Historical scholarship often relies on intermittent adjustments rather than radical innovation. Through a close reading of three different universal histories published between 1690 and 1760, this essay argues that the secularization of world history in the age of Enlightenment was an incomplete and often unintended process. Nonetheless, one of the most significant changes in this period was the centering of universal history in Europe, a process that accompanied the desacralization of the story of man. Once human progress was embraced as a universal process, the story of the development of the arts and sciences gradually eclipsed the non-European cultures that had formerly played a central role in the Christian narrative of human history.

Antonio Gramsci's notion of “passive revolution” has often been understood as a distinctive historical narrative, political concept, or theory of state formation. This article proposes to consider it instead as a “heuristic formula” within the “lexical architecture” of the Prison Notebooks. Based upon a diachronic and contextualist analysis of the usage of the formula, I argue that Gramsci's research on passive revolution emerged as a critical element within the development of his own distinctive conception of the “sublation” and “actualization” of the slogan of “the revolution in permanence.” Attending to this dialectical relationship allows the political and strategic dimensions of passive revolution to be highlighted, and suggests new paths of research for the debate about its analytic fertility and contemporary relevance.

What motivated an absolutist Erastian who rejected religious freedom, defended uniform public worship, and deemed the public expression of disagreement a catalyst for war to endorse a movement known to history as the champion of toleration, religion's freedom from coercion, and separation of church and state? At least three factors motivated Hobbes's 1651 endorsement of Independency: the Erastianism of Cromwellian Independency, the influence of the politique tradition, and, paradoxically, the contribution of early modern practices of toleration to maintaining the public sphere's religious uniformity. The third factor illustrates how a key function of the emerging private sphere in the early modern period was to protect uniformity, rather than diversity; it also shows that what was novel was not so much the public/private distinction itself, but the separation of two previously conflated dimensions of publicity—visibility and representativeness—that enabled early modern Europeans to envisage modes of worship out in the open, yet still private.

One of the most vibrant subfields of American intellectual history over the last fifteen years has been the history of the social sciences during the late twentieth century, a period when the size and quality of American social-scientific output grew explosively. Given that the major historiographic push to historicize this period of social science began in the 1990s, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the declaration by some Americans of Cold War victory, it was perhaps inevitable that the geopolitics of the Cold War emerged as a major tool for accounting for what was distinct about the social science and broader culture of the postwar period. After all, wasn't it obvious that what made the 1990s different from the decades that came before it was the fact that the Cold War was over? And wasn't it further obvious that the bipolar geopolitics and nuclear night terrors of the Cold War had deformed everything they touched, not least the work of American social scientists? One marker of this obviousness was the transformation of the term “Cold War” from a noun describing (perhaps already too vaguely) a particular sort of geopolitical struggle into an adjective that could explain all sorts of extra-geopolitical activity. By the turn of the century this adjectivalization of the Cold War had become something of a historiographic cliché, a blunt (if not lazy) way to historicize our immediate forebears. When John Lewis Gaddis chose to title his “rethink” of Cold War history Now We Know, he didn't even need to add Better.

This essay offers a detailed reconstruction of the thought of Inayatullah Khan al-Mashriqi, a camp-follower of fascism in inter-war India who sought to reformulate Islam as a “Religion of Science” according to the precepts of Darwinian evolutionism. Mashriqi has so far been neglected because his political impact was only short-term and did not contribute to the larger story of decolonization in India and Pakistan. But far from being marginal, Mashriqi's philosophical ruminations actually provide a window for a much-needed re-evaluation of the meaning of colonial modernity. While there was much in Mashriqi's writing that conforms to the usual picture of anti-colonial nation-building—his obsession with the truth of science, for instance, and his emphasis on disciplinary political methodologies—the by now standardized critique of such features in the “postcolonial” literature no longer suffices. Behind a façade of continuities with nineteenth-century “Enlightenment” traditions stood a much darker vision of modernity that no longer had any recourse to the certainties of a grand narrative of modernization. Instead, it was a vision that fluctuated between mystical exuberance and deep pessimism. The only sense of certainty was provided by a radical notion of emotional authenticity and a related belief in quasi-religious leadership figures. The larger conclusion to be drawn from the dualistic and contradictory structure of Mashriqi's “fascism” is that the intellectual history of inter-war South Asia needs to be given relative autonomy from the standard nationalism–modernization narrative, for rather than the continuation of an earlier modernity, it should be interpreted as the starting point of a new and much darker formation that arguably continues into the present.

