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.

Scholars have hitherto found little to no place for natural philosophy in the intellectual makeup of the Enlightened historian William Robertson, overlooking his significant contacts with that province and its central relevance to the controversy surrounding David Hume and Lord Kames in the 1750s. Here I reexamine Robertson's Situation of the World at the Time of Christ's Appearance (1755) in light of these contexts. I argue that his foundational sermon drew upon the scientific theism of such thinkers as Joseph Butler, Edmund Law, and Colin Maclaurin to counter the autonomous figurations of the universe associated with Hume and Kames, and to develop a historical account of progress based around Christian progressivism rather than the stadial theory of Adam Smith. Robertson conceived of history neither in secular terms nor in those of traditional religion, but sought instead to update the language of providentialism by naturalizing the sacred within a framework of general laws.

This article shows how two concepts for which Blaise Pascal's Pensées (1670) are best known—divertissement and ennui (often mistranslated as “boredom”)—inherited and transformed medical conceptions of melancholy along with one of melancholy's signature therapeutic protocols: diversion. Instead of limiting the genealogy of Pascal's concepts to more obvious textual sources (St Augustine, Montaigne, etc.), here they are read against the background of an epistemological paradigm dominant in his time: Galenic medicine. Drawing on a large corpus of early modern French medical texts, this article discloses how melancholy, stripped of its overt medical status, remerges in Pascal's analysis of subjectivity, which valorized melancholic ennui against the values of a nascent civil society subservient to the monarchic order. Once used to describe outlying temperaments and exceptional pathologies, the discourse on melancholy becomes fundamental to the human being per se in Pascal's theological and anthropological perspective. Thus transformed, the older forms of melancholy and its remedies ensured the possibility of their survival—disguised and unrecognized—in modern theories of subjectivity and psychology. Understanding melancholy's latent presence in the Pensées, in other words, sheds new light on the affective aspects of Pascal's social critique and invites us to investigate the modern afterlife of early modern melancholy.

B. R. Ambedkar (1891–1956), the radical Indian anti-caste thinker, left unfinished a critical corpus of works on “Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Ancient India”, a fragment of which was provisionally titled “Essays on the Bhagavad Gita”. This essay engages with that corpus, situating Ambedkar's encounter with the Gita within a much broader twentieth-century political and philosophical concern with the question of tradition and violence. It interrogates the excessive and heterogeneous conceptual impulses that mediate Ambedkar's attempt to retrieve a counterhistory of Indian antiquity. Located as it is in the same Indic neighborhood from which a radical counterhistory of touchability might emerge, the Gita is a particularly fraternal and troubling text for Ambedkar. Yet his responsibility towards the Gita comes to be hinged not upon evasion but rather upon an exaggeration of its hermeneutic power; that is, upon his painstaking inflation of the Gita's willfully modern interest in instituting the universal. Ambedkar's relentless struggle to annihilate this universality of the Gita would have to be founded upon another universality, at once destructive, excessive and counterlegislative. In this unfinished attempt to recuperate the ideality of the universal, this essay asks, does Ambedkar himself become the most thorough modern practitioner of the Gita?

“Rationalism” became the subject of intense debate in nineteenth-century Britain. This article asks why this was so, by focusing on the usage and implications of the term in contemporary argument. Rationalism was successively defined and redefined in ways that reached to the heart of Victorian epistemological and religious discussion. By treating rationalism as a contextually specific term, and examining how its implications changed between the 1820s and the early twentieth century, the article brings new perspectives to bear on the development of nineteenth-century freethought and countervailing religious apologetic. It underlines the importance of history, and constructions of intellectual lineage, as ways of establishing the relationship between rationality and religion in a progressively wider-ranging Victorian debate about the sources of knowledge and value.

This article examines the role of the consumer in the writings on regulation launched by the Chicago school from the 1930s to the 1980s. It shows how Chicago school scholars used the concept of the consumer to shape and justify their calls for deregulation, as they continually claimed to offer market solutions that protect and benefit the consumer. The focus is on how the scholars at issue executed a shift from choice to welfare in their consumer concept as they began more decisively to embrace deregulation in the postwar period. From initially having described consumers as individual agents, capable of ensuring democracy and freedom in modern society by expressing their choices on a partly regulated market, they began to portray consumers as a coherent, homogeneous and predictable mass, acting on a deregulated market and serving merely as a tool of so-called consumer welfare, understood as economic efficiency and aggregate wealth.

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.

