Liberal Worlds: James Bryce and the Democratic Intellect

The intellectual biography of a Victorian Liberal polymathJames Bryce (1838-1922) was a leading figure in Britain’s Liberal Party and a distinguished historian, a versatile scholar-politician who moved seamlessly between academia and politics.He was, among many other things, a cabinet minister and a popular ambassador, an expert on American politics and on Roman law, an advocate for the Armenian people and an architect of the League of Nations, a world traveller and a climber of Mount Ararat.In Liberal Worlds, Stuart Jones offers an intellectual biography of Bryce, tracing a Scots-Ulster Presbyterian’s assimilation to the increasingly multiconfessional Victorian state, and a late Victorian Liberal’s encounter with the wider world.Jones shows how a polymathic intelligence grappled with a dizzyingly wide range of concerns and issues, including the challenges of democracy and race relations, the rise of modern universities and the reconstruction of the international order after World War