Adam Smith's lectures present a bleak theory of history in which the innate human “love of domination” results in the perpetuation of increasingly repressive slave societies. This theory challenges common conceptions about the philosophical and historical foundations of Smith's thought, and accounting for it requires moving beyond traditional dichotomies between an “economic” sphere grounded on asocial wants and a “political” sphere grounded on sociability. For Smith, under the influence of earlier thinkers like La Rochefoucauld, Mandeville, and Rousseau, all human behavior is rooted in our esteem-seeking social nature, and the dominant form of esteem-seeking is a “corrupt” one based on external superiority. Understanding these foundations explains why Smith views both European commercial society and its central motive of economic self-interest as historically contingent, the product of a long series of unintended historical consequences.

This essay examines the thought of the French anthropologist Pierre Clastres (1938–1977). It situates his once-famous depiction of savage politics as a premonitory rejection of the state at the crossroads of several traditions, long- and short-term. First, Clastres's thought resonates with the primitivistic appeal by French “moralists” since the early modern period to the lifestyle of prehistoric societies; second, it casts light on the history of French anthropology in the crisis years of structuralism; and third, it reflects the revival of Friedrich Nietzsche in French thought of the era. Above all, however, the essay explains Clastres's thought as an attempt to resist and to overcome the well-known communist allegiances of postwar French intellectuals. Early in rejecting communism, Clastres owed his prominence to the 1970s popularization of the critique of “totalitarianism.” The so-called “passing of an illusion” of communism, one version of which Clastres pioneered, is often interpreted as the replacement of confusion with truth. It is more interesting, the essay suggests, to situate it in its time, as a complex achievement as defective as it was creative, if Clastres's thought is taken as an example. In closing, the essay suggests some legacies, often unintentional, Clastres left behind in French political thought of the years since his death.

W. V. Quine is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential philosophers of the twentieth century. Quine wrote and lectured on logic, philosophy of language, and epistemology throughout his long career, and was one of the American figures who did most to establish the analytic tradition of philosophy in the United States. Until recently, the historical development of both Quine's philosophy and the analytic tradition of which it is a part remained unexamined by historians and philosophers alike. In the last decade or so, however, analytic philosophers have begun to assess the history of their enterprise, and Quine's place within it. Building on this welcome development with the tools of intellectual history, this essay examines Quine's philosophical apprenticeship in the late 1920s and 1930s.

The basic tenets of Quine's mature thought set in early in his studies. Most notably, he displayed in his student writings a commitment to science as the primary theory of the world within which philosophical inquiry should take place. Yet he found the uncertain direction of interwar American philosophy uncongenial to his views. During a year of postdoctoral research in Europe, Quine encountered the work of analytic philosophers and logicians such as Rudolf Carnap and Alfred Tarski. Their scientific program for philosophy captivated Quine, who returned to Harvard a champion of their work. For the rest of the 1930s, Quine was an indefatigable advocate of the analytic tradition; he brought news of European logic and scientific philosophy to American universities. His purpose in doing so was to move American philosophy towards science and away from what he saw as its metaphysical entanglements. The reception and transformation of analytic philosophy in the United States is shown to have involved a complex dynamic between foreign and domestic conceptions of philosophy.

Historians of political thought tend to emphasize the continuous flow and transmission of concepts from one generation to the next, and from one place to another. Historians of Indian ideas suggest that India was governed with concepts imported from Europe. This article argues instead that the sense of rupture that British officials experienced, from both the intellectual history of Britain and Indian society, played a significant role in forming colonial political culture. It examines the practice of “Hindu” property law in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Bengal. It suggests that the attempt to textualize and codify law in the 1810s and 1820s emerged from British doubts about their ability to construct viable forms of rule on the basis of existing intellectual and institutional traditions. The abstract and seemingly “utilitarian” tone of colonial political discourse was a practical response to British anxieties about their distance from Indian society. It was not a result of the “influence” of a particular school of British thinkers.

