Dan Edelstein
Biographic Data
| ID | 1098607 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Dan Edelstein |
| GIVEN NAMES | Dan |
| FAMILY NAME | Edelstein |
| SIGNATURE | EDELSTEIN D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stanford University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2541-1119 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 36 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Sovereignty and Government in the French Revolution
This article argues that while the instability and violence of the French Revolution has been overwhelmingly attributed to the transfer of unitary sovereignty from king to people, popular sovereignty was neither conceptually novel nor inherently destabilizing in 1789. We begin by drawing on early modern political theory, most importantly Bodin, d’Argenson and Rousseau, to argue that democracy was understood to be as much a form of government as a…
Stasis in Ithaca? A Thucydidean Reading of the Odyssey
The Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea from Thucydides to Lenin
Cambridge History of Rights: Volume 4, the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea from Thucydides to Lenin
Plutarch and Machiavelli: The Politics of Prudence
Plutarch and Machiavelli: What could they have in common? Machiavelli may have mined Plutarch for historical exempla, but his political arguments could not be more different. Or could they? In this article, I make the case that Plutarch in fact is the source of some of the more iconoclastic claims of The Prince , from the conquest of fortune to the importance of being feared, and even the necessity, on occasion, of immoral acts. If this connectio…
Introduction to Volume IV
Writers during the age of the Enlightenment and revolutions did such a good job “declaring” rights that many historians and politicians later believed that they invented them. But as we show in this volume (the fourth in a chronological series), this assumption is flawed. What’s more, many of the earlier characteristics of rights – in particular, their connection to religion – remained present through the revolutions of the late eighteenth and ea…
The Cambridge History of Rights
The age of Enlightenment and revolutions produced some of our best-known declarations of rights, but they did not create the idea of rights. Writers during this age did such a good job at declaring rights that many historians and politicians later believed that they invented them. The fourth volume of The Cambridge History of Rights shows that the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are better understood as a time of transformation, extending rig…
How Republics Die: Plutarch and the Intra-elite Rivalries that Destroyed the Roman Commonwealth
Plutarch's Roman Lives present an unusual, if historically compelling, account of why the Roman Republic collapsed. Drawing on Polybius' political theory (sketched out in Histories 6.57), Plutarch suggests that after the fall of Carthage, traditional competition among elites began to spiral out of control. Not only did competition lead to increasingly violent clashes over scarce honours, it exacerbated the tensions between social classes, which t…
On the liberties of the ancients: Licentiousness, equal rights, and the rule of law
In this article, we discuss Greek and Roman conceptions of liberty. The supposedly ‘neo-Roman’ view of liberty as non-domination is really derived from negative Greek models, we argue, while Roman authors devised an alternative understanding of liberty that rested on the equality of legal rights. In this ‘paleo-Roman’ model, as long as the law was the same for all, you were free; whether or not you participated in making the law was not a constit…
Rousseau, Bodin, and the Medieval Corporatist Origins of Popular Sovereignty
This essay reconsiders Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s debt to Jean Bodin, on the basis of Daniel Lee’s recent revision of Bodin as a theorist of popular sovereignty. It argues that Rousseau took a key feature of his own theory of democratic sovereignty from Bodin—namely, the dual identity of political members as both citizens and subjects of the state. It further makes the case that this dual identity originates in medieval corporatist law, which Bodin …
A "Revolution" in Political Thought: Translations of Polybius Book 6 and the Conceptual History of Revolution
How did "revolution" obtain its particular meanings in political thought? This article examines the role played by translations of Polybius's Histories (Book 6), where "revolution" was the near-unanimous choice for rendering "anacyclosis." It further claims "revolution" displaced the earlier Aristotelian vocabulary of political change (in translations, "mutation" and "sedition"). Finally, it argues that recognizing the Polybian source of much "re…
Capitalism and the Emergence of Civic Equality in Eighteenth-Century France
Eingegangene Bücher
Eingegangene Bücher
Spirit of Rights. Response to Comments
Dan Edelstein responds to the comments by ThĂŠrence Carvalho, Olivier Grenouilleau, Emmanuelle de Champs and Ivo Cerman. He sums up the argument of his book and stresses that it was not only about 18th century and physiocracy. He explains that the book was motivated by his efforts to bridge the gap which appeared in US historiography, where an older trend stressed natural law, while a second newer trend focuses only on natural rights and the twen…
