Despite the recent boom in research on the reception and influence of Hume's writings, most scholars have overlooked the fact that his enigmatic essay “Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth,” published in the Political Discourses in 1752, not only attracted the attention of some French intellectuals before and after the Revolution, but was also taken seriously by a significant number of radicals—such as Paine, Price, Godwin, Wollstonecraft—and other reform-minded Whigs—such as James Mackintosh. Although the influence of Hume's plan on The Federalist, No 10, has been much discussed, what is more important is that these British reformers often associated his plan with the National Assembly after the Revolution in France. This essay demonstrates that Hume's plan of a large republic with a bicameral system through a two-tier election was an important intellectual resource for his contemporaries and for later generations.

This essay explores the development of Georg Simmel's interpretation of Immanuel Kant's philosophy in the context of neo-Kantianism and its preoccupation with the question of unity in modern diversity. It argues that the neo-Kantian movement can be divided into two periods: in the first, unity was addressed with regard to Kant's epistemology; in the second period, the main issue was the overall coherence of Kantian teaching. Simmel, who belonged to the younger generation of neo-Kantians, absorbed the conclusions of the previous generation that purged Kantian epistemology from its metaphysical foundations related to the noumenal world. Yet he did not share the views of his peers who considered Kant to be the philosopher of cultural plurality. On the contrary, he argued that Kant's system is thoroughly intellectualistic, and that ethics, aesthetics and religion within it are subordinated to logic. At the same time, his own philosophy presupposed cultural plurality akin to that of other neo-Kantians. In other words, Simmel abandoned Kant in order to develop his own version of neo-Kantianism.

This essay analyses Alfred Zimmern's scheme for a global British Commonwealth. A prominent British liberal internationalist and leading early scholar of International Relations, Zimmern developed an anti-racial account of empire and international order. In conceptualizing a British Commonwealth, he sought to replace “race” with “nation” as the basic ontological category of world ordering. The idea of cultural Zionism, formulated by Ahad Ha’am, played a key role in Zimmern's attempt. Ahad Ha’am's account of non-statist Jewish nationalism served as a useful ideological device for Zimmern to theorize a multinational Commonwealth without acknowledging colonial demands for self-determination. The essay also shows that Horace Kallen's notion of American cultural pluralism helped Zimmern to consolidate his project for the post-racial empire.

The most senior Australian in the League of Nations secretariat, H. Duncan Hall became an established advocate of institutional internationalism as a mitigator of conflict. From 1933, however, the advent of totalitarian movements and his exposure to Freudianism through his association with Dr Robert Waelder led him to the conviction that psychoanalysis provided the key to the irrationality of the times. He endeavoured to use his League position, including his influence in Australia, to convince opinion leaders of the profound dangers of national mass psychosis to the survival of the international order. Frustrated in the League, he then sought to convey the same message in the United States. Although largely unsuccessful in his efforts, and unable to establish an academic vehicle for the study of the issue in America, he was able to help bring to Australia the first practitioners of Freudian psychoanalysis trained in Europe.

In the disciplines of political science and international relations, Machiavelli is unanimously considered to be “the first modern realist.” This essay argues that the idea of a realist tradition going from the Renaissance to postwar realism founders when one considers the disrepute of Machiavelli among early international relations theorists. It suggests that the transformation of Machiavelli into a realist thinker took place subsequently, when new historical scholarship, informed by strategic and political considerations related to the transformation of the US into a global power, generated a new picture of the Renaissance. Focusing on the work of Felix Gilbert, and in particular his Machiavelli and Guicciardini, the essay shows how this new interpretation of Machiavelli was shaped by the crisis of the 1930s, the emergence of security studies, and the philanthropic sponsorship of international relations theory.

Admired throughout the twentieth century by literary and sociological theorists but long neglected by philosophers, readers have overlooked Kenneth Burke's theoretical dependence on American philosophic realism, thus missing consistent patterns of his insight. By tracing Burke's own realism back to his year at Columbia University and his time at The Dial magazine, we see how Burke's earliest aesthetic theories conformed to aspects of the new realist movement. During the Depression, in his book Permanence and Change, he followed earlier new realists in arguing for a reconstructed modern teleology of “purpose” and incorporated realism within his pleas for a suppler Communist Party rhetoric than that sanctioned by the party leadership. Burke's apparently inconsistent positions can be understood as a continuous philosophical argument for realism within changing intellectual contexts, explaining his long-lived cross-disciplinary appeal and influence. Burke maintained central realistic tenets: (1) the independent existence and intelligibility of an external world and (2) the substantive meaning of universals, particularly a common human nature. Examining these connections informs our readings of Burke while illuminating one reverberation of the philosophical “new realists” in American intellectual culture. Burke expressed realist principles in his presentation of symbolic action and dramatism in The Philosophy of Literary Form and A Grammar of Motives, both published in the 1940s. His sophisticated aesthetic–linguistic realism appeared in his arguments against logical empiricists and New Critics, which displayed an arc of transformation in the philosophical and critical culture before World War II from a still-contested mixture to an emphatically nominalistic, antirealist one. It was from this philosophical position that Burke offered his lively, penetrating analyses of and challenges to many of the major movements in twentieth-century philosophy: realism, pragmatism, positivism, and post-structuralism.

In 1921, John A. Ryan, a priest and professor at Catholic University in Washington, DC, and one of his students, the Reverend Raymond McGowan, published A Catechism of the Social Question. The first question in it reads, “What do we mean by the social question?” Answer: “A question denotes a problem or a difficulty which demands solution. A social question is one that concerns society, or a social group. The social question means certain evils and grievances affecting the wage-earning classes, and calling for removal or remedy.”

