Hannah Arendt's well-known examinations of the problem of evil are not contradictory and they are central to her corpus. Evil can be banal in some cases (Adolf Eichmann) and radical (the phenomenon of totalitarianism) in others. But behind all expressions of evil, in Arendt's formulations, is the imperative that it be confronted by thinking subjects and thoroughly historicized. This led her away from a view of evil as radical to one of evil as banal. Arendt's ruminations on evil are illuminated, in part, by concerns that she shared with her fellow New York intellectuals about the withering effects of mass culture upon individual volition and understanding. In confronting the challenges of evil, Arendt functioned as a “moral historian,” suggesting profitable ways that historians might look at history from a moral perspective. Indeed, her work may be viewed as anticipating a “moral turn” currently afoot in the historical profession.

This article analyses the early international thought of Trinidad-born Marxist journalist Claudia Jones. We focus on a neglected aspect of Jones's intellectual production in the United States: her interrogation of geopolitics in her Weekly Review articles in the early 1940s. We situate Jones in relation to the contemporary popularization of geopolitical thought in this period, reading her alongside another neglected figure in histories of international thought, the African American geopolitical scholar and diplomatic historian Merze Tate. Jones read together the geopolitical, class, racialized, and anticolonial implications of the expanding Nazi empire, positioning her at the forefront of Marxist theoretical innovation in this period. Moving beyond studies of canonical texts and white male thinkers in international intellectual history, we build on black women's intellectual history to center a black working-class woman's popular theorizing of international relations.

Anglophone historians of modern Europe know Karl Barth primarily as the intellectual leader of the anti-Nazi Church Struggle and the principle author of the Barmen Declaration of 1934, which spoke a dramatic “No” to National Socialism's attack on the German churches. But Barth was also arguably the most important—and most prolific—theologian of the twentieth century. Aside from his unfinished magnum opus, the fourteen-volume Church Dogmatics, he published more than one hundred books and articles, and he quite literally wrote until the day he died in 1968. Barth's output has elicited an equally impressive secondary literature, produced mostly by students of theology and amounting to around fourteen thousand titles in twenty-five languages. As might be expected, theologians differ in their interpretations of Barth, seeing him as a formative voice in “neo-orthodox” Protestantism, a left-wing socialist, a fitting subject of deconstructionist philosophical theology, a thinker who showed the way “past the modern,” or a “critically realistic dialectical theologian.” In view of this record it may come as a surprise to find that until recently the Swiss was still “habitually honored but not much read,” as theologian George Hunsinger wrote in 1991. Hunsinger was not the only observer to see that Barth's work was never fully integrated into the corpus of theological culture in Europe and the United States despite the scholarly interest in his thought. This situation may be changing, as a transatlantic “Barth renaissance” now gathers momentum, nearly forty years after the great theologian's death.

Jawaharlal Nehru was both a historian and a self-conscious agent of historical change. This essay explores his political thought by bringing these two perspectives together. I argue that his approaches to a number of issues, including the state project that has been his most significant legacy, shared a concern with linking together the past, present and future. My concern here is primarily with the post-1947 phase of Nehru's career, which was marked by key shifts in his political thought due to a perceived transformation of temporal experience and an altered relationship with history. By attending to the way his thought worked through notions of temporality and historicity, this article offers insights into Nehru's understanding of technological modernity, violence, socialism, the individual, the nation and the role of the state.

This article brings the case of imperial transformation of the Russian Empire/Soviet Union into global discussions about empire, nationalism, and postimperial governance, and highlights the political and legal imaginaries that shaped this transformation, including their global and entangled character. This article argues that the legal and political discourses of decentralization, autonomism, and federalism that circulated at the time of the imperial crisis between the Revolution of 1905 and the adoption of the Soviet Constitution in 1924 contributed to the formation of an ethno-national federation in place of the Russian Empire, despite both the efforts of the Bolsheviks to create a unitary state, and the expectations of a different future among contemporary observers. At the same time, the postimperial institutional framework became a product of political conjunctures rather than the legal discourse. Its weakness before the consolidating party dictatorship made the Soviet Union a showcase of sham federalism and autonomism.

