Voltaire's Letters Concerning the English Nation (Lettres philosophiques) have left the indelible impression that the French philosophe was fundamentally marked by his exposure to English thought in the late 1720s. On the map of his epistolary correspondence, however, England is hardly to be found. What are we to make of this discrepancy? In this article, we demonstrate that the missing letters to England are unlikely to be the result of a data glitch, but rather reflect a lack of interest in contemporary English matters. The only England that Voltaire seems to have cared about lay in the past, during the reign of Charles II. Moreover, this period of English history was (in his view) intrinsically French, given the English monarch's close ties to Versailles. Voltaire's limited admiration of English thought, accordingly, formed part of his broader philosophy of history, which was centered at the court of Louis XIV.

“One book is a book, two books is a trend,” goes an old adage in publishing. And what of three books? The 2012 publication of Angus Burgin's The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression and Daniel Stedman Jones's Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics, together with the 2011 publication of Nicholas Wapshott's Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics, suggests that the intellectual history of conservatism is not merely a trend, but an interest that is here to stay. At least the study of free markets, that is, for the books under consideration here focus more on conservative economic ideas than on religious or cultural ideals, capturing the intellectual history of free markets in the twentieth century through the Mont Pelerin Society, transatlantic policy, and the debate between John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek. While remarkably similar in subject and source, these are three different books, distinguished from each other in interpretation, execution, and focus. All three, however, display a similar temperament, assessing conservative ideas in an evenhanded if not overtly sympathetic tone suggesting that scholars have finally found a shared register through which to consider the most controversial and politically consequential ideas of the late twentieth century. They also converge upon a perhaps surprising synthesis, positioning free-market thought not only at the interstices of America and Europe, but between and across left and right, conservative and liberal.

This article seeks to establish a new perspective for understanding Catholic intellectual history in the German territories during the mid-nineteenth century. By analyzing scholars' efforts to revamp “Catholic Wissenschaft” in the context of a broader revival movement, it reveals how both “liberals” and “ultramontanes” engaged in a form of devotional activism which made Catholicism the measure of social action and scholarly practice alike. Important differences notwithstanding, scholars of all stripes saw their task as transforming Catholicism into a relevant tool for meeting the needs of the age. Rooting their efforts in the broader Catholic revival movement in this way, the article proposes “Catholic modernity” as a salient category for interpreting the significance of their work, and for better integrating it into the broader framework of German history.

In his Mémoires, published in the year of his death in 1983, Raymond Aron—the French sociologist and Cold War champion of liberalism—astonishingly remarked that as a man of high culture Carl Schmitt could have never been a Nazi. Aron's defenders have typically downplayed his mature views on Schmitt: for how else could the main defender of the liberal faith in France devote himself to salvaging the reputation of the greatest antiliberal of the age? This essay argues, however, that Aron's bizarre statements about Schmitt actually provide a crucial aperture into the nature of Aron's liberalism. I will begin by placing Aron's comments about Schmitt within his Clausewitz project of the 1970s. Aron took Schmitt as a guiding inspiration even as he sought to overcome Schmitt's existential interpretation of Clausewitz. By doing so, Aron hoped to establish a rational foundation for political action. Yet Aron's attempt to contain Clausewitz would not only lead to a renewal of interest in Schmitt's thought; it would also revive Aron and Schmitt's correspondence that had lain dormant since the early 1960s. As the 1970s advanced, this would have implications for how Aron viewed Schmitt, especially in light of the critical German reception of Penser la guerre, Clausewitz. This essay concludes by looking at the intellectual legacy of Aron's Schmittian inspirations—at just the time he became the avatar of contemporary French liberalism

In this essay I discuss the historical adequacy of Charles Taylor's philosophical history of secularization, as presented in his A Secular Age. I do so by situating it in relation to the contextual historiography of secularization in early modern Europe, with a particular focus on developments in the German Empire. Considering how profoundly conceptions of secularization have been bound to competing religious and political programmes, we must begin our discussion by entertaining the possibility that modern philosophical and historiographic conceptions of secularization might themselves be outcrops of this unfinished competition. Peter Gordon has rightly observed that Taylor's philosophical history of secularization is a Catholic one, and that this is bound up with a specific (neo-Thomist) view of secularization as a theological and ecclesiological “disembedding” of rational subjectivity from its prior embodiment in a sacral body, community (church), and cosmos. Taylor delivers this history in his “reform master narrative”: that certain fundamental religious and cultural reforms or changes in early modern Europe wrought the secularization responsible for a modern epoch of “unbelief”.