“Enthusiasm” has been described as the intellectual opposite of the Enlightenment, its “anti-self”. It stood for a religion of the “heart” rather than the “head”, and was associated with the extreme, millenarian sects on the fringes of established Protestantism. The relationship between religious enthusiasm and enlightened philosophy, however, could be closer than is often thought. Here I focus on the example of the jurist and philosopher Christian Thomasius (1655–1728), who is considered to be one of the first and most influential representatives of the early Enlightenment in Protestant Germany. Usually, Thomasius is described as a sort of classical enlightened thinker who separated the question of religious truth from the pursuit of secular philosophy, and it is implied that the interpretation of Thomasius's religious beliefs contributes little, if anything, to the understanding of his philosophical views. His religious views, however, not only were regarded by contemporaries as an example of religious “enthusiasm”. These “enthusiastic” religious beliefs were also more important to his philosophy than is often argued. They were part of a programme for religious and intellectual renewal and reform which, Thomasius believed, would prepare the reform of Lutheran philosophy from the obsolete, “scholastic” intellectual traditions it had inherited from the papal church. This essay examines the often complex development of Thomasius's religious views in their historical context and their significance for his wider “enlightened” intellectual interests.

My interest here is in the way Leo Strauss (1899–1973) and his followers, the Straussians, have dealt with race and rights, race and slavery in the history of the United States. I want, first, to assess Leo Strauss's rather ambivalent attitude toward America and explore the various ways that his followers have in turn analyzed the Lockean underpinnings of the American “regime,” sometimes in contradistinction to Strauss's views on the topic. With that established, I turn to the account, particularly that offered by Harry Jaffa, of how slavery and race comported—or did not—with the Straussian account of the political foundations of the new nation and how latter-day followers of Strauss have dealt with the persisting topic of race and racism in America. Overall, I want to make two large points. First, the Straussian commitment to superhistorical standards provides the Straussians with a moral perspective on slavery, race, and racism. Second, though race and slavery have been less than central among the concerns of most followers of Strauss, the contributions of Jaffa and others have significantly shaped the present American conservative position on race, including the idea of color-blindness.

The history of the social sciences in the United States—like many other fields of intellectual history—confirms John Dewey's observation: “Intellectual progress usually occurs through sheer abandonment of questions together with both of the alternatives they assume—an abandonment that results from their decreasing vitality and a change of urgent interest. We do not solve them: we get over them.” As Dewey suggests, two fine new books mark intellectual progress in the field through a change of generational interest. As he also implies, new perspectives leave important issues behind.1

Why should intellectual historians care about children? Until recently, the answer was that adults’ ideas about children matter, particularly for the history of education and the history of conceptions of the family, but children's ideas are of little significance. Beginning with Philippe Ariès in the 1960s, historians took to exploring how and why adults’ ideas about children changed over time. In these early histories of childhood, young people figured as consumers of culture and objects of socialization, but not as producers or even conduits of ideas.

Karl Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte can be read as a guidebook, but it is also a site of pilgrimage for those seeking to come to terms with the Marxist legacy, from within and from without. This essay examines the reading and citing of The Eighteenth Brumaire by Marxist and non-Marxist political analysts, historians of the Second Republic, and cultural theorists. Invoking this text and claiming to rescue it from the distorted glosses others have given it, readers both confront and evade their own political and intellectual anxieties.

This article argues that the link Hans Jonas drew between Martin Heidegger's philosophy and Gnosticism cannot be properly understood without taking into consideration his philosophical interpretation of modern science. It claims that Jonas saw Heideggerian existentialism not as a modern instantiation of Gnosticism but as a specific experiential reaction to the new cosmological outlook that emerged from the seventeenth-century scientific revolution, which negated the conceptual world that made Gnosticism possible. Jonas's interpretation is “against the grain”: by claiming that Heidegger's thought is a product of the reduction of nature to measurable, manipulable, and calculable extension governing the modern scientific mind, Jonas attributed to Heidegger the very flaws Heidegger critiqued in others. It is further claimed that Jonas's original contribution to Heidegger's reception history is not in proposing the link to Gnosticism but in reading him as the philosophical outcome of the instrumental reasoning of modern science.

Unlike the memory of the querulous and time-bending White Queen in Through the Looking Glass, mine befits her complaint, inclined as I am to thinking backwards when asked to contemplate the state of our field. Backwards, then, I go in the first section of this essay, after a few opening comments on the situation of our field at the present moment. Thereafter, I describe the emergence of cultural history and summarize some of its strengths and weaknesses, to the end of reflecting on its implications for intellectual history.

