What are the debts that the modern world owes to the political culture of the Enlightenment? For historians of political thought this is a widely debated subject. Throughout Europe, the Enlightenment provided the critical lens for a widespread reassessment of the nature of political authority. Much of the intellectual history of the eighteenth century focuses on this reassessment and the debates over the nature of good government, liberty and sovereignty. The discussion of these issues is linked to the history of liberalism, democratic republicanism, popular sovereignty, and the nature of the modern political world itself.

The cultural world of French elites was profoundly shaken by the long sequence of events we now refer to as the French Revolution. The legal, political, and social world in which elites moved was transformed by successive revolutionary regimes and, more generally, by what Benjamin Constant called “the torrent” of change that began with the Revolution in 1789. Individuals experienced excitement, hope, and enthusiasm, but also suffered trauma, insecurity, and loss. The effects of these experiences on elite sociability and culture are difficult to characterize precisely. Michelle Perrot and Anne Martin-Fugier have written that there was a tendency on the part of French elites during the nineteenth century to retreat increasingly into the sanctuary of their homes, where they practiced more exclusionary forms of sociability, and simultaneously adopted more defensive forms of politics. Alain Corbin reminds us that the vulnerability that accompanied the progress of individuation in nineteenth-century France frequently manifested itself as an obsession with self-scrutiny, as represented by the enriched forms of interior monologue found in diaries and in Romantic poetry and literature. This retreat and concomitant self-scrutiny can be seen as a further refinement of the delicacy and sense of shame—of what we call modesty—that Norbert Elias suggested over sixty years ago was a central characteristic of the advance of European manners.

The United States is a deeply Christian country, but over the last sixty years American public culture has become increasingly detached from religious concerns. Christian activists, when not speaking within the Republican Party, have had to assert their privilege in a way that they never had to do in the past. In spite of their efforts, the role of Christianity in culture and politics has seen a more or less continuous decline. This essay examines how and why that process occurred. It puts forward a schematic narrative that relies on the concepts of public reason, the avant-garde, and an overlapping consensus to explain how different people came together in the mid-twentieth century to secularize and liberalize American public life.

While the word “liberalism” only appeared in Britain from the 1820s, this article argues that its prehistory must pay attention to the language of “liberality.” It suggests that until the 1760s, to be “liberal,” and to demonstrate “liberality,” were primarily associated with the exercise of charity, but that thereafter they increasingly came to refer to having an open mind: there were frequent appeals to the “liberal” and “enlightened” spirit of the times. Those latitudinarians and Dissenters pushing for more toleration in the 1770s were particularly attracted to “liberal” language, and pioneered the idea that “liberality of sentiment” was a necessary accompaniment to the pluralism thrown up by the right of private judgment. Only from the mid-1790s did anti-Jacobins start to fixate on this terminology, arguing that liberality was insidious because under the cover of a virtue it nurtured the indifference which enabled the enemies of religion to triumph. These arguments did not appeal beyond orthodox circles, but they indicate how established the language of “liberality” had become—it provides a framework for understanding the reception of “liberalism” after 1815.

This essay considers Benjamin Rush's concern with the political organization of sympathy in post-Revolutionary America and how this concern shaped his response to the threat of post-Revolutionary “mobocracy.” Like many of his contemporaries, Rush worried about the contagious volatility of large public assemblies engendered by the Revolution. For Rush, regular gatherings of the people out of doors threatened to corrupt visions both of an orderly and emancipatory public sphere and of the virtuous and independent citizens required by republican government. Rush feared that the unregulated communication of passion between bodies gathered in public might unleash what Michael Meranze has called an “anarchy of reciprocal imitations.” It was in eighteenth-century theories of sympathy that this idea of contagious mimesis was most rigorously developed and most widely disseminated. Rush's medico-political understanding of sympathy, acquired during his years as a medical student in Edinburgh, provides an important framework for understanding his post-Revolutionary reform efforts, particularly those focused on the spatial choreography of the American citizenry.

