William Rathbone Greg's name is well known to historians of nineteenth-century Britain, but the content of his political thought is not. This article, based on a comprehensive reading of Greg's prolific published output, has two aims. The first is to pin down his politics. The article positions Greg as a leading spokesman for the rationalistic, antidemocratic strand of mid-Victorian Liberalism. It argues that his thought centered on the idea that politics was a science, and that scientific statesmanship might solve many of the problems of the age. The article's second aim is to show that Greg was a sophisticated thinker on politics overseas. He developed distinctive arguments about the structures of European politics, and especially about France under the Second Empire (1852–70). Greg's writings cast important light on the connections between abstract, domestic, and European issues in less familiar reaches of Liberal thought, and on how Victorian political science grappled with Continental despotism.

威廉·拉斯伯恩·格雷格的名字为 19 世纪英国的历史学家所熟知，但他的政治思想内容却并非如此。本文基于对 Greg 多产的已发表作品的全面阅读，有两个目的。首先是牵制他的政治。这篇文章将格雷格定位​​为维多利亚中期自由主义理性主义、反民主主义的主要发言人。它认为他的思想集中在政治是一门科学的观点上，科学的政治家可能会解决这个时代的许多问题。文章的第二个目的是表明格雷格是一位成熟的海外政治思想家。他对欧洲政治结构，尤其是关于第二帝国（1852-70 年）统治下的法国提出了独特的论点。格雷格