As the foundational contributions of the fin de siècle sexual science movement to research on sexuality continue to be fleshed out, new avenues of understanding this important movement will continue to emerge. This essay uncovers the explosive intersection of early sexual science and strains of first-wave feminism in Vienna and charts the emergence of anti-essentialist feminism from this intersection. The first section offers an interpretation of how the discipline of sexual science emerged from medical criminology and how these origins contributed to the misogynist inflection of early sexology. The essay then chronicles the intersection of first-wave feminism and this misogynist sexual science. The central argument is that feminists’ encounters with sexual science dialectically produced an anti-essentialist variant of feminism. This microscopic interpretation of historical context, it will be argued, provides a new vista from which to view the larger tableau of modern European, especially Austrian, intellectual history.

As part of Benjamin Constant's academic “revival,” scholars have revisited the political and religious elements of his thought, but conclude that he remained uninterested in the nineteenth century's major social and economic questions. This article examines Constant's response to what would later become known as “the social question” in his Commentary on Filangieri's Work, and argues that his claims about poverty and its alleviation highlight central elements of his political liberalism, especially on the practice of citizenship in the modern age. By interpreting social issues through his original political lens of “usurpation,” Constant encouraged skepticism of social legislation and identified the political implications of a “disinherited” poor class. The lens of usurpation ultimately limited the scope of Constant's solutions to poverty. But his attention to social and economic issues prompts us to reexamine the category of “the social” and its uses in the history of liberal thought, particularly the place of class concerns in the French liberal tradition.

An American conservative movement developed rapidly after World War II. It brought together intellectuals and politicians opposed to the New Deal in domestic policy and Soviet communism in foreign policy. The movement's first presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater, lost the election of 1964 but its second, Ronald Reagan, won the election of 1980. It has remained an influential force in American life up to the present, despite strong internal contradictions, which include disagreements about centralized power, about religion, about tradition, about elites, and about the free market. To some of the movement's early luminaries, such as Russell Kirk, free-market capitalism was the antithesis of conservatism since it required perpetual innovation and the sweeping away of traditional forms. To others, such as Ayn Rand, capitalism was the heart and soul of conservatism because it alone preserved the dignity and freedom of the individual.

In recent years, scholars across the humanities have argued that the nineteenth-century American abolitionists articulated important conceptual lessons about democracy. This essay contributes to this literature by newly interpreting the political thought of Charles Sumner. Regnant scholarly treatments of Sumner have been narrowly biographical. I shift focus by examining his use of the word “caste” as an analytic and political term. The article demonstrates that Sumner adopted the language of caste from missionary accounts of caste hierarchy in India; that he used this information to argue that there was an oppressive analogue at home: racial caste; and that, accordingly, Sumner's conception of abolition included the dismantling of racial caste and the cultivation of interracial republican association.

While previous research on the rise of neoliberalism has focused on elite networks of economists, politicians, journalists, and business leaders, this article investigates the attractiveness of Milton Friedman's ideas at the time of the neoliberal breakthrough from a bottom-up perspective. A close reading of mostly favorable letters by two hundred viewers in response to the 1980 television documentary series Free to Choose indicates that neoliberalism's popular legitimacy was based on a broad yet fragile coalition. Four different and in many ways contradictory viewer narratives can be distilled from the letters: (i) a conservative narrative, (ii) a reactionary narrative, (iii) a left libertarian narrative, and (iv) a populist narrative. Although in 1980 Friedman was, and today still is, perceived as a conservative economist, the letters show that under the surface of public debate his reach as a public intellectual far exceeded the realms of postwar conservatism as Friedman was supported by people who were situated further to the right and the left. Perhaps more than the elite sources of the neoliberal project, Friedman's lay reception thus highlights neoliberalism's complex and contradictory history in a plastic manner.