This article examines the changing nature of fear in Enlightenment France. While the growing power of the absolutist state reduced many traditional sources of insecurity, fears of state power proliferated during the eighteenth century, prompting leading figures of the French Enlightenment to turn their attention to the problem of political fear: its sources, its effects, and the means for overcoming it. One of the unifying aspects of the Enlightenment was its commitment to reducing the burden of fear in human existence. From that standpoint, however, political fear posed a particular challenge since the objects on which it focused could not be dismissed as purely imaginary. Unlike such traditional religious terrors as hell, purgatory, and the Devil, police agents, police spies, and prisons really existed. And yet political fears too were mediated—and magnified—by collective imaginaries. The fear of imprisonment stands out as a key example of such a phenomenon. Best-selling prison memoirs published in the early 1780s sought to mobilize public opinion against lettres de cachet (administrative arrest warrants) by evoking the horrors of imprisonment, and especially its psychological torments: solitude, tedium, uncertainty about the future, and the looming threat of insanity. In these works, prisoners inhabit a separate self-contained world, helpless before the omnipotent will of their jailers, who rule over them like “oriental despots.” The wide dissemination of terrifying images of the prison contributed to building the public pressure for the abolition of lettres de cachet during the Revolution, but the enormous commercial success of the memoirs suggests that some readers found the depictions of life behind prison walls darkly fascinating as well as terrifying. Much the same could be said of readers’ responses to the exposés of Revolutionary prisons published after Thermidor, the Gothic novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the fictional universe of the Marquis de Sade, all of which drew heavily on the carceral imaginary invented under the Old Regime.

This essay reconstructs the intellectual development of the philosopher of history Louis O. Mink Jr, in order to illuminate the philosophical background to “postmodernism” in American historical epistemology. From around 1970, Mink was a prominent and influential defender of the view that historical narratives were imaginative constructions rather than representations of past actuality. This has since been understood as a characteristically postmodern view. Mink's wider sensibility, however, is better described as modernist than postmodernist. The crucial context for his philosophy was a hostility to “positivism” going back to his graduate years at Yale, and his epistemological views were of a piece with a defence of historical understanding as both distinctive and valuable. In both respects Mink was influenced by the philosophy of R. G. Collingwood, while he was himself an important influence on Hayden White. Mink's case therefore helps bridge the gap between interwar and later twentieth-century versions of Anglophone historical contructivism, while drawing attention to some cultural contexts in which the development of both modernist and postmodernist views of historiography must be understood.

Antiquity is back. In some respects, it is surprising it ever went away: for the last forty years, Peter Gay's magisterial survey, which connected the “little flock” of philosophes with “pagan” authors, has loomed large over the field of Enlightenment studies. But shortly after its publication, a methodological sea change pulled the field in an opposite direction. Robert Darnton hailed this rising tide of social and cultural history in a 1971 largely critical review of Gay's two volumes. The hyper-longue durée of Gay's historical panorama, which extended from the age of Virgil to that of Voltaire, was soon to be displaced by more focused inquiries into the history of the book, forms of enlightened sociability, and national difference. Intellectual history, particularly of Gay's epic brand, soon became scarce, despite the lasting presence of Gay's two volumes on bibliographies and course syllabi.

This article considers the philosophical foundations of the French Enlightenment through a close study of the Stoic influences on the Marquis de Condorcet's education philosophy. The article argues that although Condorcet did not acknowledge any direct Stoic influence, his philosophy of education nevertheless should be understood in the eclectic idiom of eighteenth-century Stoic discourse. Furthermore, Condorcet's Stoicism was entirely compatible with Rousseau's Stoicism to the degree that one could call Condorcet a Rousseauean at least in matters of education theory—even though Condorcet, a protégé of Voltaire, is usually presented as a critic of Rousseau. Finally, the article suggests that the notion of liberty that Condorcet seeks to make flourish through his national education plan is in line with the Stoic ideal of rational autonomy, despite Condorcet's insistence that the modern idea of liberty (that is, his own idea) is fundamentally different from the ancient idea.

This article reappraises the political ideas of William Manning, and through him the trajectory of early modern republicanism. Manning, an early American farmer writing in the 1780s and 1790s, developed the republican distinction between “the idle Few” and “the laboring Many” into a novel “political theory of the dependent classes.” On this theory, it is the dependent, laboring classes who share an interest in social equality. Because of this interest, they are the only ones who can achieve and maintain republican liberty. With this identification of the interests of the dependent classes with the common good, Manning inverted inherited republican ideas, and transformed the language of liberty and virtue into one of the first potent, republican critiques of exploitation. As such, he stands as a key figure for understanding the shift in early modern republicanism from a concern with constitutionalism and the rule of law to the social question.