Networks of Enlightenment: Digital Approaches to the Republic of Letters
On the Spirit of Rights
The ancient constitution and the Roman law: On Benjamin Straumann’s Crisis and Constitutionalism
Benjamin Straumann’s book advances a bold claim: that constitutionalism was not born from the practice of framing or of living under a constitution, but rather from the experience of its demise dur
How England Fell Off the Map of Voltaire's Enlightenment
Voltaire's Letters Concerning the English Nation ( Lettres philosophiques ) have left the indelible impression that the French philosophe was fundamentally marked by his exposure to English thought in the late 1720s. On the map of his epistolary correspondence, however, England is hardly to be found. What are we to make of this discrepancy? In this article, we demonstrate that the missing letters to England are unlikely to be the result of a data…
Christian Human Rights in the French Revolution
This essay explores the early Catholic response to the concept of human rights. It is widely assumed that the Catholic Church opposed human rights talk in the wake of the French Revolution, and only slowly came around to accepting it in the twentieth century. However, a more systematic analysis of Pius VI's stance toward the French Revolution reveals that he approved of human rights, but had a more Thomistic understanding of them than what was fo…
Historical Research in a Digital Age: Reflections from the Mapping the Republic of Letters Project
What can a big data approach bring to the study of the early modern Republic of Letters? This is the question we asked ourselves in our collaborative project Mapping the Republic of Letters. For the past nine years, we have been exploring the limits and possibilities of computation and visualization for studying early modern correspondences, whose massive and dispersed character have long challenged their students. Beyond cliometrics, what new wa…
Red Leviathan: Authority and Violence in Revolutionary Political Culture
As Mao euphemistically remarked, revolutions are not dinner parties. Violence is to be expected when political regimes are overturned. But the violence that accompanied modern revolutions is remarkable for the fact that it targeted fellow revolutionaries almost as often as declared opponents. Why is this? In this essay, I suggest that the reason has to do with a specific feature of revolutions that abandon constitutional forms of political legiti…
The French Enlightenment Network
Scripting Revolution: A Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolutions
To Quote or not to Quote: Citation Strategies in the Encyclopédie
Ever since the first volume of the Encyclopédie was published in 1751, critics have complained about its liberal borrowings from other sources. This article explores some of the reasons why not citing other sources may have been an important publishing and philosophical strategy. Using a data-mining program that automatically flags likely matches between texts, we were able to identify thousands of citations and to discover clear citational patte…
Rousseau, Bodin, and the Medieval Corporatist Origins of Popular Sovereignty
This essay reconsiders Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s debt to Jean Bodin, on the basis of Daniel Lee’s recent revision of Bodin as a theorist of popular sovereignty. It argues that Rousseau took a key feature of his own theory of democratic sovereignty from Bodin—namely, the dual identity of political members as both citizens and subjects of the state. It further makes the case that this dual identity originates in medieval corporatist law, which Bodin …
War and Terror: The Law of Nations from Grotius to the French Revolution
Research Article| April 01 2008 War and Terror: The Law of Nations from Grotius to the French Revolution Dan Edelstein Dan Edelstein Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google French Historical Studies (2008) 31 (2): 229–262. https://doi.org/10.1215/00161071-2007-021 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Dan Edelstein; War and Terror: The Law of Nations from Grotius to th…
Intellectual History and Digital Humanities
The digital age has been a boon for intellectual historians, particularly those of us who work on early modern Europe and America. The mass digitization of old books has made research more efficient than ever: first editions are there for the downloading on Google Books, Gallica, Liberty Fund, Project Gutenberg, and elsewhere. The creation of such large-scale databases as Early English Books Online (EEBO), Eighteenth-Century Collection Online (EC…
The French Enlightenment Network
On the liberties of the ancients: Licentiousness, equal rights, and the rule of law
In this article, we discuss Greek and Roman conceptions of liberty. The supposedly ‘neo-Roman’ view of liberty as non-domination is really derived from negative Greek models, we argue, while Roman authors devised an alternative understanding of liberty that rested on the equality of legal rights. In this ‘paleo-Roman’ model, as long as the law was the same for all, you were free; whether or not you participated in making the law was not a constit…
How England Fell Off the Map of Voltaire's Enlightenment
Voltaire's Letters Concerning the English Nation ( Lettres philosophiques ) have left the indelible impression that the French philosophe was fundamentally marked by his exposure to English thought in the late 1720s. On the map of his epistolary correspondence, however, England is hardly to be found. What are we to make of this discrepancy? In this article, we demonstrate that the missing letters to England are unlikely to be the result of a data…
