This article looks at Sigmund Freud's attempt to rethink psychoanalytic therapy at the close of the Great War. By profoundly undermining a liberal world order and dramatically eroding the material security and social prestige of the educated middle class (Bildungsbürgertum) to which Freud belonged, the war unsettled the social politics of classical analytic therapy. Simultaneously, the treatment of the war neuroses by psychoanalysts appeared to invert the liberal principles around which the procedure of psychoanalysis was developed by placing the analyst in a fundamentally disciplinary relationship vis-à-vis the patient. In response to these threats to the identity of psychoanalysis, Freud undertook a far-reaching renegotiation of the politics of analytic therapy in his address, titled “The Paths of Psychoanalytic Therapy,” to the Fifth International Psychoanalytic Congress in the last months of the war. His attempt to mediate the contradictions exposed by the war gave rise to a vision of a postclassical psychoanalysis for a mass democratic age.

This article reconsiders the Catholic reaction to the French Revolution, focusing on Nicola Spedalieri's On the Rights of Man (1791) and on the debate that its publication sparked in Italy and beyond. The outbreak of the Revolution and the polarization of public opinion between the supporters of the new regime and its relentless opponents convinced Spedalieri, a well-reputed Catholic theologian, of the need to find a via media between these two extremes. Assuming the re-Christianization of the postrevolutionary world as his goal, Spedalieri argued that some aspects of revolutionary political culture were acceptable from a Catholic standpoint as long as the revolutionaries, in turn, agreed to abandon secularization and to uphold the traditional confessional organization of the state. It was not modernity itself, he claimed, that should be rejected, but secularization, for a different modernity from that conceived by the revolutionaries—a confessional modernity, combining revolutionary politics and confessional states—was possible. Far from gaining immediate acceptance, Spedalieri's ideas were harshly criticized during the 1790s and then set aside by the triumph of reactionary Catholicism during the Restoration. However, they resurfaced later in the nineteenth century and ultimately played a decisive role in the development of the church's attitudes toward modern culture, for they carved a path for Catholics to fight secularization from within and to reshape modernity accordingly.

This issue has been concerned with two problems. First, all the contributors have considered how ideas travelled to, from and within nineteenth- and twentieth-century India. It examines how these ideas were received and reinterpreted by India's English-influenced intelligentsia in the light of its own intellectual histories. Second, the volume is intended as a contribution to an emerging global and trans-national history of ideas that attempts to set the sophisticated traditions of European, Atlantic, Islamic and Asian intellectual history in a world context.

This essay shows how Adam Smith addressed concerns about economic decline not only by proposing quantifiable categories through which relative decline could be measured, but also by characterizing the century as the proper timescale in which such quantities could be observed. What sometimes appears up close to be a process of decline and fall, Smith suggested, could, with a shift to a more distant long view, be explained instead as part of a normal business cycle. William Playfair then used Smith's emphasis on quantification to develop elaborate graphic techniques—what we now call the time-series line graph and the pie chart—to visualize more easily the patterns Smith sought to identify. Collectively, the reordering of temporal scale by Smith and Playfair helps us to rethink not only discourses of decline, but also our understanding of the temporalities of political economy as a problem of historical distance that needs to be thought about beyond temporal terms.

This essay reconstructs the career of the 18th-cetnury Neapolitan publicist Giuseppe Maria Galanti, who championed the genre of anthropological geography in the Kingdom of Naples. Although little attention has been paid to Galanti by the English-language historiography, the person and work of the Neapolitan publicist has loomed large in Italian studies on the Enlightenment. In landmark Italian studies, Galanti has been hailed as a clear-sighted reformer committed to the improvement of socioeconomic conditions within the Kingdom. Likewise, the geographical literature he wrote has been read not as such but rather in light of its program of socioeconomic reform. However important that same program was, undue emphasis upon it has conflated his empirical approach to political geography with a connotation of realism that fundamentally has obscured the place of Galanti's project in the history of anthropology and, in particular, the emergence of European ethnography. By reconstructing the career of Galanti, it is my hope to provide a privileged window on what motivated a precocious ethnographer of Europe to undertake the unusual and arduous project of visiting and describing the provinces of his kingdom, on why he chose to conceptualize the terrain of the Kingdom as an object of philosophical study, and on how he understood his vocation in relation to the alternatives available to him as a man of Enlightenment. While bearing in mind the political aims of Galanti's work, this essay will also return it to the context in which it was first conceived and piloted—namely the ethos, epistemology, and professional culture of the human sciences of the Enlightenment city of Naples, which, it can be said, smacked of a Rousseauian contempt for the “civilization” of the capital, for its learned professions, and for the cosmopolitan theories of Europe's most urbane philosophes.

Whoever has travelled in the New England States will remember, in some cool village, the large farmhouse, with its clean-swept grassy yard … In the family “keeping-room,” as it is termed, he will remember the staid, respectable old bookcase, with its glass doors, where Rollin's History, Milton's Paradise Lost, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, and Scott's Family Bible, stand side by side in decorous order, with multitudes of other books, equally solemn and respectable.

