Focusing on Carl Schmitt's early work, this article argues that Schmitt's relatively unfamiliar mystical interpretation of Spinoza's pantheism, in combination with his use of the abbé Sieyès's notion of pouvoir constituant, deeply informed his particular conception of anti-liberal, dictatorial democracy. Although it is often argued that, in Carl Schmitt's view, Spinoza heralded the end of political theology, this essay suggests that, even though it may be correct to say that Schmitt by 1938 deemed Spinoza “the corrupting spirit of modern liberalism”, there is a prior crucial, yet relatively unexplored, story to tell about Schmitt's reading of Spinoza—a story that leads to the heart of Schmitt's reconceptualization of democracy. While in Schmitt's view Spinoza's pantheism was detrimental to divine and kingly transcendentalism, it also served as a bold mystical foundation of Schmitt's notion of democratic homogeneity that would be capable of competing with contemporary “political theories of myth”.

The social context of Hobbes's political thought is ripe for reassessment in light of advances in the social history of seventeenth-century England in the past half-century. The evidence does not support C. B. Macpherson's claim that England had a “possessive market society” which became the social model for Hobbes's political theory, nor the case that Hobbes was a bourgeois ideologist. A new examination of his social theory, his social identity, his social prejudices and his understanding of what we today call social class instead produces a picture of an intellectual of the “middle sort” with strong aristocratic, pro-court sentiments. A clearer understanding of his social views would probably have prevented the current controversy over his political sentiments or channeled it in a different direction. The issues make a strong case for more social contextualization at the macro level of analysis in intellectual history.

“‘Histoire du livre’”, remarked Robert Darnton in a much celebrated essay from 1982, “‘Geschichte des Buchwesens’…‘history of books’ or ‘of the book’ in English-speaking countries—its name varies from place to place, but everywhere it is being recognized as an important new discipline”. In the twenty-five years since Darnton's original observation book history has if anything continued to flourish. With a number of multi-volume national histories of the book now at various stages of completion, an international infrastructure of research centres, teaching programmes and publishers’ lists, quite clearly something has been happening.

Britons viewed speculative thinking as a primary cause of the French Revolution and the disorders that followed. In this context, Edmund Burke and others identified a form of enthusiasm that was theoretical, not religious, in nature, but which also corrupted reasoning to disastrous effect. This article investigates how this accusation was made against David Ricardo and his political economy, and the variable defences that he deployed. The result is to uncover the language that was used to appraise political economy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, along with the intellectual disciplines that were prescribed to protect economic reasoning from falling into fantasy.

Where does occultism fit on the map of modernity? Frank Miller Turner proposed an intriguing answer in his 1974 study Between Science and Religion: The Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian England. The book examined the lives and struggles of six Victorian men: the philosophers Henry Sidgwick and James Ward, the scientists Alfred Russel Wallace and George John Romanes, and the writers Frederic W. H. Myers and Samuel Butler. Of the six, three cultivated a serious and sustained interest in the occult. Sidgwick and Myers engaged in psychical research, while Wallace immersed himself in phrenology and spiritualism. Raised as Christians, all of them came to find Christian belief inadequate. Yet the scientific naturalism that might have provided an alternative pole for their allegiance, that was the alternative pole of allegiance for much of their generation, failed to entice them. All had ethical qualms about its refusal to comment on God's existence or on life after death. All, too, wondered about the soul and bemoaned the reluctance of scientists to investigate the immaterial and subjective aspects of human nature. Caught between the Christianity of their upbringing and the scientific naturalism of their adulthood, Turner argued, these men “came to dwell between the science that beckoned them and the religion they had forsaken.”

Catholicism's contribution to the development of nationalist ideology, and more generally to the process of European nation building in the nineteenth century, has been neglected. Most previous work has concentrated instead on varieties of liberal nationalism. In fact, Catholic intellectuals forged a whole nationalist discourse, but from traditional-conservative and orthodox doctrine. This essay charts a transnational path through Latin European countries, whose thinkers pioneered the theoretical development of Catholic nationalism. The Latin countries–France, Italy, and Spain, especially–were the homeland of Catholicism and theological, philosophical, historical, and political theories originating in it had a tremendous impact on the general formation of Western nationalism. This essay examines the formation, evolution, and consolidation of Catholic nationalism through “New Catholicism,” showing how the nation-state project and modernity itself were rethought in a new conservative and Catholic form.

