Elie Halévy became famous as a historian of England in the years before World War I, due to his lectures on England at the Ecole libre des sciences politiques, his three-volume analysis of utilitarianism published between 1901 and 1904, a 1906 article on the birth of Methodism, and the 1912 book L’Angleterre en 1815. In these last two works he argued—in what became known as the Halévy thesis—that English Protestantism, and especially the evangelical forms of English Protestantism associated with Methodism, were a key element of Britain's sociopolitical stability. This deep-seated religiosity, he argued, was supportive of British liberalism and British philanthropy; it was responsible for an England that, in his own words, “governs itself, in place of being governed from above.”

Liberalism in France has typically been concerned with political, rather than economic, issues. Its classic texts—those of Constant, Guizot, and Tocqueville—were written in the aftermath of the Revolution, and reflected on the historical and political problems that grew out of it: the nature of the modern state, the rights and duties of the individual, and the nexus of institutions that mediated their relationship. These writings defined the contours of modern French liberalism, and became a key resource for thinkers in the late 1970s, notably Pierre Rosanvallon and Marcel Gauchet, who were looking for ways to revitalize the liberal-democratic project. In his 1985 study of Guizot, Rosanvallon could regret that “the question of liberalism in French political culture of the nineteenth century is ‘missing’ in contemporary thought.”1 If the task of political theory was to recover this intellectual tradition, what were the terms of the recovery? Which ideas were missing from the conceptual landscape of the 1970s to inspire it?

The story of American intellectual history has a mythic quality: a slow beginning, a rise to great heights, and a precipitous fall. Early in the twentieth century, the study of American history and literature grew in American colleges and universities, after many years of teaching European ideas in lieu of an American canon. Then, from a literature department arose Vernon Louis Parrington and from an American studies department Perry Miller—their writing compelling, learned, and suggestive. Their books and their students established the new field of American intellectual history, drawing readers far and wide into their interpretations of how not just individuals but entire peoples had “minds” that hovered above society, transmitting ideas from the past and changing with the times. Miller pioneered this approach with The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century, which became required reading for historians for decades—and ever since, for Puritan specialists. Miller used the published sermons of the most prominent theologians—and their European sources—to describe a crisis in Puritan thought over the character of their faith and therefore purpose. The concept of the regional or national mind became so popular that when Parrington's student Henry Steele Commager published The American Mind at mid-century, the book met a hungry public and went into eight printings in seven years.

The sweep, originality, and plenitude of Jerrold Seigel's work have transformed our field. His prolific and creative scholarship encompasses the history of ideas, the history of cultural forms, and the history of intellectuals, areas typically examined separately as coherent and discrete sections of intellectual history. I have been reading Seigel for many years now, assigned his texts in my classes, and watched students come alive as they encounter his Marx, his Bohemia, his Baudelaire, his Foucault, his Simmel. My own research and writing have been deeply influenced by key ideas generated in Seigel's body of work, testing and contesting, for example, his project of historicizing subjectivity and identity in modern Europe.

This essay examines the efforts by Austro-Marxists to identify, define, and incorporate “intellectual workers” (geistige Arbeiter) into their movement. In this struggle, socialists faced a hegemonic conservative establishment that controlled the largest scholarly societies and intellectual publications and held most positions in the universities and educational bureaucracy. Despite notable successes in “Red Vienna,” a closer examination of the discourse on intellectuals reveals that conservative ideas remained entrenched in interwar Austria. Austro-Marxists could not overcome the class biases and status anxieties of the educated middle class (Bildungsbürgertum), a problem that became more pronounced as the 1920s unfolded. The analysis of this lost debate reveals that the historiography of interwar Vienna requires revision to account for the relative weakness of progressive and radical ideologies and the persistence of antidemocratic, anti-Semitic, and authoritarian beliefs within Viennese intellectual culture. The participants in this “Black Viennese” cultural field have largely escaped critical scrutiny despite, and likely because of, their pervasiveness during the First Republic and after World War II. In looking at Austrian and European debates on the role of intellectuals in modern society, this article places conservatives back at the center of interwar Austrian intellectual and cultural history, while contending that they must bear greater responsibility for the authoritarian and fascist turns of Austria during the 1930s.