Christian Human Rights in the French Revolution
This essay explores the early Catholic response to the concept of human rights. It is widely assumed that the Catholic Church opposed human rights talk in the wake of the French Revolution, and only slowly came around to accepting it in the twentieth century. However, a more systematic analysis of Pius VI's stance toward the French Revolution reveals that he approved of human rights, but had a more Thomistic understanding of them than what was fo…
Red Leviathan: Authority and Violence in Revolutionary Political Culture
As Mao euphemistically remarked, revolutions are not dinner parties. Violence is to be expected when political regimes are overturned. But the violence that accompanied modern revolutions is remarkable for the fact that it targeted fellow revolutionaries almost as often as declared opponents. Why is this? In this essay, I suggest that the reason has to do with a specific feature of revolutions that abandon constitutional forms of political legiti…
Enlightenment Rights Talk
A "Revolution" in Political Thought: Translations of Polybius Book 6 and the Conceptual History of Revolution
How did "revolution" obtain its particular meanings in political thought? This article examines the role played by translations of Polybius's Histories (Book 6), where "revolution" was the near-unanimous choice for rendering "anacyclosis." It further claims "revolution" displaced the earlier Aristotelian vocabulary of political change (in translations, "mutation" and "sedition"). Finally, it argues that recognizing the Polybian source of much "re…
Do We Want a Revolution without Revolution? Reflections on Political Authority
How can we move past revisionism? This article suggests that a first step is to recognize its strengths: Furet was right to underscore the transformative effects of revolution on political culture. But his interpretation of its significance was flawed. Not only did the events of July 1789 transform the understanding of revolution that had prevailed in previous months, but this concept continued to evolve over the next four years. It gradually wen…
Hyperborean Atlantis: Jean-Sylvain Bailly, Madame Blavatsky, and the Nazi Myth
War and Terror: The Law of Nations from Grotius to the French Revolution
Research Article| April 01 2008 War and Terror: The Law of Nations from Grotius to the French Revolution Dan Edelstein Dan Edelstein Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google French Historical Studies (2008) 31 (2): 229–262. https://doi.org/10.1215/00161071-2007-021 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Dan Edelstein; War and Terror: The Law of Nations from Grotius to th…
The Classical Turn in Enlightenment Studies
Antiquity is back. In some respects, it is surprising it ever went away: for the last forty years, Peter Gay's magisterial survey, which connected the “little flock” of philosophes with “pagan” authors, has loomed large over the field of Enlightenment studies. But shortly after its publication, a methodological sea change pulled the field in an opposite direction. Robert Darnton hailed this rising tide of social and cultural history in a 1971 lar…
Do We Want a Revolution without Revolution? Reflections on Political Authority
How can we move past revisionism? This article suggests that a first step is to recognize its strengths: Furet was right to underscore the transformative effects of revolution on political culture. But his interpretation of its significance was flawed. Not only did the events of July 1789 transform the understanding of revolution that had prevailed in previous months, but this concept continued to evolve over the next four years. It gradually wen…
To Quote or not to Quote: Citation Strategies in the Encyclopédie
Ever since the first volume of the Encyclopédie was published in 1751, critics have complained about its liberal borrowings from other sources. This article explores some of the reasons why not citing other sources may have been an important publishing and philosophical strategy. Using a data-mining program that automatically flags likely matches between texts, we were able to identify thousands of citations and to discover clear citational patte…
Enlightenment Rights Talk
Scripting Revolution: A Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolutions
Intellectual History and Digital Humanities
The digital age has been a boon for intellectual historians, particularly those of us who work on early modern Europe and America. The mass digitization of old books has made research more efficient than ever: first editions are there for the downloading on Google Books, Gallica, Liberty Fund, Project Gutenberg, and elsewhere. The creation of such large-scale databases as Early English Books Online (EEBO), Eighteenth-Century Collection Online (EC…
The French Enlightenment Network
Historical Research in a Digital Age: Reflections from the Mapping the Republic of Letters Project
What can a big data approach bring to the study of the early modern Republic of Letters? This is the question we asked ourselves in our collaborative project Mapping the Republic of Letters. For the past nine years, we have been exploring the limits and possibilities of computation and visualization for studying early modern correspondences, whose massive and dispersed character have long challenged their students. Beyond cliometrics, what new wa…
