This essay provides a close study of the international horizons of Kallol, a Bengali literary journal, published in post-World War I Calcutta. It uncovers a historical pattern of Bengali intellectual life that marked the period from the 1870s to the 1920s, whereby an imperial imagination was transformed into an international one, as a generation of intellectuals born between 1885 and 1905 reinvented the political category of “youth”. Hermeneutics, as a philosophically informed study of how meaning is created through conversation, and grounded in this essay in the thought of Hans Georg Gadamer, helps to reveal this pattern. While translocal vistas of intellectual life were always present in Bengali thought, the contours of those horizons changed drastically in the period under study. Bengali intellectual life, framed within a center–periphery imperial axis in the 1870s, was resolutely reframed within a multipolar international constellation by the 1920s. This change was reflected by the new conversations in which young Bengalis became entangled in the years after the war. At a linguistic level, the shift was registered by the increasing use of terms such as bideś (the foreign) and āntarjātik (international), as opposed to bilāt (England, or the West), to name the world abroad. The world outside empire increasingly became a resource and theme for artists and writers. Major changes in global geopolitical alignments and in the colonial politics of British India, and the relations between generations within Bengali bhadralok society, provide contexts for the rise of this international youth imagination.

The slavery debates in the antebellum United States sparked a turning point in American theology. They forced moderately antislavery Protestants, including William Ellery Channing, Francis Wayland, and Horace Bushnell, to reconcile their contradictory loyalties to the Bible and to antislavery reform. Unable to use the letter of the Bible to make a scriptural case against slavery in itself, the moderates argued that although slavery had been acceptable in biblical times, it had become a sin. Antislavery Protestantism required a theory of moral progress, a deeply unorthodox idea that became fundamental to the development of late nineteenth-century liberal Protestantism. The antislavery argument from moral progress, along with the moral progress represented by abolition, established a progressive conception of revelation that would be further developed by late nineteenth-century liberal theologians, including Newman Smyth, Lyman Abbott, and Theodore Munger.

This essay shows that the central core of Tocqueville's book, its condemnation of the centralist state of the Old Regime, can be placed in a specific tradition in French political thought—the legitimist critique of centralization. Long before the publication of L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution, the legitimists had made the problem of centralization into one of their central themes, and they had come to attribute all of France's ills to the centralist legacy. As this essay illustrates, the particular vocabulary and arguments used by the legitimists to describe the nefarious effects of centralization on the French body politic showed a considerable resemblance to the language used by Tocqueville in L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution. Indeed, this resemblance is so striking that, while direct influence is difficult to pinpoint, the legitimist publicists and political thinkers discussed in this essay—many of whom were friends or acquaintances of Tocqueville's—contributed in an important way to shaping the linguistic universe in which L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution was created.

Having put an end to his first great movement of non-cooperation following the First World War, Gandhi sat down to learn the lessons of this early experiment in mass politics. In 1926 he went on to impart these lessons to his fellow workers in the Sabarmati Ashram by way of a series of lectures on the Bhagavad Gita. Gandhi was interested in exploring the relations between violence and non-violence, which he thought were so intimate that one could very easily turn into the other. Seeking out the Archimedean point that made such a turning possible, the Mahatma had occasion to criticize any ethics that would divide good from evil on the basis of a moral calculus. How, he asked, was an ethics possible that recognized the intractability of ignorance and compulsion? Any ethical system that relied upon knowledge and choice, he thought, was either deluded or true only for a very small elite. A common ethics, then, had to be one which recognized ignorance and compulsion not negatively, as posing limits to moral life, but rather in the form of positive virtues like duty and obedience. Gandhi's commentary on the Gita was therefore an attempt to think about moral action in the context of ignorance and compulsion, which he did by focusing on the integrity of the act itself divested of the idealism lent it by any moral calculus.

