This essay analyses Burke's ideas on European history, which lay scattered over his works, and suggests that Burke may have considered Europe, with the notable exception of ancient Rome, as having been in a state of barbarism or confusion from the ancient era until the sixteenth century, despite the gradual development of society. Unlike some of his contemporaries, he did not closely examine the growth of a European state system, nor the rise of the balance of power in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Nor did he specially underline the collapse of feudalism and the process of establishing absolute monarchy. Instead, Burke stressed more fundamental elements. While he often drew attention to the glimmer of hope towards future prosperity amid devastation, which dominated large parts of European history, his ideas on European history reflected his long-held social theory that nations could revive and develop as long as the foundations of society were not damaged.

Basic questions about Kant's international theory remain unresolved, in part because the ambiguous language and sketchy blueprints given in Perpetual Peace lend themselves to a wide variety of interpretations. This essay proposes a novel solution for this difficulty: a careful reconsideration of the political concepts embedded in Kant's first philosophy. In the First Critique, the “Conflict of the Faculties,” and in particular his neglected essay “Perpetual Peace in Philosophy,” Kant repeatedly draws on the language of sovereignty, war, and international law, in order to describe how the critical philosophy will bring peace to what he terms the “battlefield of metaphysics.” The most striking feature of this program for “perpetual peace in philosophy” is that it does not end disagreement over ideas, but rather prevents it from becoming pathological by subjecting it to the “discipline” of critical reason. And I argue that Kant's proposal for global peace is precisely parallel: a sovereign world court that arbitrates decisively between states, while otherwise leaving them free to clash, compete, and disagree.

This essay addresses the emergence of theories of “identity” in twentieth-century politics, aesthetics, and philosophy by considering Theodor Adorno's understanding of “negative identity” as a form of coercive categorization that nevertheless contains social knowledge. A historical account of the Frankfurt school's relation to questions of race, anti-Semitism, and the idea of culture, the essay analyzes Adorno's infamous jazz articles in light of the transatlantic history of Marxian political theory and its understanding of racism, subject–object relations, and models of cultural production. The result is an investigation of the history of the concept of identity, its emergence alongside the rise of cultural studies, and its relation to international cultural–aesthetic formations such as jazz. The article concludes with an examination of Adorno's critique of idealism, cultural identity, and nationalism in light of the “wounded” political subjectivity of the modern era.

In the wake of the Second World War, Germany saw an intensive debate about the idea of the university and its future role in society. All were agreed that the country's universities had to be revitalized after the ravages of Nazism, but the question was what weight should be given to the classical German heritage, and the Humboldtian tradition in particular. The mandarins, the older humanist scholars, dominated the public debate about the fundamental principles of research and higher education, and this essay focuses on the contribution made by three of them—Karl Jaspers, Gerhard Ritter, and Werner Richter. In making their points, they all revealed a strong historical orientation, but equally very different views on the Humboldtian legacy. This essay argues that their ideas about the German university must be seen against the background of the specific experiences of their generation. In the event, the immediate post-war period was the last time their academic ideals were to gain much of a hearing. The university debate proved to be the swansong for Germany's intellectual elite.

Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism is a distinctively international history. It traces Nazism to a “collapse of the nation-state” across Europe, brought on by European anti-Semitism and European imperialism, rather than to specifically German developments. This essay recovers the political meaning of that methodological choice on Arendt's part, by documenting the surprising intersection between Arendt's involvement in political debates over postwar European reconstruction, where she made an intellectual alliance with Resistance groups across Europe and strongly argued for European federation, and her involvement in historiographical debates over the sources of Nazism. I show the explicit connection that Arendt drew between an internationalist historiography of Nazism and the need for an internationalist European politics, in a series of essays she wrote in the mid-1940s. I then argue that this connection continues to play a prominent role in Origins itself, sharply differentiating Arendt from other prominent theorists of Nazism.