This article demonstrates how T. H. Marshall's conceptualization of sociology—its subject, key questions and methodology—was embedded within broader moments in twentieth-century political history, including two world wars, the economic crisis of the interwar era, the onset of the Cold War and the rise of decolonization. In doing so, it brings intellectual history and the history of academic disciplines (particularly sociology) together with more recent trends in the historiography of twentieth-century Europe, including research on postwar democratization, reconstruction and the global spread of human rights discourses. Marshall was a sociological thinker in what Eric Hobsbawm has called the “age of extremes,” whose understanding of social citizenship not only played a role in theorizing the welfare state in postwar Britain, but also helped shape reconstruction within Europe and international development efforts following decolonization. In this respect, Marshall was part of a transnational and global movement to recast key concepts such as democracy, human rights and citizenship after the Second World War. This broader perspective illuminates how his work straddles traditions of pluralism and idealism, liberalism and social democracy, rather than being simply representative of any one of these schools of thought.

Adam Ferguson has usually been portrayed as an advocate of conflict, political parties, and factional strife. This article demonstrates that this is a rather unbalanced reading. A careful investigation of Ferguson's works and correspondence in context reveals a man deeply troubled by both turbulence and party politics. He consistently expressed fears of what he saw as the tumultuous populace, and the willingness of party leaders to rise on the shoulders of the mob. This could ultimately lead to military despotism, something he dreaded. While Ferguson's theory of antagonistic sociability was original, this article shows that we should not take for granted that it implied an approval of party conflict in a broad sense. Indeed, he was highly critical of opposition parties seeking to replace the government. He did tolerate a regulated form of contest between different orders in the state under a mixed constitution, but it is here argued that he is much better understood as a Christian Stoic promoting stability and order than a supporter of party struggle.

This article bridges the gap between the intellectual history and critical geography of neoliberalism through a study of the overlooked figure of the German economist Herbert Giersch. As a public economist and director of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy from 1969 to 1989, Giersch blended German traditions of location theory with liberal globalism to lay the foundation of a neoliberal economic geography. We show the origins of globalism at Kiel through the work of the institute's founder, Bernhard Harms, and Giersch's influences, including Johann Heinrich von Thünen, August Lösch, and Alfred Weber. We argue that Giersch's neoliberal economic geography emerged out of two perceived necessities in the 1970s. On the one hand, he saw a need to reorient German industry through import competition with the global South. On the other hand, he felt the need for an ethically defensible global imaginary to pose against both traditional German social democracy and the promise of the global South's New International Economic Order. In his metaphor of a landscape of so-called Schumpeterian volcanoes in which regions were locked in perpetual struggle for temporary monopoly positions against competitors, Giersch provided a powerful distillation of the geographic imaginary at the heart of the neoliberal movement since the 1970s.

This article pursues the origin and mutation of a fantastic story concerning an automaton in the shape of a young girl that was supposedly built by René Descartes. In recent decades it has been retold and reimagined so many times that the tale has become an iconic narrative in the context of the reassessment of Descartes's significance in intellectual history. But a close reading of the original story, found in a 1699 work entitled Mélanges d'histoire et de littérature by Vigneul-Marville, reveals an overtly stated agenda of saving the philosopher's moral reputation, which makes most recent interpretations of the story problematic. The vast majority of modern retellings demonstrate no awareness of the content or the significance of the first tale even as it has been used to shed light on Descartes, Cartesian ideas, and early modern thought in general.

This essay argues that Jean-Paul Sartre's notion of “dialectical reason”, as elaborated in his Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), had a decisive impact on the composition of Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1961). The relationship between the two works has not before received a thorough textual exposition. Such an exposition, it is suggested, also entails revising the view of the nature of Fanon's work that has become entrenched in anglophone scholarship. Instead of a self-grounding theorist who more resembles the postcolonialists who would succeed him, this essay presents a view of Fanon as a situated theorist, drawing on those resources that could best help him to articulate the task at hand. The notion of “dialectical reason” allowed him to break from his previous understanding of decolonization as the attainment of reason through struggle, and see the “praxis” of revolution as, itself, self-realizing reason. To perceive this allows us better to seize on the thinking that guides his discussions of objectification under colonialism, anticolonial violence, and the role of the national bourgeoisie, and, thus, to clear up a number of controversies.