This article explores the vast body of English language works on Hinduism published since 1981 by Voice of India—an influential right-wing Hindu publishing house headquartered in New Delhi, but contributed to by Indians at “home” and in diasporic communities, as well as Europeans and North Americans. Focus on the construction of the Hindu “Self” and the non-Hindu “Other” shows the manner in which European thought, primarily represented by the contributions of colonial-era British and German indologists, but bolstered by evangelicals, Utilitarians and Arabo-Islamicists from the same era, has become an important feature of postcolonial forms of Hinduism. In particular, the influence of fin de siècle German indologist Paul Deussen, mediated by such colonial-era Hindu thinkers as Swami Dayananda, Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo Ghose and Mahatma Gandhi, not only defines Voice of India's theology, but leads to the construction of a Hindu Self that is the personification of “Aryan godliness” and a non-Hindu Other that is essentialized as a “Semitic Demon.” Although closely associated with and often serving the political initiatives of the Sangh Parivar, the authors of this theology have been kept at arm's length by the organization for reasons of political expediency. Both the growing network of contributors to and consumers of this view, and its periodic use by the Sangh Parivar, insure that it represents a significant development in the ideology of Hindutva.

There is a long history of scholars finding in architecture tools for thinking, whether this is the relationship between nature and culture in Simmel's ruins, industrial capitalism in Benjamin's Parisian arcades, or the rhythms of the primordial in Heidegger's Black Forest farmhouse. But what does it mean to take seriously the concepts and dispositions articulated by architects themselves? How might processes of designing and making constitute particular forms of thinking? This article considers the words and buildings of Lahore-based architect Kamil Khan Mumtaz (b. 1939) as an entry point into such questions. It outlines how professional architecture in Pakistan has grappled with the unsettled status of the past in a country forged out of two partitions (1947 and 1971). Mumtaz's work and thought—engaging questions of tradition, authority, craft and the sacred—demonstrates how these predicaments have been productive for conceptualizing time, labor and the nature of dwelling in a postcolonial world.

Castigated as theoretically naive by Perry Anderson, or praised as culturally sensitive by later writers, the political thought of the “first New Left” has often been understood in relation to F. R. Leavis's cultural criticism. This article seeks to reframe the writings of E. P. Thompson, Stuart Hall, Charles Taylor and Alasdair Macintyre from this period as interventions in a fundamentally sociological debate about the nature of capitalism in the managed economy of postwar Britain.

The British philosopher F. C. S. Schiller (1864–1937) was a leading pragmatist in the early twentieth century. His critiques of formal logic and his attempts to construct a humanist logic, derived from an anti-foundationalist humanism, are recognized as lasting philosophical achievements. But scholars have failed to consider that Schiller was passionately committed to the British eugenics movement. This essay explores the relationship between Schiller's pragmatism and his eugenicism. It argues that Schiller represents the broad scope of pragmatism in the early twentieth century through his involvements not only with eugenics, but also with psychical research as well. Underneath Schiller's various undertakings lies a common theme: the self, conceived in voluntaristic, historicist, and concrete terms. By tracing the trajectory of this theme in Schiller's thought, this essay demonstrates that Schiller's eugenicism was confined to the presuppositions of his pragmatist logic, which steered Schiller's eugenicism toward a distinctively nondeterministic and non-social-Darwinist kind.

“God knows,” lamented the physicist Isidor Rabi, “I'm not the simplest person, but compared to Oppenheimer, I'm very, very simple.” J. Robert Oppenheimer played myriad roles in the science and politics of modern America: as a physicist working to establish a synthetic American school uniting theoretical and experimental approaches; as a government functionary and “weaponeer” piloting the development and fine-tuning the deployment of the first atomic bombs; as insider, consultant, and oracle speaking in the name of American science; but also as outsider, voice of conscience, and political pariah.

