At a critical moment during the Napoleonic era, the stockbrokers of Paris were summoned before the Council of State to defend the marché à terme, or futures contract in public debt. Surprisingly, despite official disdain and ample legal opportunity for prohibition, the brokers’ argument was successful, and the marché à terme escaped repression. The defense of the marché à terme turned on the nature of property. To critics, it divided property from possession, severing property from any concrete anchors. Advocates, by contrast, pointed to the inherent abstraction of property encoded in legal norms. These debates helped shape a concept of property in which economic utility, legal validity, and moral grounding converged. As a central pillar of the new regime, this concept of property also constrained political authority. The successful defense of the marché à terme shows that property was a right that not even authoritarian regimes could restrict arbitrarily.

In his biography of James Mill, Alexander Bain made a number of claims with regard to Mill's essay “Government” (1820). First, the essay was a catalyst in the movement for reform, making “in all probability . . . our political history very different from what it might otherwise have been.” Second, the essay provided a unique opportunity for Mill to expound on “the whole theory of Government in a compact shape.” Third, as far as his “Logic of Politics” was concerned, Mill depended on the deductive method—the method of geometry—having quickly discarded the applicability of inductive logic in politics. In this article, I take issue with the last claim.

“Rationalism” became the subject of intense debate in nineteenth-century Britain. This article asks why this was so, by focusing on the usage and implications of the term in contemporary argument. Rationalism was successively defined and redefined in ways that reached to the heart of Victorian epistemological and religious discussion. By treating rationalism as a contextually specific term, and examining how its implications changed between the 1820s and the early twentieth century, the article brings new perspectives to bear on the development of nineteenth-century freethought and countervailing religious apologetic. It underlines the importance of history, and constructions of intellectual lineage, as ways of establishing the relationship between rationality and religion in a progressively wider-ranging Victorian debate about the sources of knowledge and value.

Wilhelm Friedrich Georg Roscher (1817–94) is generally remembered as a significant nineteenth-century German political economist and a contributor to the “German historical school of economics.” His work is usually placed in the context of a larger narrative about the development of economic thought. Yet intellectual historians have rarely noticed that, for Roscher, Staatswirthschaft or Nationalökonomie were subordinate to a larger science of politics, and few have engaged with the substance of his political thought (as opposed to his economics). The aim of this article is to provide an interpretation of Roscher as a political thinker, focusing especially on his account of the modern European state between the 1840s and the 1890s. In particular, it explores Roscher's concern that nineteenth-century Europe's economically advanced societies, characterized by an unstable combination of democratic sovereignty, deep socio-economic inequality and a centralized state apparatus, would soon find themselves at the mercy of “military tyranny” or “Caesarism.” It underlines the ways in which Roscher's preoccupation with ancient history fed into his estimation of nineteenth-century politics, and also examines his comparative assessment of democracy's prospects in Britain, France and the United States.

This article examines the intersection of interwar debates about the scientific study of politics and international order, two fields which are often studied in isolation. It does so through an analysis of the political and international thought of the British political scientist and advocate of Anglo-American union George Catlin, one of the few political thinkers who made important contributions to each field. Catlin was one of the earliest proponents of the scientific study of politics, and his work prefigured the subsequent advent of public-choice theory. He was also the most vocal British advocate of Anglo-American union in the 1930s and 1940s. Catlin believed that international peace could be attained through the equilibrium of regional blocs based upon shared cultural identities. He saw Anglo-American union as the most feasible first step towards such international organization, given what he identified as the existing close bonds of “Anglo-Saxony.”

Historians of pragmatism have long overlooked Kenneth Burke and Richard McKeon. This has not been without good reason. At first glance, the two read more like critics than adherents of the tradition. Yet placing Burke and McKeon's writings from the 1920s to the late 1950s in the context of their development reveals a shared project aimed at reforming pragmatism. While pragmatists such as John Dewey and Sidney Hook alleged a conceptual fidelity between the scientific method and democratic processes such as public debate, Burke and McKeon questioned this link. Metaphors drawn from science, they believed, blinded pragmatists to the nature of communication. Due to this oversight, pragmatists ignored the ideological ambiguity that surrounded terms like “science” and “democracy” during the mid-twentieth century. Burke and McKeon sought to fix this omission. Pragmatists, they argued, needed to trade the language of science for a terminology drawn from a source more attuned to the power of communication: the arts. By advancing this case, Burke and McKeon crafted an aesthetic form of pragmatism—a variant of the philosophy that, ultimately, contemporaries would barely recognize as such.

What does it mean to live a modern life? Countless books have explored the nature of modern society, culture, thought, and politics; the “philosophical discourse of modernity” and the “postmodern condition” have, in recent decades, been the focus of intense theoretical debates. Yet the implications of these concerns for the question of how, under modern conditions, human lives are actually lived—the material circumstances that make them possible, the relationships people enter into, the purposes they choose to pursue, and the significance with which they endow their efforts—is one from which contemporary scholarship has tended to shy away, as if such matters were best left in the hands of artists and novelists.