Jean-Sylvain Bailly, an eighteenth-century French astronomer and polymath, elaborated an original interpretation of the prehistoric origins of civilization which anticipated many of the details of the “Aryan myth.” Bailly argued that Atlantis was the root civilization of mankind, which had invented the arts and sciences and civilized the Chinese, Indians, and Egyptians. He situated this primordial people in the far north of Eurasia, and argued that as the cooling of the Earth buried their ancestral home beneath sheets of ice, the Atlanteans were lost to history. Bailly drew eclectically upon science, classical mythology, linguistics, and orientalism to substantiate his case, and argued that the Brahmans who shaped Indian civilization were Sanskrit-speaking Atlanteans. His theories reflected many of the prevailing ideas of the age, such as the climate determinism of Montesquieu and Buffon and the superiority of the dynamic West over the decadent Orient. Though Bailly did not racialize the Atlanteans, his works laid the foundations for the subsequent emergence of the Aryan myth.

“Humanitarian” (humanitaire) came into use in French contemporaneously with the emergence of romantic socialism, and in the context of the rebuilding of post-revolutionary French society and its overseas empire beginning in the 1830s. This article excavates this early idea of humanitarianism, documenting an alternative genealogy for the term and its significance that has been overlooked by scholars of both socialism and humanitarianism. This humanitarianism identified a collective humanity as the source of its own salvation, rather than an external, well-meaning benefactor. Unlike liberal models of advocacy, which invoked individualized actors and recipients of their care, socialists privileged solidarity within their community and rejected the foundational logic of liberal individualism. In tracing this history, this article considers its importance for contemporary debates about humanitarianism’s imperial power dynamics.

While some American civil rights activists professed belief in the “philosophy of nonviolence,” others declared nonviolent civil disobedience to be “a tactic rather than a philosophy.” Like many dichotomies, the tactic-versus-philosophy distinction combined as much as it divided. Those who viewed nonviolence as a tactic or method were treated as akin regardless of how much they differed in their tactics or methods. Similarly, those who believed in the philosophy of nonviolence were lumped together with each other and with those who saw nonviolence as a “way of life.” The history of the tactic-versus-philosophy dichotomy provides a unique window on the role of nonviolence within the American civil rights movement.

This article offers an interpretation of a key moment in the long history of democracy. Its hypothesis may be simply stated in the following terms: key political theorists and administrators in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century France defined democracy as a means for solving public problems by the public itself. This conception of democracy focused on inventing effective practices of government, administrative intervention and regulatory police and differed fundamentally from our contemporary understandings that privilege the vote, popular sovereignty and parliamentary representation. Moreover, this conception of modern democracy overlapped and in some cases complemented, but—more importantly for this article—remained in significant ways distinct from, other early modern political traditions, in particular liberalism and classical republicanism. What follows therefore uncovers a largely forgotten, but widespread, conception of democracy in the crucial revolutionary age from the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth by asking the question, was there a modern democratic tradition?

Scholars of religion today understand that the scientific basis of religious studies lies in the fact that religion is a multifarious historical phenomenon accessible through empirical research, and that this study therefore differs fundamentally from theology premised on the acceptance of supernaturally revealed truths and faith traditions. Meanwhile, it has been broadly believed that theology once occupied the preeminent position in the medieval university, as expressed by the well-known sobriquet “queen of the sciences.” By surveying the early history of the university, this article shows that most medieval universities did not have a theology faculty until the fourteenth century. With the notable exception of Paris and its immediate offspring (Oxford and Cambridge), the relation between theology and the university was far more tangential and temporizing than is generally assumed—a point worth bearing in mind as we consider the question of the secularization of learning, which is said to have taken place since the early modern period.

There is a long-standing myth that the history of modern India was foretold at the beginning of the nineteenth century by British liberals who predicted that the enlightened despotic rule of India's new conquerors would, by its beneficial effects, improve the native character and institutions sufficiently to prepare the people of that country one day to govern themselves. Lord William Bentinck, a disciple of Jeremy Bentham, while presenting as governor-general his case for the opening up of India to European settlers, speculated on the possibility of “a vast change to have occurred in the frame of society . . . which would imply that the time had arrived when it would be wise for England to leave India to govern itself”, but added that such change “can scarcely be looked for in centuries to come”. The doctrinal basis within liberal theory for justifying a democratic country like Britain exercising despotic power in colonies such as Ireland and India was securely laid out by mid-century liberals such as John Stuart Mill. The project of “improvement” was revived at the end of the nineteenth century by Gladstonian liberals who inducted elite Indians into new representative institutions based on a very narrow franchise in preparation for some form of self-government. When power was ultimately transferred to the rulers of a partitioned subcontinent in 1947, the history of liberal progress in India was complete. The storyline was laid out, for instance, in Thompson and Garratt's Rise and Fulfilment of British Rule in India or in Percival Spear's revised edition of the hugely successful textbook by Vincent Smith. Even nationalist Indian scholars adopted at least a part of this story, nowhere more so than in the histories of constitutional law which traced the foundations of the postcolonial Indian republic to the progressive expansion of liberal state institutions under British rule.