Abstract

Elie Halévy's later works have made him one of the most renowned French liberal thinkers of the twentieth century. I want to argue, however, that there exists another facet of the man, more republican than liberal, to be found in his pre-Great War papers. Halévy reveals himself as a man with reformist tendencies, concerned with the concrete aspects of freedom, both for individuals and peoples, and therefore holding more qualified views on the project of a political and social control of the economy. My analysis focuses on Halévy's unpublished first series of lectures on the history of European Socialism, delivered in 1902 at the Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques, in which the major features of this early Halévy can be best identified