This essay examines the rapprochement between science and metaphysics that the French philosopher Alfred Fouillée staged in his writings from 1872 up until his death in 1912. Amidst the influx of new research in scientific psychology inundating France in the late nineteenth century, Fouillée's thought stands out for its creative effort to advance a new spiritualist philosophy on the basis of positive scientific advancements. Fouillée's work is significant for intellectual historians of thought in the fin de siècle because it challenges the common historiographical narrative, initially presented in H. Stuart Hughes's Consciousness and Society, which erroneously frames spiritualist thinkers, Henri Bergson chief among them, as leading a “revolt against positivism.” Fouillée throws into stark relief a new spiritualist current that incorporated research in the natural and human sciences from across Europe in order to craft an updated understanding of consciousness. This essay treats Fouillée's work as a historical window onto a distinctly new spiritualism whose proponents sought to overcome the old spiritualism of Victor Cousin's eclectic school, which shunned any naturalist underpinning of metaphysics. While Fouillée has already been widely historicized as a social and political thinker, this essay introduces original archival materials that help to resituate Fouillée as a leading figure of the new spiritualism animating French philosophy in the final quarter of the nineteenth century.

In the early 1960s, Donald Smith's India as a Secular State questioned the credentials of the Indian state's secularism. Since then the issue of what constitutes secularism in India has loomed large in Indian political thought. Like a number of other key categories in political history, such as nationalism, the debate has centred on the question whether the Indian state's version of secularism is viable in its own right or not, and if it is viable, whether it extends the concept of secularism in new and innovative directions. The other possibility is to see this secularism as a “derivative discourse” (to adopt a phrase from Partha Chatterjee), confusedly echoing Western notions of secularism, with the caste and communal complexities of Indian society and the structuring role of religion in everyday life at odds with any coherent or recognisable notion of secularism.

During the 1920s, Ukrainian publicist Dmytro Dontsov (1883–1973) created “active nationalism,” a political doctrine that later became the ideology of the radical right-wing Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. Yet, before World War I, Dontsov was a fervently internationalist social democrat. Much of his shift rightward occurred during the internecine fighting that beset Ukraine from 1914 to 1922, but he had already adumbrated key components of his mature, “integral nationalist” world view prior to this time, from a vantage point well within the mainstream of the day's social-democratic discourse. His incendiary brand of Ukrainian realpolitik used the language of an early twentieth-century Marxism that had become riddled with various “heterodoxies.” Anticipating a world conflict that would favor the Germans and dismantle the Russian Empire, Dontsov advocated a pro-“Western,” anti-“Muscovite” orientation for Ukrainians, and in 1913 spearheaded a controversial program for Ukraine's separation from Russia and integration into “Europe.”

The German ethnologist Gustav Klemm (1802–67) occupies a rather problematic position in the history of ideas, alternately hailed as a seminal figure in the development of concepts of race and culture, or belittled as a rather derivative marginal thinker. This article seeks to clarify Klemm's significance by rooting his theories in their contemporary intellectual and social context. It argues that his system, a linear model of human development driven by the interworkings of race and culture, grew from an attempt to synthesize Enlightenment notions of universal progress with major shifts of the mid-nineteenth century, including experiences of dramatic social, political and technological change, commitments to constitutional liberalism, and changes in contemporary ethnology and museology. His works therefore illustrate the complex manners in which ideas of heredity, environment, civilization, development and gender could be blended in this often neglected period, and how their meanings and implications altered as syntheses were built.

Between the years 1949 and 1953 the leaders of the Federative People's Republic of Yugoslavia embarked on a series of radical social and economic reforms that restructured state–society relations in line with a decentralized, participatory model of socialism. “Self-management socialism,” as this system became known, served to harmonize local revolutionary ambitions with the embedded liberalism of the postwar international order into which Yugoslavia sought to integrate. During the early reform period Yugoslav intellectuals reorganized socialist ideology around new understandings of autonomy and creativity in ways that resonated with liberal traditions and diverged sharply from the Soviet paradigm. These concepts informed Yugoslav ideas of social self-management and national self-determination and facilitated the country's orientation to the postcolonial world. They also underpinned the new realm of cultural production, where reformers such as Miroslav Krleža and Marko Ristić mobilized this new concern with autonomous creativity to revive previously discarded aesthetic theories of interwar modernism.

This article provides a new look at Weimar Germany's Conservative Revolution by exploring its suspicion of conceptual and discursive language. It argues that Conservative Revolutionaries not only disdained intellectualism and public discourse; they also extolled their presumed opposites—instinct, intuition, self-evidence—as crucial ingredients in an “ineffable nationalism” which held that a true nation is based on unexpressed or difficult-to-articulate feelings and values. The origins of this ideology are found in a modernist crisis of representation and in sociological accounts of traditional “organic” communities. These themes were politicized by World War I, whose seeming incommunicability magnified the problem of representation and made the unspoken harmony of wartime comradeship an attractive model for a revitalized national community. The article's final section examines the early writings of Ernst Jünger in order to show in detail how these issues came together to create the Conservative Revolutionary mind.