This article elucidates the meaning of Indian nationalism and its connection to religious universalism as a problem of ethics. It engages in that exercise of elucidation by interpreting a few of the key texts by Aurobindo Ghose on the relationship between ethics and politics in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Both secularist and subalternist histories have contributed to misunderstandings of Aurobindo's political thought and shown an inability to comprehend its ethical moorings. The specific failures in fathoming the depths of Aurobindo's thought are related to more general infirmities afflicting the history of political and economic ideas in colonial India. In exploring how best to achieve Indian unity, Aurobindo had shown that Indian nationalism was not condemned to pirating from the gallery of models of states crafted by the West. By reconceptualizing the link between religion and politics, this essay suggests a new way forward in Indian intellectual history.

This article traces a history of the literary critic and theorist Raymond Williams’s idea of the “structure of feeling”, the formation of which is situated within debates about the place of artistic and moral values in democratic politics during the 1940s and 1950s. It demonstrates that the “structure of feeling” was intended to circumvent an equation of collective normative legislation with totalitarianism in the early cultural Cold War, by conceiving the definition of values as a process upon which all individuals in a society were always, necessarily, engaged. In articulating this quasi-democratic account of the production of artistic and moral standards, Williams also sought to escape the various theories of “minority culture” that dominated literary and cultural criticism in mid-century Britain. However, his concept of the “structure of feeling” required him to maintain a privileged role for artistic and intellectual arbiters, which constrained his vision of a properly democratic culture. In conclusion, the article argues that the problem of “democratic values” that Williams addressed in his work of the 1950s was a major factor in the marginalization or exclusion of moral criticism from political argument in Britain after 1945, and suggests that this passage of intellectual history may therefore be of considerable importance to contemporary debates about the lineages and reform of, in a broad sense, neoliberal political economy.

The chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) is today recognized as one of the most important twentieth-century thinkers about scientific knowledge and scientific community. Yet Polanyi's philosophy of science exhibits an unresolved tension between science as a traditional community and science as an intellectual marketplace. Binding together these different models was important for his overall intellectual and political project, which was a defense of bourgeois liberal order. His philosophy of science and his economic thought were mutually supporting elements within this political project. Polanyi's intellectual corpus formed a contradictory unity, the tensions within which were manageable only under particular historical conditions. His attempt to hold together traditional authority and the free market fit with, and derived plausibility from, the social conditions under which his philosophical work came to maturity: Keynesian class compromise and surviving habits of social deference within postwar Britain.

Martin Heidegger and Ernst Jünger rightly count among the signal examples of intellectual complicity with National Socialism. But after supporting the National Socialist movement in its early years, they both withdrew from political activism during the 1930s and considered themselves to be in “inner emigration” thereafter. How did they react to the end of National Socialism, to the Allied occupation and finally to the foundation of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949? Did they abandon their stance of seclusion and engage once more with political issues? Or did they persist in their withdrawal from the political sphere? In analyzing the intellectual relationship of Heidegger and Jünger after 1945, the article reevaluates the assumption of a “deradicalization” (Jerry Muller) of German conservatism after the Second World War by showing that Heidegger's and Jünger's postwar positions were no less radical than their earlier thought, although their attitude towards the political sphere changed fundamentally.

The Order of Books was published in France in 1992 and translated into English in 1994. I have to confess that I had not reread it since, and perhaps I would have never read it again had I not been invited to do so for this exercise. The central aim of that book was to try to understand something of how in the period between the fourteenth and the eighteenth century the written word was classified, organized, and perceived by all the actors involved within the trajectory of the text, from authors to publishers and printers, from the printing shop to the library. I will begin by recounting some of the factors in my own intellectual life that I believe led up to that book, and go on to reflect on the arguments that I posited in 1992, in the hope of giving some account of the ways in which that earlier work might today be supplemented.

