Elements of the Philosophy of Right (original) (raw)

Abstract

until the end of his long career, perhaps reinforced in his ideology by the luxury of never having to make any political decisions himself. In his analysis of Campbell's ideas, Abbattista has given us the best account yet of the place of trade, commerce and empire in eighteenth-century "Country" thought, and in this the earlier chapters of the book are its most important. The later chapters, on Campbell's association with Bute (based on a thorough review of the Bute manuscripts), the debate surrounding the Peace of Paris, the Modem Universal History, and the arguments over the structure of the empire in the 176Os, are both less original and less striking: they contain more information and summary than argument, and work within but do not stretch the historiographical boundaries drawn by Linda Colley and John Brewer, for example. It is in these chapters that Abbattista's decision to stick to a strictly chronological, bibliographical and above all biographical scheme seems most unfortunate. The book contains many fine insights and conclusions buried amid footnotes and paraphrases, for example on the British reception of Dutch political thought (especially the work of the de la Court brothers), or on the Abbe Raynal's debt to Campbell in the Histoire des Deux Zndes. Abbattista's biographical concern means that he does not draw some of the most obviously striking conclusions suggested by his material. Britain's hegemony over its colonies and its commercial empire in the eighteenth century was essential to its self-image as a liberal state, though the protests of the American colonists from the 1760s revealed the deceptions and practical limits of this self-image. Imperial identity developed alongside creole patriotism and (as David Brading has also recently shown for the Spanish empire) there were philo-colonial as well as metrocentric strands within the political and historical formation of that identity. Though Abbattista carefully presents striking evidence of these developments, it will be left to others to conceptualise them more widely.

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