This article provides a new look at Francoist sociology by exploring the impact of the early Cologne school of sociology in Spain prior to and after the Spanish Civil War. It starts by explaining Helmuth Plessner's critical argument on the Renaissance and the Reformation, delving into its echo in Spain. Following the influence of Schelerian material value ethics on Spanish philosophy of right, the second section focuses on a critical analysis of José Ortega y Gasset's sociological concepts. Going deeper into academic debate around Freyerian Wirklichkeitswissenschaft, the third section explores the parameters of early Francoist sociology's academic implementation up to the 1950s. Summarizing the analytical results, this article concludes by evaluating the early Cologne school of sociology's persistence in Francoist Spain in terms of a growing rhetoric associated with the rejection of alleged errors.

Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929) has for decades been recognized as a leading European philosopher and public intellectual. But his global visibility has obscured his rootedness in German political culture and debate. The most successful historical accounts of the transformation of political culture in West Germany have turned on the concept of German statism and its decline. Viewing Habermas through this lens, I treat Habermas as a radical critic of German statism and an innovative theorist of democratic constitutionalism. Based on personal interviews with Habermas and his German colleagues, and by setting the major work alongside his occasion-specific political writings from 1984 to 1996, I interpret Habermas's political thought as an evolving response to two distinct moments in German history: first, the mid-1980s, and second, the revolutions of 1989 and German reunification in 1990. This essay challenges the dominant interpretations of Habermas's mature statement of his political theory. Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Democracy (1992), which have described it as marking a distinct break with, and reversal of, the commitments of his earlier work. By contrast, I describe the work as an intellectual summa, consistent with Habermas's previous thought and career, and containing remarkable historical interpretations of two intertwined phenomena: the intellectual and institutional dimensions of the Bonn Republic and Habermas's own biography.

In January 1776, Thomas Paine demanded to know whether “the Power of feeling” did not require that American colonists declare independence from Great Britain. Paine's efforts included an appeal to “common sense,” to the idea that it was only natural for colonists to end their ties with Britain. For Paine, independence did not depend on elaborately wrought arguments; instead, it should be obvious to all, even the most unlettered. His own emotionally charged language—the king was akin to a “crowned ruffian” descended from “a French Bastard landing with an armed Banditti”—sought to stir even those who still longed for reconciliation to “examine the passions and feelings of mankind” and to throw off the yoke of oppression. Paine's formulations, like these two books, raise numerous questions. How significant has the expression of emotion been in American history? How far can scholars go in attributing to it sufficient momentum to effect major historical change? Can something so universal be harnessed into nationalist political trajectories? Should America be seen as having a unique emotional culture in the eighteenth century? Did this exceptional culture of feeling contribute to the Revolution itself? These two authors answer yes to the last three questions, thus prompting re-evaluation of the “power of feeling” in the American Revolution itself.

Throughout the 1690s there were several high-profile parliamentary debates about lowering interest rates from 6 to 4 percent. Locke's involvement in these policy debates is significant. In this period, he circulated at least one important pamphlet on this issue to various Members of Parliament. The purpose of this article is to illuminate the links between Locke's arguments against interest rate reduction and immigration policy. Locke's essay “For a General Naturalization” (1693) employs some of the same pro-naturalization formulations that Josiah Child uses in A New Discourse of Trade (1693), a pamphlet that was ostensibly published in support of the parliamentary proposal for lower interest rates. Even though Locke had a long history with pro-naturalization arguments, the framework of his essay on naturalization is very likely an extension of those debates with Child about interest rates from 1691/2.

This article discusses Nahda intellectual Buṭrus al-Bustānī’s public and pedagogic writings. It focuses on the nationalist pamphlets, the Nafīr Sūrriya, written in the wake of the first sectarian–civil war, and his translation of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, both published in Beirut in 1860. I analyze Bustānī’s politico-theological and economic thought by looking at the nexus of debt, guilt, love, and mercy that he draws out in the Nafīr. The article argues that Bustānī’s nation is inaugurated into a “guilt-history” and eternally faced with the task of confronting the mercy of debt and the un-requitable debt of mercy. Nationality in this specific sociohistorical context became a form of artifice that in a postlapsarian age requires religion, labor, and exchange to survive as a social contract. The “civil war” exemplified a return to a state of nature that could only be amended by a return to the laws of nature and the seeking of refuge under the name of one God and one religion, diyāna. The social contract, articulated in these terms, could only be sealed through the recognition of natural laws as the foundation provided by God himself, while politics remained concealed under the folds of political theology.