The world of grand strategy is not one to which intellectual historians have devoted a great deal of attention. Matters of interstate economic competition and imperial rivalry have, of course, long been at the center of histories of early modern political thought. Yet, when these currents in the history of political thought narrow into nineteenth-century realpolitik, and then turn toward the professionalized contemporary discourses of international relations and war studies, intellectual historians have, for the most part, left the matter to the experts. The strategic maxims of Clausewitz and Liddell Hart may fascinate IR theorists, political scientists, and military historians, but they seldom fire the imaginations of tender-minded historians of ideas. The two books under review challenge such preconceptions. They ask us to consider the history of Cold War strategic thought in a wider conceptual frame. Buried in the history of strategy, they suggest, are some of the central themes of postwar social and political thought.

Walt Rostow wanted his landmark contribution to modernization theory, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-communist Manifesto (1960), to offer an alternative to Marxist analysis, and in service of that effort he sought to replace class with nation as the agent of history. Britain figured prominently in the resulting account, functioning as everything from a trailblazing pioneer to an idiosyncratic anomaly to a cautionary tale for weak-kneed Americans, but it never explicitly offered the model for other nations to follow that historians today associate with the text. In explaining how that misreading came to dominate discussions of Stages, this essay rethinks a US historiography that collapses modernization theory with American exceptionalism, and a UK historiography premised on the claim that Britain made the modern world. Attending to the function of Britain in Stages reinserts British history into postwar conceptions of world history—not as a paradigmatic case, but nevertheless as a significant one.

There can be little doubt that the history profession is experiencing a turn to the present. The post-2016 “crisis of democracy” has only dramatized it. Long-standing anxieties over presentism have crumbled under the weight of recent events. They have proven little match for Brexit, Trump, the rise of strongmen in the world writ large, racial injustice, and the pandemic. The turn to the present, however, is at times marked by undeniable provincialism—one that consistently offers a narrow perspective for understanding new and emerging global realities. Some historians, for instance, have taken on the role of liberal watchmen ready to strike the tocsin against suspected fascism, but they regularly do so by focusing on Europe's fascist past of the 1930s to explain the contemporary order. Or consider the economic crisis brought on by the coronavirus pandemic. In the search for solutions, scholars proved quick to make historical comparisons to the great war economies of World Wars I and II, but appeared little bothered by the possibility that taking inspiration from Europe's age of extremes might “lead us to look for enemies and scapegoats.” So with the George Floyd protests: certain scholars and pundits likened them to the 1968 student protests in France and the United States, even as other scholars pointed out the historical shortcoming of the comparison.

The mythical scientist in early twentieth-century America cut a lone figure, “impersonal as the chill northeast wind” and “oblivious of everything save his experiment.” He toiled through the night in his laboratory, “a place unimpressive and unmagical save for the constant-temperature bath with its tricky thermometer and electric bulbs,” as if working in the lab were a prayer that promised illumination—“alone, absorbed, [and] contemptuous of academic success and of popular classes,” he knew all about material forces, but he was blind to the vital force that created all others. Accustomed to the “beautiful dullness of long labors,” he remained “illimitably ignorant” of literature, art, and music. He believed that unerring techniques in experimentation, impartial observations, and exquisitely minute calculations would bring progress—a steady march toward the truth. He chose the highest calling in the world because he was “intensely religious—so religious that he will not accept quarter-truths, because they are an insult to his faith.” He was “so devoted to Pure Science . . . that he would rather have people die by the right therapy than be cured by the wrong. Having built a shrine for humanity, he wanted to kick out of it all mere human beings.” This autocratic figure, brilliantly insane and tyrannically honest, embodied the cult of science and objectivity.

This essay examines Isaiah Berlin's ambivalent relationship with the ideas and practices of Jewish nationalism and the ways in which this ambivalence shaped some of the key premises of his political thought. Drawing upon extensive archival research in his unpublished letters from the mid-1930s to the late 1950s, this essay reconstructs Berlin's attempt to reconcile himself with the national idea. This attempt forced him to enrich his liberalism, and pushed him to develop “Diaspora Zionism” and adopt the Jewish normalization discourse. In the course of those intra-Jewish debates Berlin also began to conceptualize freedom as an opportunity concept, an idea that would later become central both in Berlin's famous negative concept of freedom and in his pluralism. Adopting a dual perspective, which considers Berlin as both a British liberal and a Russian-Jewish émigré intellectual, I therefore offer to see the Jewish Zionist writings as complementary rather than secondary to Berlin's “liberal” enterprise.