History as a body of knowledge, a loose bundle of working routines and writing practices, of genres, memories, imaginaries, and institutions, has struggled with its relationship to “religion” for a long time. In the European tradition, but also elsewhere, historical writing often served to fill the gaps in the knowledge about the past that had been, in the main, supplied by scriptural tradition. At the same time, historical writing also became a competitor with this tradition. The resulting relationship was, and continues to be, uneasy. In its familiar present-day form, for example, the quality of being “historical,” i.e. “historicity,” requires the exclusion of divine agency as a permissible explanation of events in the course of worldly affairs. In what François Hartog calls the modern “regime of historicity,” the culture of historical writing after 1750 became dominated by scholarship and aligned with mechanist understandings of the philosophy of nature. Enlightenment-era historical writing increasingly conceived of the world as a nexus of cause–effect relations that afforded space to the divine agency only in the function of “prime mover.” History then appeared to fall in line with the other forces of reason-driven “secularization” that stripped religious knowledge of the privilege of explaining things in the world, ultimately transforming it into “dogma” and “belief,” both only tenuously connected to reality. Knowledge based on the divinely “revealed” texts and the divinely “inspired” thought of traditionally recognized religious authorities lost its previous epistemic standing. Yet this loss occurred, to the extent that it did, in the form of a highly complicated negotiation, with compromises stacked on top of other compromises, generating a continuously confusing and mobile state of affairs.

The still astonishing expansion of the American university since World War II has transformed the nation's intellectual and cultural life in myriad ways. Most intellectual historians familiar with this period would agree, I suppose, that among the conspicuous changes is the sheer increase in the size and diversity of intellectual and cultural activity taking place on campuses across the country. After all, we know that colleges and universities that employ us also provide full- and part-time academic appointments to novelists, poets, playwrights, filmmakers, choreographers, composers, classical and jazz musicians, painters, photographers, and sculptors, even though most of them probably began their careers with little or no desire to join us in the halls of academe. This now widespread employment practice has decentralized the nation's literary and artistic talent. It also has made for a manifold increase in degree-granting programs in writing and the creative arts. One example will suffice here. When World War II ended, there were a small handful of university-based creative-writing programs. Over the course of the next thirty years, the number increased to fifty-two. By 1985, there were some 150 graduate degree programs offering an MA, MFA, or PhD. As of 2004, there were more than 350 creative-writing programs in the United States, all staffed by practicing writers and poets, many of whom now also hold advanced degrees in creative writing. (If one includes current undergraduate degree programs, the number grows to 720.)

Catherine Kerrison, Claiming the Pen: Women and Intellectual Life in the Early American South (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005)

Susan Stabile, Memory's Daughters: The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004)

Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America's Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2006)

Consider Abigail Adams. Known to us mostly through over one thousand letters that she exchanged with her husband, John Adams, she was a woman of redoubtable intelligence and energy. Wife of the second president of the United States, she was mother to its sixth. She traveled to France and England, rubbing elbows with dukes and diplomats; she read deeply in history and literature; she supported the literacy of black children; she was a conduit for the American reception of Catharine Macaulay's republican-friendly History of England from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line (1763–8). The letters between John and Abigail fly so fast and furious, are so full of learned banter and palpable yearning, that their marriage appears strikingly modern, a union of equals. Let us not be deceived. Abigail Adams, like other women of her generation even in the social stratosphere, had no formal schooling, and her erudition was dwarfed by the massive learning bestowed upon John. He had a Harvard BA and read law for three years. He took for granted a vast public arena in which to unleash his colossal, if tortured, political ambitions. Abigail never published a word.

Scholars have been paying increasing attention to the republican theory of liberty developed by the eighteenth-century British radical Richard Price. This article studies his narrative of a revolution of liberty, which consists in the downfall of oppressive powers, the establishment of republican institutions, and the introduction of a utopian age. In distinction from work that has focused on the millennial aspects of Price's narrative of emancipation, I highlight its political contexts and functions, situating its early development in utopian speculations about agrarian equality and population, demonstrating how the American Revolution had transformed it into a rallying cry for revolutionaries, and reconstructing its role as a source of politically mobilizing hope. This study differs from much of the scholarship on Price in looking beyond the Anglo-American context and presenting his work as part of a European conversation on the prospects of republican utopia, a conversation whose participants included Rousseau, Turgot, Mirabeau, and Condorcet.

