Staggered Terms for the US Senate: Origins and Irony

This article provides the first detailed study of the origins of staggered Senate terms, which typically have been interpreted as part of the framers’ intent to create an insulated, stable, and conservative Senate. I draw upon three sources of evidence—the meaning and application of “rotation” in revolutionary America, the deliberations and decisions at the Constitutional Convention, and the arguments during Ratification—to show that the origins of and intentions behind staggered terms offer little support for the dominant interpretation. Instead, staggered terms, a mechanism to promote “rotation” or turnover of membership, were added to the Constitution as a compromise to offset, not augment, the Senate's longer terms by exposing a legislative chamber with long individual tenure to more frequent electoral influence and change.     

On Jordan Peterson,Postmodernism, and PoMo-Bashing

Jordan Peterson says that postmodernists say no interpretation is better than another. I would no sooner identify Peterson’s adversaries as those who have been misled by “postmodernism” than I would identify them as misled by “sustainability,” “diversity,” “multiculturalism,” or “intersectionality.” Such fare is mainly symptomatic. “Postmodern” invocations are often like “sustainability” invocations: inessential. This piece is not a defense of postmodernism. It is a critique of PoMo-bashing.     

British Peace Activism and ‘New’ Diplomacy: Revisiting the 1899 Hague Peace Conference

This analysis provides a re-appraisal of the 1899 Hague Conference by looking more closely at how citizen activists—notably in Britain but also transnationally—used it as a forum through which to press their agenda onto politicians and diplomatists. In so doing, this assembly existed as a stepping-stone between the ‘old’ diplomacy of the nineteenth century and the ‘new’ diplomacy of the twentieth. Peace activists identified and harnessed a growing body of progressive public opinion—on both a domestic and international scale—in the hope of compelling governments to take the necessary steps towards realising their ambitions of peace, disarmament, and international arbitration. Although the tangible outcomes of the 1899 Conference were limited, the precedents it established not only paved the way for further advances in international law, but also facilitated ever closer public and press scrutiny of international affairs into the twentieth century.     

Le Président Nicolas Jannon,les deux éditions du Développement et une vision contre‐révolutionnaire et ‘parlementaire’ de la Constitution traditionnelle de la France

SUMMARY

In this article, Maria Sofia Corciulo analyses the political significance of the period of the Italian Restoration. The author suggests that the revolutions which took place in both Naples and Piedmont in 1820–21 affected the apparently static institutional tranquillity of the ‘restored’ Italy to such an extent that they represent a break from the preceding period—the Five-year Period, during which the Napoleonic institutions had been, anyway, partly retained. The revolutionary action which, as in Spain, was sparked by the military, was characterized by forms of participation and aims that constituted, at least where they could be fully expressed, the beginning of a new historical period, surely overshadowing that of Restoration: the Risorgimento. The Neapolitan Revolution was carried out under the banner of the most democratic principles of those years, as they had been sanctioned by the Constitution of Cadiz of 1812. Although the Italian revolutionaries of 1820–21 were defeated, the principles of the Cadiz Constitution remained vivid in the minds of the patriots, especially Neapolitans, in an intricate sectarian world, where even the participation of the most humble classes was welcome and accepted in the name of the egalitarian principles of the Carboneria. The article suggests that this Revolution spelled the de facto end of the Restoration, even it was to continue to exist de jure, in its limited dynastic sense. This is true not only for the Kingdom of the two Sicilies but also for the other Italian states, because so-called ‘public opinion’ became a reality in this period: the existence of political plots and conspiracies from a rising number of secret societies is clear evidence that Italy's Risorgimento was under way.