J Pitts
Biographic Data
| ID | 22436 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J Pitts |
| GIVEN NAMES | J |
| FAMILY NAME | Pitts |
| SIGNATURE | PITTS J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Chicago |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8313-4359 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 131 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Cugoano, Condorcet, and Abolition on the Eve of Revolution
Quobna Ottobah Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (1787), the first comprehensive antislavery treatise authored by a black writer in the West, was quickly published in an anonymous French translation, Réflexions sur la traite et l’esclavage des Nègres, Traduite de l’Anglais, d’ Ottobah Cugoano , afriquain, esclave à la Grenade et libre en Angleterre (Paris, 1788). Mars…
The Good Ambassadress: Gender and Diplomacy in the Marriage of Figaro
True to his pathbreaking and imaginative scholarship, David Armitage has discovered a rich fabric of connections between opera and international law — links that have been largely overlooked by previous scholars. By reading Beaumarchais and Mozart alongside Abraham Wicquefort and other contemporary sources on ambassadorial practice, he brings out some of the implications of his historical and sociological argument that opera was born not only wit…
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 Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville
Theme: ‘The Struggle between Statehood and Civil Society’, written by Martti Koskenniemi
Response to Murad Idris’s review of Boundaries of the International: Law and Empire
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Empire and its afterlives
Boundaries of the International: Law and Empire
It is commonly believed that international law originated in relations among European states that respected one another as free and equal. In fact, as Jennifer Pitts shows, international law was forged at least as much through Europeans' domineering relations with non-European states and empires, leaving a legacy still visible in the unequal structures of today's international order. Pitts focuses on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the g…
Apsa Active and Award Committees
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
Irony in Adam Smith’s Critical Global History
This essay argues that attention to Adam Smith’s ironic framing of his historical narratives in the Wealth of Nations shows his critique of modern commercial society to have been more radical than is generally recognized. These narratives traced the pathologies of European development and the complex chains of causation that linked Smith’s readers—with often destructive and even catastrophic results—to other human beings distant from themselves. …
International relations and the critical history of International Law
Just as the contemporary global structure is a product of nineteenth-century economic and political developments, namely, industrial capitalism and global empires dominated by European metropoles, a misleading conception of the international system as composed of formally equal sovereign states is a product of the same period, as Vattel's conception of states as equal moral persons was taken up and transformed in the early nineteenth century, esp…
The Critical History of International Law
A Liberal Geoculture
Jennifer Pitts on Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System IV: Centrist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789–1914. A seminal multi-volume account of the ‘capitalist world-economy’ reaches the long 19th century
Empire and Legal Universalisms in the Eighteenth Century
RECENT WORK ON EMPIRE IN THE HISTORY of political thought has been much concerned with the connections between various forms of moral universalism and projects of conquest. This work, especially on the “mutually constitutive” relationship between liberalism and empire, has asked: What sorts of universalism have accompanied imperial expansions, whether to justify them or to reflect critically on them? 1 Is moral universalism inherently imperial? W…
Bentham’s “Place and Time”
In recent years Bentham scholarship has unearthed a new Jeremy Bentham from manuscript, and this figure is gradually displacing the received Bentham of pre-revisionist research. The effects of new Bentham editing can be particularly dramatic because of the peculiar histories of so many of his texts; he wrote a fantastic amount and only supervised the publication of a small portion of it, and the editor who did the most to make his reputation - Ét…
"Bentham's "Place and Time
Bentham's "Place and Time" Stephen G. Engelmann (bio) and Jennifer Pitts (bio) In recent years Bentham scholarship has unearthed a new Jeremy Bentham from manuscript, and this figure is gradually displacing the received Bentham of pre-revisionist research.1 The effects of new Bentham editing can be particularly dramatic because of the peculiar histories of so many of his texts; he wrote a fantastic amount and only supervised the publication of a …
Political Theory of Empire and Imperialism
The past decade has seen a spate of new work on empire in political theory and the history of political thought. Much of this work has focused on the place of empire in the thought of many canonical thinkers and in the formation of modern liberalism and related arenas, such as postcolonial settler societies and the discipline of international law. Political theory's turn to empire has been belated in comparison to other fields, such as history, l…
Liberalism and Empire in a Nineteenth-Century Algerian Mirror
Le Miroir , published in Paris in 1833 by Hamdan ben Othman Khodja ( c. 1773–1842), was the first Algerian contribution to French public deliberation about France's emerging empire in North Africa. A work of a self-consciously liberal cosmopolitan, and modernizing, perspective, the Miroir was almost alone in French debates in making a principled argument for a complete French withdrawal from Algeria—what Khodja called a “liberal emancipation” of …
Covenants Without Swords: Idealist Liberalism and the Spirit of Empire
