Since the 1950s, interpreters of John Locke have debated whether his ideas about political economy figured among the intellectual sources of capitalist development. While some have labeled Locke a mercantile or agrarian “capitalist thinker,” others have insisted that, although a mercantilist, he was in no sense a theorist of capitalism. By reconstructing the relationship between Locke's ideas and the capitalist society of his day, this article challenges the prevailing terms through which commentators have traditionally interpreted his political economy and its place in the history of capitalism. I interpret Locke's perspectives on capital accumulation, foreign trade, and labor discipline throughout the 1690s as a reflection of the historical rise of export-oriented cycles of commodity manufacturing in the English countryside known as “proto-industrialization.” Moreover, I claim that, because proto-industrialization was tied to the expansion of England's colonial economy, this neglected context of Locke's economic doctrine sheds new light on his vision of empire. Looking to his writings on Ireland, I argue that Locke pursued proto-industrial economic reform by combining a hierarchical, stadial theory of progress with an imperial policy aimed at “improving” the colonies through decreed patterns of production and exchange that favored metropolitan trade.

The Chinese rites controversy (c.1582–1742) is typically characterized as a religious quarrel between different Catholic orders over whether it was permissible for Chinese converts to observe traditional rites and use the terms tian and shangdi to refer to the Christian God. As such, it is often argued that the conflict was shaped predominantly by the divergent theological attitudes between the rites-supporting Jesuits and their anti-rites opponents towards “accommodation.” By examining the Jesuit missionary Kilian Stumpf's Acta Pekinensia—a detailed chronicle of the papal legate Charles-Thomas Maillard de Tournon's 1705–6 investigation into the controversy in Beijing—this article proposes that ostensibly religious disputes between Catholic orders consisted primarily of disagreements over ancient Chinese history. Stumpf's text shows that missionaries’ understandings of antiquity were constructed through their interpretations of ancient Chinese books and their interactions with the Kangxi Emperor. The article suggests that the historiographical characterization of the controversy as “religious” has its roots in the Vatican suppression of the rites, which served to erase the historical nature of the conflict exposed in the Acta Pekinensia.

This articles focuses on a significant change to the curriculum in “ethics” (moral philosophy) in the University of Naples, superintended by Celestino Galiani, the rector of the university (1732–53), and Antonio Genovesi, Galiani's protégé and the university's professor of ethics (1746–54). The article contends that Galiani's and Genovesi's sympathies lay with the form of “modern natural law” pioneered by Hugo Grotius and his followers in Northern Europe. The transformation of curricular ethics in Protestant contexts had stemmed from an anxiety about its relevance in the face of moral skepticism. The article shows how this anxiety affected a Catholic context, and it responds to John Robertson's contention that Giambattista Vico's use of “sacred history” in his Scienza nuova (1725, revised 1730, 1744) typified a search among Catholics for an alternative to “scholastic natural law,” when the latter was found insufficiently to explain the sources of human sociability.

Scholars have been paying increasing attention to the republican theory of liberty developed by the eighteenth-century British radical Richard Price. This article studies his narrative of a revolution of liberty, which consists in the downfall of oppressive powers, the establishment of republican institutions, and the introduction of a utopian age. In distinction from work that has focused on the millennial aspects of Price's narrative of emancipation, I highlight its political contexts and functions, situating its early development in utopian speculations about agrarian equality and population, demonstrating how the American Revolution had transformed it into a rallying cry for revolutionaries, and reconstructing its role as a source of politically mobilizing hope. This study differs from much of the scholarship on Price in looking beyond the Anglo-American context and presenting his work as part of a European conversation on the prospects of republican utopia, a conversation whose participants included Rousseau, Turgot, Mirabeau, and Condorcet.

Richard Price (1723–91) is important in present-day historiography chiefly for the interpretation of two great revolutions, the American and the French. Recent studies have depicted him as insightfully forward-looking, a well-informed cosmopolitan, his thought providing an interpretive key to the Age of Revolutions, and so as a landmark figure of a singular Enlightenment. They have paid insufficient attention to his identity as a theologian, a Welsh-born Nonconformist minister of more defined outlook, spending his life in England and campaigning above all for the relief of Nonconformist grievances, picturing “tyranny” and “superstition” in conventional Nonconformist terms. This article offers a reconsideration of the significance of such a Price for the historical understanding of two major and (it contends) related problems: how did the American Revolution relate to the French in a supposed Age of Revolutions, and how should they be understood as putative episodes in the development of the Enlightenment?

