Rousseau's Lettres écrites de la montagne have traditionally been cited as evidence of the influence on his thinking of Genevan traditions of democratic republican political argument, on the grounds that the Lettres were written on behalf of those members of the citizens and bourgeois in the city who were critical of the growing powers of the magistracy, the co-called représentants. This essay proposes a different reading. It argues that the Lettres confirmed long-standing Genevan suspicions about Rousseau's politics and theology which were held both by the représentants and the magistrates. The reason was that Rousseau had composed the Lettres as a critique both of représentant plans for democratic reform and of magisterial usurpation of the sovereign rights of the citizens. The Lettres underscored Rousseau's commitment to the distinction between sovereignty and government outlined in the Contrat social. Rousseau believed that Geneva deserved to be a model for European states because the distinction between sovereignty and government characteristic of its constitution had such clear historical roots. He also recognized that growing uncertainty concerning the relative powers of the General Council, the smaller executive committees of leading magistrates, and the Consistory had created a political impasse. Accordingly the Lettres argued for a new political settlement, that would redefine the constitutional relationship between citizens and magistrates, as well as between church and the state. Rousseau emerges as a dedicated enemy of democratic political innovation in Geneva, and an advocate of renewed Reformation which would make religion the foundation of an anti-commercial morality. Rousseau's singular and heterodox perspective on Geneva and its history is outlined in the essay, which places Rousseau's Lettres in the broader local context of republican and magisterial reform politics.

The fundamental importance of theology in the work of Carl Schmitt has been the subject of much recent literature on this controversial figure. However, there has been little consensus on the precise nature of Schmitt's own political theology—that is, on what links there are between his religious or metaphysical concepts and his ideas concerning the nature of political organization and action. This is especially the case with his works of the Nazi era, which are now being studied with the same kind of critical attention given to his more influential Weimar works. In this essay I focus on the important turn Schmitt made in the early years of the Third Reich, from “decisionism” to what he called “institutional thinking,” in order to reveal the theological basis for his understanding of the new regime. I will then argue that Schmitt's institutional approach had in fact always been central to his earlier, better-known writings on law and the state. Schmitt's concept of the institution, which had roots in French legal theory, grounded a political theology that was in the end less a metaphysical approach to the state than one that drew on the concrete example of the legal institutional order of the Catholic Church.

This essay offers a detailed reconstruction of the thought of Inayatullah Khan al-Mashriqi, a camp-follower of fascism in inter-war India who sought to reformulate Islam as a “Religion of Science” according to the precepts of Darwinian evolutionism. Mashriqi has so far been neglected because his political impact was only short-term and did not contribute to the larger story of decolonization in India and Pakistan. But far from being marginal, Mashriqi's philosophical ruminations actually provide a window for a much-needed re-evaluation of the meaning of colonial modernity. While there was much in Mashriqi's writing that conforms to the usual picture of anti-colonial nation-building—his obsession with the truth of science, for instance, and his emphasis on disciplinary political methodologies—the by now standardized critique of such features in the “postcolonial” literature no longer suffices. Behind a façade of continuities with nineteenth-century “Enlightenment” traditions stood a much darker vision of modernity that no longer had any recourse to the certainties of a grand narrative of modernization. Instead, it was a vision that fluctuated between mystical exuberance and deep pessimism. The only sense of certainty was provided by a radical notion of emotional authenticity and a related belief in quasi-religious leadership figures. The larger conclusion to be drawn from the dualistic and contradictory structure of Mashriqi's “fascism” is that the intellectual history of inter-war South Asia needs to be given relative autonomy from the standard nationalism–modernization narrative, for rather than the continuation of an earlier modernity, it should be interpreted as the starting point of a new and much darker formation that arguably continues into the present.

The publication of the collection of essays Women, Gender and Enlightenment (ed. Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor, Houndsmills: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005) affords an unusual opportunity to confront a myriad of interrelated issues, at once definitional and ideological, that face intellectual historians of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe and America. The 768-page work came out of a highly unusual collaborative research project conducted from 1998 to 2001, “Feminism and Enlightenment, 1650–1850: A Comparative History,” a series of colloquia, conferences, and Internet exchanges enlisting the participation of over a hundred historians in Europe, North America, and Australia. The product of this extensive interaction showcases the contributions of thirty-eight authors, not only covering a broad array of topics but, still more remarkable, displaying a large degree of consensus about issues of interpretative concern. While dozens of books and articles have anticipated pieces of the arguments made in this volume, never has so extensive an attempt been made to pull them together into a cohesive whole.