Covenants Without Swords: Idealist Liberalism and the Spirit of Empire. By Jeanne Morefield. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 280p. $39.50. The entanglement of liberal political thought and European imperial expansion has received increasing attention in recent years, in work by David Armitage, Barbara Arneil, Uday Mehta, Richard Tuck, and James Tully, among others. Yet the phenomenon remains puzzling, for while many European liberals…
Legislator Of The World? A Rereading of Bentham on Colonies
It has become almost commonplace to claim that utilitarianism was, from its inception, an imperialist theory. Many writers, from Bentham’s own followers to recent scholars, have suggested that from Bentham onward, utilitarians reveled in the opportunity that they believed despotic power provided for the establishment of perfectly rational laws and institutions. A closer look at Bentham’s own views on empire, however, reveals a sharp break between…
Writings on Empire and Slavery
Books in Review
Empire and Democracy: Tocqueville and the Algeria Question
In the closing years of the eighteenth century, a great intellectual and moral challenge to European empire was launched by many of the most innovative thinkers of the day, including Kant, Adam Smith, Bentham, Burke, Diderot, and Condorcet. They drew on a strikingly wide range of ideas to argue against empire: among others, the rights of man and the imperative of popular self‐determination, the economic wisdom of free trade and foolishness of con…
Political Theory of Empire and Imperialism
The past decade has seen a spate of new work on empire in political theory and the history of political thought. Much of this work has focused on the place of empire in the thought of many canonical thinkers and in the formation of modern liberalism and related arenas, such as postcolonial settler societies and the discipline of international law. Political theory's turn to empire has been belated in comparison to other fields, such as history, l…
Empire and Democracy: Tocqueville and the Algeria Question
In the closing years of the eighteenth century, a great intellectual and moral challenge to European empire was launched by many of the most innovative thinkers of the day, including Kant, Adam Smith, Bentham, Burke, Diderot, and Condorcet. They drew on a strikingly wide range of ideas to argue against empire: among others, the rights of man and the imperative of popular self‐determination, the economic wisdom of free trade and foolishness of con…
Empire and its afterlives
Legislator Of The World? A Rereading of Bentham on Colonies
It has become almost commonplace to claim that utilitarianism was, from its inception, an imperialist theory. Many writers, from Bentham’s own followers to recent scholars, have suggested that from Bentham onward, utilitarians reveled in the opportunity that they believed despotic power provided for the establishment of perfectly rational laws and institutions. A closer look at Bentham’s own views on empire, however, reveals a sharp break between…
Irony in Adam Smith’s Critical Global History
This essay argues that attention to Adam Smith’s ironic framing of his historical narratives in the Wealth of Nations shows his critique of modern commercial society to have been more radical than is generally recognized. These narratives traced the pathologies of European development and the complex chains of causation that linked Smith’s readers—with often destructive and even catastrophic results—to other human beings distant from themselves. …
"Bentham's "Place and Time
Bentham's "Place and Time" Stephen G. Engelmann (bio) and Jennifer Pitts (bio) In recent years Bentham scholarship has unearthed a new Jeremy Bentham from manuscript, and this figure is gradually displacing the received Bentham of pre-revisionist research.1 The effects of new Bentham editing can be particularly dramatic because of the peculiar histories of so many of his texts; he wrote a fantastic amount and only supervised the publication of a …
Liberalism and Empire in a Nineteenth-Century Algerian Mirror
Le Miroir , published in Paris in 1833 by Hamdan ben Othman Khodja ( c. 1773–1842), was the first Algerian contribution to French public deliberation about France's emerging empire in North Africa. A work of a self-consciously liberal cosmopolitan, and modernizing, perspective, the Miroir was almost alone in French debates in making a principled argument for a complete French withdrawal from Algeria—what Khodja called a “liberal emancipation” of …
The Critical History of International Law
International relations and the critical history of International Law
Just as the contemporary global structure is a product of nineteenth-century economic and political developments, namely, industrial capitalism and global empires dominated by European metropoles, a misleading conception of the international system as composed of formally equal sovereign states is a product of the same period, as Vattel's conception of states as equal moral persons was taken up and transformed in the early nineteenth century, esp…
Empire and Democracy: Tocqueville and the Algeria Question
In the closing years of the eighteenth century, a great intellectual and moral challenge to European empire was launched by many of the most innovative thinkers of the day, including Kant, Adam Smith, Bentham, Burke, Diderot, and Condorcet. They drew on a strikingly wide range of ideas to argue against empire: among others, the rights of man and the imperative of popular self‐determination, the economic wisdom of free trade and foolishness of con…
Books in Review
Legislator Of The World? A Rereading of Bentham on Colonies
It has become almost commonplace to claim that utilitarianism was, from its inception, an imperialist theory. Many writers, from Bentham’s own followers to recent scholars, have suggested that from Bentham onward, utilitarians reveled in the opportunity that they believed despotic power provided for the establishment of perfectly rational laws and institutions. A closer look at Bentham’s own views on empire, however, reveals a sharp break between…
Writings on Empire and Slavery
Covenants Without Swords: Idealist Liberalism and the Spirit of Empire