According to a dominant narrative, the concept of popular sovereignty was joined to the notion of public opinion during the French Revolution to form the blueprint of a liberal constitutional state. This article shows how, after the Revolution, Benjamin Constant, who is now recognized as a founding figure of “liberalism,” used public opinion as a substitute for popular sovereignty to theorize political legitimacy and constitution making. I show why and when Constant discussed popular sovereignty, namely to dismiss it as an unhelpful and dangerous fiction in answer to factions invoking the concept to revolutionize the political order, or rulers such as Napoleon using it to claim absolute power. In parallel, I explain how Constant designed his alternative, opinion-based theory of legitimacy in the 1790s, before pragmatically adapting it over the course of his career as political regimes changed in France. Constant's substitution of public opinion for popular sovereignty, I contend, reveals distinct views on what makes a political regime legitimate and the meaning of constitutional changes. I conclude with a discussion of how Constant's views, thus interpreted, throw light on debates about sovereignty and public opinion in modern political thought.

Current discussions of the early Jewish reception of Kantian philosophy are dominated by two major approaches. According to the first, this reception was governed by a universal Enlightenment rationalism that was present in Judaism no less than in Kantian philosophy. According to the second, it was the fact that Kantianism contained a latent Judaic kabbalistic philosophy that made it attractive to Jewish intellectuals. This paper departs from both approaches by showing that when Jewish intellectuals encountered Kantianism they found neither a universal rationality to which Judaism should conform, nor an esoteric Jewish metaphysics to which Kantian philosophy had already conformed, but something else entirely, namely a hostile philosophical religion that sought to reconstruct Judaism in its own image. As a result of the historical context in which this challenge arose, some Jewish intellectuals accepted this reconstruction as a rational reform, while others repudiated it as a Christian-rationalist assault on Jewish law and tradition. Characterized first by the absence of a defensive Jewish Schulmetaphysik that might combat Kantianism on its own grounds, and second by the preparedness of enlightened intellectuals to extort Jewish acceptance of Christian rationalism by withholding citizenship rights, this context made Kantian philosophy into an offer that was difficult for Jewish intellectuals to refuse, or accept.

Scholars have shown that historicizing studies of sight can shed light on everything from art history to statecraft to scientific inquiry. But the disciplined eye of the scholar of language—the philological observer—has received little attention, an omission particularly worthy of notice given recent interest in how the history of humanities might be incorporated into the history of science more broadly. This article contributes to a treatment of philological observation in the nineteenth century. Focusing particularly on the career of the Munich Latinist Eduard Wölfflin (1831–1908), a founding father of the monumental Latin lexicon known as the Thesaurus linguae Latinae, it isolates three distinct modes of philological observation: the constitutive, the collative, and the estimative. In the process, it indicates parallels between the kinds of sight practiced by philologists and those of their contemporaries in other investigative arenas, showing how developments on a Latinist's desk can be tied into much larger networks of cultural and epistemic concerns

This article attends to a formative moment in the history of Japanese historiography around 1900, when many Japanese historians began to identify with the eminent German historian Leopold von Ranke—curiously, however, without a substantial preceding engagement with his work. The article employs the concept of the “scholarly persona” to explore the views of influential Japanese historians on the significance of Leopold von Ranke as an embodiment of scholarly virtues. Contrasting Ranke's image in Japan with that prevalent among German and European practitioners, the article argues that Ranke did not function as a marker of a “Western” or “modern” way of doing history, as most previous accounts of his impact in Japan have asserted, but as a universally appropriable icon of a globalizing discipline.

This article investigates Norman Mailer's appropriation and Americanization of the concept of totalitarianism as an internal critique of US society and culture in the 1960s. Dominant understandings of totalitarianism from the 1930s to the 1950s focused on external threats and were wedded to notions of pervasive state control of all aspects of life. Mailer's crucial intervention offered an alternative theory which viewed totalitarianism as an internal threat to the United States and de-emphasized the centrality of the state. His theory of cultural totalitarianism focused on internal psychological manipulation rather than external political coercion. Mailer's focus on the United States was symptomatic of a broader intellectual trend towards the study of non-statist forms of totalitarianism which has yet to receive adequate scholarly attention. This article thus illuminates new dimensions of the totalitarianism debate in American political thought and provides a fuller picture of Mailer's significance as a social critic.

