This paper is the first substantial investigation in English or German of the work and career of the student of Jacob Fries, leader of the Burschenschaften, educational reformer, and professor of philosophy and law Karl Hermann Scheidler. It examines Scheidler's interventions into political and constitutional debates during the German Vormärz and argues that he developed a unique brand of liberal corporatism that has been overlooked or misunderstood by intellectual historians—one that attempts to bridge the gap between eighteenth-century natural law and nineteenth-century political nationalism by defending the corporate autonomy of the churches and universities, and by promoting a combination of public virtue and moral perfection that he dubbed “political Protestantism.” It emphasizes Scheidler's polemical articles against the “Hegel school” and the “New Hegelians” in Rotteck's and Welcker's Staats-Lexikon. It proposes that a detailed examination of Scheidler's work provides a clearer understanding of how liberalism emerged as a distinct political ideology during the Vormärz and how one strand of German liberalism defined itself against Hegelianism.

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.

William R. Hutchison had a complaint. Though he was a dean of American religious history and a gatekeeper of the field at Harvard, Hutchison could not shake the feeling that the discipline was going in the wrong direction. In 1989, when he wrote an introduction to his edited volume, Between the Times, his fellow religion scholars were busy examining trans-denominational movements like revivalism, smaller religious practices like voodoo in New York, and “dissenters and other outsiders” to the mainstream. But their efforts had ignored what Hutchison considered the most important subject of all, the Protestant denominations that had guided American life since the American Revolution.

This article explores the religious response of one neglected writer to the evolutionary philosophy of Herbert Spencer. William Todd Martin was a minister of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland and in 1887 published The Evolution Hypothesis: A Criticism of the New Cosmic Philosophy. The work demonstrates the essentially contested nature of “evolution” and “creation” by showing how a self-confessed creationist could affirm an evolutionary understanding of the natural world and species transformation. Martin's approach reflected a transatlantic Presbyterian worldview that saw the harmony of science and religion on the basis of Calvinism, Baconianism and Scottish Common Sense philosophy. Martin's critique is also relevant to issues that continue to animate philosophers of science and religion, including the connections between mind and matter, morality and consciousness in a Darwinian framework, and the relationship between subjective conscious experience and evolutionary physicalism. Martin was able to anticipate these debates because his critique was essentially philosophical and theological rather than biological and biblicist.

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.

Despite the voluminous work devoted to the “social history of Enlightenment ideas” since the 1970s, surprisingly little has been done to integrate its findings into general interpretations of this moment in intellectual history. Attempts to understand the Enlightenment as a long-term global phenomenon have made it difficult to situate it within any social context other than that of globalization. This essay makes the case for relating the Enlightenment, as it developed within Europe and European overseas possessions, to the advance of commercial capitalism. Drawing on recent work on the history of capitalism, it argues that a burgeoning market economy vastly expanded the opportunities for ordinary readers to participate in intellectual life, and that this change dramatically influenced the production of intellectual work, not only in its form and genre, but in the causes advanced by writers, whose work increasingly took the form of a great project for collective human self-improvement.

Harlem loomed large in the imagination of Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington, one of the twentieth century's most significant composers and an important theorist of the condition of being black and American. This article provides insights into Ellington's social thought by foregrounding his evocations of Harlem and his efforts to interpolate that neighborhood into the physical, cultural, and imaginative spaces of US national life. In doing so, it also situates Ellington's ideas in relation to the competing intellectual currents of the Harlem Renaissance movement that had inspired his project of racial vindication. More broadly, the article argues that understanding of the history of African American ideas of race and nation benefits from analysis of discursive place-making and the spatial practices of artistic and intellectual work. Attending to space and place recuperates the complexity and multiplicity of such ideas, which are often concealed by abstracted discussion of concepts such as “integration.”

In Enlightenment-era France, theologians, philosophers, and politicians contested the nature and prerogatives of human personhood with particular vehemence. Yet historians have tended to reduce these struggles to a narrative of ascendant individualism. This essay seeks to recover non-individualist formulations of the self in eighteenth-century France, and, in doing so, to offer a more nuanced account of subjectivity during the period. Out of debates over Christian mysticism, radical philosophy, and republican politics emerged two distinct and conflicting modes of formulating the self 's relationship to its ideas and actions. On one side, mainstream philosophes joined Descartes, Locke, and orthodox Catholic theologians in elaborating the individual's capacity to accumulate existential goods in terms of a discourse of self-ownership. Opposition to this view, in contrast, challenged such claims by employing a discourse of dispossession, which stressed the human person's resignation to, and ultimate identification with, a totalizing force outside the self. The essay traces a specific genealogy of this discourse in the writings of Fénelon, Rousseau, and the Illuminist theologian Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, in the context of intellectual polemics ranging from the role of self-love in Christian devotion to the virtues of self-sacrifice in a republican polity. If the Fénelonian doctrine of spiritual abandon called on believers to surrender their particular desires in the love of God, Rousseau likewise demanded that citizens place their property and their persons under the direction of the general will. Saint-Martin, for his part, applied Rousseau's politics of alienation to his vision of a theocratic republic in the wake of the French Revolution, thereby posing the mystic ideal of dispossession as a means of transforming the self and its world along communal, rather than individualist, lines.

