Presenting "Dictatorship in the American Founding" at the Stanford Political Theory Workshop this Friday, 11:30 am, Graham Stuart Lounge. And pleased to be starting a new position here, as lecturer in the humanities.

Reading Thomas Paine in China (John Barrow, 1804)

Portrait of Machiavelli, by the Italian artist Raffaello Morghen (1796)

A Spartan mother hands her son his shield as he departs for war, demanding that he return "either with it or on it," a line made famous by Plutarch. (Alix, after Moitte, ca. 1795)

The English radical Horne Tooke (1810) rails against inflation caused by paper money, comparing it to a kind of stealth agrarian law, equalizing property by inflating away debts. America, by resort to this expedient, experienced something like a nonviolent revolution.

The government protecting commerce (Boizot and Darcis, ca. 1795-98)

The French monarchy, crucified between two thieves (the clergy and the parlement), on the floor of the National Constituent Assembly (1790).

The lighting of public opinion strikes out in every direction, in this newspaper header from Restoration France (1823).

Hephaestus at his forge, a symbol of arms production for the French revolutionary armies (ca. 1793)

Celebration of 9 Thermidor, featuring a winged genius representing the republic, holding a death sentence for the "triumvirs" Robespierre, Saint-Just, and Couthon (Michel Poisson, 1794)

A revolutionary newspaper celebrates the surrender of the Papal States in 1797, and looks forward to Napoleon flying the tricolor over the Vatican, and installing a monument to the Rights of Man in Saint Peter's Basilica.

Claude Basire gives the ice-cold reply: "We have made one with Death."

Reviewing the Jacobin constitution in June 1793, L.-S. Mercier calls attention to its prohibition on making peace with any nation occupying its territory, which he calls unrealistic. "Do you flatter yourself that you will always be victorious? Have you made a pact with Victory?"

Female figure of Hercules, representing the force and power of the republic (1794)

Curtiopolis, one of the wittiest Federalist polemicists, satirizes Antifederalist complaints about the new constitution in a long list of "grievances," taking special aim at its inclusiveness. The paranoia and the florid prose are both perfectly on the mark. (Jan. 1788)

In "Le Triomphe de la Raison et de la Vérité" (ca. 1794), Philosophy, symbolized by Rousseau, emerges with a torch to crush the symbols of religious obscurantism (a mitre, a crosier, etc.), and to lift up the curtain of error.

"Liberty, equality, property"—detail from a 1797 print celebrating the coup of 18 Fructidor.

Emblem of the Section du Contrat-Social, founded shortly after the revolution of August 10. Its slogan, "The republic is the only legitimate form of government," paraphrases a line from Rousseau. Design by Augustin de Saint-Aubin.

Equality, symbolized by a masonic triangle, is presented the aspiration of loyal republicans, and the nightmare of aristocrats, in this diptych from 1793-94.