JEAN-LOUIS DELOLME AND THE POLITICAL SCIENCE OF THE ENGLISH EMPIRE

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article aims to extend our understanding of eighteenth-century political science through a re-examination of the writings of Jean-Louis Delolme (1741–1806). Beginning with an account of Delolme's conception of a modern ‘science of politics’, the article demonstrates that Delolme's ambition to rest the study of politics on scientific foundations developed in the context of an evolving concern with the stability and durability of the English ‘empire’. Underlining Delolme's critique of traditional republican political science as well as the comparative science of politics set out in Montesquieu'sThe spirit of the laws, the article thus sheds light on the connection between eighteenth-century conceptions of political science and eighteenth-century analyses of the English constitution and the British state. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the resonance of Delolme's central ideas in late eighteenth-century debates, in Britain, America, and France, about the character and properties of the modern constitutional republic.