For over half a century, the American transformation of German philosophy and social thought has been a major theme of modern intellectual history. The main protagonists of this “cultural migration,” as the story traditionally has been told, were German-speaking scholars and writers who, fleeing Hitler's Europe, brought their erudition and indigenous methodologies to American shores. But beyond this beachhead lies a vast and unfamiliar terrain for the historian. What became of German texts and concepts as they traveled further inland? Who transported them—and for what ends? In The Closing of the American Mind, the philosopher Allan Bloom marveled at the ways in which nonacademic Americans had become complicit in the dissemination of German thought: “What an extraordinary thing it is that high-class talk from what was the peak of Western intellectual life, in Germany, has become as natural as chewing gum on American streets.” It was an extraordinary thing, but not a good one, as far as Bloom was concerned:

Prussia's Edict on Religion of 1788 forbade sermons that undermined popular belief in the Holy Trinity and the Bible. Scholars have assumed that this act was counter-enlightened because it limited the free use of reason in public. An analysis of two court cases related to the edict reveals, however, that both the edict and its “enlightened” opponents within the state assumed that public expression should be disciplined. With respect to the enlightened bureaucratic elite that opposed the edict, it identifies two factors that impelled them toward the disciplining of public communication: 1) German universities created an elite social group that assiduously cultivated its own intellectual sphere, and 2) having access to state power gave each member of the elite something to lose if the process of the Enlightenment proved politically or socially destabilizing. As a result, the fight over the Edict on Religion cannot be understood in terms of an Enlightenment/counter-Enlightenment dichotomy, but must be seen as a debate within the German elite about the level of social discipline that was sufficient for maintaining domestic tranquility.

People often seem to forget that Rousseau dedicated his Second Discourse to “The Republic of Geneva.” This is a shame because, in doing so, they miss precious clues not only about the meaning of the Discourse itself, but also about its place in Rousseau's political thought as a whole. It is also rather curious, because Rousseau's dedicatory letter to Geneva is actually not so easy to overlook; in the Pléiade edition it takes up more than ten pages of tightly worded text and is thus almost twice as long as Rousseau's more frequently cited “Preface” that follows it. Ignoring the dedication is, of course, part of a larger and more general problem in Rousseau scholarship: the still widespread tendency to read Rousseau out of historical context and with little concern for his intended meaning.

For the five hundred years since Thomas More first depicted the island of Utopia, the portrayal of an ideal social system has intrigued generations of authors. The concept served a double purpose: it applied to an ideal place (eutopia) but also an imaginary, unrealizable one (utopia). Although the search for utopia started from the Classical Age, More invented the genre and hundreds of utopian thinkers followed in his footsteps trying to predict how life would unfold and provide a detailed description of an ideal (or nonideal) future society. From H. G. Wells and Aldous Huxley to Arthur C. Clarke and Ursula Le Guin, successful and popular authors showed a deep concern for future living and working conditions. If the past is another country, the growing literature of utopian thought suggests that the future can be a whole continent. Several undiscovered countries lay in waiting and intellectual historians have often been fascinated by the dense explorations of the utopian writers.

“Secular intellectuals have not been kind to the evangelical mind,” writes historian Molly Worthen in the opening sentence of Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism. Her history of evangelical thought after World War II is an extended effort to understand why. The answers, it turns out, entail not only specific and important critiques of evangelical theology, but also much larger trajectories in the modern intellectual history of the United States. Theology, after all, was once “the queen of the sciences,” the very foundation of all other intellectual labor, and remained central to American academic and intellectual culture well into the nineteenth century. Beginning at least with Thomas Jefferson in the United States, however, main currents in Protestant theology and elite intellectual life began their slow and steady divergence, a process that reached critical mass early in the twentieth century. Nowhere has this divergence been more evident, or created more crisis and drama, than among evangelicals.