The liberal social thought of the long 1950s is best seen as an attempt to combat the threat that the United States, as a modern mass society, could succumb to totalitarianism. Widely discussed texts like Escape from Freedom, The Vital Center, The Lonely Crowd, and The Origins of Totalitarianism announced the threat. Academic and theoretical studies worked to provide social supports for now weakened individuals or to find behavioral evidence that Americans still functioned as liberal democrats, but they did so by subordinating individual autonomy and mutual social responsibility to social systems, the market, and elites. Although social liberalism revived during the 1960s, the Great Society fused social liberalism to the Cold War state; the movements for civil rights and social inclusion, fueled by the desire for authenticity, veered into individualistic, identitarian channels; and radical calls for participatory democracy magnified both desires for authenticity and fears of American totalitarianism. Until the end of the century the totalitarian frame of liberal social thought continued to encourage visions of the future as a monolithic totality, to steer liberal social thinkers into individualistic channels, to hobble mutualistic conceptions of the social, and to weaken the ability of social liberals to respond to the conservative backlash that grew through the century and beyond.

On three occasions the Qur'an mentions what it calls barzakh, an enigmatic word that denotes a partition such as that found between fresh and sea water, good and evil, faith and knowledge, even this world and the next. Nimble thinkers have made good use of the in-betweenness of barzakh. Its divisions make possible distinctions and provide form. And yet, just as it divides, the barzakh also connects. In fact, the word is often rendered in English as “isthmus,” which shows up its usefulness for thinking about difference in a way that does not presuppose stark oppositions, on the one hand, nor conflation and indistinction, on the other. The twelfth-century philosopher Ibn ‘Arabi used barzakh to describe that which separates/unites the created and the Creator, making it a key concept within his theory of the unity of existence. Building upon these insights, modern readers have found this concept useful to negotiate contemporary questions of self and other, questions that became particularly important in the colonial and postcolonial eras. For example, the late Algerian novelist Mohammed Dib used barzakh to signify his personal struggles to think across North (Europe) and South (North Africa), French and Arabic. Likewise, the Moroccan scholar Taieb Belghazi has mobilized barzakh to rethink the Mediterranean Sea as a heterogenous space that joins and “disjoins” lands, languages, and people. Barzakh also names an important new publishing house in Algiers and its concept frames the editors’ work producing titles in which questions of (post)colonialism and of cultural liminality figure prominently.

In 1955, Alain Resnais's now canonical documentary, Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog) ended with an ominous question, asking “who, among us, is keeping watch from this strange watchtower [of the ruins of Auschwitz] to warn of the arrival of our new executioners” who might bring about the return of the “concentrationary plague?” One man had already made it his mission to do so: the French writer and former political deportee David Rousset. Rousset had shaken the French world of letters and politics with the 1946 publication of L'univers concentrationnaire (The Concentrationary Universe), which warned of the civilizational and moral cesura that the Nazi camps had been. The term quickly became a widely used conceptual framework. Former deportee and Catholic writer Jean Cayrol borrowed from it to write his voice-over to Night and Fog. In 1949, Rousset published another text that created a scandal in Cold War France: an Appeal to “fellow deportees” calling upon them to “investigate the USSR's concentrationary universe” (Kuby, 46). This indictment fiercely divided the French left. In 1950, he brought a libel suit against another former deportee, communist writer Pierre Daix, who had accused him of amnesiac “apoliticism” (Kuby, 65–6; Dean, 61). Just before, in the wake of his Appeal, Rousset had founded an organization against concentrationary regimes with those, like him, who had been political deportees. In 1951, it put the Soviet Union on trial for crimes against humanity. Rousset and his organization were involved in many trials, eager to denounce the “new executioners” who had revived the “scourge of the camps” in the postwar world. For many today, he is an “exceptional” man because, as philosopher and critic Tzvetan Todorov argues, he was not paralyzed by the memory of “this painful experience”; instead, he harnessed it into action against dehumanizing state violence. For Todorov, Rousset had allowed morality to prevail over base political considerations.