Gregory Conti
Biographic Data
| ID | 3628691 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Gregory Conti |
| GIVEN NAMES | Gregory |
| FAMILY NAME | Conti |
| SIGNATURE | CONTI G |
| AFFILIATIONS | Princeton University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5099-7636 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 23 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Kahan’s Liberalism
Worlds of Liberalism
Tocqueville against Guizot? On Gianna Englert’s Democracy Tamed
On the Nadir of Natural Rights Theory in Nineteenth-Century Britain
This chapter examines the aversion to theories and programs of natural rights in much mainstream nineteenth-century British political discourse. Following on the heels of their Enlightenment and revolutionary efflorescence, writers in Great Britain articulated various critiques of natural rights philosophies and declarations. Moving from early critics such as Burke and Bentham to later Victorian writers and statesmen – most importantly, J. S. Mil…
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…
Albert Venn Dicey: Writings on Democracy and the Referendum: Writings on Democracy and the Referendum
What are the limits to parliamentary sovereignty? When should the people be able to vote directly on issues? The constitutional theorist Albert Venn Dicey (1835–1922) was a cogent advocate of the referendum. While his enthusiasm for the institution was widely acknowledged in his own day, thereafter this dimension of his career has been largely neglected. This fall into obscurity is partly explained by the fact that Dicey never collected his writi…
In what senses should we see John Stuart Mill as a socialist
Rousseau on multiplying partial associations
In Feb. 2022 Sungho Kimlee passed away. In his memory, we present this revised and abridged version of a portion of his dissertation, Factions and Orders: from Machiavelli to Madison. Sungho summarized the work as follows: “Since antiquity, thinkers have held that every society consists of two hostile orders – the few and the many. But they have disagreed on the proper method for defusing this civic divide, and their various proposed remedies can…
Albert Venn Dicey: Writings on Democracy and the Referendum
A response to the roundtable: Politics, history, and JS Mill in Parliament the Mirror of the Nation
The English Utilitarians, Some Recent Reconsiderations
In 1900, perhaps the greatest Victorian historian of ideas, Leslie Stephen, released his three-volume English Utilitarians . Coming to grips with the political thought of the century that had just ended, he believed, required considering the “dominant beliefs of the adherents of this school.” So privileged a point of access was offered by what we would now call “classical utilitarianism” that a study of it could serve as a “sequel” to his previou…
Charles Dupont-White: An idiosyncratic nineteenth-century theorist on speech, state, and John Stuart Mill
Although he is little read today, especially by Anglophone academics, Charles Dupont-White (1807–78) deserves the attention of historians of political thought for two reasons. First, he was an original and powerful theorist of a more statist brand of liberalism that in several ways proved a harbinger of later liberal and social-democratic ideas. Second, he was responsible for the original translations into French of two of John Stuart Mill’s most…
James Fitzjames Stephen's other enemies: Catholicism and Positivism in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity and beyond
As the most famous critic of John Stuart Mill, James Fitzjames Stephen has often been assumed to have been a religious conservative or even reactionary. In contrast to these assessments, this article shows that Stephen's most consistent enemies were what he took to be the two most significant religious forces of the modern world: Ultramontane Catholicism and Comtean Positivism. The article explores his objections to these two religious ideologies…
How to Read James Fitzjames Stephen: Technocracy and Pluralism in a Misunderstood Victorian
This paper offers a new reading of the political thought of the mid-Victorian jurist and intellectual James Fitzjames Stephen. Contrary to impressions of Stephen as a conservative or religious authoritarian, this article recognizes the liberal character of Stephen’s thought, and it argues that investigating Stephen’s liberalism holds lessons for us today about the structure of liberal theory. Stephen, the paper demonstrates, articulated robustly …
John Stuart Mill and modern liberalism: A study in contrasts
The lost history of political liberalism
We have entered a revisionist moment in the study of the history of liberalism. In many respects this reorientation has been salutary. Scholars have corrected such unsupportable but tenacious simpl
Ostrogorski before and after: Three moments in antipartyism and “elite theory