This article offers a new reading of the place of Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism in the history of totalitarianism theory. Building on a novel genealogy of Marxist theories of totalitarianism, the article traces this inheritance into Arendt's early work on the subject, demonstrating that her “languages” (in the Pocockian sense) were basically continuous with those of interwar Marxism. The article proceeds in three stages. First, it reconstructs two core languages of interwar Marxism (imperialism and Bonapartism). Second, it shows how these languages underpinned a central controversy in Marxist theories of totalitarianism during World War II, a debate conducted in the languages of imperialism and Bonapartism and turning on the relationship between the political and the economic. Third, it shows that Arendt wrote in these languages and contributed to the same debate. In conclusion, this striking affinity with Marxism in Arendt's early work is contrasted with the emergence of classical totalitarianism theory—a project with which Arendt was soon eager to associate herself and which makes a unified and consistent reading of The Origins of Totalitarianism so difficult.

The Orwell centenary of 2003 has come and gone, but the pace of academic publications that usually accompany such biographical milestones has not slackened. The Cambridge Companion to George Orwell was released in summer 2007, John Rodden's Every Intellectual's Big Brother: George Orwell's Literary Siblings was published in 2006, On Nineteen Eighty-Four: Orwell and Our Future, the proceedings of a 1999 conference, came out in 2005. The striking thing about many of these publications, not to mention the ones which emerged out of the commemorative activities of 2003 itself, is that they are more concerned with Orwell's reputation and relevance today than with his oeuvre as such. As many as five chapters of the Cambridge Companion have a “posthumous” focus; the proceedings of the largest centenary conference, George Orwell: Into the Twenty-First Century, raise the issue of Orwell and the war in Iraq more frequently than that of Orwell and World War II.The latter is not entirely surprising for an American conference which featured the “liberal hawk” and former Trotskyist journalist Christopher Hitchens as the keynote speaker, and whose proceedings were edited in accordance with a corresponding political agenda, but it is also indicative of a larger phenomenon, a phenomenon most thoroughly examined by John Rodden in books like George Orwell: The Politics of Literary Reputation and Scenes from an Afterlife: The Legacy of George Orwell. Few imaginative writers have been so compulsively remoulded, coopted, and invoked outside of their proper literary sphere; as Rodden's scrupulous documentation shows, no modern crisis from the Cold War to the war on terror has gone by without an Orwell headline to define it. What, one may ask, are the mechanisms behind this astounding popularity? How are reputations on this vast scale made? Looking at “the writer and his work” will only get one so far; one must also look outward, for the world's perception of Orwell is as interesting and intriguing a subject as Orwell himself. Rodden, the most prolific Orwell critic publishing today, has made this reception history his focus.

Peter Drucker (1909–2005) is celebrated as perhaps the greatest management guru, and one of the greatest futurists, of the twentieth century, but he has rarely been taken seriously as an intellectual. Raised in Vienna among a cohort of émigré academics that included Schumpeter, Hayek, and von Mises, among others, Drucker was both deeply learned and incredibly prolific. This essay seeks to rehabilitate Drucker as a humanistic social thinker, reinterpreting his earliest writings in German, his two major treatises on totalitarianism and the crisis of capitalism published after he emigrated to the US, his debate with Polanyi and engagement with Kierkegaard, and his early postwar writings on management theory and the knowledge society. It identifies in Drucker's Protestant faith a deep and abiding set of intellectual, ethical, and spiritual commitments helping him to navigate a path out of Nazi Germany and assume a position of enormous influence in American business life.

Jean-Paul Sartre's 1961 famous and infamous preface to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth has engendered the common impression of Sartre as an intellectual who was particularly hostile to Europe. In revising this perception, this article reviews Sartre's engagement with the idea of Europe over many decades. This certainly included critique, but also nuanced and positive considerations of what Europe and being European meant. This thinking about Europe is to be situated, first, in terms of Sartre's evolving philosophical project to reconcile freedom and facticity, and second, in political and intellectual contestations over Europe in the context of fascism and the Second World War, postwar international relations, and the emergence of the Third World. Sartre's contribution to these debates was an adumbration of a “knotted Europe,” the provincialization of Europe whilst retaining a commitment to universalism, and a notion of Europe as an ongoing project rather than an ossified identity.