This paper situates Alfred Russel Wallace's spiritualist writings from his book Miracles and Modern Spiritualism (1875) against the backdrop of Victorian anthropology. It examines how he constructed his argument, and the ways in which he verified the trustworthiness of his evidence using theories and methods drawn from anthropology. Spirit investigations relied on personal testimony. Thus the key question was: who could be trusted as a credible witness? While much has been written on Wallace's inquiries into spirit phenomena, very little scholarship has taken seriously his remark about how his studies of spirits and mediums were a “new branch of anthropology.” Wallace's aim of aligning his spirit investigations to the practices of British anthropology fed into larger disciplinary discussions about the construction of reliable anthropological data. Most notably, like many of his Victorian anthropological counterparts, Wallace grounded his research in a double commitment to firsthand observation and Baconian inductivism.

American intellectual history in the future will be embodied, embedded, and extended. Building on a sturdy foundation of past practices, intellectual historians will consolidate the advances of the last half-century and continue to study ideas articulated in multiple registers, by multiple historical actors, for multiple purposes.

Pierre Leroux founded the liberal journal Le Globe in the 1820s, moved briefly into the Saint-Simonian camp, and then emerged as one of the most important, independent and philosophically ambitious Romantic socialists of the period before 1848. This essay examines the conflict that erupted between Leroux and German Left Hegelians when Leroux chose to endorse the Berlin lectures of F. W. J. Schelling in 1841. Whereas German radicals like Marx believed Leroux simply did not understand Schelling, the article argues that Leroux's support of Schelling was consistent with the political project that he had pursued since his break with the Saint-Simonians. Leroux's attempt to create a third-way politics between the “socialisme absolu” of the Saint-Simonians and the “individualité absolu” of liberalism was strongly influenced by his long-standing engagement with Romantic poetics, most importantly with what he called Romanticism's “style symbolique.” The Romantic notion that the symbol is a visible representation of the invisible and fundamentally unrepresentable connected Leroux's aesthetics and his politics, for the symbolic mode suggested a way to think of social relationships without reifying them; the gap between representation and objects such as “individual”, “society”, “humanity”, and “God” seemed to open up a space for artistic and political creativity. This commitment to a politics based on the role of the symbolic created an affinity with Schelling that was not acknowledged in the polemics that followed from Leroux's defense of the Left Hegelians' arch-enemy. Recovering the terms of that affinity casts a new and different light on the intersection of aesthetics and politics in Romanticism, and it illuminates paths in the early history of socialism that later developments closed down.

Recent years have seen a remarkable renewal of interest in the thought of Benjamin Constant (1767–1830). For long recognized as the author of the literary masterpiece Adolphe, Constant is now receiving increasing attention for his political writings. Paperback editions of his major works are presently available in both French and English, helping to establish his growing reputation as a founding father of modern liberalism. Constant's stature as a seminal liberal thinker has benefited from the recent climate of opinion in the Western world and, in particular, from the return to fashion of liberalism as a social and political doctrine. Paradoxically, however, this political climate has also led to some problems, since presentist concerns have left an undeniable imprint on the image we have of Constant.

This article tells the archival story of how Rawls invented a hypothetical Muslim state that he called “Kazanistan.” It examines drafts of The Law of Peoples from 1992 to 1998, Rawls's notes, his personal correspondence, and the sources preserved in his archives. I track Rawls's gradual interest in Islam, which resulted in his invention of Kazanistan during the final revisions, in March 1998. Contrary to the aesthetics of rigor and simplicity in ideal theory's methods, Rawls's actual method in his incursion into “comparative philosophy” and Islam was circuitous and contingent. And contrary to ideal theory's self-presentation as emerging from an ahistorical conceptual realm, the idealized abstraction of Islam emerges from Rawls's own history, or from an ideologically limited set of texts, conversations, and political debates about Islam. The genealogy of Kazanistan illustrates how liberal philosophy extracts data from other disciplines to construct other peoples, without regard for the surrounding disciplinary politics.