Democracy Confronts Diversity: Descriptive Representation in Victorian Britain
Today political theorists and the public generally often associate descriptive representation with democracy. However, in Victorian Britain supporters of descriptive representation tended to be arrayed against democracy. The impression that democracy was incompatible with descriptive representation and a set of related values, primary among which was deliberation, formed one of the great obstacles which democratic theory faced in this period. The…
Representative Institutions and the Question of Lefortian Democracy
Claude Lefort's interests as a democratic theorist primarily lied elsewhere than in institutional questions. This essay, however, takes up what commentary he did provide on representative institutions to offer a new interpretation of his thought. Focusing in particular on little-studied writings of his from the late 1980s, this essay argues that at the institutional level Lefort was committed to a descriptive account of representation, based in a…
Evaluating Adversarial Interfaces: An Automated Approach
Contrary to the idealistic notion that human-computer interfaces are designed to actively help users accomplish their goals, millions of people who use the World Wide Web every day encounter a wide variety of interfaces that aggressively divert users toward the goals of the designer and away from those of the user. We label such strategies "adversarial interface design." Techniques of adversarial design include coercion, confusion, distraction, e…
What's Not in On Liberty: The Pacific Theory of Freedom of Discussion in the Early Nineteenth Century
It is often assumed that John Stuart Mill's On Liberty (1859) is representative of the major lines of thought on the freedoms of discussion and the press in the period. In fact, however, Mill's treatise was selective about the kinds of reasons it admitted in support of these liberties. This essay depicts one set of arguments that Mill omitted and that has subsequently been overlooked in the history of political thought. An important element of li…
The Other Side of Representation: The History and Theory of Representative Government in Pierre Rosanvallon
Lockean toleration and the victim's perspective
According to Jeremy Waldron, John Locke's argument for the instrumental irrationality of persecution is fatally flawed. In this paper, I offer evidence that Waldron has misread Locke, and that Locke's views about why persecution generally proves inefficacious have greater plausibility than Waldron allowed. Locke's argument for the irrationality of intolerance does not, as has been thought, rest on a tendentious ontological distinction between ‘th…
Deconstructing the Relationship Between Privacy and Security [Viewpoint]
From a government or law-enforcement perspective, one common model of privacy and security postulates that security and privacy are opposite ends of a single continuum. While this model has appealing properties, it is overly simplistic. The relationship between privacy and security is not a binary operation in which one can be traded for the other until a balance is found. One fallacy common in privacy and security discourse is that trade-offs ar…
Lips
PROSE POETRY My thing them. lips he King have touched Midas had into a changed spell gold. cast My everyover lips them.KingMidas changedeverything hetouched intogold.Mylips don'tknow howtogivecaresses orbites; they're condemned tochanging everytouchoftheirs into a kiss. Onceupona timethere was a princess who wantedtoridherself oflove.Shetouched her lipstoeverything, making nodistinction among surfaces, things, skin, so that noonewouldsay ofhertha…
The Other Side of Representation: The History and Theory of Representative Government in Pierre Rosanvallon
Ostrogorski before and after: Three moments in antipartyism and “elite theory
Representative Institutions and the Question of Lefortian Democracy
Claude Lefort's interests as a democratic theorist primarily lied elsewhere than in institutional questions. This essay, however, takes up what commentary he did provide on representative institutions to offer a new interpretation of his thought. Focusing in particular on little-studied writings of his from the late 1980s, this essay argues that at the institutional level Lefort was committed to a descriptive account of representation, based in a…
Democracy Confronts Diversity: Descriptive Representation in Victorian Britain
Today political theorists and the public generally often associate descriptive representation with democracy. However, in Victorian Britain supporters of descriptive representation tended to be arrayed against democracy. The impression that democracy was incompatible with descriptive representation and a set of related values, primary among which was deliberation, formed one of the great obstacles which democratic theory faced in this period. The…