Recent studies have identified the revival of the idea of democracy in early nineteenth-century French thought. This article recovers one important reason behind this revival: democracy became a response to another debate that emerged during that period—the “social question.” Although not well known in the English-speaking world, Louis Blanc was one of the most important socialist figures during the July Monarchy in France. Examining Blanc's Organization of Labor, this article shows how Blanc mobilized democracy to challenge the July Monarchy's exclusionary representative government and its reduction of the “social question” to pauperism. Blanc argued that industrial competition created a system of domination and proposed democratic reorganization of labor as a way to promote the common good. Blanc reformulated the “social question” as a democratic question, arguing that poverty and class domination can be solved not by administrative measures but through democratic participation in work and in the republic.

Is there any work by a modern author that inspires the range of comparisons that Rousseau's Second Discourse does? Looking backward, the quartet of scholars writing above—leading figures of anglophone scholarship on Rousseau—finds echoes of the book of Genesis, the Histories of Tacitus, Ovid's Metamorphoses, and Pelagius. Others have been reminded of Lucretius and more than one of Plato's dialogues. Looking forward, the names of Hegel, Marx, and Heidegger are cited here; comparisons with The Genealogy of Morals and Civilization and Its Discontents spring as easily to mind. If the Second Discourse thus serves as a kind of intense philosophical echo-chamber, this no doubt has something to do with its author's singular position in modern intellectual history, standing not just at the crossroads of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, but at that of antiquity and modernity themselves. It also owes much to the sheer internal complication of the text, whose relatively few pages feature a bewildering variety of moving parts: the extended Dedication to Rousseau's native city of Geneva; the Preface, with its preliminary presentation of Rousseau's philosophical anthropology; the prize question that inspired the Second Discourse: “What is the origin of inequality among men, and whether it is authorized by natural law”; the Exordium, announcing Rousseau's scandalous intention to “set aside the facts”; the analysis of the “state of nature” in Part One, with its excoriating attack on previous natural-law thinkers; the account, in Part Two, of the various “revolutions” that gradually established and deepened social inequality, before sealing it with political tyranny; and last, but certainly not least, Rousseau's trenchant endnotes, conjuring up a fabulous range of philosophical, cultural, and scientific reference, as essential to the Second Discourse as Gibbon's footnotes are to his History.

Mid-twentieth century American intellectual history is in the midst of a boom; a younger generation of historians, now half a century distant from the era, and less inclined than their immediate forerunners to be committed to a vision of the 1960s as a critical turning point in modern culture, is reshaping what has been an underdeveloped field. Recent studies of thinkers such as C. Wright Mills, Ayn Rand, Lionel Trilling, and Whitaker Chambers, and subjects such as postcapitalist social thought and pollsters in mass society, to name a few, have regenerated interest in an arena that had once been dominated by studies of the New York Intellectuals and Richard Pells's useful summaries and evaluations of prominent intellectuals of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. The newer intellectual history of this period appears to be premised on several ideas: that the so-called “liberal consensus” of the era was an ideological product of liberalism itself, rather than an adequate description of the contours of thought; that thinking in terms of clear and sharp distinctions between right and left doesn't help us understand the ways in which ideas, sensibilities, and intellectual commitments were configured at mid-century; that there is a great deal more continuity in social, political, and cultural thought than an image of the 1960s as cultural watershed would allow; and that the mid-century decades are, in the most profound sense, the first years of our own time, with all the characteristic epistemic, moral, and critical problems that have characterized thought and culture in the world in which contemporary Americans live. What the Progressive Era was for mid-century historians and intellectuals such as Richard Hofstadter and Henry May, the mid-century, and particularly the early Cold War era of the late 1940s and 1950s, is, for the historian of today, the root of the destabilizing conundrums of modernity, particularly the puzzle of the role of critical intellect in a mass-mediated environment of socialized knowledge, feeling, and being.

