Nineteenth-century colonial jurists, sociologists, and Indian nationalists revived the ancient Indian legal concept of rakshasa marriage by bride capture after vanquishing her kinsmen, which the Hindu “lawgiver” Manu condemned but permitted to the warrior caste alone. Only the Kshatriyas, India's designated sovereigns, could break patriarchal and brahmanical authority in this way. But rakshasa marriage was also identified with the demon Ravana, who abducted Sita in the epic Ramayana, and with Hindu nationalism's Muslim enemy. Preoccupied with the loss of kshatriyahood, Hindu nationalism uniquely premised sovereignty on the power to dispossess enemy Fathers of their women: from Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay's celebration of epic hero Arjuna and Krishna's own rakshasa marriages, to the appropriation of this supposedly Muslim method by the architect of Hindutva, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883–1967). Transcending the “sexual contract” in the Indian case, rakshasa marriage's association of bride capture and miscegenation with sovereignty sheds new light on gendered Partition violence, beyond brahmanical notions of (defiled) purity and honor.

In 1975 the Clarendon Press at Oxford published Peter Nidditch's edition of John Locke's An Essay concerning Human Understanding. In his Introduction Nidditch says that his edition “offers a text that is directly derived, without modernization, from the early published versions; it notes the provenance of all its adopted readings (some of which are new, correcting long-established errors); and it aims at recording all relevant differences between these versions”. As Nidditch goes on to acknowledge, the “relevant differences” were many, “requiring several thousand registrations both in the case of material variants (deletions, additions, or changes of wording) and in the case of formal variants (changes of punctuation, parentheses, italics, etc.)”. The textual history of Locke's Essay is extremely complicated. While there is no manuscript of the first edition of the book, there were four editions in Locke's lifetime, each new one containing extensive and significant revisions, as well as a posthumous edition published shortly after the author's death. There was a translation into French made with Locke's cooperation and published in 1700, and a Latin translation came out a year later. Nevertheless, Nidditch managed to record all the material variants in footnotes to the text, in a way that makes it fairly easy to track the changes that Locke made to successive editions of the book, and to locate points at which judgements had to be made as a critical text was established on the basis of the chosen copy text. Sometimes a critical edition succeeds in completely changing the way that a text is read. Peter Laslett's 1960 edition of Locke's Two Treatises of Government is a good example. Nidditch's edition of the Essay did not have that kind of very dramatic effect on Locke scholarship. Rather, it made it possible for those without direct access to all the early editions to engage in careful, historically sensitive studies of Locke's account of human understanding. The result was a slow revolution in Locke studies that continues to shed new light on even the most familiar aspects of the Lockean philosophy.

Distortion in intellectual history is not a direct function of distance from the present. The recent past can create its own problems of perspective. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy is a case in point. Is the controversy surrounding the assassination a worthy subject for an intellectual historian? After all, there is now little serious debate as to what happened in Dallas on 22 November 1963. Mainstream historians regard the case as closed, an issue settled by the exhaustive and fair-minded deliberations of the Warren Commission, whose report, issued in the autumn of 1964, concluded that a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, a sad and unsettled individual from a dysfunctional background, had killed the president. However, as we know, the topic remains, almost half a century later, a matter of huge fascination, but only outside the gates of the academy. The study of Kennedy's assassination is now best known to academics as a counterculture, which grossly caricatures the best practices of the academy and where extravagant theories tend to trump sound scholarship, plausibility and common sense. Indeed, this disjunction between the obsessions of amateur historians, known as buffs, and the reluctance of academic historians to lose caste by exploring subjects such as the Kennedy assassination which the wider public—but only the wider public—seems to find worthy of further research and explanation is, as Professor W. D. Rubinstein notes, an interesting sociological and historiographical phenomenon in its own right. Writing in 1994, Max Holland, the journalist and intelligence historian, noted that the history of the Kennedy era was “bifurcated”. For academic historian writing on the Kennedy presidency the assassination is “treated as a footnote or afterthought if it is addressed at all”, while “very few of the more than 450 books and tens of thousands of articles that compose the vast assassination literature published since 1964 have been written by historians.”

In his biography of James Mill, Alexander Bain made a number of claims with regard to Mill's essay “Government” (1820). First, the essay was a catalyst in the movement for reform, making “in all probability . . . our political history very different from what it might otherwise have been.” Second, the essay provided a unique opportunity for Mill to expound on “the whole theory of Government in a compact shape.” Third, as far as his “Logic of Politics” was concerned, Mill depended on the deductive method—the method of geometry—having quickly discarded the applicability of inductive logic in politics. In this article, I take issue with the last claim.