In a recent forum contribution to the American Historical Review on the relationship between history and biology, Lynn Hunt proposed that the future of academic scholarship devoted to exploring the origins and development of modern selfhood would depend on the disciplinary alliance between history and neuroscience. Tabling, for the moment, the cogency of her central assertion, we can nevertheless agree that Hunt espouses a sentiment shared by many historians: “the question of the self is a huge and difficult subject on its own,” she writes, and historical analysis of some sort can help us make better sense of it. The effort to do precisely that over the past several decades, through a variety of historiographic approaches, has engendered a remarkably sizable corpus of writings on the history and conceptual development of the modern, typically Western, self.

Ever since the publication of “The Imperialism of Free Trade” by John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson in 1953, “informal empire” has been a key term for historians. It has, however, always been contentious. The central issue was whether imperial historians were prepared to accept a new concept of empire. This article explains the paradox of informal empire by creating a stronger provenance for the term. Since the early nineteenth century, imperial metaphors have been used to characterize Britain's position in the world economy. Gallagher and Robinson—like their immediate predecessors, Charles Fay and Keith Hancock—wanted to understand British imperialism in the broader context of European expansion while also formulating an alternative to the radical liberal and neo-Marxist interpretations widely current after World War I. Ultimately, the difficulty of using “empire” as a single category led Gallagher and one of his most influential successors to choose an alternative term.

At a critical moment during the Napoleonic era, the stockbrokers of Paris were summoned before the Council of State to defend the marché à terme, or futures contract in public debt. Surprisingly, despite official disdain and ample legal opportunity for prohibition, the brokers’ argument was successful, and the marché à terme escaped repression. The defense of the marché à terme turned on the nature of property. To critics, it divided property from possession, severing property from any concrete anchors. Advocates, by contrast, pointed to the inherent abstraction of property encoded in legal norms. These debates helped shape a concept of property in which economic utility, legal validity, and moral grounding converged. As a central pillar of the new regime, this concept of property also constrained political authority. The successful defense of the marché à terme shows that property was a right that not even authoritarian regimes could restrict arbitrarily.

Frederick Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism, 1781–1801 (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 2002)

Robert Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2002)

All art should become science and all science art; poetry and philosophy should be made one.

Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Fragmente

When two major studies on the same thematic appear roughly simultaneously, integrating not only their authors' respective careers but the revisions of a whole generation of scholarship, the moment cries out for stock-taking, both substantively and methodologically. At a minimum, we need to recognize the key theses of our two protagonists and the frameworks they erect to uphold them. But we need even more to step back from that endeavor to wider considerations. I advance two claims in that light. First, something has been unearthed in these studies which speaks to urgent philosophical concerns of our day, namely the rise of naturalized epistemology and the need for a more encompassing naturalism. Indeed, I suspect this current interest may have incited (if only subliminally) discernment of just those aspects of the earlier age. That signals something essential about the point and practice of intellectual history, namely (my second claim) the mutuality, not opposition, of historicism and presentism.

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.

Freud's criticism of the localization project as carried out by Theodor Meynert and Carl Wernicke has usually been seen as marking his break with contemporaneous brain science. In this article, however, I show that Freud criticized localization not by turning his back on brain science, but rather by radicalizing some of its principles. In particular, he argued that the physiological pretensions of the localization project remained at odds with its uncritical importation of psychological categories. Further, by avoiding a confusion of categories and adopting a parallelist reading, Freud was able to develop a fully “physiologized” account of nervous processes. This opened up the possibility for forms of mental pathology that were not reliant on the anatomical lesion. Instead, Freud suggested that lived experience might be able to create a pathological organization within the nervous system. This critique—a passage through, rather than a turn away from, brain science—opened the possibility for Freud's theory of the unconscious and his developing psychoanalysis. On a methodological level, this article aims to show how the intellectual history of modern Europe can gain from taking seriously the impact of the brain sciences, and by applying to scientific texts the methods and reading practices traditionally reserved for philosophical or literary works.

We have all heard the admonition to “take religion seriously.” It is a perplexing command, since AHA statistics indicate that graduate students have been flocking to religious topics for years. Library shelves groan under the weight of recent works that take religion seriously. What, then, might it mean to take religion more seriously, as it has been such a booming academic field for decades now? As Elizabeth Pritchard has pointed out, the imperative is not a methodological recommendation at all, but an ethical–political one. To take religion “seriously” is to grant it its rightful place as an independent variable amidst others, without reducing it to the old categories of politics or class or gender. It is implicitly frivolous to see religion as a superstructural manifestation of a deeper social or economic reality, as have many functionalist theories from Marx onwards. These accounts are routinely pilloried as condescending towards the past, and as failing to take historical actors at their word when they claim to act for religious reasons. There is much to this; nonetheless, the currently reigning assumption of religious autonomy, like that of other cultural artifacts, has been perilously undertheorized. In this joint review, I would like to show how this understanding of religion impedes historical understanding. It might be the case that, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, religion is too important to take seriously.