The last couple of decades has brought a renewed interest in American conservatism among historians. Yet most recent studies have focused on the emergence of neoconservatism after World War II and virtually no recent scholarly work has pursued the history of conservatism before the 1920s. Both Richard Hofstadter and Clinton Rossiter agreed that the late nineteenth century was an important watershed in the evolution of American conservative thought. Hofstadter argued that the new laissez-faire conservatism that became dominant during the Gilded Age was remarkable in that “it lacked many of the signal characteristics of conservatism as it is usually found.” Yet some conservatives refused to accept key features of what Clinton Rossiter once branded this new “contradictory conservatism.” This essay focuses mostly on Protestant clerical intellectuals (both Northern and Southern) who dissented from the new orthodoxy and attempted to preserve older conservative principles. Against the laissez-faire conservatives' hyperindividualism, these dissenting conservatives stressed an organic view of the social order and the importance of mediating institutions such as family and church. To the others' secularism, they offered a social theory suffused with evangelical Protestantism. This analysis highlights where these dissidents differed from their fellow conservatives and seeks also to elucidate their alternative conservative vision of the American republic. Such a study serves to clarify just how profound an ideological shift occurred among conservatives during the Gilded Age and illuminates some of the persistent tensions within American conservatism still evident today.

Recent scholarship on Southern intellectual history has tended to minimize the importance of America's most reactionary defenders of bondage. This essay revisits the significance of proslavery extremists by attending to how George Fitzhugh and a group of fellow polemicists legitimated Confederate authoritarianism during the early 1860s. By joining together as avowed counterrevolutionaries during a period of rapid change, these publicists vindicated force and “institutionalism” as an alternative to the American founders' commitment to consensual government and equal political rights. Conjuring up sweeping historical vistas and developing a modish vocabulary of organic social development helped these popular essayists gain a hearing for their strikingly frank hostility towards popular government. In their growing attention to martial themes, they forecast an impending transition within Southern authoritarianism. As emancipation made earlier proslavery efforts obsolete, the enduring affinity for martial principles among Southern conservatives demonstrated the prescience of those writers who first recast an emphasis on racial domination into an even broader species of reactionary militarism.

This essay places Eugen Ehrlich and Hans Kelsen afresh in their common context, the late Habsburg Empire. It reframes Ehrlich's legal sociology and Kelsen's pure theory of law as co-original and connected responses to the problem of legal universals under conditions of fractured sovereignty and imperial diversity. At first glance, Kelsen and Ehrlich seem antipodes, an impression apparently confirmed by their prickly exchange in the 1910s: while Kelsen made universality reside in the formal features and sequences of imputation that held the normative order together, Ehrlich claimed that every normative system which purported to be meta-social and meta-cultural merely camouflaged its local conditions of emergence. Once resituated in their Habsburg environment, these strategies can be read as articulations of a broader set of common proclivities. Ehrlich's and Kelsen's proficiency in the empire's techniques of plurality management enabled them to demystify the state and to dismantle the nation: both perceived the state as a juristic construction, hence they unmasked its alleged social, cultural, and ontological unity as a delusion. The same held true for the nation: Ehrlich challenged its supremacy by showing that social relationships—“associations”—cut across national divides, while Kelsen delegitimized the nation's status as a rights-bearing collective and blurred the distinction between citizens and alien residents, working toward the civic enfranchisement of the latter. This dovetailed with Ehrlich's and Kelsen's unmaking of the distinction between private and public law: the false belief in the latter's superiority over the former served to license arbitrary rule. Both jurists deterritorialized state sovereignty by highlighting the brittleness of spatial dominion and the artificiality of political boundaries: Ehrlich and Kelsen discovered a gamut of sovereign authorities with overlapping spatial areas of jurisdiction that coexisted within the Habsburg polity. This in turn permitted them to effectively transcend the distinction between domestic and international law: while, according to Ehrlich, the state fizzled out on the local level, Kelsen redescribed it from a global perspective, turning it into a mere subordinate organ of world law. Ehrlich's legal pluralism and Kelsen's pure theory were the two most successful juristic legacies of the Habsburg polity whose imprint they bore. Both creatively reworked Habsburg constitutional reality into templates of legal order that survived the empire's demise.

In September 1829, David Walker published the first edition of his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, a pamphlet that became a stirring call to arms for both slaves and free blacks alike. Walker's audience was blacks in the United States and his aim was to foster black unity and education, combat racial stereotypes, and make the case for the abolition of slavery. Like most abolitionists, black and white, Walker hoped that the end of slavery could come about through peaceful means. Unlike most other abolitionists, however, Walker openly called for slaves to violently resist their bondage, stating, “it is no more harm for you to kill a man, who is trying to kill you, than it is for you to take a drink of water when thirsty.” While advocates of pacifism and nonviolence often based their positions on their Christian faith, it was Walker's Christianity which lent support to his calls for revolutionary violence. “Does the Lord condescend to hear their cries and see their tears in consequence of oppression?” he asked. “Will he let the oppressors rest comfortably and happy always? Will he not cause the very children of the oppressors to rise up against them, and oftimes to put them to death?” Walker firmly believed that God would have his vengeance on blacks’ oppressors and that the vehicles for that vengeance might very well be the slaves themselves.