If one is looking for the authoritative work on the history of the modern Western concept of “self,” the place to go is Jerrold Seigel's The Idea of the Self. It is a wide-ranging, deeply insightful account of Western thinking about the nature of selfhood in Britain, France, and Germany since Descartes, framed by a powerfully argued thesis about the right way to conceptualize it. But that project was driven by what in the retrospect of Seigel's whole body of work can be seen as an even more comprehensive historical program, one both methodological and substantive. One of Seigel's basic historiographical convictions, more implicit than systematically argued, is that individual subjectivity matters for historical explanation. His broader substantive interest is in the meaning of the Western notion of “modernity,” above all in its implications and consequences for our contemporary self-understanding. Methodological conviction and substantive interest are tightly interwoven. As Seigel sees it, the process of European modernization was guided by, and in turn further developed, a historically locatable, complex, and internally conflicted version of universal selfhood—the autonomous bourgeois self. His corpus is an extended and evolving exploration of this process and its result, which he finds most clearly documented in European thought and culture from the mid-seventeenth century to the mid-twentieth.

In the early 1970s, when I was a graduate student, biography was considered “an unloved stepchild” of the historical discipline. The naive empiricism of its soup-to-nuts narratives seemed deaf to any theory that might call the biographer's craft into question. In 2009, the American Historical Review honored the genre of biography with a roundtable on its creative renewal. Oddly (and regrettably) there was no mention of the work of Jerrold Seigel in any of the roundtable essays, though he had published three innovative biographical works over the previous thirty years. Characterizing Seigel as a biographer by trade would, to be sure, seriously diminish the scope of his scholarship. But two of his seven books have been full biographies, and in two others a biographical approach has been central to his modus operandi. A leading figure in refashioning the genre, he has been quite conscious of the implications of that commitment. In 1987 he ended an article on Durkheim with a challenge: “our knowledge of the human world must be able to survive the recognition of its personal sources.” Three years later he concluded an article on “the personal roots of Foucault's thinking” with another provocation to recent preoccupations in the discipline: “the proclaimed death of the subject is not some newly discovered set of relations that produce the illusion of human will and intentions as residues of their silent operation, but the action of a subjectivity that will not speak its name.”

In the opening pages of his remarkable book about Marcel Duchamp, Jerrold Seigel writes that the French artist “cared more about his personal independence than he did about art itself. Beneath the succession of avant-garde movements there had always lurked an impulse of radical individualism, and no one represented it better than Marcel Duchamp” (PW, 10). Given the subject matter of this essay—the place of art in Seigel's thinking—it may seem odd to say so, but in one respect Seigel's attitude to art mirrors that of Duchamp: he cares less about art itself than about the impulse of radical individualism in modern society revealed through it.

The sweep, originality, and plenitude of Jerrold Seigel's work have transformed our field. His prolific and creative scholarship encompasses the history of ideas, the history of cultural forms, and the history of intellectuals, areas typically examined separately as coherent and discrete sections of intellectual history. I have been reading Seigel for many years now, assigned his texts in my classes, and watched students come alive as they encounter his Marx, his Bohemia, his Baudelaire, his Foucault, his Simmel. My own research and writing have been deeply influenced by key ideas generated in Seigel's body of work, testing and contesting, for example, his project of historicizing subjectivity and identity in modern Europe.

Since his first year in graduate school, Jerrold Seigel has puzzled over the relationship between modernity and the bourgeoisie. Willing to acknowledge the salience of this class in the making of the modern, he grew increasingly troubled by the failure of every effort to give a clear account of its distinctive historical role. To define the bourgeoisie as simply the group(s) in the middle, “all those who are neither peasants nor workers on the one side, nor aristocrats by birth on the other,” might be empirically accurate, he reasoned, but this provided no analytical insight into the processes of history. The Marxist alternative avoids this vacuity, but only by creating a mythology of the ascendant bourgeoisie—a class that by mere dint of its privileged relation to capital is deemed to be capable of entirely transforming the realms of culture, politics, and the material world. Dissatisfied with these conventional approaches, Seigel introduced a fundamentally new way of thinking in his seminal synthesis Modernity and Bourgeois Life, which sought to replace the “traditional nominative formulation [of the bourgeoisie's role] with ones that are more adjectival and historical.” Considering “‘bourgeois’, not in terms of the rise of a class,” he has reconceptualized this term to denote “the emergence and elaboration of a certain ‘form of life’.” It is in connection with this project that Seigel developed the two key concepts that will be considered in this essay, “chains of connection” and “networks of means” (MBL, ix, 6, 25).

History, Georg Simmel tells us, consist of a conflict between life and form. Life—the physical and biological basis of existence—is, in itself, bereft of culture and devoid of form. Through culture, however, the energies life harbors can become manifest. “We speak of culture,” Simmel writes, “whenever life produces certain forms in which it expresses and realizes itself; works of art, religions, sciences, technologies, laws, and innumerable others.” Life, in this way, produces something related to yet different from itself: “Life as such is formless, yet incessantly generates forms for itself.” Though form proceeds from life, conflict between them is unavoidable. Form struggles to liberate itself from the “pulse of life,” while life attempts to draw form back into its own “immediacy,” in a gambit to reduce culture's achievements to “direct manifestations of life.” The unprecedented character of modern culture, Simmel maintained, lies in the fact that life's forces were henceforth targeting the very “principle of form.” In the latest and most radical round of this conflict, life's cultural partisans assert that they no longer need the opaque and alien resources of form to express life's energies; form can be jettisoned, mediation dispensed with, and life can exist and relish its powers in their most unalloyed purity.

Marx's Fate begins with a quote from W. B. Yeats, who says that he “often has had the fancy that there is some one Myth for every man, which, if we but knew it, would make us understand all he did and thought.” There is no one Myth for anyone, including Jerry Seigel, but there is, I think, in his work an “inner sameness and continuity,” as Erik Erikson would put it, which is matched, once we reflect on the matter, by a “continuity of [his] meaning for others.”