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The French State in Question places the idea of the state back at the heart of our understanding of modern French history and political culture, and challenges the accepted view of the Third Republic as a 'weak' state. At its core is an examination of a central problem in French politics of the belle epoque: should the employees of the state have the right to join trade unions and to strike? The book examines this as a problem of intellectual history: it seeks to explain why this was such an intractable question, and does so by demonstrating the importance of legal theory and the idea of the state in French political culture. In this important and innovative essay in the history of ideas, Stuart Jones shows how during the Third Republic French legal thinkers engaged in a vigorous rethinking of the idea of the state, and assesses their significance for the development of French political discourse

AbstractThis article traces the invention of pluralist political language in France to a very specific ideological source: Jacques Maritain, Emmanuel Mounier, and the progressive Catholic circles that gathered around the journalEspritin the 1930s. It shows that the dialogue with the émigré Russian Jewish sociologist Georges Gurvitch was an important influence on theEspritcircle, but also that it was Maritain rather than Gurvitch who did most to disseminate the language of pluralism. The paper thus builds on recent work according Maritain and Christian democracy a central place in the intellectual history of twentieth-century politics. It also contests the Anglo-American bias that has dominated histories of pluralism, and instead places France at the centre.

Ever since the resurgence of the sub-discipline in the 1960s, the foremost achievements of the history of political thought have dealt with the early modern period. The classics of the genre—Laslett's edition of Locke, Pocock'sMachiavellian Moment, Skinner'sFoundations—have all dealt with that period, and it is hard to think of any works on the nineteenth century that have quite the same stature. Of all the canonical political thinkers, John Stuart Mill is perhaps the one who has proved resistant to the contextualist method. There is a vast literature on Mill, and many historians have written penetratingly about him—Stefan Collini, William Thomas, Donald Winch—but there has hitherto been no historically grounded study of his thought to rival, say, John Dunn on Locke or Skinner on Hobbes, or even a host of learned monographs. Before Varouxakis's book, no study of Mill had been published in Cambridge University Press's flagship series in intellectual history, Ideas in Context. But all that has changed. In these two works, published more or less concurrently, we have two triumphs for contextualism. They demonstrate in impressive detail just why it matters in reading Mill to get the history right.

By the general theory of PT-symmetric quantum systems, their energy levels are either real or occur in complex-conjugate pairs, which implies that the secular equation must be real. However, for periodic potentials it is by no means clear that the secular equation arising in the Floquet method is indeed real, since it involves two linearly independent solutions of the Schrödinger equation. In this brief note we elucidate how that reality can be established.