If you have never had a conversation with Tony La Vopa—and I mean a serious, four-hour conversation, in which topics range from Rousseau to the Final Four to marzipan to Kant—you have missed out on one of academia's great pleasures. Tony is one of intellectual history's most beloved conversationalists: because he knows many things, because he loves to tell stories, because he listens, because he argues. He also, incidentally, has mastered the pithy, but somehow personal, email: he once wrote me, simply “You’re not resting,” and another time: “I’m alarmed about your porcelain addiction.” Those readers who know Tony only from his work on this journal or his published works will know the clarity, deep intelligence, and admirable density of his research and his editing, but may not know much about the conversations that he has sustained and that have sustained him across his career, and haven't caught the impish glint in his eye when he launches into a story about his own current fetishes (photography, gooseberry Küchen), or lightly, invitingly, teases you about your own (according to Tony, mine include “loony men in gray suits”). And so, having had the pleasure of being a friend, coconspirator, and conversation partner of Tony's for several decades now, I have gladly accepted the honor of further acquainting Modern Intellectual History's readership with the career and contributions (so far!) of Anthony J. La Vopa, whose work has done so much to make intellectual history the thriving field it is today.

The year 2015 marks not only the sesquicentennial of Appomattox but also the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Martin Duberman's anthology The Antislavery Vanguard, a collection of essays that set the agenda for an ever-expanding treatment of antislavery that continues to this day. In assessing these new additions to that literature, I began to think about the arc that historians of American abolitionism have traced in the past half-century, and the ways in which Kytle and McDaniel were inheritors and extenders of that historiographical revolution. Duberman defined his purpose as bringing together the work of historians bent on overthrowing a long-prevailing view of abolitionists as “meddlesome fanatics . . . wrapped in their self-righteous fury, who did so much to bring on a needless war.” He initially imagined a volume that would debate abolitionist virtue and vice but could find no scholars who would uphold the older stereotype. Instead, his contributors explored themes largely sympathetic to the reformers.

“Secular intellectuals have not been kind to the evangelical mind,” writes historian Molly Worthen in the opening sentence of Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism. Her history of evangelical thought after World War II is an extended effort to understand why. The answers, it turns out, entail not only specific and important critiques of evangelical theology, but also much larger trajectories in the modern intellectual history of the United States. Theology, after all, was once “the queen of the sciences,” the very foundation of all other intellectual labor, and remained central to American academic and intellectual culture well into the nineteenth century. Beginning at least with Thomas Jefferson in the United States, however, main currents in Protestant theology and elite intellectual life began their slow and steady divergence, a process that reached critical mass early in the twentieth century. Nowhere has this divergence been more evident, or created more crisis and drama, than among evangelicals.

Modernization theory has rightly become a central topic of twentieth-century US intellectual history. Not only does it represent a key movement in modern economics, but modernization theory's purposeful interdisciplinarity ropes in psychology, sociology and political science (at least), and makes it stand as one of the main pillars of the new interdiscipline of behavioral science that was so influential in the postwar Western academy. As an equally purposeful policy science, modernization theory also played an important role in a raft of postwar political initiatives—in the Cold War, in international economic development, in the organization of science, in counterinsurgency and the Vietnam War. This unusually fruitful (albeit often unusually destructive) intermeshing of ideas and politics has been neatly exemplified in the person of Walt Rostow, “America's Rasputin,” who parlayed a politically unpromising track record as an economic historian into a role as one of the principal strategists of the Vietnam War. Opinion differs as to how determinative modernization theory's ideas were; Bruce Kuklick has suggested of most social science in this period that it “served to legitimate but not to energize politics,” or, as a participant put it more trenchantly in 1949, “The administrator uses social science the way a drunk uses a lamppost, for support rather than for illumination.” Still, most intellectual historians would be happy (though not necessarily proud) to think that their key concepts provided even support for the major political enterprises of their day.

Intellectual historians owe Nietzsche a debt for many things, not least for lending the quality of “untimeliness” a positive connotation. In the late 1990s, when Marxism was arguably at its nadir as an intellectual program, much less a political one, Warren Breckman published an insightful study of Marx's early thought and its genesis out of a series of disputes with the Young Hegelians concerning the state and its ambiguous relationship with theological conceptions of authority. The untimeliness of Breckman's intervention had much to recommend it. Taking his distance from the pallbearers, Breckman showed that a historical inquiry into the Marxist enterprise increased rather than diminished its contemporary relevance. In the wake of the eastern bloc's collapse, “civil society” had become the order of the day. Breckman showed that, far from being an innocuous panacea to the terror of state power, the concept had its own contested political history, one that Marx grappled with in ways whose resonance has only grown in the decade since Breckman's first book appeared.

A few decades after the linguistic turn began affecting them, historians are now writing its history. For one of them the linguistic turn meant much more than just an acknowledgement of the importance of language and signs. In his latest book, appropriately called Adventures of the Symbolic, Warren Breckman argues instead that the linguistic turn was part of a much broader “symbolic turn” (266). His book is a rich collection of previously published articles that all deal with “the symbolic” in different times (from the eighteenth century till today) and places (mainly France and Germany and to a lesser extent the UK). That survey begins with the Romantics, whose focus on the symbolic dimension was criticized by Hegel and Marx, but praised by Leroux. The concept resurfaced in France, first with Durkheim and Mauss and later with Lévi-Strauss, Merleau-Ponty and Lacan, who in turn influenced Castoriadis and Lefort. These last three thinkers all had a significant impact on the following generation represented by Gauchet, Laclau, Mouffe and Žižek, to whom Breckman devotes the second half of his book. One merit of his book is that Breckman analyzes and presents figures like Leroux, Castoriadis, Lefort, Gauchet and Laclau who are important for political theory and intellectual history, yet remain under-researched and relatively unknown.