Covenants Without Swords: Idealist Liberalism and the Spirit of Empire. By Jeanne Morefield. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 280p. $39.50. The entanglement of liberal political thought and European imperial expansion has received increasing attention in recent years, in work by David Armitage, Barbara Arneil, Uday Mehta, Richard Tuck, and James Tully, among others. Yet the phenomenon remains puzzling, for while many European liberals…
Liberalism and Empire in a Nineteenth-Century Algerian Mirror
Le Miroir , published in Paris in 1833 by Hamdan ben Othman Khodja ( c. 1773–1842), was the first Algerian contribution to French public deliberation about France's emerging empire in North Africa. A work of a self-consciously liberal cosmopolitan, and modernizing, perspective, the Miroir was almost alone in French debates in making a principled argument for a complete French withdrawal from Algeria—what Khodja called a “liberal emancipation” of …
Political Theory of Empire and Imperialism
The past decade has seen a spate of new work on empire in political theory and the history of political thought. Much of this work has focused on the place of empire in the thought of many canonical thinkers and in the formation of modern liberalism and related arenas, such as postcolonial settler societies and the discipline of international law. Political theory's turn to empire has been belated in comparison to other fields, such as history, l…
Bentham’s “Place and Time”
In recent years Bentham scholarship has unearthed a new Jeremy Bentham from manuscript, and this figure is gradually displacing the received Bentham of pre-revisionist research. The effects of new Bentham editing can be particularly dramatic because of the peculiar histories of so many of his texts; he wrote a fantastic amount and only supervised the publication of a small portion of it, and the editor who did the most to make his reputation - Ét…
"Bentham's "Place and Time
Bentham's "Place and Time" Stephen G. Engelmann (bio) and Jennifer Pitts (bio) In recent years Bentham scholarship has unearthed a new Jeremy Bentham from manuscript, and this figure is gradually displacing the received Bentham of pre-revisionist research.1 The effects of new Bentham editing can be particularly dramatic because of the peculiar histories of so many of his texts; he wrote a fantastic amount and only supervised the publication of a …
A Liberal Geoculture
Jennifer Pitts on Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System IV: Centrist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789–1914. A seminal multi-volume account of the ‘capitalist world-economy’ reaches the long 19th century
Empire and Legal Universalisms in the Eighteenth Century
RECENT WORK ON EMPIRE IN THE HISTORY of political thought has been much concerned with the connections between various forms of moral universalism and projects of conquest. This work, especially on the “mutually constitutive” relationship between liberalism and empire, has asked: What sorts of universalism have accompanied imperial expansions, whether to justify them or to reflect critically on them? 1 Is moral universalism inherently imperial? W…
The Critical History of International Law
Apsa Active and Award Committees
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
Irony in Adam Smith’s Critical Global History
This essay argues that attention to Adam Smith’s ironic framing of his historical narratives in the Wealth of Nations shows his critique of modern commercial society to have been more radical than is generally recognized. These narratives traced the pathologies of European development and the complex chains of causation that linked Smith’s readers—with often destructive and even catastrophic results—to other human beings distant from themselves. …
International relations and the critical history of International Law
Just as the contemporary global structure is a product of nineteenth-century economic and political developments, namely, industrial capitalism and global empires dominated by European metropoles, a misleading conception of the international system as composed of formally equal sovereign states is a product of the same period, as Vattel's conception of states as equal moral persons was taken up and transformed in the early nineteenth century, esp…
Boundaries of the International: Law and Empire
It is commonly believed that international law originated in relations among European states that respected one another as free and equal. In fact, as Jennifer Pitts shows, international law was forged at least as much through Europeans' domineering relations with non-European states and empires, leaving a legacy still visible in the unequal structures of today's international order. Pitts focuses on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the g…
Response to Murad Idris’s review of Boundaries of the International: Law and Empire
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Empire and its afterlives
Theme: ‘The Struggle between Statehood and Civil Society’, written by Martti Koskenniemi
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 Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville
The Good Ambassadress: Gender and Diplomacy in the Marriage of Figaro
True to his pathbreaking and imaginative scholarship, David Armitage has discovered a rich fabric of connections between opera and international law — links that have been largely overlooked by previous scholars. By reading Beaumarchais and Mozart alongside Abraham Wicquefort and other contemporary sources on ambassadorial practice, he brings out some of the implications of his historical and sociological argument that opera was born not only wit…
Cugoano, Condorcet, and Abolition on the Eve of Revolution
Quobna Ottobah Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (1787), the first comprehensive antislavery treatise authored by a black writer in the West, was quickly published in an anonymous French translation, Réflexions sur la traite et l’esclavage des Nègres, Traduite de l’Anglais, d’ Ottobah Cugoano , afriquain, esclave à la Grenade et libre en Angleterre (Paris, 1788). Mars…
Political science (19 works) · Law (17 works) · Law (13 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Empire (10 works) · History (10 works) · Politics (9 works) · Sociology (9 works) · History (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works)