Red Leviathan: Authority and Violence in Revolutionary Political Culture
As Mao euphemistically remarked, revolutions are not dinner parties. Violence is to be expected when political regimes are overturned. But the violence that accompanied modern revolutions is remarkable for the fact that it targeted fellow revolutionaries almost as often as declared opponents. Why is this? In this essay, I suggest that the reason has to do with a specific feature of revolutions that abandon constitutional forms of political legiti…
On the Spirit of Rights
The ancient constitution and the Roman law: On Benjamin Straumann’s Crisis and Constitutionalism
Benjamin Straumann’s book advances a bold claim: that constitutionalism was not born from the practice of framing or of living under a constitution, but rather from the experience of its demise dur
How England Fell Off the Map of Voltaire's Enlightenment
Voltaire's Letters Concerning the English Nation ( Lettres philosophiques ) have left the indelible impression that the French philosophe was fundamentally marked by his exposure to English thought in the late 1720s. On the map of his epistolary correspondence, however, England is hardly to be found. What are we to make of this discrepancy? In this article, we demonstrate that the missing letters to England are unlikely to be the result of a data…
Christian Human Rights in the French Revolution
This essay explores the early Catholic response to the concept of human rights. It is widely assumed that the Catholic Church opposed human rights talk in the wake of the French Revolution, and only slowly came around to accepting it in the twentieth century. However, a more systematic analysis of Pius VI's stance toward the French Revolution reveals that he approved of human rights, but had a more Thomistic understanding of them than what was fo…
Networks of Enlightenment: Digital Approaches to the Republic of Letters
Spirit of Rights. Response to Comments
Dan Edelstein responds to the comments by ThĂŠrence Carvalho, Olivier Grenouilleau, Emmanuelle de Champs and Ivo Cerman. He sums up the argument of his book and stresses that it was not only about 18th century and physiocracy. He explains that the book was motivated by his efforts to bridge the gap which appeared in US historiography, where an older trend stressed natural law, while a second newer trend focuses only on natural rights and the twen…
Eingegangene Bücher
Eingegangene Bücher
Rousseau, Bodin, and the Medieval Corporatist Origins of Popular Sovereignty
This essay reconsiders Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s debt to Jean Bodin, on the basis of Daniel Lee’s recent revision of Bodin as a theorist of popular sovereignty. It argues that Rousseau took a key feature of his own theory of democratic sovereignty from Bodin—namely, the dual identity of political members as both citizens and subjects of the state. It further makes the case that this dual identity originates in medieval corporatist law, which Bodin …
A "Revolution" in Political Thought: Translations of Polybius Book 6 and the Conceptual History of Revolution
How did "revolution" obtain its particular meanings in political thought? This article examines the role played by translations of Polybius's Histories (Book 6), where "revolution" was the near-unanimous choice for rendering "anacyclosis." It further claims "revolution" displaced the earlier Aristotelian vocabulary of political change (in translations, "mutation" and "sedition"). Finally, it argues that recognizing the Polybian source of much "re…
Capitalism and the Emergence of Civic Equality in Eighteenth-Century France
On the liberties of the ancients: Licentiousness, equal rights, and the rule of law
In this article, we discuss Greek and Roman conceptions of liberty. The supposedly ‘neo-Roman’ view of liberty as non-domination is really derived from negative Greek models, we argue, while Roman authors devised an alternative understanding of liberty that rested on the equality of legal rights. In this ‘paleo-Roman’ model, as long as the law was the same for all, you were free; whether or not you participated in making the law was not a constit…
Introduction to Volume IV
Writers during the age of the Enlightenment and revolutions did such a good job “declaring” rights that many historians and politicians later believed that they invented them. But as we show in this volume (the fourth in a chronological series), this assumption is flawed. What’s more, many of the earlier characteristics of rights – in particular, their connection to religion – remained present through the revolutions of the late eighteenth and ea…
The Cambridge History of Rights
The age of Enlightenment and revolutions produced some of our best-known declarations of rights, but they did not create the idea of rights. Writers during this age did such a good job at declaring rights that many historians and politicians later believed that they invented them. The fourth volume of The Cambridge History of Rights shows that the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are better understood as a time of transformation, extending rig…
Political science (19 works) · History (17 works) · Law (16 works) · Politics (14 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Law (10 works) · Sociology (9 works) · History (8 works) · American Constitutional Law and Politics (7 works) · European Political History Analysis (7 works)