The story of French liberalism is, we are often told, one of exceptions, eccentricities, and enigmas. Compared to their British counterparts, French liberals seem more reluctant to embrace individualism. Whereas liberals in the English-speaking world typically espouse what Isaiah Berlin called “negative liberty”—a sphere of private autonomy from which the state is legally excluded—French liberals have often proved highly accommodating towards “positive liberty”—that is, liberty insofar as it is tethered to collectively defined ends. Most crucially, rather than seeking to shield individuals and civil society from an intrusive state, French liberals—consistent with a broader trend in French political culture—are inclined to see the state as an essential and even emancipatory political tool. In this vein, Jean-Fabien Spitz writes in a recent collection entitled French Liberalism from Montesquieu to the Present Day,

Among the topics discussed in Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, those of education, training, and pedagogy are apt to seem the least compelling. Certainly, the earliest debates about Structure focused on other, more controversial, matters: incommensurability, meaning change, the rationality of theory choice, normal science—the list goes on. Over the past two decades, however, a growing concern among historians and sociologists of science with the nature of scientific apprenticeship has stimulated greater appreciation of the importance of questions of teaching and learning to the philosophical position sketched in Structure. This paper seeks to develop further our understanding of these issues as they bear on Kuhn's theory of science.

This essay reconstructs conceptually and situates historically contemporary French philosopher Marcel Gauchet's theory of the origins and development of modern selfhood. It argues that his history of the self as the interiorization of constitutive alienation, and of the history of self-consciousness as the progressive recognition of this alienation, originated out of a unique combination of historical factors—the radical politics of May 1968, the rise of the antipsychiatry movement, and (perhaps most surprisingly) the new psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan. The essay considers Gauchet's study, together with his partner Gladys Swain, of the foundations of psychiatry, and investigates the connections of their narrative of origins to Michel Foucault's work. The essay concludes by turning to Gauchet's more recent contributions and considering the implications of his history of the self for Anglo-American scholarship.

Josiah Tucker, who was the Anglican dean of Gloucester from 1758 until his death in 1799, is best known today as a controversialist, a political economist and a lesser contemporary of Adam Smith. Little attention has been paid, however, to the important relationship between his religious writings and his wider economic thought. This article addresses this lack of attention in two ways: first by demonstrating the link between Tucker's conception of civil and religious liberty and his “science” of political economy, and second by drawing sustained attention to his economic adaptation and reformulation of the moral philosophy of Bishop Joseph Butler, Tucker's ecclesiastical mentor from 1739 to 1752. Emphasizing Butler and Tucker's views on the traditional Christian virtue of charity, and the moral duty of the rich towards the poor, the article suggests that both clergymen were proponents of a sociability-based, neo-Stoic conception of human nature, which was not only compatible with, but also dependent upon, the established Anglican Church and state and the predominantly Whig commercial order. In consequence, Tucker's political economy was premised on the unavoidability of social subordination and economic inequality as necessary hallmarks of modern commercial society. Accordingly, the article closes with a brief discussion of Tucker's “Butlerian” assessment and rejection of the “anti-social” doctrine of individual natural rights, associated with the popular radicalism of the American and French Revolutions in the latter half of the eighteenth century.

Wilhelm Friedrich Georg Roscher (1817–94) is generally remembered as a significant nineteenth-century German political economist and a contributor to the “German historical school of economics.” His work is usually placed in the context of a larger narrative about the development of economic thought. Yet intellectual historians have rarely noticed that, for Roscher, Staatswirthschaft or Nationalökonomie were subordinate to a larger science of politics, and few have engaged with the substance of his political thought (as opposed to his economics). The aim of this article is to provide an interpretation of Roscher as a political thinker, focusing especially on his account of the modern European state between the 1840s and the 1890s. In particular, it explores Roscher's concern that nineteenth-century Europe's economically advanced societies, characterized by an unstable combination of democratic sovereignty, deep socio-economic inequality and a centralized state apparatus, would soon find themselves at the mercy of “military tyranny” or “Caesarism.” It underlines the ways in which Roscher's preoccupation with ancient history fed into his estimation of nineteenth-century politics, and also examines his comparative assessment of democracy's prospects in Britain, France and the United States.