Kahan’s Liberalism
Rousseau on multiplying partial associations
In Feb. 2022 Sungho Kimlee passed away. In his memory, we present this revised and abridged version of a portion of his dissertation, Factions and Orders: from Machiavelli to Madison. Sungho summarized the work as follows: “Since antiquity, thinkers have held that every society consists of two hostile orders – the few and the many. But they have disagreed on the proper method for defusing this civic divide, and their various proposed remedies can…
John Stuart Mill and modern liberalism: A study in contrasts
The lost history of political liberalism
We have entered a revisionist moment in the study of the history of liberalism. In many respects this reorientation has been salutary. Scholars have corrected such unsupportable but tenacious simpl
Lockean toleration and the victim's perspective
According to Jeremy Waldron, John Locke's argument for the instrumental irrationality of persecution is fatally flawed. In this paper, I offer evidence that Waldron has misread Locke, and that Locke's views about why persecution generally proves inefficacious have greater plausibility than Waldron allowed. Locke's argument for the irrationality of intolerance does not, as has been thought, rest on a tendentious ontological distinction between ‘th…
VizSEC 2007: Proceedings of the Workshop on Visualization for Computer Security
Lips
PROSE POETRY My thing them. lips he King have touched Midas had into a changed spell gold. cast My everyover lips them.KingMidas changedeverything hetouched intogold.Mylips don'tknow howtogivecaresses orbites; they're condemned tochanging everytouchoftheirs into a kiss. Onceupona timethere was a princess who wantedtoridherself oflove.Shetouched her lipstoeverything, making nodistinction among surfaces, things, skin, so that noonewouldsay ofhertha…
Deconstructing the Relationship Between Privacy and Security [Viewpoint]
From a government or law-enforcement perspective, one common model of privacy and security postulates that security and privacy are opposite ends of a single continuum. While this model has appealing properties, it is overly simplistic. The relationship between privacy and security is not a binary operation in which one can be traded for the other until a balance is found. One fallacy common in privacy and security discourse is that trade-offs ar…
Lockean toleration and the victim's perspective
According to Jeremy Waldron, John Locke's argument for the instrumental irrationality of persecution is fatally flawed. In this paper, I offer evidence that Waldron has misread Locke, and that Locke's views about why persecution generally proves inefficacious have greater plausibility than Waldron allowed. Locke's argument for the irrationality of intolerance does not, as has been thought, rest on a tendentious ontological distinction between ‘th…
Evaluating Adversarial Interfaces: An Automated Approach
Contrary to the idealistic notion that human-computer interfaces are designed to actively help users accomplish their goals, millions of people who use the World Wide Web every day encounter a wide variety of interfaces that aggressively divert users toward the goals of the designer and away from those of the user. We label such strategies "adversarial interface design." Techniques of adversarial design include coercion, confusion, distraction, e…
What's Not in On Liberty: The Pacific Theory of Freedom of Discussion in the Early Nineteenth Century
It is often assumed that John Stuart Mill's On Liberty (1859) is representative of the major lines of thought on the freedoms of discussion and the press in the period. In fact, however, Mill's treatise was selective about the kinds of reasons it admitted in support of these liberties. This essay depicts one set of arguments that Mill omitted and that has subsequently been overlooked in the history of political thought. An important element of li…
The Other Side of Representation: The History and Theory of Representative Government in Pierre Rosanvallon
Representative Institutions and the Question of Lefortian Democracy
Claude Lefort's interests as a democratic theorist primarily lied elsewhere than in institutional questions. This essay, however, takes up what commentary he did provide on representative institutions to offer a new interpretation of his thought. Focusing in particular on little-studied writings of his from the late 1980s, this essay argues that at the institutional level Lefort was committed to a descriptive account of representation, based in a…
Democracy Confronts Diversity: Descriptive Representation in Victorian Britain
Today political theorists and the public generally often associate descriptive representation with democracy. However, in Victorian Britain supporters of descriptive representation tended to be arrayed against democracy. The impression that democracy was incompatible with descriptive representation and a set of related values, primary among which was deliberation, formed one of the great obstacles which democratic theory faced in this period. The…