As the “Indo-Pacific” concept gains currency in public discourses on foreign policy, it remains poorly understood as an idea, due to inadequate surveys of its intellectual origins and international visions in global contexts. This article studies Karl Haushofer's theory of the “Indo-Pacific” as an organic and integral space primed for political consciousness. Haushofer not only laid the oceanographic foundation of the “Indo-Pacific” with novel evidence in marine sciences, ethnography, and philology, but also legitimated it as a social and political space. Mindful of Germany's geopolitical predicament in the interwar period and informed by sources in indology and sinology, Haushofer envisaged the political resurrection of South, East, and Southeast Asia against colonial domination, and conceived the “Indo-Pacific” vision for remaking the international order.

Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism is a distinctively international history. It traces Nazism to a “collapse of the nation-state” across Europe, brought on by European anti-Semitism and European imperialism, rather than to specifically German developments. This essay recovers the political meaning of that methodological choice on Arendt's part, by documenting the surprising intersection between Arendt's involvement in political debates over postwar European reconstruction, where she made an intellectual alliance with Resistance groups across Europe and strongly argued for European federation, and her involvement in historiographical debates over the sources of Nazism. I show the explicit connection that Arendt drew between an internationalist historiography of Nazism and the need for an internationalist European politics, in a series of essays she wrote in the mid-1940s. I then argue that this connection continues to play a prominent role in Origins itself, sharply differentiating Arendt from other prominent theorists of Nazism.

Recent literature on the moral economy of nineteenth-century German historiography shares with older scholarship on Leopold von Ranke's methodological revolution a tendency to refer to “the” historical discipline in the third person singular. This would make sense as long as historians occupied a common professional space and/or shared a basic understanding of what it meant to be a historian. Yet, as this article demonstrates, in a world sharply divided over political and religious issues, historians found it difficult to agree on what it meant to be a good historian. Drawing on the case of Ranke's influential pupil Georg Waitz, whose death in 1886 occasioned a debate on the relative merits of the example that Waitz had embodied, this article argues that historians in early imperial Germany were considerably more divided over what they called “the virtues of the historian” than has been acknowledged to date. Their most important frame of reference was not a shared discipline but rather a variety of approaches corresponding to a diversity of models or examples (“scholarly personae,” in modern academic parlance), the defining features of which were often starkly contrasted. Although common ground beneath these disagreements was not entirely absent, the habit of late nineteenth-century German historians to position themselves between Waitz and Heinrich von Sybel, Ranke and Friedrich Christoph Dahlmann, or other pairs of proper names turned into models of virtue, suggests that these historians experienced their professional environment as characterized primarily by disagreement over the marks of a good historian.

Whilst Edward Gibbon's Memoirs of My Life comprise a notoriously complex document of autobiographical artifice, there is no reason to question the honesty of its revelation of his attitudes to geography and its relationship to the historian's craft. Writing of his boyhood before going up to Oxford, Gibbon commented that his

This article examines the “new professions” as alternative settings where women thought and wrote about the international. Presenting the case studies of Fannie Fern Andrews, Mary Parker Follett and Florence Wilson, it shows that, in emerging professional and disciplinary contexts that have hitherto lain beyond the purview of historians of international thought, these women developed their thinking about the international. The insights they derived from their practical work in schools, immigrant communities and libraries led them to emphasize the mechanics of participation in international affairs and caused them to think across the scales of the individual, the local group and relations between nations. By moving beyond the history of organizations and networks and instead looking for the professional settings and audiences which enabled women to theorize, this article shifts both established understandings of what counts as international thought and traditional conceptions of who counts as an international thinker.

The digital age has been a boon for intellectual historians, particularly those of us who work on early modern Europe and America. The mass digitization of old books has made research more efficient than ever: first editions are there for the downloading on Google Books, Gallica, Liberty Fund, Project Gutenberg, and elsewhere. The creation of such large-scale databases as Early English Books Online (EEBO), Eighteenth-Century Collection Online (ECCO), the Making of the Modern World (formerly Goldsmiths’–Kress), or, on a more modest level, the ARTFL project's FRANTEXT, has also breathed new life into old texts. Books that lay forgotten for generations can now be rediscovered thanks to the magic of search engines. To be sure, this power has not always been wielded for good: students today can “cite anything, but construe nothing,” stringing together KWICs (keywords in context), and reading only a surrounding sentence or two (if that). But however they are used, these tools and platforms have transformed our daily work habits.