Hannah Arendt's early writings, focused on Jewish politics in the 1930s and 1940s, are in many ways her most directly political work. Yet certain problematic concepts in these texts, notably the idea of the “Jewish nation,” have led many to disregard it. A shift in the themes of Arendt's work following the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951 has resulted in further divisions being drawn between the pre- and post-Origins work. This essay opposes both these positions. By mapping out the causes and development of Arendt's thought on the “Jewish nation,” in particular through her critical engagement with Zionism and her support of a binational or federal political solution in Israel and Palestine, the influence of Arendt's early thought on Jewish politics is shown to form the basis of a more general theory of politics, further developed in her later work on the nature of the political.

Among the most important ideas in Cold War nuclear strategy and arms control was that of “stability”—the notion that by protecting weapons for use in retaliation, the superpowers would be less likely to fight a thermonuclear war. Conventional wisdom among strategists and historians of strategy has long held that stability was inherent to the logic of rational nuclear deterrence. This essay shows the conventional wisdom to be mistaken. It examines the technical practice of Thomas Schelling, who introduced the stability idea in a classic 1958 paper. Celebrated as a game theorist, Schelling was actually trained as a Keynesian macroeconomic modeler during the second half of the 1940s. In 1958, he used Keynesian techniques to frame deterrence as a stable system of dynamic adjustment, akin to the stable macroeconomic system he had modeled as a young economist. Among Schelling's fellow strategists, stability quickly became popular as a rationalization for their preferred nuclear deployment policies.

This essay will explore the presence of Germany as a key trope of Bengali nationalist discourse in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth. It will problematize the exhaustiveness of a conventional spectrum of interpretation in the analysis of colonial intellectual history that has been defined at one extreme by the cultural violence of colonial interpellation and at the other by a hermeneutic conception of authentic intercultural encounter across the limits of great traditions. When Bengalis actually began to interact directly with Germans and German thought, it was an encounter whose parameters had already been deeply determined in the course of the preceding forty or fifty years. But I shall also argue that this appeal to the trope of Germany emerged from within a more complex, multilateral configuration in which “Germany” was itself a key figure of Victorian discourses in Britain itself.

This article revisits what has often been called the “naive presentism” of Voltaire's historical work. It looks at the methodological and philosophical reasons for Voltaire's deliberate focus on modern history as opposed to ancient history, his refusal to “make allowances for time” in judging the past, and his extreme selectiveness in determining the relevance of past events to world history. Voltaire's historical practice is put in the context of the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns, and considered in a tradition of universal history going back to Bossuet and leading up to nineteenth-century German historicism. Paradoxically, Voltaire is a major figure in the history of historiography not in spite of his presentism (as Ernst Cassirer and Peter Gay have argued), but because of it.

This article scrutinizes a little-known venture in Turkish republican intellectual history, namely Turkish neo-spiritualism. Combining the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Western trend of modern spiritualism with its local dynamics and sociocultural structures, Turkish neo-spiritualism integrated the spiritual philosophies and practices of Western spiritualism with various doctrines of Islamic mysticism (Sufism). It thus sheds light on the complex ways in which a form of knowledge that was originated and disseminated from the West was not derivative in its “imported” version. The article demonstrates how modern spiritualism attained new meanings and connotations in Turkey by merging with indigenous cultural codes and memory, and how it responded to (or was shaped within) local sociopolitical as well as intellectual contexts, particularly including the top-down secularism of the early Turkish Republic.