In December of 1850, exhausted by his role in French politics and recuperating from tuberculosis, Alexis de Tocqueville retreated to the Amalfi coast to think, write, and recover. To his best friend Louis de Kergolay, Tocqueville wrote about completing his memoir on the 1848 revolution and his plans to undertake a comprehensive account of French history that would explain the turmoil of the past century. The appeal was powerful, he explained to Kergolay, but “the difficulties are immense. The one that most troubles my mind comes from the mixture of history properly so called with historical philosophy. I still do not see how to mix these two things,” he conceded, “and yet, they must be mixed, for one could say that the first is the canvas and the second the color, and that it is necessary to have both at the same time in order to do the picture.” Tocqueville feared “that the one is harmful to the other, and that I lack the infinite art that would be necessary in order to choose properly the facts that must, so to speak, support the ideas.

Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, 6 vols. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005)

Until recently, serious students of music did not read sweeping histories of music. In a time of increasing specialization, we do not expect to find new ideas in such work. This has changed with the publication of Richard Taruskin's History of Western Music. Monumental in its scope and original in its approach but informal in its prose and always engagingly direct, it offers a provocative perspective on the whole of music's history and sets fresh agendas for anyone interested in music and its relation to the history of ideas, politics and culture. Taruskin's History differs from all previous projects of its kind in that it does not principally survey famous works by famous composers. Focusing instead on particular issues within a chronological framework (his chapter titles refer, amongst other things, to feudalism, humanism, enlightenment, virtuosos, transcendentalism and totalitarianism), and selecting composers whose music contributes to the consideration of those issues (sometimes omitting well-known figures or placing familiar works in radically new contexts), he sets out quite simply to explain why music has been composed as it has, and to show how its existence has relied not on composers in isolation but on a whole musical culture of composers, patrons, performers, critics and many others. Rather than relegating historical events and ideas to the status of context or calling them extra-musical, he places them at the centre of his narrative and in intricate dialogue with music; so while his close analyses of music will mean most to those with musical training, they are part of an argument about history that will be suggestive and illuminating to any reader.

Kevin Repp, Reformers, Critics, and the Paths of German Modernity: Anti-politics and the Search for Alternatives, 1890–1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000)

Suzanne Marchand and David Lindenfeld, eds., Germany at the Fin de Siecle: Culture, Politics, and Ideas (Baton Rouge: Lousiana State University Press, 2004)

As in the colorization of old black-and-white films, large swaths of modern German history have been undergoing a major makeover through full-spectrum, high-definition re-colorization. Stark black and white—and in between steely gray-on-gray—hardly suffice any longer for representing the full spectrum of the German past in its manifold formations and transformations. As compellingly set forth in the two works reviewed here, this changing retrospective view of change itself is revamping the history of the Wilhelmine Reich of 1890–1914. And just as in the colorization of old films, this shift has the uncanny parallax effect of making a bygone period-piece seem somehow closer to our sensibly “more modern” present-day world—even while the earlier period is also plainly lodged in a distant timeframe. The new history has some very interesting and unsettling special effects and nowhere do they come into play more palpably than in treating the special “German question” in relation to the larger question of Western mainstream modernity.

George A. Reisch, How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science: To the Icy Slopes of Logic (Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press, 2005)

Scott Soames, Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century. Vol. 1, The Dawn of Analysis; Vol. 2, The Age of Meaning (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2003)

Although How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science is narrower in scope, the two books included in this review by and large cover the same ground—the history of anglophone philosophy in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, the two authors occupy two different universes, and it is instructive to examine the issues and styles of thought that separate their comprehension of analytic philosophy.

Fritz K. Ringer, a member of the MIH editorial board, died in February of this year, less than five years after he retired from a Mellon Professorship at the University of Pittsburgh. I was not one of his students, but from my graduate years onward his influence on my own scholarship was profound. In recent years his friendship helped keep me anchored in times of crisis.

“I am an American, Chicago born,” runs the first line of a famous novel by Saul Bellow. Anyone who knew the historian Kenneth Cmiel, who died on 4 February 2006, will recognize how this blunt affirmation of Chicago identity could serve Ken as well as it served Augie March. Not that Ken played the identity game pretentiously. A capacity to live a particular persona without being captured by it was one of his countless endearing traits. But being a Chicago person, by birth and by doctorate and by a style that never left him in Iowa City or Berkeley, meant a lot to Ken, and it gave a certain tone to his skeptical, yet sensitive, responses to the conceits and aspirations of his colleagues and friends.