This article focuses on how late Ottoman intellectuals selectively read the sociologist Emile Durkheim and used his thoughts to rediscover and reform their own classical, normative Islamic and social theories. Emile Durkheim, a late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French thinker who combined philosophy with social and political issues, powerfully inspired one of the late Ottoman intellectual circles that aimed to provide theoretical underpinnings for a significant transformation of Turkish society. The article takes a closer look at the school of Ziya Gökalp, the acknowledged pioneer of social thought in Turkey, highlighting also lesser-known works of some of his followers, and how they perceived—in distinct ways—Durkheim's views in a Gökalpian manner, seeking a new synthesis with Islamic legal and religious interpretations to modernize their society in connection with the past. It thus explores some creative Ottoman appropriations of Durkheimian methodology for a different cultural environment.

Historians of pragmatism have long overlooked Kenneth Burke and Richard McKeon. This has not been without good reason. At first glance, the two read more like critics than adherents of the tradition. Yet placing Burke and McKeon's writings from the 1920s to the late 1950s in the context of their development reveals a shared project aimed at reforming pragmatism. While pragmatists such as John Dewey and Sidney Hook alleged a conceptual fidelity between the scientific method and democratic processes such as public debate, Burke and McKeon questioned this link. Metaphors drawn from science, they believed, blinded pragmatists to the nature of communication. Due to this oversight, pragmatists ignored the ideological ambiguity that surrounded terms like “science” and “democracy” during the mid-twentieth century. Burke and McKeon sought to fix this omission. Pragmatists, they argued, needed to trade the language of science for a terminology drawn from a source more attuned to the power of communication: the arts. By advancing this case, Burke and McKeon crafted an aesthetic form of pragmatism—a variant of the philosophy that, ultimately, contemporaries would barely recognize as such.

Jeffrey Sklansky, The Soul's Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820–1920 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002)

Jackson Lears, Something for Nothing: Luck in America (New York: Viking, 2003)

Jerry Z. Muller, The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002)

Allan Megill, Karl Marx: The Burden of Reason (Why Marx Rejected Politics and the Market) (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2002)

For European literati of the early twentieth century, Fyodor Dostoevsky represented a mythically Russian spirituality in contrast to a soulless, rationalized West. One such enthusiast was Georg Lukács, who in 1915 began a never-completed book about Dostoevsky's work, a model of spiritual community that could redeem a fallen world. Though framing his analysis in the language and themes of broader Dostoevsky reception, Lukács used this idiom innovatively to go beyond the reactionary implications this model might connote. Highlighting similarities with Max Weber's account of political ethics, I argue that Lukács developed an ethic derived from his reading of Dostoevsky, which focused on the idea of a hero defined by an ability to resolve the specific ethical dilemma of adherence to duty and moral law on the one hand, and, on the other, the need to restore spontaneous human community at a time when the social institutions embodying such laws had fallen into decay. Crucially, he deployed the same framework after his conversion to Marxism to justify revolutionary terror. However different his position from Dostoevsky's, it was through engagement with these novels that Lukács not only clarified his thought but also came to identify Lenin as a Dostoevskyan hero figure.

The interpretation of liberalism as a project that not only masks, but enables, political domination has long held currency in South Asian historiography. Recently, the subject of liberalism and empire in both francophone and anglophone contexts has returned to discussions in broader imperial historiography. One especially pressing question that emerges from these approaches is how to analyze intellectuals of colonized countries, such as India, who themselves claimed liberal terminologies and pressed forth liberal arguments. Are they to be assessed by the same criteria as European liberals who argued for the rights of the individual, the free press, and individual property rights?

Every discipline has its foundational terms, those words that practitioners use to name what they study, or how they study, or why that study is valid. These terms often go unscrutinized when a discipline is up and running, but in the formative stages of a discipline and in periods of contention or crisis they often become subject to intensive criticism and attempts at redefinition. Challenging foundational terms is no simple task. Because they are foundational, they are difficult to do without, even by those who would reject them. They are often used or assumed by those who question them, and after intensive questioning is done they often simply recur, even in their most unquestioned, naive form. The “foundational” nature of foundational terms, one begins to see, is not just a matter of a basic organizing concept or a description of some natural process, but of a term that is invested with aspirations of different sorts. The term also offers authorization to interpret, enacts a wish, suggests a cultural utopia, or puts in place a political program. The density of functions found in foundational terms guarantees that even the most questioned term will return.