Although in most accounts of liberalism Africans appear only as passive victims or beneficiaries of European policies, in the early nineteenth century many Africans shared liberal aspirations for the “good society” based on free trade, constitutional government and individual property. However, African liberalism was articulated in the context of an existential crisis provoked by the new European world order. Hassuna D’Ghies, educated in Tripoli and Europe, articulated an overtly “African” liberal response to this crisis of adaptation through his writings and political activity in London in the 1820s. By the end of the decade, D’Ghies had abandoned this project and returned to North Africa to take up a more authoritarian model of reform that ultimately led to the reabsorption of Tripoli and its region into the Ottoman Empire. D’Ghies's turn toward an “imperial liberalism” underwritten by Islamic legitimacy suggests the impossibility of reconciling African autonomy with European liberal claims to universality, and the ways in which African political thought was fragmented by imperial globalization.

This essay examines one of the least-studied works in the philosophical corpus of Theodor Adorno, The Concept of the Unconscious in the Transcendental Theory of Mind. A retracted habilitation thesis composed in 1926–7, the text is often regarded as an exposition of the philosophical system of Adorno's teacher, Hans Cornelius, that bears little significance for Adorno's mature works. I argue that Concept of the Unconscious sheds significant light on both the historical origins and the conceptual underpinnings of the relationship between society and the psyche that Adorno would theorize over the course of his intellectual career. In this early text, Adorno articulated a dual critique of dominant neo-Kantian and vitalist understandings of the unconscious, turning to Freud for a more adequate account of the unconscious as a product of intertwining psychological and social processes. Adorno developed this dialectical understanding of the psycho-social relationship in numerous postwar writings on psychoanalysis.

Two legal publications that Carl Schmitt produced during the First World War contain the first expressions of his maximally authoritarian interpretation of the state of emergency. Yet, when read in conjunction with his wartime journals, we find that his production of these texts is contextualized by a profound, private struggle over whether to accept or reject the political values they articulate. What is most surprising about Schmitt's self-presentation in these journals is the degree to which, during the early war period, he expresses a visceral anti-authoritarianism and concern for decidedly liberal ideals such as the rights of the individual and the separation of powers. But it is also in these journals that we observe the process—culminating in a moment of existential decision during the winter of 1915–16—through which he came to see such liberal commitments as untenable on both personal and political-theoretical levels simultaneously.

In 1950 Martin Heidegger published his 1938 lecture “Die Zeit des Weltbildes” in the essay collection Holzwege. He did so in order to document his “inner resistance” after the mid-1930s against the Nazi regime. This text has since been seen as evidence for Heidegger's early rejection of National Socialism and his refusal of a modern ideology that culminated in the totalitarian system. In spite of its influence, the published text has never been compared to the original lecture delivered in 1938. The assessment has now been made, and the differences between the two documents are a striking testimony to the artful falsifications that Heidegger used to re-establish his reputation and philosophical standing after the collapse of the Nazi system.

John Rawls (1921–2002) and his work are now squarely a subject for history. In the more than fifteen years since his death, a rich body of scholarship has emerged which attempts, in different ways, to understand the nature, development, and impact of Rawls's thought from a variety of historical perspectives. With 2021 marking fifty years since A Theory of Justice (1971) was first published, this special forum examines what we here call the “historical Rawls.”

The story of Western philosophy in the late twentieth century is, first and foremost, a tale of the discipline's division into two distinct discourses—analytic and Continental philosophy. This article argues that institutional dynamics of American higher education played a decisive role in the creation of this divide. Through quantitative analysis of the hiring and promotion of philosophers, it demonstrates how hierarchies and informal academic networks established boundaries for mainstream American philosophy that excluded modern European thought. Following the end of World War II, as American universities expanded, philosophy departments nearly tripled in size. However, the discipline was dominated by a Brahmin caste of elite departments that hired its own graduates almost exclusively. In this environment, the invidious distinction between the “elite” analytic departments and heterodox departments at the discipline's periphery was mapped onto the styles of philosophy practiced at those schools, and shaped America's reception of “Continental” European philosophy.