Few intellectual histories of France by non-French authors in recent years have produced the bitter polemic that Tony Judt's Past Imperfect: French intellectuals (1944–1956) elicited. Published in French at the same time as the English edition in 1992, the book was held to account for its questionable historiographical legitimacy, alleged inaccuracy in the treatment of sources, and not-so-hidden partisanship, even if it also received some positive reviews from authoritative specialists in the field in important national newspapers. Nevertheless, the general tone and content of the French academic reviews were largely negative, and in many ways this response was unsurprising: how could a study arguing that a certain dominant (and still alive) Jacobin philosophical tradition was characterized by a “marked absence of a concern with public ethics or political morality” be read otherwise? Further, in an often caustic style, Judt accused the postwar French intellectuals of being seduced by totalitarian tendencies. Such charge, not surprisingly, provoked a pointed defence of the intellectual and historiographical national sensibility, which was not above resorting to Continental stereotypes against the “Anglo-Saxon” cultural model. Nor was the negative reception surprising to Judt, who positioned himself explicitly in the text as an outsider, belonging to a different intellectual tradition. It is useful to remember this uproar today as one considers new books by Gisèle Sapiro and François Dosse, as it illustrates three important issues in a lively academic register: the continuity of a French approach to intellectual history, its difference from Anglo-American traditions, and a possible—although mediated—angle for understanding the nature of this French particularism, through the discussion of the historiographic projection of the idea of intellectual status.

How have modern cultures of dissent learnt to narrate the experience of political imprisonment? From 1851 to 1853, M. A. Bakunin was incarcerated in St Petersburg's Peter and Paul Fortress. Here, the “father of Russian anarchism” wrote what has become known as his Confession: an account of his personal and political development, penned in the most notorious prison of the Russian autocracy at the behest of the tsar. Previous scholarship has focused entirely on the content of this peculiar text. The present article is the first to mobilize extensive archival research—on its carceral conditions of production and intellectual conditions of possibility—in order to understand the form of Bakunin's Confession. Doing so reveals the text as one of the first Russian Bildungsromane: the birth of a genre whereby the imprisoned self became legible through a new epistemology of self and history between Goethe and Hegel. Excavating the nature and afterlives of this novel political aesthetics provides original insights into the “politicization” of state incarceration in European history, the origins of modern Russian autobiographics, and the construction of the radical self.

William Rathbone Greg's name is well known to historians of nineteenth-century Britain, but the content of his political thought is not. This article, based on a comprehensive reading of Greg's prolific published output, has two aims. The first is to pin down his politics. The article positions Greg as a leading spokesman for the rationalistic, antidemocratic strand of mid-Victorian Liberalism. It argues that his thought centered on the idea that politics was a science, and that scientific statesmanship might solve many of the problems of the age. The article's second aim is to show that Greg was a sophisticated thinker on politics overseas. He developed distinctive arguments about the structures of European politics, and especially about France under the Second Empire (1852–70). Greg's writings cast important light on the connections between abstract, domestic, and European issues in less familiar reaches of Liberal thought, and on how Victorian political science grappled with Continental despotism.

In recent years, the historiography of Nazi Germany has taken what Neil Gregor has called a “voluntarist turn.” By this, Gregor means that the recent literature on Nazi Germany has emphasized “that the panoply of organizations actively involved in occupation and murder, the number of German men and women who actively participated in these crimes, and the range of places in which they committed them, was much, much greater than has hitherto been acknowledged.” In the first instance this voluntarist turn has meant an increased stress on the centrality of Nazi criminality and atrocity to the regime, not as one feature, but as the central characteristic, of the Third Reich. Alongside this, however, has come an increased insistence that these criminal policies were both widely known at the time and broadly popular among Germans. As Saul Friedländer has put it, “the everyday involvement of the population with the regime was far deeper than has long been assumed, due to the widespread knowledge and passive acceptance of the crimes, as well as the crassest profit derived from them.” In short, then, the most recent trend among historians of the Third Reich is to insist that people believed in the Nazi project, including its criminal aspects.