The American Workingmen's Parties in the 1828–32 period occupy a distinctive place within the history of socialism: they were the first to embrace a strategy of organizing a working-class political party and seizing the democratic state for their collective self-liberation. With universal suffrage, a working-class majority could take political power electorally and expropriate the rich. Karl Marx read about these workers’ parties through works by Thomas Hamilton and Thomas Cooper in the period of his early political development. Like the American workers, he was stringently in favor of robust political rights and conceived of socialism as a democratic mass movement. Unlike the antipolitical socialists predominant in his day, Marx saw the northern United States as uniquely situated for socialism precisely because it had already solved the basic political problem facing Europe: the workers could vote.

The figure of Oedipus haunted the thought of Michel Foucault from the outset of his tenure at the Collège de France, in association with several key philosophical and historical projects, and enduring until the conclusion of his career. However, it was with Foucault's account of an “Oedipus complex”—one that operated “not at the individual level but at the collective level; not in connection with desire and the unconscious but in connection with power and knowledge” (“Truth and Juridical Forms,” 1973)—that Foucault was able to enlist Oedipus for a genealogy of “sexuality” and, furthermore, of “governmentality,” such as would increasingly preoccupy him through the mid- to late 1970s. Foucault's attention to classical texts—in particular the Oedipus Tyrannos of Sophocles and the Republic of Plato—thereby helped to clear a critical pathway through the conventional Marxism embraced by the “repressive hypothesis,” and to arrive at a Nietzschean genealogy of sexuality and power.

This essay analyses Burke's ideas on European history, which lay scattered over his works, and suggests that Burke may have considered Europe, with the notable exception of ancient Rome, as having been in a state of barbarism or confusion from the ancient era until the sixteenth century, despite the gradual development of society. Unlike some of his contemporaries, he did not closely examine the growth of a European state system, nor the rise of the balance of power in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Nor did he specially underline the collapse of feudalism and the process of establishing absolute monarchy. Instead, Burke stressed more fundamental elements. While he often drew attention to the glimmer of hope towards future prosperity amid devastation, which dominated large parts of European history, his ideas on European history reflected his long-held social theory that nations could revive and develop as long as the foundations of society were not damaged.

Elie Halévy's legacy is bounded by the two primary objects of his scholarly interest: the history of modern Britain and the study of French socialist doctrines. Taken together, his writings on temperate English politics and occasionally intemperate French socialists cemented his status as a leading French liberal of his generation. Read out of context, the tone of his criticism of wartime socialization and the growth of wartime governments has given him a conservative reputation in some circles and inspired a backlash among historians seeking a more progressive Halévy in his prewar writings. Meanwhile, the depth of his historical study of Britain has elicited several discussions of Halévy's turn from philosophy to history at the end of the 1890s. The portrait of Halévy that emerges in light of his historical studies of England and of French socialism is detailed, accurate, and flattering, but, like any portrait, it is incomplete. Before he was a historian, Halévy was a philosopher, and before he mastered his craft in the early twentieth century, Halévy struggled to find his voice in the late nineteenth.

Among the astonishing variety of sources mentioned in Martin Jay's new book on lying in politics the reader will find ancient Greek philosophical dialogues, pamphlet controversies between eighteenth-century philosophers, post-structural literary theories and, resting easily among the likes of these, a familiar old joke. “How can you tell when a politician is lying?” Jay asks. “He moves his lips” is the answer my grandfather used to give, and that is the punch-line that Jay recounts here. But my grandfather told the joke as part of a syllogism whose unstated premise was “lying is bad” and whose common-sense conclusion was that politics is corrupt. Jay is not satisfied with that conclusion. His book, The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics, puts forward a very different argument: He assumes that politics is worthwhile, suggests that it is unavoidably linked to lying, and concludes that lying must not be as bad as we think it is. There are a host of complications and caveats, so many that one could spend a whole review admiring the virtuosity involved in constructing such a rich pastiche of historical episodes and texts touching on mendacity. But the frisson that the book provokes comes almost entirely from its willingness to flirt with the endorsement of vice, so any serious engagement with it cannot avoid responding in some way to that flirtation.