This essay historicizes the formation of Edward Said's critique of imperial culture before the publication of Orientalism (1978) and examines how it framed the decolonial approach that made him world-renowned. Deeply influenced by the writings of Martinique-born psychiatrist and Algerian revolutionary Frantz Fanon, an Arab tradition of anti-orientalism, existentialist thought, and the Palestinian national movement, the New York-based intellectual reconceptualized the idea of decolonization in the late 1960s in a way that shifted contemporary thinking on social relationships between racial difference and empire from the individual and interpersonal to the collective and intercultural. Through his deep historical, epistemological, and phenomenological digs into orientalism's imperial culture and its myriad ways of being, Said made it his antiracist mandate to liberate consciousnesses from Eurocentrism and empower the universalization of decolonization.

This essay addresses the emergence of theories of “identity” in twentieth-century politics, aesthetics, and philosophy by considering Theodor Adorno's understanding of “negative identity” as a form of coercive categorization that nevertheless contains social knowledge. A historical account of the Frankfurt school's relation to questions of race, anti-Semitism, and the idea of culture, the essay analyzes Adorno's infamous jazz articles in light of the transatlantic history of Marxian political theory and its understanding of racism, subject–object relations, and models of cultural production. The result is an investigation of the history of the concept of identity, its emergence alongside the rise of cultural studies, and its relation to international cultural–aesthetic formations such as jazz. The article concludes with an examination of Adorno's critique of idealism, cultural identity, and nationalism in light of the “wounded” political subjectivity of the modern era.

Scholarship largely holds that the “Persianate world”—a transregional sphere of cultural exchange mediated by an Indian Ocean lingua franca—was put paid to by a colonizing English East India Company. Against that historiography, this article reveals how colonial and Indo-Persian modern textual trends were coproduced. Reading a first-person account of the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, written in 1815–17 by a prince from a Mughal successor state under Company rule, the article argues that the travelogue's unprecedented form of a diary, and its uncharacteristically affective contents for Indo-Persian prose, drew on emerging genres and Romantic ideologies in British India. But while this resulted in a new kind of Indo-Persian ego-document, this text of Indian Ocean travel remained, however, anchored in Mughal concepts of moods and manners. As such it betrayed transitional tensions that compel a reconsideration of how colonialism led ultimately to the passing of a precolonial Persianate Babel.

Basic questions about Kant's international theory remain unresolved, in part because the ambiguous language and sketchy blueprints given in Perpetual Peace lend themselves to a wide variety of interpretations. This essay proposes a novel solution for this difficulty: a careful reconsideration of the political concepts embedded in Kant's first philosophy. In the First Critique, the “Conflict of the Faculties,” and in particular his neglected essay “Perpetual Peace in Philosophy,” Kant repeatedly draws on the language of sovereignty, war, and international law, in order to describe how the critical philosophy will bring peace to what he terms the “battlefield of metaphysics.” The most striking feature of this program for “perpetual peace in philosophy” is that it does not end disagreement over ideas, but rather prevents it from becoming pathological by subjecting it to the “discipline” of critical reason. And I argue that Kant's proposal for global peace is precisely parallel: a sovereign world court that arbitrates decisively between states, while otherwise leaving them free to clash, compete, and disagree.

This article positions the early career of the Japanese activist and writer Tsumura Takashi as anticipating, from an intellectual and historical-media standpoint, the surge of interest in gendai shisō (“contemporary thought,” i.e. French theory) in 1980s Japan. Often understood as the devolution of theory into a mere commercial fad, the gendai shisō boom—in its reliance on a host of writers who worked at a distance from traditional academic publishing networks—promoted an ethos of interdisciplinary and transgressive knowledge production. Tracing Tsumura's interest in structuralism and post-structuralism as an outgrowth of his participation in the student movement, the article provides a prehistory of gendai shisō in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It argues that Tsumura's creative appropriation of structuralism and post-structuralism took place at a crucial juncture when the academic print networks that had legitimated intellectuals in postwar Japan were being hollowed out from within and without.

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.

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.

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 article traces the invention of pluralist political language in France to a very specific ideological source: Jacques Maritain, Emmanuel Mounier, and the progressive Catholic circles that gathered around the journal Esprit in the 1930s. It shows that the dialogue with the émigré Russian Jewish sociologist Georges Gurvitch was an important influence on the Esprit circle, but also that it was Maritain rather than Gurvitch who did most to disseminate the language of pluralism. The paper thus builds on recent work according Maritain and Christian democracy a central place in the intellectual history of twentieth-century politics. It also contests the Anglo-American bias that has dominated histories of pluralism, and instead places France at the centre.

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.

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.

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.