This essay analyses Alfred Zimmern's scheme for a global British Commonwealth. A prominent British liberal internationalist and leading early scholar of International Relations, Zimmern developed an anti-racial account of empire and international order. In conceptualizing a British Commonwealth, he sought to replace “race” with “nation” as the basic ontological category of world ordering. The idea of cultural Zionism, formulated by Ahad Ha’am, played a key role in Zimmern's attempt. Ahad Ha’am's account of non-statist Jewish nationalism served as a useful ideological device for Zimmern to theorize a multinational Commonwealth without acknowledging colonial demands for self-determination. The essay also shows that Horace Kallen's notion of American cultural pluralism helped Zimmern to consolidate his project for the post-racial empire.

This article introduces non-Western policy sciences into the burgeoning field of the intellectual history of Earth system governmentality, a field that studies the ideas, institutions and material systems that enable action at the global scale. It outlines the rise of debates on the idea of the governability of the global biosphere in late Soviet Russia (1970s–1980s), focusing particularly on the extension of Vladimir Vernadskii's famous theory of the biosphere and its governance (the stage of the noosphere) into computer modeling and systems analysis. As a result, a new notion of governance as guidance through milieu arose to conceptualize global governance of the biosphere. This conceptual innovation was part of Soviet scientists’ attempt to liberalize the centrally commanded Soviet governmental system.

This article revisits one of John Rawls's rare forays into activist politics, his proposal presented to the Harvard faculty, calling for a denunciation of the “2-S” system of student deferments from conscription. In little-studied archival papers, Rawls argued that the draft both exposed “background” structural racial injustice and constituted a burdening of black Americans that violated the norms of fair cooperation. Rather than obscuring racial injustice and focusing exclusively on economic inequality, as Charles Mills has claimed, Rawls rejected the ascendant conservative views that naturalized black poverty or else attributed it to cultural pathologies in black families. Thus Rawls found nothing illicit in taking the position of a disadvantaged racial group as a relevant comparison when applying his ideal theory to nonideal circumstances. However, I contend in this article that Rawls's account of political philosophy as an attempt to find a consensus may be similarly ideological, leading him to displace the reality of conflict through begging descriptions, expressivist formulations, and historical romanticism.

This article situates francophone anticolonial thinkers—including Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Frantz Fanon—within the “humanism debate” in postwar French thought. Drawing on their poetry, prose, speeches, and interviews, this article reconstructs their critique of the humanist tradition that had identified the capacity for reason as the essence of “man.” It then traces their dialogue with approaches to this critique, including existentialism, phenomenology, and surrealism, that circulated in the metropole. The particular ways in which anticolonial thinkers built upon such approaches merit our attention because they force us to revise our understanding of the politics motivating the turn to so-called “antihumanism” in the 1960s. Drawing on recent studies that have highlighted proposals for federalist alternatives to empire entertained prior to national independence, this article suggests that the “federalist imagination” helped to inspire the distinctive mode of criticism developed by certain anticolonial thinkers and taken up by later scholars.

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.

“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.

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

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.

Neoliberalism is an ideal subject for intellectual historians. It is an ideological movement that has been both theoretically sophisticated and influential, ensuring that excursions along the highways and byways of neoliberal thought can always be justified practically, as disclosing the ideas that have shaped contemporary politics. There is also no shortage of source material, as the voluble characters who generated neoliberal ideology wrote innumerable books and articles and left behind extensive archival collections that preserve their correspondence, drafts and records of meetings. Furthermore, there is abundant evidence of the collaboration (and tensions) between the key neoliberal thinkers, since they worked together in their long years in the wilderness as members of the Mont Pèlerin Society (MPS), the invitation-only discussion group formed by Friedrich Hayek in 1947 to restate the case for market liberalism, and with various associated think tanks scattered across the globe. Given all this, it is surprising that more historical research hadn't focused on neoliberalism earlier, but the field was largely left clear for philosophers and social scientists until the 2000s. Much of this work was in any case historicist in character, notably the influential lectures of Michel Foucault, delivered in 1979 but only published in French in 2004 and in English in 2008, which scrutinized certain key texts of neoliberal theory some time before other scholars had focused on them. The years around the 2008–9 financial crisis—by a mixture of accident and design—marked the point at which intellectual historians (and social scientists with an interest in the history of ideas) followed Foucault by diving more systematically into tracing the origins and trajectory of neoliberal thought. Much of this research has concentrated on the MPS, although the MPS itself is probably best understood as a useful entry point for exploring several distinct strands of market liberalism that emerged in different places in the 1930s and 1940s before being woven together into a broader transnational movement of ideas in the course of the 1950s and 1960s. In spite of skeptical voices claiming either that “neoliberalism” does not exist, or that if it does exist it is best analyzed as the assertion of class interests rather than as an ideology, this work has cumulatively demonstrated that tracing the history of neoliberal thought is an indispensable exercise if we are to understand how we have reached the present conjuncture.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

In the Confessions Rousseau provides a very helpful account of the composition of the Discourse on Inequality (as he calls the Second Discourse). This account contains two elements that prefigure the work's reputation among scholars today. First, Rousseau says that, while in his earlier works he had only partially revealed the basis of his thought, the question posed by the Academy of Dijon offered him the occasion to develop his principles, “completely in a work of the greatest importance.” A few pages later he confirms the importance of the Discourse by saying, “Everything that is bold in the Social Contract was previously in the Discourse on Inequality.” A consensus of scholars would, I think, agree that the Discourse is, indeed, a particularly bold work and the first place to look for a rigorous exposition of Rousseau's principles.

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.

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.

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.