The fundamental importance of theology in the work of Carl Schmitt has been the subject of much recent literature on this controversial figure. However, there has been little consensus on the precise nature of Schmitt's own political theology—that is, on what links there are between his religious or metaphysical concepts and his ideas concerning the nature of political organization and action. This is especially the case with his works of the Nazi era, which are now being studied with the same kind of critical attention given to his more influential Weimar works. In this essay I focus on the important turn Schmitt made in the early years of the Third Reich, from “decisionism” to what he called “institutional thinking,” in order to reveal the theological basis for his understanding of the new regime. I will then argue that Schmitt's institutional approach had in fact always been central to his earlier, better-known writings on law and the state. Schmitt's concept of the institution, which had roots in French legal theory, grounded a political theology that was in the end less a metaphysical approach to the state than one that drew on the concrete example of the legal institutional order of the Catholic Church.

During the Coinage Crisis of 1695, John Locke successfully advocated a full recoinage without devaluation by insisting on silver money's “intrinsick value.” The Great Recoinage has ever since been seen as a crucial step toward the Financial Revolution and it was long regarded as Locke's most consequential achievement. This article places Locke's intervention in the context of the postrevolutionary English state at war and reads his monetary pamphlets as an integral, if largely neglected, part of his political philosophy. Instead of taking Locke's insistence on “intrinsick value” itself at face value, I argue that it was precisely money's fragile conventionality that threatened its role as a societal bond of trust. In response to this fragility and corruptibility, Locke tied money by fiat to an initially arbitrary but unalterable quantity of metal. While Locke's argument contributed to the modern naturalization of money, it arose from a paradoxical political act of monetary depoliticization.

M. K. Gandhi's “Discourses on the Gita,” a series of talks delivered to ashramites at Sabarmati during 1926 and 1927, provides a singular instance in Indian intellectual thought in which the Bhagavad Gita's message of action is transformed into a theory of non-violent resistance. This essay argues that Gandhi's reading of the Gita has to be placed within an identifiable general understanding of the political that emerged among the so-called “extremists’ in the Congress towards the beginning of the twentieth century. Gandhi, we argue, wrested from the “Extremists” their vocabulary and their pre-eminent political text, the Gita, and put them to use in the cause of non-violent politics. But, more importantly, his discourses on the Gita after 1920 suggest an acceptance, on his part, of politics as it actually was. This is where he departed from the projects of Tilak or Aurobindo. The Gita, in Gandhi's hand, became a talismanic device that allowed the satyagrahi his or her involvement in political action while providing protection from the necessary and unavoidable venality of politics and its propensity to violence.

This essay explores the development of Georg Simmel's interpretation of Immanuel Kant's philosophy in the context of neo-Kantianism and its preoccupation with the question of unity in modern diversity. It argues that the neo-Kantian movement can be divided into two periods: in the first, unity was addressed with regard to Kant's epistemology; in the second period, the main issue was the overall coherence of Kantian teaching. Simmel, who belonged to the younger generation of neo-Kantians, absorbed the conclusions of the previous generation that purged Kantian epistemology from its metaphysical foundations related to the noumenal world. Yet he did not share the views of his peers who considered Kant to be the philosopher of cultural plurality. On the contrary, he argued that Kant's system is thoroughly intellectualistic, and that ethics, aesthetics and religion within it are subordinated to logic. At the same time, his own philosophy presupposed cultural plurality akin to that of other neo-Kantians. In other words, Simmel abandoned Kant in order to develop his own version of neo-Kantianism.

This article restores the context of political action to Burke's thinking about politics. It begins with the specific case of his interventions in the parliamentary debate over the Quebec Bill in 1774, and proceeds from this focal point to establish the centrality of the theme of conquest to his political motivation and understanding in general. Burke's preoccupation with conquest drove him to examine eighteenth-century British politics within a set of comparative historical frameworks. These frameworks encompassed the trajectories of both modern European and imperial politics and ancient historical development. The objective of Burke's politics of conquest was to overcome the destructive influence of the spirit of conquest. That objective involved deciding upon and justifying courses of action with reference to these comparative historical frameworks of understanding. Careful investigation shows that while Burke's approach to this task was powerfully influenced by Montesquieu, his arguments invariably entailed serious criticism of Montesquieu's conclusions. Properly understood, these criticisms show that Burke himself did not endorse the political principles that were later taken to constitute “Burkian conservatism”. The article draws the conclusion that a thorough grasp of the politics of conquest in Burke's thinking will force us to reposition him in the history of political theory.