Tom Stoppard, The Coast of Utopia (London: Faber and Faber, 2002)

Part I: Voyage

Part II: Shipwreck

Part III: Salvage

In a recent article in the London Review of Books, Perry Anderson sang a dirge over the decaying corpse of the Russian liberal intelligentsia. A “spirit of opposition…had defined the Russian intelligentsia since the 19th century—and for long periods [had] been its virtual raison d'être…whatever its internal disputes, [it] had always taken its role as Kulturträger for granted” (8). But then in the early 1990s it helped to saw off the branch it was sitting on, and plunged itself, unwittingly, into an economic and cultural abyss. It had used its cultural clout to support and legitimate Yeltsin's market reforms. The result was the decimation of all the institutions, from universities to film studios and the press, which had guaranteed the intelligentsia's existence and enabled it—not just despite, but because of the censorship—to maintain its role as the late Soviet system's permanent and often salaried opposition.

In her book Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America's Tradition of Religious Equality (New York: Basic Books, 2008) the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum joins a chorus of American intellectuals who have criticized France and other European nations for their failure to embrace the concept of cultural pluralism. In Nussbaum's opinion, the meaning that the French attach to egalité has remained stuck in circumstances peculiar to the eighteenth century. The concept is outdated and has not in the contemporary world been able to protect cultural diversity in general and religious diversity in particular. Her book takes to task what she terms “the French tradition of “coercive assimilation” that is insensitive to what George Washington stressed as the “‘delicacy and tenderness’ that is owed to other people's ‘conscientious scruples.’” The French refusal to allow Muslim schoolgirls to cover their heads with a foulard, however stylish it might be, is linked back to the French emancipation of Jews that required, in Nussbaum's analysis, a heavy requirement of cultural erasure. The French, like most Europeans, grew used to the idea “that citizens are all alike,” an idea that now haunts France as it tries to figure out what to do with its Muslim population.

Colleagues hailed the Rutgers University historian Warren Susman as a pioneer in the field of cultural history and popular culture when he died in 1985 at the age of fifty-eight. Although well known, Susman had published just a handful of essays, a collection of which was published only the year before his death. Despite his reputation, this work was not widely reviewed and when it was, not uniformly positively. This essay explores the disjunction between his work and his reputation and, through an analysis of archival sources, including Susman's newly available personal papers, argues that Susman's importance lies less in his contributions to the field of cultural history than in his understanding of the relationship between historical work and the critical intellectual heritage of progressivism. The essay traces Susman's early professional career and historical work, including his unpublished doctoral study of expatriate intellectuals and his critical engagement with the legacy of the Progressive historians, and his mid-career efforts to join with other left scholars in establishing a new socialist party. Susman's career allows for the analysis and better understanding of the progressive tradition in historical scholarship, the changes in intellectual and cultural history in the 1960s, and the way historians have understood their role in social reform.

Anyone who works at the interstices of intellectual history and philosophy and the history and philosophy of science will be quick to rank Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions amongst the most influential works of the last half-century. But its influence extends well beyond these disciplines as well. First published in 1962 as a contribution to the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, over the last fifty years it has enjoyed a rich afterlife, leaving in its wake an immense if contested inventory of ideas whose significance has transcended the well-policed boundaries that often separate the natural sciences from the social sciences and the humanities. Even more surprising for a book of its academic character, it has enjoyed a reception in popular discourse that exceeds its disciplinary bailiwick. Its trademark terms—not only the celebrated ideas of a paradigm and a paradigm shift but also more technical themes such as normal science, incommensurability, and anomaly—have been naturalized into mundane English with a degree of success that puts to shame just about any other work of recent scholarship. Paraphrasing one of its characteristic claims, one may be temped to observe that, since the publication of Kuhn's Structure, we all live in a different world.

The action of the soul on the body is the abyss of philosophy in the constitution of man, just as the action of the general will on the public force is the abyss of politics in the constitution of the State.