The publication of the Clarendon edition of the Works of Thomas Hobbes recently entered its fourth decade. The monumental project has unfolded against shifting methodologies in the practice of intellectual history, and the edition's own history exemplifies these shifts. Its first general editor was Howard Warrender, who died in 1985 after a distinguished career as a professor of political theory at the University of Sheffield. Warrender was best known for the Political Philosophy of Hobbes: His Theory of Obligation. This influential book offered a deontological interpretation of Hobbes's theory of obligation, according to which the Hobbesian natural laws were to be understood as divine commands. Warrender's book appeared in 1957 and was resolutely textualist in its approach, exploring Hobbes's arguments in isolation and with considerable interpretive charity. His subject was the “theoretical basis” of Hobbes's writing, the importance of which might not be “historically conspicuous.”

Through an analysis and historical contextualization of Gujarati writer Karsandas Mulji's Travels in England (1866), this article makes two interrelated arguments. First, Indian liberals' efforts to translate notions of liberty exposed the gap between liberalism's subtractive and additive projects, its abolition of customary constraints on the subject and its imposition of new constraints. Second, Mulji's travelogue suggests the complexity of anthropology in post-1850s India, when an amateur form of social science persisted alongside the emergence of the ethnographic state. As an amateur ethnologist, Mulji drew freely on source material from Henry Mayhew to Samuel Smiles to present England as a moral template for India. His turn to self-help or self-improvement literature, moreover, suggests the global scope of a mid-Victorian ethical culture that set the stage for the ethical concerns of anticolonial thinkers like M. K. Gandhi.

George Cotkin, Existential America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003)

Ann Fulton, Apostles of Sartre: Existentialism in America, 1945–1963 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999)

Jean-Philippe Mathy, Extrême-Occident: French Intellectuals and America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993)

Jean-Philippe Mathy, French Resistance: The French–American Culture Wars (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000)

More than a century ago, the German Catholic historian Sebastian Merkle made the case for a specifically Catholic engagement with the Enlightenment. His audience was largely Protestant academics, who assumed that Protestantism and modernity went hand in hand. But Merkle also refuted wholesale condemnations of the Enlightenment by conservative Catholics, who blamed the movement for the ills that had beset the Church since the French Revolution and which were at the root of the liberal attack on Catholicism up through the Kulturkampf. Merkle insisted that a moderate and constructive Catholic Enlightenment had embraced some aspects of modernity, and that it was important to acknowledge this historical reality in order to fully bring the Church into the modern age.

During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Rabbi Joseph Karo composed two major Jewish codes of law: the Beit Yosef, and its abridged version, Sulchan ‘Aruch. Though several centuries of legal discussion and scholarship have passed since their publication, these double codes of law were never superseded. This codification project defined the axial place of law in Jewish tradition. I argue that it responded to changes in legal processes and the enforcement of law that simultaneously transformed early modern Europe and the Ottoman world. Transcontinentally connected changes in political institutions—the formation of a centralized Islamic empire in the Ottoman case, and the formation of centralized states in Europe—dramatically redefined the role of law and legal codification in the forging of state power and community identities. The resultant belief among Sephardi rabbis, including Karo, that changes in Jewish legal tradition were now needed, prompted a redefinition of Jewish legal culture, whereby law (a gradually centralized conception of it) began to be seen as the foundation of Jewish religious heritage and ethnic identity. Despite the absence of state backing, early modern transformations in Jewish law were thus part of comparable changes taking place in the European and Islamic legal worlds.

Recent scholarship has examined Alexis de Tocqueville's underexplored assertion that American racial stratification functioned as an extension of European feudalism. However, Tocqueville was not alone in his insights. At least a half-dozen nineteenth-century African American writers and thinkers, including Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Maria Stewart, Harriet Jacobs, Sojourner Truth, and especially Hosea Easton, have also described America's racial hierarchy as a continuation of antecedent European feudal social structures. Not only do their perspectives on what I call racial feudalism in America lend credence to Tocqueville's hypothesis that the afterlife of medieval social frameworks continued to persist in the post-Enlightenment United States, but also black Americans establish a distinctive body of knowledge that must be read alongside Tocqueville to render a more complete understanding of antebellum US social hierarchy.