This article reconstructs French readings and debates of German approaches to Völkerpsychologie. Irrespective of its academic credentials, Völkerpsychologie was a symptomatic approach during a transformative period in German, and indeed European, intellectual history: based on the idea of progress—both scientific and moral—and on the belief in the primordial importance of the Volk, it represented the mindset of “ascendant liberalism” in an almost pure form. The relevance and importance of Völkerpsychologie can be gauged from a list of scholars and intellectuals who discussed its merits as well as its problems. Moreover, the reception of Völkerpsychologie was not restricted to German academics: it was in France where central elements of Völkerpsychologie had the most profound effect on scholars who tried to establish a social science. Some of the best-known French academics and intellectuals of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries—Théodule Ribot, Célestin Bouglé, Ernest Renan, Alfred Fouillée, Emile Durkheim, and Marcel Mauss—commented extensively on the works of Moritz Lazarus, Heymann Steinthal and Wilhelm Wundt, and developed their concepts of a “social science” that would reach beyond traditional philosophy, philology and history in a close dialogue with their German colleagues. Hence Völkerpsychologie was not a German oddity, but an integral part of the debates that led to the establishing of the modern social sciences, as its French reception shows.

Since the 1950s, interpreters of John Locke have debated whether his ideas about political economy figured among the intellectual sources of capitalist development. While some have labeled Locke a mercantile or agrarian “capitalist thinker,” others have insisted that, although a mercantilist, he was in no sense a theorist of capitalism. By reconstructing the relationship between Locke's ideas and the capitalist society of his day, this article challenges the prevailing terms through which commentators have traditionally interpreted his political economy and its place in the history of capitalism. I interpret Locke's perspectives on capital accumulation, foreign trade, and labor discipline throughout the 1690s as a reflection of the historical rise of export-oriented cycles of commodity manufacturing in the English countryside known as “proto-industrialization.” Moreover, I claim that, because proto-industrialization was tied to the expansion of England's colonial economy, this neglected context of Locke's economic doctrine sheds new light on his vision of empire. Looking to his writings on Ireland, I argue that Locke pursued proto-industrial economic reform by combining a hierarchical, stadial theory of progress with an imperial policy aimed at “improving” the colonies through decreed patterns of production and exchange that favored metropolitan trade.

This essay reconstructs Hannah Arendt's reading of Marx and Hegel in order to elucidate her critique of comprehensive philosophies of history. During the early 1950s Arendt endeavoured to develop a historical epistemology suitable to her then embryonic understanding of political action. Interpretations of her political thought either treat historical narrative as orthogonal to her central theoretical concerns, or focus on the role of “storytelling” in her writing. Both approaches underplay her serious consideration of the problem of historical understanding in the course of an engagement with European Marxism, French existentialism and French interpretations of Hegel. This essay begins with her writings on totalitarianism and her ambiguous relation with Marxism during the 1940s, and then examines her critique of French existentialism before finally turning to her “Totalitarian Elements of Marxism” project in the early 1950s. Reconstructing Arendt's treatment of philosophies of history helps elucidate the themes of violence and the relationship between means and ends in her political thought, and places a concept of history at the centre of her thought.

By embodying the hopes of a set of qualitative liberals who believed that postwar economic abundance opened up opportunities for self-development, David Riesman's bestselling The Lonely Crowd influenced the New Left. Yet Riesman's assessment of radical youth protest shifted over the course of the 1960s. As an antinuclear activist he worked closely with New Left leaders during the early 1960s. By the end of the decade, he became a sharp critic of radical protest. However, other leading members of Riesman's circle, such as Kenneth Keniston, author of the influential Young Radicals (1968), applied Riesman's ideas to create more sympathetic understandings of the New Left. Examining reactions to the New Left by Riesman and his associates allows historians to go beyond the common understanding of the key ideological divisions of the 1960s as existing between liberalism and radicalism or between liberalism and conservatism to better appreciate the significance of splits among liberals themselves.

The idea of sustainability is an odd composite of imagination and accounting. Environmental history is a permissive historical subdiscipline, and this essay is about the environmental–economic–intellectual history of an environmental idea, sustainability, which is historical in the sense that it is very old, and historical, too, in the sense that it is an idea about history, or about imagining the future in relation to the past. One of the oddities of the last several decades is that these old ideas have been transformed into the most celebrated of all the dicta of environmental policy, or an aspiration of UN commissions, “strategy consultancies”, and very large government agencies (“sustainability is our ‘true north.’”)