In 1995, the Presses universitaires de France re-published (for the very first time in French) Elie Halévy's classic book La formation du radicalisme philosophique (first edition 1901–4). Startlingly, in the afterword of volume 1, Jean-Pierre Dupuy explained that even if this book on Bentham and his school of thought has been considered a classic and one of the first serious historical studies in any language, Halévy had been a “bad interpreter” of utilitarianism.

Gottlob Frege is considered a founder of analytic philosophy and mathematical logic, but the traditions that claim Frege as a forebear never embraced his Begriffsschrift, or “conceptual notation”—the invention he considered his most important accomplishment. Frege believed that his notation rendered logic visually observable. Rejecting the linearity of written language, he claimed Begriffsschrift exhibited a structure endogenous to logic itself. But Frege struggled to convince others to use his notation, as his frustrated pedagogical efforts at the University of Jena illustrate. Teaching Begriffsschrift meant using words to explain it; rather than replacing spoken language, notation became its obverse in a bifurcated style of argument that separated deduction from commentary. Both registers of this discourse, however, remained within Frege's monologue, imposing a consequential passivity on his students. In keeping with Frege's visual understanding of notation, they learned by silently observing it, though never in isolation: notation and language were always mixed together.

Recent years have witnessed a marked revival of guaranteed-income proposals. Among these, Milton Friedman's negative income tax is one of the most successful ideas to establish a universal floor of income for every citizen. Elaborated in the early 1940s, it attracted widespread attention among economists and policy makers in the aftermath of Johnson's War on Poverty. This contribution will, however, focus on the intellectual setting under which Friedman envisioned a new way to think about poverty. Tracing back the origin of the proposal in the context of the New Deal, this article shows how Friedman hollowed out redistributive considerations from the hierarchies of needs, notions of duty, or citizenship that were common in the British welfarist conception and preexisting notions of equality where the state played a key role by replacing it with a monetary and market-friendly conception of poverty.

Prior to World War II, the founder and key theorist of Poland's Christian Democratic movement—the Silesian political revolutionary Wojciech Korfanty—developed a sophisticated “Catholic rights-talk” in conversation with trends in Western European Catholic thought. In the wake of the Holocaust, however, both in ephemeral political opposition on Polish soil and in subsequent exile, Poland's Christian Democrats abandoned their interwar rights discourse. This essay explores that shift, locating its source in interwar Polish Catholic anti-Semitism. Given the Holocaust's perverse fulfillment of Polish Christian Democracy's crucial 1930s advocacy of restricting the political and economic life of Poland to rights-endowed Christians—necessitating the removal of Jewish “non-persons”—the Poles’ transnational postwar advocacy vacillated between Cold War cooperation with American-aligned governments and a desire to participate in the governance of a Poland that, even if Communist, had finally become a “nationally homogeneous state.”

This article presents a decades-long conflict in the upper echelons of postwar French academic philosophy between the self-identifying “Cartesian” Ferdinand Alquié, professor at the Sorbonne, and the “Spinozist” Martial Gueroult of the Collège de France. Tracking the development of this rivalry serves to illuminate the historical drama that occurred in France as phenomenology was integrated into the Cartesian tradition and resisted by a commitment to rationalism grounded in a specifically French understanding of Spinozism. Over the course of Alquié and Gueroult's polemic, however, we nevertheless witness a shared concern to preserve philosophy from the reductive tendencies of historicism and its possible assimilation to theology. What is more, the ultimate impasse of this conflict continues to inform the most innovative projects in French thought in the wake of structuralism and the “theological turn” of French phenomenology.

H. G. Wells was one of the most celebrated writers in the world during the first half of the twentieth century. Famed for his innovative fiction, he was also an influential advocate of socialism and the world-state. What is much less well known is that he was a significant contributor to debates about the nature of social science. This article argues that Wells's account of social science in general, and sociology in particular, was shaped by an idiosyncratic philosophical pragmatism. In order to demonstrate how his philosophical arguments inflected his social thought, it explores his attack on prevailing theories of race, while also highlighting the limits of his analysis. The article concludes by tracing the reception of Wells's ideas among social scientists and political thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic. Although his program for utopian sociology attracted few disciples, his arguments about the dynamics of modern societies found a large audience.