Samuel Laing was a key figure in propagating both an academically respectable defense of peasant proprietors and a critique of bureaucratic central government in Victorian Britain, his writings cited and argued with by John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, Walter Bagehot, and John Austin (among others). This article corrects misapprehensions that Laing was a libertarian apologist for unfettered commercialism and complacent patriotism. It situates Laing in his argumentative contexts to show him as a critic of conventional political economy who called for a “natural” society of self-governing freeholders like that he observed in Norway, but who gradually became ambivalently caught between a British commercial and aristocratic order and a Continental model of greater property diffusion and strong central government. Laing's story sheds new light on the complex afterlives of republican and civic themes in nineteenth-century Britain, and their interaction with emergent concerns over the dangers to active citizenship of both wage labor in international markets and centralizing bureaucracies.

Dr John Moore's four-volume account of his Grand Tour in the company of the Duke of Hamilton was one of the most successful European travel books of the late eighteenth century. Moore's text, I argue, is a philosophical travel narrative, an examination of manners, customs and characters, analogous to the philosophical histories of the Scottish Enlightenment. Intended as a critique of the superficial observations of much travel literature, it argues for a greater degree of closeness between the traveler and the native, one based on sympathetic conversation rather than observation, but accompanied by a more distanced analysis, based on conjectural history, of the hidden processes that explain manners and character. Difference should be understood through a combination of sympathy and analysis that makes travel and its accounting valuable.

Conceptions of Geist (mind/spirit) associated with German Romanticism shaped ideologies of national folk, not only in Europe but elsewhere in the world. In Meiji Japan (1868–1912) psychologists drew upon Volkerpsychologie (folk psychology) and Geist to create a narrative of Japanese folk mind/spirit. Here, spirit functioned as a “hidden essence” which substantiated the integrity of the folk, positioned the folk hierarchically in opposition to other societies, and explained (and presented correctives to) the fragmentation of Japanese society. Japanese psychologists, I argue, appropriated the narrative form of Geist discourse, retaining its ideological power even as they altered its substance by divesting German psychology of its orientalist and Christian content. Attention to Japan's engagement with nineteenth-century German psychology will contribute to a more thorough account of the production of “spirit” in Meiji Japan and to a critique of present-day exclusionary ideologies of Japanese spirit and identity.

Georg Jellinek was one of the legal theorists who brought a new level of methodological sophistication to German public law scholarship at the turn of the twentieth century. Where previous research has called attention to his theory of conceptual “types” and his application of contemporary neo-Kantian epistemology to the law, this article explores his thinking on the nature of values and value judgments, and the possibilities for objectivity in the legal and political sciences. Jellinek sought to open an increasingly calcified legal positivism to the findings of the social sciences and to an inherently pluralistic, changing world of subjective values, but without abandoning the positivist ideals of legal certainty and the exclusion of political and other value judgments. Analyzing his response to this challenge opens a window onto his broader work in public law and political science, illuminating doctrines like the “two-sided” theory of the state and the “normative power of the factual,” which have achieved a lasting place in German legal and political theory. It also shows why Jellinek put aside the traditional ideal of bias-free objectivity for a surprisingly modern vision of a process of intersubjective agreement, driven by the institutions of free and open scholarly debate.

How may one imagine the global travel of legal concepts, thinking through models of diffusion and translation, as well as through obstruction, negation, and dialectical transfiguration? This article offers some reflections by interrogating discourses (intertextually woven with Sanskritic invocations) produced by three celebrated Bengalis: the nationalist littérateur Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay (1838–94), the Rajavamshi “lower-caste” peasant leader Panchanan Barma (1866–1935), and the international jurist Radhabinod Pal (1886–1967). These actors evidently took part in projects of vernacularizing (and thereby globalizing through linguistic–conceptual translation) legal–political frameworks of state sovereignty. They produced ideas of nexus between sovereignty, law, and “divine” lawgiving activity, which resemble as well as diverge from notions of political theology associated with the German jurist Carl Schmitt. Simultaneously, these actors critiqued coercive impositions of state-backed positive law and sovereign violence, often in the name of globally oriented concepts of “ethical”/natural law, theology, and capacious forms of solidarity, including categories like “all beings,” “self/soul,” “humanity,” and “world.” I argue that “sovereignty,” as a metonym for concrete practices of power as well as a polyvalent conceptual signifier, thus dialectically provoked the globalization of modern legal intellection, including in the extra-European world.