The lost history of political liberalism
We have entered a revisionist moment in the study of the history of liberalism. In many respects this reorientation has been salutary. Scholars have corrected such unsupportable but tenacious simpl
Ostrogorski before and after: Three moments in antipartyism and “elite theory
Charles Dupont-White: An idiosyncratic nineteenth-century theorist on speech, state, and John Stuart Mill
Although he is little read today, especially by Anglophone academics, Charles Dupont-White (1807–78) deserves the attention of historians of political thought for two reasons. First, he was an original and powerful theorist of a more statist brand of liberalism that in several ways proved a harbinger of later liberal and social-democratic ideas. Second, he was responsible for the original translations into French of two of John Stuart Mill’s most…
James Fitzjames Stephen's other enemies: Catholicism and Positivism in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity and beyond
As the most famous critic of John Stuart Mill, James Fitzjames Stephen has often been assumed to have been a religious conservative or even reactionary. In contrast to these assessments, this article shows that Stephen's most consistent enemies were what he took to be the two most significant religious forces of the modern world: Ultramontane Catholicism and Comtean Positivism. The article explores his objections to these two religious ideologies…
How to Read James Fitzjames Stephen: Technocracy and Pluralism in a Misunderstood Victorian
This paper offers a new reading of the political thought of the mid-Victorian jurist and intellectual James Fitzjames Stephen. Contrary to impressions of Stephen as a conservative or religious authoritarian, this article recognizes the liberal character of Stephen’s thought, and it argues that investigating Stephen’s liberalism holds lessons for us today about the structure of liberal theory. Stephen, the paper demonstrates, articulated robustly …
John Stuart Mill and modern liberalism: A study in contrasts
A response to the roundtable: Politics, history, and JS Mill in Parliament the Mirror of the Nation
The English Utilitarians, Some Recent Reconsiderations
In 1900, perhaps the greatest Victorian historian of ideas, Leslie Stephen, released his three-volume English Utilitarians . Coming to grips with the political thought of the century that had just ended, he believed, required considering the “dominant beliefs of the adherents of this school.” So privileged a point of access was offered by what we would now call “classical utilitarianism” that a study of it could serve as a “sequel” to his previou…
Albert Venn Dicey: Writings on Democracy and the Referendum: Writings on Democracy and the Referendum
What are the limits to parliamentary sovereignty? When should the people be able to vote directly on issues? The constitutional theorist Albert Venn Dicey (1835–1922) was a cogent advocate of the referendum. While his enthusiasm for the institution was widely acknowledged in his own day, thereafter this dimension of his career has been largely neglected. This fall into obscurity is partly explained by the fact that Dicey never collected his writi…
In what senses should we see John Stuart Mill as a socialist
Rousseau on multiplying partial associations
In Feb. 2022 Sungho Kimlee passed away. In his memory, we present this revised and abridged version of a portion of his dissertation, Factions and Orders: from Machiavelli to Madison. Sungho summarized the work as follows: “Since antiquity, thinkers have held that every society consists of two hostile orders – the few and the many. But they have disagreed on the proper method for defusing this civic divide, and their various proposed remedies can…
Albert Venn Dicey: Writings on Democracy and the Referendum
On the Nadir of Natural Rights Theory in Nineteenth-Century Britain
This chapter examines the aversion to theories and programs of natural rights in much mainstream nineteenth-century British political discourse. Following on the heels of their Enlightenment and revolutionary efflorescence, writers in Great Britain articulated various critiques of natural rights philosophies and declarations. Moving from early critics such as Burke and Bentham to later Victorian writers and statesmen – most importantly, J. S. Mil…
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…
Kahan’s Liberalism
Worlds of Liberalism
Political science (19 works) · Law (17 works) · Law (16 works) · Political Theory and Influence (16 works) · Politics (16 works) · Sociology (12 works) · History (11 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · American Constitutional Law and Politics (8 works)