Sometime in the 1760s, a Constantinople-born, French-educated Muslim arrived at the port of Balassor in north-east India. Known variously as Mustapha or Monsieur Raymond, he had, he later wrote, “with a mediocre dictionary and a bad grammar”, and by conversing with the ship's captain en route from Bombay, “learned enough of English . . . as I might delight in Bolingbroke's Philosophical works”. This student of contemporary intellectual history soon put his knowledge to work, securing a position translating for Robert Clive, the conquering hero of the English East India Company's new imperial administration in India. Subsequently falling from favour, Mustapha crossed over to seek employment with the English company's French rivals, earning himself a spell in prison as a spy. He also travelled to Mecca, where he gained the honorific “Haji” but lost his fortune, his cabinet of curiosities and his collection of books and manuscripts. He then became the keeper of a zenana (to the Europeans, a harem or seraglio), and he entered the world of publishing. In 1789, in Calcutta, Mustapha had printed for himself a pamphlet-length diatribe on the iniquitous administration of the law in British Bengal entitled Some Idea of the Civil and Criminal Courts of Justice at Moorshoodabad. In the same year he was also involved, as the pseudonymous editor “Nota Manus”, in the publication of a three-volume English translation of a Persian work of Indian history—Ghulam Hussain Khan Tabatabai's Seir Mutaqherin, or View of Modern Times (written in 1781–2)—which dealt with the British conquest and administration of Bengal, and offered a stern critique of the new rulers who seemed to have “an aversion to the Society of Indians, and a disdain against conversing with them”. Finally, Mustapha (who called himself a “Semi-Englishman” who had the interests of his “adopted countrymen” at heart) claimed to have published in London a work of futurology entitled State of Europe in 1800. In his encounters with Europeans, his travels within and beyond India (although he never made it to England as he had planned), and his involvement in the production of historical and geographical knowledge, Mustapha was deeply interested in that which shaped his own fortunes: the relationships of knowledge and power between Europe and other parts of the world.

This article examines the use of David Hume's political writing by the extra-parliamentary opposition writers of the 1760s and early 1770s. The disturbances surrounding the publication of North Briton 45 and Wilkes's abortive attempts to become MP for Middlesex attracted a level of public support which was remarkable for its size, social diversity and ideological coherence. Hume, as is well known, reacted angrily to this growth in popular politics, condemning both the “mobs” that swept through London in the latter part of the decade and the Ministry's failure to deal with them. However, while Hume may have been highly critical of the Wilkites, the Wilkites frequently used ideas and quotations from the Scotsman's work in their anti-Ministerial polemics. My discussion traces the various ways in which Hume was employed in Wilkite political discourse, and aims to establish the significance of these appropriations for our understanding both of Hume's later life and of the radical politics of the period.

This article explores continuities between the antiquarian erudition of humanist historians and Enlightenment philosophical histories, showing that supposedly revolutionary developments in eighteenth-century historiography emerged from an older scholarly tradition. It focuses on the research of the Royal Academy of Inscriptions and Letters, a learned society in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France that went from serving as a propaganda tool for promoting King Louis XIV's absolutist regime to becoming the first modern historical research institute and a cradle of the Enlightenment. The article examines the emergence of what might be called “cultural history” or “the history of culture” (histoire des moeurs, as eighteenth-century authors called it). It analyzes how the academicians studied pagan beliefs and speculated about the functions of ancient myths and cults, thus transforming the views about the origin of religion and its role in society. The article also discusses how the academicians made sense of customs and daily practices and how they understood the causes of the progress and decline of civilizations.

Economists began using models between the First and Second World Wars. The first econometric model of the United States was produced by Jan Tinbergen at the League of Nations. Modeling was a methodological solution to the political problems of the interwar period. International norms of cooperation and governance had to be reconciled with new demands for national autonomy in economic affairs, with a new understanding of the nation-state's capacity to make and remake the economy. Models possessed a composite, ambiguous character that appealed to both nationalist and internationalist sympathies. Models combined fact and theory, the particular and the general, the local and the global. The practice of modeling contrasted with and largely displaced an older, universalizing discourse of scientific law, predominant in the nineteenth century. Modeling reflected the nation-state's ascendance as a legitimate arbiter of economic policy, situated uneasily within a regime of international norms and institutions.