Since Dilthey's template study of 1890, the Prussian state's attempt to censor Kant's religious writings has typically been seen as the work of a reactionary politics bent on imposing religious orthodoxy as a bulwark against the spread of Aufklärung. This essay offers a revisionist interpretation, arguing that the attempted censoring was a by-product of a set of a long-standing Religionspolitik designed to achieve religious toleration through a system of regulated public confessions. Reaffirmed in the Religious Edict (1788) and the Censorship Edict (1788), Prussian policy required acceptance of a plurality of public confessions whose stability was preserved through the restriction of public proselytizing and the acceptance of private religious freedom. In breaking with this religious settlement, through their public advocacy of a true “religion of reason”, the Protestant religious rationalists of the theological Aufklärung breached the embargo on public proselytizing, leading eventually to government's attempt to censor Kant's own “pure moral religion”.

What did early national Americans mean when they articulated fears of “luxury and effeminacy,” those twin sins of a republic that idolized the classical virtues of manly self-restraint? This essay argues that the fear of luxury and effeminacy circulated not just as airy metaphor but as palpable reality, specifically in the figure of the female recumbent on the sofa. The article traces separately the careers of Enlightenment Venus, who especially in her recumbent form embodied fears of passion in a republic built on reasoned consent, and the sofa, a piece of neoclassical furniture that rose to great popularity at this time and was envisioned as both effeminate and luxurious in fictional and nonfiction writing. The essay then joins the two figures of recumbent Venus and the sofa, showing how they were mutually enabling, and how they entered into early national conversations about labor and race. It concludes by examining how two educated American women, the self-described Roman matrons Mercy Otis Warren and Martha Bayard Smith, incorporated the image of the supine woman and her implied sofa into fictional writings about classical polities in danger. By knitting political ideologies, imaginative worlds, and neoclassical objects, the essay suggests a way for historians to flesh out the intellectual history of early national women, showing how they could participate in a conversation about modern politics and classical antiquity from which we have assumed they were largely disbarred.

Pierre Leroux founded the liberal journal Le Globe in the 1820s, moved briefly into the Saint-Simonian camp, and then emerged as one of the most important, independent and philosophically ambitious Romantic socialists of the period before 1848. This essay examines the conflict that erupted between Leroux and German Left Hegelians when Leroux chose to endorse the Berlin lectures of F. W. J. Schelling in 1841. Whereas German radicals like Marx believed Leroux simply did not understand Schelling, the article argues that Leroux's support of Schelling was consistent with the political project that he had pursued since his break with the Saint-Simonians. Leroux's attempt to create a third-way politics between the “socialisme absolu” of the Saint-Simonians and the “individualité absolu” of liberalism was strongly influenced by his long-standing engagement with Romantic poetics, most importantly with what he called Romanticism's “style symbolique.” The Romantic notion that the symbol is a visible representation of the invisible and fundamentally unrepresentable connected Leroux's aesthetics and his politics, for the symbolic mode suggested a way to think of social relationships without reifying them; the gap between representation and objects such as “individual”, “society”, “humanity”, and “God” seemed to open up a space for artistic and political creativity. This commitment to a politics based on the role of the symbolic created an affinity with Schelling that was not acknowledged in the polemics that followed from Leroux's defense of the Left Hegelians' arch-enemy. Recovering the terms of that affinity casts a new and different light on the intersection of aesthetics and politics in Romanticism, and it illuminates paths in the early history of socialism that later developments closed down.

The historiographical trend that goes under the name of the “linguistic turn,” or, more capaciously, the “new cultural history,” has stressed the enormous plasticity and contingency of the human world. Its proponents have maintained that, instead of being determined by laws analogous to those that govern the physical world, human reality is to a large degree—just how large a degree is, of course, a hotly contested issue—autonomously constructed by the human manipulation of language. Language is, in this view, not confined to passively mirroring a prior social reality; rather, linguistically constituted entities can powerfully influence social life even in the absence of “real,” objective referents. As Sarah Maza notes in the introduction to The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie: An Essay on the Social Imaginary, 1750–1850, cultural historians have, since the 1970s, enthusiastically embraced such an approach with respect to newer topics of investigation like gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. Yet its application to the venerable historical category of class, while not altogether lacking, has lagged noticeably behind.

Arguably, with respect to religious practice, the United States Constitution sought to metamorphose what had been restricted practices of religious toleration into what we more commonly and with more generous spirit call religious tolerance. The provisions of toleration laws, making legal concessions under the aegis of an official religion, were better than burning heretics at the stake, a practice that after the bloody Thirty Years War in Europe (1618–48) usually caused more trouble than it was worth. Still they extended only a grudging permission to “dissenters.” The category “dissenter” did not include all religious minorities, and it placed the tolerated minorities at a disadvantage in almost all civil capacities. Religious toleration before the end of the eighteenth century gave some religious believers license to be wrong, but it carried no pledge of respect.

In reality, no one single-handedly creates a new field of historical inquiry. As soon as you open your mouth to pronounce George Grote the modern father of ancient Greek history, you remember that August Boeckh, Karl Otfried Müller, and Connop Thirlwall laid Grote's groundwork. But it almost seems as if Michael O'Brien has pulled off such a feat. Taking the scattered bricks of the intellectual history of the antebellum American South, he has, over long years of labor, built from them a coherent structure where none existed before, a many-roomed mansion of the mind. The two volumes and 1,200 pages of Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860 culminate a quarter-century of rare scholarly achievement.

As most readers of this journal will already know, 2003 marked the bicentennial of Ralph Waldo Emerson's birth in Boston on May 25, 1803. The occasion did not generate quite the hoopla that characterized the celebration of the centennial of his birth; then, as Lawrence Buell notes in his own generous tribute to Emerson, children in Concord were let out of school for the day, and there were major celebrations both there and in Boston. To the chagrin of some of Emerson's admirers, the bicentennial passed without official recognition: as one complained on a website, “It's Emerson's 200th Birthday—and there's no postage stamp,” an important indicator of cultural currency in the United States. In 1967, for example, the Post Office issued a stamp to commemorate the mere 150th anniversary of the other most famous Transcendentalist, Henry Thoreau. Nonetheless, like Thoreau, Emerson retains a tenacious foothold in American popular culture, though he is probably known there primarily for the inspirational aphorisms—usually collected under headings such as “action,” “confidence,” and “conformity”—on websites with names like Brainy Quote and Wisdom Quotes. Despite challenges from both the left and the right, Emerson also remains a central figure in American literary and cultural history; and he has been the focus of sustained scholarly attention, especially since the so-called “Emerson Renaissance,” the resurgence of interest in his life and writings beginning around 1980.