broadens the theme of Cobden's contemporary impact, including his contribution to the debate on peace, internationalism and the American Civil War; whilst the final section opens up the theme of Cobden's contested legacy, the variety of interpretations of Cobden's ideas and their influence on late nineteenth- and twentieth-century politics. Offering a broad yet coherent investigation of the 'Cobdenite project' by leading international scholars, this volume provides a fascinating insight into one of the nineteenth century's most important figures whose ideas still resonate today.

This book provides a critical analysis of the liberal ideas of the decline of the state through a historical comparison. It takes special note of the implications of state failure to control economic growth and market exigencies for international relations. The book is divided into three sections. The first analyzes Cobden, Mitrany, and Ohmae's empirical claims, the second looks at their normative judgements and the third looks at their predictive assertions. It concludes that the three primarily propose normative arguments for less state involvement in economic and international relations but conceal them in empirical and predictive assertions. The liberal idea of the decline of the state is more of an ideological statement in response to political, social, and economic trends than an objective observation of an empirically verifiable fact.

Beneath the surface of the apparently untutored and deceptively frank Abraham Lincoln ran private tunnels of self-taught study, a restless philosophical curiosity, and a profound grasp of the fundamentals of democracy. Now, in Lincoln: A Very Short Introduction, the award-winning Lincoln authority Allen C. Guelzo offers a penetrating look into the mind of one of our greatest presidents. If Lincoln was famous for reading aloud from joke books, Guelzo shows that he also plunged deeply into the mainstream of nineteenth-century liberal democratic thought. Guelzo takes us on a wide-ranging exploration of problems that confronted Lincoln and liberal democracy--equality, opportunity, the rule of law, slavery, freedom, peace, and his legacy. The book sets these problems and Lincoln's responses against the larger world of American and trans-Atlantic liberal democracy in the 19th century, comparing Lincoln not just to Andrew Jackson or John Calhoun, but to British thinkers such as Richard Cobden, Jeremy Bentham, and John Bright, and to French observers Alexis de Tocqueville and François Guizot. The Lincoln we meet here is an Enlightenment figure who struggled to create a common ground between a people focused on individual rights and a society eager to establish a certain moral, philosophical, and intellectual bedrock. Lincoln insisted that liberal democracy had a higher purpose, which was the realization of a morally right political order. But how to interject that sense of moral order into a system that values personal self-satisfaction--"the pursuit of happiness"--remains a fundamental dilemma even today. Abraham Lincoln was a man who, according to his friend and biographer William Henry Herndon, "lived in the mind." Guelzo paints a marvelous portrait of this Lincoln--Lincoln the man of ideas--providing new insights into one of the giants of American history. About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam.