Having accepted the invitation to revisit my essay of 1982, “What Is the History of Books?”, I find that I can do it only in the first person singular and therefore must ask to be excused for indulging in some autobiographical detail. I would also like to make a disclaimer: in proposing a model for studying the history of books twenty-four years ago, I did not mean to tell book historians how they ought to do their jobs. I hoped that the model might be useful in a heuristic way and never thought of it as comparable to the models favored by economists, the kind in which you insert data, work it over, and arrive at a bottom line. (I do not believe that bottom lines exist in history.) It seemed to me in 1982 that the history of books was suffering from fissiparousness: experts were pursuing such specialized studies that they were losing contact with one another. The esoteric elements of book history needed to be integrated into an overview that would show how the parts could connect to form a whole—or what I characterized as a communications circuit. The tendency toward fragmentation and specialization still exists.

This paper concerns the reformulation by British expatriates and the first generation of English-speaking Indian intellectuals of the key ideas of European constitutional liberalism between 1810 and 1835. The central figure is Rammohan Roy, usually seen as a “reformer” of Hinduism. Here Rammohan's thought is set in the context of the Iberian and Latin American constitutional revolutions and the movement for free trade and parliamentary reform in Britain. Rammohan and his coevals created a constitutional history for India that centred on the institution of the panchayat, a local judicial body. While some expatriates and Indian radicals discussed “independence” or “separation” for the country as early as the 1830s, Rammohan himself argued for constitutional limitations on the Company's power and Indian representation in Parliament. Under liberal British government, he believed, an Indian public would emerge, empowered by service on juries and the operations of a free press.

Since the 1830s thinkers in both the United States and India have sought to establish analogies between their respective countries. Although many have felt the US black experience to have obvious parallels in India, there has been a fundamental disagreement about whether being black is comparable to being colonized or to being untouchable. By examining these two competing visions, this essay introduces new topics to the study of black internationalism, including the caste school of race relations, B. R. Ambedkar's anti-caste movement, and the changing significance of India for Martin Luther King, Jr.

This paper is about Gandhi's critique of politics, of which his ambivalence towards democracy was a part. I argue that for Gandhi the ground of moral action is fearlessness, while that of political reason is security and self-defense. Gandhi sees the context of moral action in the mundane fabric of everyday life, in places such as the family and the village. For that reason he does not believe that moral action requires being supplemented by the particular kind of unity which politics and the state call for and necessitate.

This article challenges conventional readings of Michel Foucault by examining his fascination with neoliberalism in the late 1970s. Foucault did not critique neoliberalism during this period; rather, he strategically endorsed it. The necessary cause for this approval lies in the broader rehabilitation of economic liberalism in France during the 1970s. The sufficient cause lies in Foucault's own intellectual development: drawing on his long-standing critique of the state as a model for conceptualizing power, Foucault concluded, during the 1970s, that economic liberalism, rather than “discipline,” was modernity's paradigmatic power form. Moreover, this article seeks to clarify the relationship between Foucault's philosophical antihumanism and his assessment of liberalism. Rather than arguing (as others have) that Foucault's antihumanism precluded a positive appraisal of liberalism, or that the apparent reorientation of his politics in a more liberal direction in the late 1970s entailed a partial retreat from antihumanism, this article contends that Foucault's brief, strategic, and contingent endorsement of liberalism was possible precisely because he saw no incompatibility between antihumanism and liberalism—but only liberalism of the economic variety. Economic liberalism alone, and not its political iteration, was compatible with the philosophical antihumanism that is the hallmark of Foucault's thought.

From 1827 to 1831 the German historian Leopold von Ranke travelled through Germany, Austria, and Italy, hunting for documents and archives. During this journey Ranke developed a new model for historical research that transformed the archive into the most important site for the production of historical knowledge. Within the archive, Ranke claimed, the trained historian could forget his personal predispositions and political loyalties, and write objective history. This essay critically examines Ranke's model for historical research through a study of the obstacles, frustrations, and joys that he encountered on his journey. It shows how Ranke's archival experiences inspired him to re-evaluate his own identity as a historian and as a human being, and investigates some of the affiliations between his model for historical research and the political realities of Prince Metternich's European order. Finally, the essay compares Ranke's historical discipline to other nineteenth-century disciplines, such as anthropology and archaeology.

This essay attempts something a little peculiar: a study of the genesis of a concept within discourses which did not, in fact, use the word. This is at least true of “sustainability” in English. The emergence of the German equivalent, Nachhaltigkeit, which might also be expressed by the idea of “lasting-ness”, is, however, usually dated to the use of the word nachhalthende by Hanns Carl von Carlowitz in his Sylvicultura oeconomica of 1713, the first great forestry manual of the eighteenth century. In fact, the term can be found in the 1650s.

Intellectual history in the United States has long borne a peculiarly close kinship to social history. The twin fields rose together a century ago in a filial revolt against the cloistered, conservative study of political institutions. Sharing a progressive interest in social thought and social reform, they joined in the self-styled “social and intellectual history” of the interwar decades. After mid-century, however, they moved in divergent directions. Many social historians adopted the quantitative methods of the social sciences, documenting the diverse experiences of workers, women, immigrants, slaves, native peoples, and others often marginalized in the textual record as well as the property regimes, modes of production, patterns of inheritance and mobility, and large-scale demographic and environmental forces that governed their lives. Intellectual historians tended to favor the qualitative evidence gleaned from the more cohesive letters and libraries of traditional elites, specializing in close readings of the intricate discursive, aesthetic, and spiritual templates of social experience found in religion, science, philosophy, political theory, and art and literature. Both subdisciplines had come into parallel crises by the 1980s, chastened by postmodern attacks on “master narratives” of any kind, whether idealist or materialist. In the decades since, social historians have sought a more nuanced consideration of thought and culture, while intellectual historians have at once broadened the range of their subjects and sources and limited more carefully the claims they make for them.

During the first two decades of the Cold War, a new kind of academic figure became prominent in American public life: the credentialed social scientist or expert in the sciences of administration who was also, to use the parlance of the time, a “man of affairs.” Some were academic high-fliers conscripted into government roles in which their intellectual and organizational talents could be exploited. McGeorge Bundy, Walt Rostow, and Robert McNamara are the archetypes of such persons. An overlapping group of scholars became policymakers and political advisers on issues ranging from social welfare provision to nation-building in emerging postcolonial states. Many of these men—and almost without exception they were men—were also consummate operators within the patronage system that grew up around American universities after World War II. Postwar leaders of the social and administrative sciences such as Talcott Parsons and Herbert Simon were skilled scientific brokers of just this sort: good “committee men,” grant-getters, proponents of interdisciplinary inquiry, and institution-builders. This hard-nosed, suit-wearing, business-like persona was connected to new, technologically refined forms of social science. No longer sage-like social philosophers or hardscrabble, number-crunching empiricists, academic human scientists portrayed themselves as possessors of tools and programs designed for precision social engineering. Antediluvian “social science” was eschewed in favour of mathematical, behavioural, and systems-based approaches to “human relations” such as operations research, behavioral science, game theory, systems theory, and cognitive science.

This article examines the most prominent interwar economist at the University of Chicago, Frank Knight, through the lens of a controversial 1932 lecture in which he exhorted his audience to vote Communist. The fact that he did so poses a historical problem: why did the premier American exponent of conservative economic principles appear to advocate a vote for radical change? This article argues that the speech is representative of Knight's deliberately paradoxical approach, in which he refused to praise markets without adding caveats about their substantial limitations, and expressed support for freedom of discussion alongside his skepticism of the public's capacity to exercise the privilege. In parsing these tensions, the article revises the conventional interpretation of Knight, illuminates the contested environment within which postwar free-market economics emerged, and reexamines a restrained defense of capitalism that has been largely forgotten in the subsequent years.

This essay is written on the following premises and argues for them. “Enlightenment” is a word or signifier, and not a single or unifiable phenomenon which it consistently signifies. There is no single or unifiable phenomenon describable as “the Enlightenment,” but it is the definite article rather than the noun which is to be avoided. In studying the intellectual history of the late seventeenth century and the eighteenth, we encounter a variety of statements made, and assumptions proposed, to which the term “Enlightenment” may usefully be applied, but the meanings of the term shift as we apply it. The things are connected, but not continuous; they cannot be reduced to a single narrative; and we find ourselves using the word “Enlightenment” in a family of ways and talking about a family of phenomena, resembling and related to one another in a variety of ways that permit of various generalizations about them. We are not, however, committed to a single root meaning of the word “Enlightenment,” and we do not need to reduce the phenomena of which we treat to a single process or entity to be termed “the” Enlightenment. It is a reification that we wish to avoid, but the structure of our language is such that this is difficult, and we will find ourselves talking of “the French” or “the Scottish,” “the Newtonian” or the “the Arminian” Enlightenments, and hoping that by employing qualifying adjectives we may constantly remind ourselves that the keyword “Enlightenment” is ours to use and should not master us.

What is the conceptual status of modernity in the Muslim world? Scholars describe Muslim attempts at appropriating this European idea as being either derivative or incomplete, with a few calling for multiple modernities to allow modern Islam some autonomy. Such approaches are critical of the apologetic way in which Muslims have grappled with the idea of modernity, the purity and autonomy of the concept of which is apparently compromised by its derivative and incomplete appropriation. None have attended to the conceptual status of this apologetic itself, though it is certainly the most important element in Muslim debates on the modern. This essay considers the adoption of modernity as an idea among Muslim intellectuals in nineteenth-century India, a place in which some of the earliest and most influential debates on Islam's modernity occurred. It argues that Muslim apologetics created a modernity whose rejection of purity and autonomy permitted it a distinctive conceptual form.

Totalitarianism theory was one of the ratifying principles of the Cold War, and remains an important component of contemporary political discourse. Its origins, however, are little understood. Although widely seen as a secular product of anticommunist socialism, it was originally a theological notion, rooted in the political theory of Catholic personalism. Specifically, totalitarianism theory was forged by Catholic intellectuals in the mid-1930s, responding to Carl Schmitt's turn to the “total state” in 1931. In this essay I explore the notion's formation and circulation through the Catholic public sphere in both France and Austria, where “antitotalitarianism” was born as a new form of the traditional Catholic animus against the nation state project.

In giving a historically specific account of the self in early twentieth-century India, this article poses questions about the historiography of nationalist thought within which the concept of the self has generally been embedded. It focuses on the ethical questions that moored nationalist thought and practice, and were premised on particular understandings of the self. The reappraisal of religion and the self in relation to contemporary evolutionary sociology is examined through the writings of a diverse set of radical nationalist intellectuals, notably Shyamji Krishnavarma, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Har Dayal, and this discussion contextualizes Mohandas Gandhi. Over three related sites of public propaganda, philosophical reinterpretation and individual self-reinvention, the essay charts a concern with the ethical as a form of critique of liberalism and liberal nationalism. While evolutionism and liberalism often had a mutually reinforcing relationship, the Indian critique of liberalism was concerned with the formation of a new moral language for a politics of the self.

Where is America in the republic of letters? This question has formed in my mind over the last four years as I have collaborated on a new project based at Stanford University called Mapping the Republic of Letters. The project aims to enrich our understanding of the intellectual networks of major and minor figures in the republic of letters, the international world of learning that spanned the centuries roughly from 1400 to 1800. By creating visual images based on large digitized data sets, we hope to reveal the hidden structures and conditions that nourished the growth of the republic of letters in the early modern era and the causes of its transformation in the nineteenth century. This task has only recently become feasible with the digitization of the correspondences of major intellectuals such as Benjamin Franklin, John Locke, Athanasius Kircher, and Voltaire, and of libraries, cabinets of artifacts, and Grand Tour itineraries.

The historiographical trend that goes under the name of the “linguistic turn,” or, more capaciously, the “new cultural history,” has stressed the enormous plasticity and contingency of the human world. Its proponents have maintained that, instead of being determined by laws analogous to those that govern the physical world, human reality is to a large degree—just how large a degree is, of course, a hotly contested issue—autonomously constructed by the human manipulation of language. Language is, in this view, not confined to passively mirroring a prior social reality; rather, linguistically constituted entities can powerfully influence social life even in the absence of “real,” objective referents. As Sarah Maza notes in the introduction to The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie: An Essay on the Social Imaginary, 1750–1850, cultural historians have, since the 1970s, enthusiastically embraced such an approach with respect to newer topics of investigation like gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. Yet its application to the venerable historical category of class, while not altogether lacking, has lagged noticeably behind.

“National identity” is one of those concepts, like “political culture”, which historians have somewhat casually borrowed from the social sciences and then used promiscuously for their own purposes. Over twenty years ago Philip Gleason wrote a wise and prescient (yet sadly underappreciated) essay on the origins of the concept of “identity” in the 1950s, warning historians that already then it had two quite distinct—psychological and sociological—meanings that needed to be distinguished to retain any conceptual clarity. Since then our own use of it has proliferated uncontrollably, and the original confusion identified by Gleason has been compounded by many others. The chain of communication between the concept's progenitors and its present-day users is now so long and so fragmentary that our usage may bear little or no relation to the discourse that Gleason described. There may be nothing wrong with this state of affairs; historians may have found their own value in the term, which need not necessarily be validated by social science. Yet social scientists have continued to work with “identity”, and have puzzled much further over its possible meaning and utility with a degree of conceptual rigour that historians do not usually share. And we continue to validate our own use of the term by reference to an increasingly shadowy and distant social science whence it came. Accordingly it may be useful to look more closely at what social scientists think “national identity” is, and how it operates in human minds and societies. This essay attempts a brief exploration of that kind and then applies its findings to the recent historiography of “national identity” in modern Britain.

This essay revises the common assumption that non-violence has been central to political modernity in India. The “extremist” nationalist B. G. Tilak, through a foundational philosophical reinterpretation of the Bhagavad Gita, created a modern theology of the Indian “political”. Tilak did so by directly confronting the question of the possibility of the “event” of war and the ethics of the conversion of kinsmen into enemies. Writing in the aftermath of the Swadeshi movement and from a prison cell in Rangoon, Tilak interpreted action as sacrificial duty that created a vocabulary of violence in which killing was naturalized. Violence, whether conceptual or otherwise, was not directed towards the “outsider” but was of meaning only when directed against the intimate. Unlike the distinction between friend and foe that has been taken as central to the understanding of the political in the twentieth century, it was instead the fraternal–enmity issue that framed the modern political in India. Tilak foregrounded the idea of a de-historicized political subject, whose existence was entirely dependent upon the event of violence itself. This helps to explain both the unprecedented violence that accompanied freedom and partition in 1947 and also the fact that it has remained unmemorialized to the present day.

Georg Cavallar, The Rights of Strangers: Theories of International Hospitality, the Global Community, and Political Justice since Vitoria (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002)

Jonathan Haslam, No Virtue Like Necessity: Realist Thought in International Relations since Machiavelli (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002)

Edward Keene, Beyond the Anarchical Society: Grotius, Colonialism and Order in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)

Although history is the pre-eminent part of the gallant sciences, philosophers advise against it from fear that it might completely destroy the kingdom of darkness—that is, scholastic philosophy—which previously has been wrongly held to be a necessary instrument of theology.