In this episode, Seungeun Lee speaks with Isaac Nakhimovsky about his new

book The Holy Alliance: Liberalism and the Politics of Federation

 (Princeton, 2024).

The book challenges the prevailing view of the Holy Alliance as a

reactionary and illusory endeavor, as well as the idea of a linear

progression of liberalism in opposition to such deviations. Nakhimovsky

reconstructs the discourse around a liberal vision of a European

federation, where reformers and patriots from smaller European states, as

well as abolitionists beyond Europe, looked to Russia as the potential

guarantor of a peaceful order.