Historical epistemology is a form of intellectual history focused on “the history of categories that structure our thought, pattern our arguments and proofs, and certify our standards for explanation” (Lorraine Daston). Under this umbrella, historians have been studying the changing meanings of “objectivity,” “impartiality,” “curiosity,” and other virtues believed to be conducive to good scholarship. While endorsing this historicization of virtues and their corresponding vices, the present article argues that the meaning and relative importance of these virtues and vices can only be determined if their mutual dependencies are taken into account. Drawing on a detailed case study—a controversy that erupted among nineteenth-century orientalists over the publication of R. P. A. Dozy's De Israëlieten te Mekka (The Israelites in Mecca) (1864)—the paper shows that nineteenth-century orientalists were careful to examine (1) the degree to which Dozy practiced the virtues they considered most important, (2) the extent to which these virtues were kept in balance by other ones, (3) the extent to which these virtues were balanced by other scholars’ virtues, and (4) the extent to which they were expected to be balanced by future scholars’ work. Consequently, this article argues that historical epistemology might want to abandon its single-virtue focus in order to allow balances, hierarchies, and other dependency relations between virtues and vices to move to the center of attention.

John Dewey, like many other American intellectuals between the world wars, was fascinated by Soviet events. After visiting Russia in 1928 he wrote excitedly about the “Soviet experiment” and especially about Soviet educational theorists. In his early enthusiasm Dewey hoped that the US and the USSR could learn from each other, especially among the cosmopolitan group of progressive pedagogues he met on his trip. Observing the rise of Stalinism in the 1930s, though, his optimism dissipated; at the same time he came to emphasize historical and cultural differences between the US and the USSR. The result is apparent in Dewey's writings in the late 1930s (especially Freedom and Culture, 1939), as he began to evaluate the Soviet Union in terms that would have been anathema to him a decade earlier. He increasingly blamed Russia's cultural heritage for inhibiting Soviet development along the lines he had envisioned. Dewey's transformation suggests the importance of a cultural reading of American ideas about the USSR. Many American observers joined Dewey in seeing the USSR as the product of Russian culture, with its historical traditions and its own national character—and not just as the instantiation or betrayal of a political doctrine.

Hugo Grotius’s account of sovereign power in De iure belli ac pacis occupies a contested place in recent genealogies of modern sovereignty. This article takes a fresh approach by arguing that Grotius’s legal arguments do not do their work alone. They function within a broader horizon of what he calls “morals,” a field of reasoning that has debts to scholastic moral theology and Aristotelian moral science. Grotius's conception of sovereignty represents a modulation between law and “morals,” which allows him both to separate his scientific jurisprudence from the science of politics and nevertheless to reply to the political scientists on their own ground. The context of “morals,” however, is not narrowly political but inter-political, generating a potential tension between popular aspirations to sovereignty and the international order. Grotius’s “moral” handling of the issue offers an invitation to reflect on our current preoccupation with much the same concerns.

Recent theories concerning the origins of the idea of “the West” have missed the most important link in the story, the writings and tireless propagandizing efforts of Auguste Comte. It was Comte who first developed an explicit and elaborate idea of “the West” as a sociopolitical concept, basing it on a historical analysis of the development of the “vanguard” of humanity and proposing a detailed plan for the reorganization of that portion of the world, before it could serve the rest of humanity to achieve the same “positive” state of development. Previous authors who had used “the West” did not go beyond employing it casually and interchangeably with “Europe.” Thus the modern political idea of “the West” was anything but an imperialistic project in its inception, despite widespread arguments in the literature that attribute its emergence to the needs of high imperialism. Comte's West was meant to abolish empires of conquest and establish world peace.

This essay examines the influence of geopolitical and imperial thought on theories of international relations in the United States. The paper assesses the thought of Owen Lattimore, a leading American sinologist and political adviser to F. D. Roosevelt and Chiang Kai-shek, and Nicholas John Spykman, an influential international-relations scholar at Yale. In the framework of the Second World War and the “air age”, they envisaged a tripolar world order that entailed a new conception of political space and international relations. Lattimore's global geopolitical order sought to replace imperialism with democracy, while Spykman employed geopolitical concepts to envisage a tripolar order of “balanced powers” which built upon—rather than rejected—existing imperial structures. This paper examines their international theories and the policy implications of their thought to claim that 1940s theoretical interdisciplinarity made an important contribution to the development of the discipline of international relations in the United States.