The Holy Alliance: Liberalism and the Politics of Federation

by Isaac Nakhimovsky

A major new account of the post-Napoleonic Holy Alliance and the promise it held for liberals

The Holy Alliance is now most familiar as a label for conspiratorial reaction. In this book, Isaac Nakhimovsky reveals the Enlightenment origins of this post-Napoleonic initiative, explaining why it was embraced at first by many contemporary liberals as the birth of a federal Europe and the dawning of a peaceful and prosperous age of global progress. Examining how the Holy Alliance could figure as both an idea of progress and an emblem of reaction, Nakhimovsky offers a novel vantage point on the history of federative alternatives to the nation state. The result is a clearer understanding of the recurring appeal of such alternatives—and the reasons why the politics of federation has also come to be associated with entrenched resistance to liberalism’s emancipatory aims.

Nakhimovsky connects the history of the Holy Alliance with the better-known transatlantic history of eighteenth-century constitutionalism and nineteenth-century efforts to abolish slavery and war. He also shows how the Holy Alliance was integrated into a variety of liberal narratives of progress. From the League of Nations to the Cold War, historical analogies to the Holy Alliance continued to be drawn throughout the twentieth century, and Nakhimovsky maps how some of the fundamental political problems raised by the Holy Alliance have continued to reappear in new forms under new circumstances. Time will tell whether current assessments of contemporary federal systems seem less implausible to future generations than initial liberal expectations of the Holy Alliance do to us today.

Genres: History, Politics

321 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 28, 2024

Reviews

[JR Roach · Rating 5 out of 5]

Increasingly, intellectual history scholarship on the eighteenth century has emphasized the lack of continuity between the political thought of that century and the familiar political vocabularies of the 19th century that continue to haunt our political thinking today. Scholars like Michael Sonenscher ("Before the Deluge," "Sans-Culottes," and "After Kant") and Richard Whatmore ("The End of Enlightenment") have attempted to map the very strange intellectual terrain of that era which confounds straightforward labels and assumptions like liberalism and conservatism, and even the conventional description of the Enlightenment as an era of optimistic rationality. Instead, we find that many of the eighteenth century's canonical thinkers were obsessed with the increasingly bleak trajectory of European power politics, as spiraling war, empire, and public debt seemed poised to erase the achievement of a modern European society defined by religious tolerance and commercial sociability in a wave of new intolerance and social upheaval. The central hope of many Enlightenment figures was precisely to try and escape from this spiral - to find a way to ground European societies and foreign relations so as to preserve the hard-won fruits of modernity. This took the form of a wide range of proposals, from those dependent on cultivating a more humane moral sensibility among Europe's monarchs (like Fenelon's Telemachus) to much grander schemes of political economy (like the Physiocrats).

The French Revolution and the ensuing decades of war across Europe seemingly realized and confounded these fears. On the one hand, Europe was thrown into violence on a scale it hadn't seen since the Napoleonic Wars, as political intolerance and fanaticism overturned existing monarchies and social structures. On the other hand, decades of warfare did not cause a debt-fueled collapse of European states - all, and especially Britain, proved far more capable at funding and waging warfare than almost all thinkers had predicted. In our attempts to understand the history of modern political thought, this leaves us at something of an impasse. Contemporary scholarship has quite successfully cut the traditional cord between the intellectual worlds of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but not much effort has been placed trying to trace where the relatively more familiar intellectual world of the nineteenth century comes from, if eighteenth century thought is such a dead end.

That's where Isaac Nakhimovsky's brilliant new book, "The Holy Alliance: Liberalism and the Politics of Federation," comes in. In the conventional image, the Holy Alliance and the post-Napoleonic Restoration are a reactionary, counter-Enlightenment regression for Europe that burnished the power of obscurantist monarchy at the expense of liberal national self-determination. However, Nakhimovsky shows how Enlightenment ideas about power politics, war, and public debt were the central influences for the conceptualization and public reception of the Holy Alliance. Far from a reactionary obstacle to progress, European liberals initially saw in the Holy Alliance the realization of their hoped for escape from decades of warfare by the creation of a Europe unified by representative government, federal cooperation, and ecumenical Christianity. Like Sonenscher, Nakhimovsky reconstructs not just the ideas, but the networks of transmission that built these expectations, which linked Swiss radicals, British abolitionists, Haitian writers, Thomas Jefferson's administration, German philosophers, and the monarchs of Europe, especially the circle of reformers around Tsar Alexander I. That these expectations were ultimately dashed only underlines the multi-directionality and contingency that Nakhimovsky aspires to bring to the hidebound historiography of political thought and especially of liberalism. Throughout the book, Nakhimovsky takes familiar thinkers and ideas and throws them into thrillingly new contexts - among my favorites are the implications this reading of the Holy Alliance has on the understanding of the American Constitution's federalism. And along the way, beyond his intervention into the historiography of liberalism, his insights deeply enrich the history of foreign relations in Europe. In a way, this book can be read as a companion to Paul Schroder's "Transformation of European Politics," providing more intellectual depth to Schroeder's account of how European governments developed a diplomacy of concert and cooperation to overcome the failure of balance of power. But fundamentally, both share the same conclusion - that the post-Napoleonic cooperation of Europe's monarchies was no winding back of the clock, but instead a progressive, if incompletely realized, solution to decades of warfare. This conclusion by implication also buttresses the emerging scholarship that presents 19th European conservatism as fundamentally an Enlightenment, not a Counter-Enlightenment, phenomenon.

Initially I was going to provide far more summary, but I don't think that's necessary to convey the key takeaway: that this book more than delivers on my hopes to further ground the intellectual history of nineteenth century political thought in the new studies of the eighteenth. It is far from a comprehensive picture of liberalism, more of a targeted intervention, but it shows how richly we can reframe familiar ideas if we can continue to embrace the strange-ness of the past. And by undermining the just-so stories of modern political thought in just this way, perhaps studies like this can broaden the political imaginations of our own age. It is hardly healthy that we remain stuck with the inherited -isms of a long-gone age.