Vienna's scientific culture has long attracted historians' attention. Impressive though the scientific accomplishments of Viennese scientists were, and recognized by numerous Nobel prizes, they alone do not account for the historians' interest. Rather, Vienna's culture of science was imbedded in broader humanistic visions and invested in political and educational projects of major historical significance. Viennese philosophy placed humanity's hopes in science and articulated its historical ramifications to the public, drawing out the political implications of competing scientific methodologies and tying them to dramatic historical events. This philosophy of science still reverberates nowadays in debates on liberty, markets, and government that quickly reveal their underpinning in the methodology of science. Vienna's scientific culture, it seems, has never ceased to capture the imagination, far beyond Austria.

In the opening years of the twentieth century a furious contest broke out over the meaning of pragmatism in professional philosophical circles in the United States. When William James introduced his idea to the learned public at the University of California in 1898, he credited Charles Peirce as its prime mover. After James's lecture became known, Peirce, an impossible man who did not know on which side his bread was buttered, re-christened his brainchild pragmaticism to make sure no one confused it with the foolishness of James. When John Dewey made his mark and critiques of pragmatism emerged, Dewey said that we should not argue about a brand name. Nonetheless, he still gave his own philosophy a new designation, dubbing it instrumentalism to avoid the charges unleashed against James. Were there, then, three styles of this speculative tendency? Arthur O. Lovejoy was an unrelenting opponent of the tendency. In 1908 he mocked these thinkers, and wrote in the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods a captivating and long-cited essay, “The Thirteen Pragmatisms.”

Acknowledgments are now a constitutive and almost compulsory part of academic productions. This essay, based on some 1,000 books in the humanities and social sciences, traces the sociogenesis of this academic genre. Focusing on the paratextual nature of acknowledgments, it examines the following questions: What do the lists of names in them mean? What effects are expected from these carefully written, or at least calculated, pieces? Acknowledgments reveal authorial strategies, the staging of a public persona, the pursuit or display of symbolic capital in a highly competitive world. But they can disclose more than that. They may also show a private person, depict an imagined Eden, recall a generosity. Acknowledgments involve a complex discourse. What they tell us is that the intellectual field is also a community, that in the “battleground” of learning there is a place for the gift, indeed that the giving of gifts still remains one of the means—perhaps even the principal one—of the advancement of learning.

Susan Layton, Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, paperback version 2005; first edition 1994)

Harsha Ram, The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003)

In the last decades of the Russian Empire, Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire made for favorite reading among the intelligentsia. Today imperial themes have become increasingly important in American academia; historians and literary scholars who study Russia are no exception. The two studies under review explore the spirit and the letter of the Russian Empire in the moment of boom and glory preceding its collapse. Published in 1994, Susan Layton's Russian Literature and Empire was the pioneering study of the subject. Published in 2003, Harsha Ram's The Imperial Sublime is so different from Layton's book that the differences, rooted in the American rather than the Russian imperial experience, deserve reflection in their own right. While Layton looked at the world through the emancipatory optic of postcolonialist and feminist movements, Ram manifests a different kind of sensibility, one which is alert to the scale and beauty of the victorious power. In a sad but understandable way, Susan Layton's ethical concerns give way to Harsha Ram's aesthetic ones.

In the summer of 1673, in what Koenraad O. Meinsma once qualified as “one of the most inexplicable events in Spinoza's life,” the philosopher left his residence in The Hague to travel to Utrecht and stayed there for some three weeks. This event has garnered much interest, for two main reasons. In the first place, it is agreed that something must have induced the rather homebound Spinoza to undertake the journey, especially since Utrecht was occupied at the time by the French, rendering travel dangerous. The paucity of available sources has kept most scholars from suggesting a motive, but those who have been so bold are virtually unanimous in positing that Spinoza traveled on a diplomatic or political mission, referring in support to his first biographer Johannes Colerus's report, gathered from the philosopher's landlord Hendrik van der Spyck, that at his return he was greeted by a frenzied crowd that was ready to lynch him as a “spy, murmuring that he treated with the French of matters pertaining to state and nation,” with Spinoza countering that “many among the highly placed know why I went to Utrecht.” A second reason for the interest is formed by the connection the trip offers between Spinoza and the French general in Utrecht, Louis II de Bourbon (1621–86), the prince of Condé, renowned not only for his military exploits but also for his interest in the arts and sciences, as evinced in his patronage of dissident thinkers like Isaac La Peyrère of pre-Adamite fame. Condé thus figures in all early accounts of Spinoza's trip, and yet the conflicting nature of these accounts, combined with the paucity of firsthand sources, has left later scholars debating at length the precise nature of the prince's involvement as Spinoza's inviter, as his host, and as his ready benefactor.