The story of French liberalism is, we are often told, one of exceptions, eccentricities, and enigmas. Compared to their British counterparts, French liberals seem more reluctant to embrace individualism. Whereas liberals in the English-speaking world typically espouse what Isaiah Berlin called “negative liberty”—a sphere of private autonomy from which the state is legally excluded—French liberals have often proved highly accommodating towards “positive liberty”—that is, liberty insofar as it is tethered to collectively defined ends. Most crucially, rather than seeking to shield individuals and civil society from an intrusive state, French liberals—consistent with a broader trend in French political culture—are inclined to see the state as an essential and even emancipatory political tool. In this vein, Jean-Fabien Spitz writes in a recent collection entitled French Liberalism from Montesquieu to the Present Day,

In his 1968 essay “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology’,” Jürgen Habermas deals more explicitly than in other works with phenomena related to modern technology and science.1 He is well known for his social theory, legal theory, and theories of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, and has been a major figure in the intellectual history of modern Europe due to the twin role he has played as both a voice and a representative of the political and philosophical movements of postwar and post-Holocaust West Germany. Exploring the role of technology in his thinking brings into focus technology's ambiguous status in critical social theory as well as the general relationship between intellectual history and the history of technology. The disturbingly open-ended question whether technology is modernity's blessing or its curse has mobilized critics and commentators at least since the Industrial Revolution and has divided them at political, epistemic, and moral levels. Habermas's project sits in the middle of such traditions, and his 1968 essay “updates” long-standing concerns about industrial modernity for the specific technological, philosophical, and political conditions of the early Cold War. Intersections between technology and his signature fields—intersections that he has both forged and contributed to—are found in political theories of technology and democracy (in the forms, for example, of technocracy and technological determinism), epistemologies of scientific knowledge and their relevance for theories of the reasonable subject and of knowledge communities, and theories of secularization and modern state-building.2

One of the most vibrant subfields of American intellectual history over the last fifteen years has been the history of the social sciences during the late twentieth century, a period when the size and quality of American social-scientific output grew explosively. Given that the major historiographic push to historicize this period of social science began in the 1990s, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the declaration by some Americans of Cold War victory, it was perhaps inevitable that the geopolitics of the Cold War emerged as a major tool for accounting for what was distinct about the social science and broader culture of the postwar period. After all, wasn't it obvious that what made the 1990s different from the decades that came before it was the fact that the Cold War was over? And wasn't it further obvious that the bipolar geopolitics and nuclear night terrors of the Cold War had deformed everything they touched, not least the work of American social scientists? One marker of this obviousness was the transformation of the term “Cold War” from a noun describing (perhaps already too vaguely) a particular sort of geopolitical struggle into an adjective that could explain all sorts of extra-geopolitical activity. By the turn of the century this adjectivalization of the Cold War had become something of a historiographic cliché, a blunt (if not lazy) way to historicize our immediate forebears. When John Lewis Gaddis chose to title his “rethink” of Cold War history Now We Know, he didn't even need to add Better.

In the preface to his book on Hegel, Charles Taylor recognized two ways that every Hegel commentator can go wrong: “Either one can end up being terribly clear and sounding very reasonable at the cost of distorting, even bowdlerizing Hegel. Or one can remain faithful but impenetrable, so that in the end readers will turn with relief to the text in order to understand the commentary.” While it is hard to imagine ever turning to the Phenomenology with relief, Taylor's cautionary remark draws attention to the indirect relationship between the form and content of Hegel critique: either one attains formal clarity at the expense of material complexity or material complexity at the expense of clarity. The task of the critic, according to Taylor, is to find a balance between these two extremes. The various “Hegel revivals” of the past century, like that of Lukács and the Marxist humanists in the interwar years or Kojève and the existentialists in postwar France, have all struggled to find this balance. The latest Hegel revival is no exception, but both Rebecca Comay's Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution and Susan Buck-Morss's Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History remind us that insight also comes from the extremes.

Together the two volumes under review contain over forty essays on the intellectual history of Weimar Germany and its legacy today. The wide interdisciplinary field of authors, historians, philosophers, theologians, and literary, legal, and religious scholars, as well as social and political scientists, testifies to the continuing fascination of this era of thought in Anglo-American academia. With the exceptions of Mitchell G. Ash, Michael Krois, and Klaus Tanner, the authors teach at American, British or Canadian universities and represent major tendencies of the anglophone engagement with Weimar's intellectual history. Despite the fact that intellectual history of the Weimar Republic has been a flourishing field of research in Germany over the last decades, the volumes contain no contributions by German historians. This observation is by no means negligible in an age of transnational academic exchange, as may be exemplified by the recent Oxford Handbook of Modern German History, which contains contributions by German, American, and British experts in their fields.

The “long 1950s,” once written off as a conservative era, now figure in many histories as the height of American “high modernity,” the apogee of a scientific outlook rooted in instrumental reason. This portrait suggests that the “Enlightenment project” took firm hold of American thought and culture in the early Cold War years, having finally defeated those who sought to yoke scientific rationality to one or another system of moral restraints. Despite nascent movements of opposition, the story goes, a rationalistic, technocratic form of liberalism dominated national life until the left and right mobilized against it in the 1960s.