In the past ten years, contextual approaches to intellectual history have been dislodged from their dominant position in the discipline. In the 2013 volume Rethinking European Intellectual History, edited by Samuel Moyn and Darrin McMahon, a number of the contributors challenged the previous generation's emphasis on context, whether social, political, or linguistic, arguing that it constrained the scope of intellectual history and unnecessarily foreclosed the possibility of critical engagement: if we could only understand ideas by embedding them in foreign contexts, how could they be meaningful today? Instead, many historians have come to embrace what had earlier been derided as a form of “idealism”: an emphasis on the autonomy of ideas and their internal structure. Paying attention to this structure has allowed historians to treat ideas less as historical artifacts and thus offer them as living resources for thinking through problems in the present.

Published in Paris in 1928 under the leadership of Guadeloupean Maurice Satineau, the newspaper La dépêche africaine featured a mélange of African diasporic contributors from across the French colonies. Chief among them were the Afro-Martinican intellectuals and sisters Jane and Paulette Nardal. It was here that Jane Nardal published her now famous essay “Internationalisme noir,” introducing the idea of “black internationalism” into popular parlance. Nardal documented a new understanding of blackness and collectivity amid post-World War I globalization. Just as wartime had broken down barriers among Europeans and white Americans, so too had it fostered the “sentiment” among black people from the around the world that they “belong[ed] to one and the same race.” Introducing and reifying terms such as “Afro Latino” and “African American” into French and English vernaculars, Nardal focused on black people's efforts to rhetorically and ideologically link the African diaspora while also reconciling these new identities with the “ancient traditions” of Africa. The result: one of the first efforts to define black internationalism as an ideology, worldview, and political practice in a moment in which black people the world over were trying to negotiate the modernizing world and their place in it.

In the Troisième Dialogue Rousseau suggests that all his writings pursued a single theme—to the effect, as he puts it, that “Nature made mankind happy and good but…. society depraves and renders it miserable.” Emile, in particular, he adds, “is nothing but a treatise on the original goodness of mankind.” He no doubt conceived Emile in that vein, since the opening line of its first book heralds precisely the claim that in the Dialogues he would declare to be his works' chief contention: “Everything is good when it springs from the hands of our Creator; everything degenerates when shaped by the hands of man.” Yet if on his own testimony we accept that this was the guiding thread of his philosophy as a whole, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the text which most fully elaborates Rousseau's central principle, and which on account of the attention he there devotes to it lies at the nexus of his whole career, is the Discours sur l'inégalité.

Despite the recent boom in research on the reception and influence of Hume's writings, most scholars have overlooked the fact that his enigmatic essay “Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth,” published in the Political Discourses in 1752, not only attracted the attention of some French intellectuals before and after the Revolution, but was also taken seriously by a significant number of radicals—such as Paine, Price, Godwin, Wollstonecraft—and other reform-minded Whigs—such as James Mackintosh. Although the influence of Hume's plan on The Federalist, No 10, has been much discussed, what is more important is that these British reformers often associated his plan with the National Assembly after the Revolution in France. This essay demonstrates that Hume's plan of a large republic with a bicameral system through a two-tier election was an important intellectual resource for his contemporaries and for later generations.

Accounts of liberalism as an ideology of European imperialism have argued that when liberals discovered that colonized people were, in various ways, intractable, they questioned and then abandoned the postulated universal human capacity for improvement; the racial and cultural determinants of native “backwardness” seemed stronger than any universal susceptibility to the civilizing projects of liberal imperialism. While the intellectual trajectory of some canonical liberals illustrates this decline in liberal universalism, some colonized intellectuals—while acknowledging distinctions of race and people-hood—adhered to the universalist optimism of liberalism. In pursuit of a global history of liberalism, this essay examines writings by Peter Jones, Charles Eastman, Zitkala-Sa, Apirana Ngata and William Cooper to illustrate a robust indigenous universalism. Drawing on the intellectual heritage of Christianity and universal (or “stadial”) philosophy of history, these intellectuals affirmed emphatically that their people were demonstrating the capacities to be subjects of liberal civilization.