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.

When did historians begin to put quotation marks around the word real? There are many examples of this habit and some of them will be set forth as evidence in what follows. But before doing so we might ask a preliminary question: What are the quotation marks themselves supposed to mean? Today we find them so familiar they hardly need to be written and they are more frequently consigned to the everyday repertoire of silent gesture: two fingers on either hand clutch at the air as if they meant to tickle the flanks of the invisible beast between them. The popular term is “scare-quotes,” a pun on the word “scarecrow.” Its etymology is revealing: just as a mere representation of a body in a field may scare off birds, so too scare-quotes permit someone to deploy a word without sincere commitment to what it normally means. But further reflection tells us that the effects are not so similar after all: To use a term without sincerity robs it of its original meaning and holds up its lifeless corpse to ridicule. The more knowing sort of crow can settle on the shoulder of the figure on the pole precisely because it recognizes that such a sorry excuse for a man can in fact harm no one. Similarly when one puts reality in quotation marks (thus: “reality”) we are put in mind of the living concept but we are immediately alerted to the fact that, for the user at least, the new term enjoys no metaphysical prestige. How did this happen? When and why did the single most privileged word in the entire lexicon of metaphysics begin to lose its authority such that in certain spheres of intellectual sophistication its sincere use would only seem an embarrassment and a sign of naïveté?

While it is well known that German conservative intellectuals were skeptical or indifferent to the Federal Republic of Germany established in 1949 and to its democratic founding principles, this essay shifts attention to a specific mode of right-wing acceptance of the new order. Focusing on Hans Zehrer, a renowned journalist and notorious opponent of democracy in the Weimar Republic, I will demonstrate how right-wing intellectuals interpreted West Germany's political system as a post-liberal order after the “end of politics”. But this vision of transcending societal and intellectual conflicts in a meta-politics was neither entirely new nor simply raked up from the late 1920s but reshaped to fit the postwar sociopolitical context. The essay illuminates several intellectual connections between Weimar-era neoconservatism and the specific conservative consensus formed after 1949, but it also explores personnel continuities within a network of right-wing journalists as well as continuities in the field of journalistic style.

The following essays present six distinct but broadly compatible narratives of scholarship in United States intellectual history over the past half-century: postwar dominance, a season of despair, and then the field's rise, transformation, and expansion. The essays are a feast of erudition; any reader will come away from them with a list of “must-read” books. But there is much more here. These are rigorous and sophisticated explorations—at once historical and prescriptive—of a flourishing field. The writers span different generations, with authors representative of older, middling, and younger scholars. These appraisals are various yet they are unambiguously within the mainstream, tracking the current understandings of the somewhat fuzzy boundaries of the field. While additional writers might have further enriched the coverage, these writers together offer a fair representation of current practice in the field.

The opening lines of Franz Delitzsch's Babel und Bibel (1902, 195) offer an unusually frank confession of the personal and psychological motives that animated German orientalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For Delitzsch and countless others like him, orientalist scholarship provided an opportunity not just to expand their knowledge of the Near East and India, but also to explore the world of the Bible and, in doing so, effect a reckoning with the religious beliefs of their childhoods. In German Orientalism in the Age of Empire, Suzanne Marchand opens up this scholarly world, exploring the criss-crossing forces and interests that shaped it, while effecting her own reckoning with orientalism as a historical and historiographical phenomenon.

It is now a problem more or less universally acknowledged that religion, even in an ostensibly secular age, must be in need of good commentary. The underlying problem is: what would constitute good commentary at this point? It is not as if religion has just appeared on the horizon of the secular intellectual. Even if we restrict our purview to nonreligious, nontheological discourse, there is a long tradition of critical appraisals and histories of religious phenomena, dating from the ancient Greeks. The field receives an intellectual boost of sorts in the late eighteenth, the nineteenth, and the early twentieth centuries, as the religion of the theologians and prophetic reformers gives way to anthropological and sociological disciplines, the better to be scientifically understood and codified. This upsurge in the secular accounting for religious belief is often explained as the result of the Enlightenment—that is, materialist explanations of nature, textual authority, and psychology eventually turn religion into a natural function of human will (as in Hume and Kant), a series of authorial inventions (as in Strauss and the “higher criticism”), and a psychological manifestation of deeper impulses, from love (as in Feuerbach), to class-based self-narcotizing illusion (as in Marx), to fear of the loss of paternal care (as in Freud). Max Weber proposed the most intriguing and far-reaching hypothesis about how the Enlightenment superseded religion in the West: Protestant reform within Christianity itself—beginning with Luther and Calvin—designed to produce a purer and far less magical, mystical, hierarchic, and corrupt system of belief, had the unintended consequence of laying the psychological foundations for ascetic capitalism, and hence (as John Wesley foresaw) the seemingly inevitable decline of religion in favor of worldly pursuits.

The story of American intellectual history's decline, fall, and phoenix-like rebirth in recent decades has become trite with the retelling: knocked from its position of prominence by the new social history and plunged into the chastened soul-searching of the famed Wingspread Conference of 1977, only to find itself rescued in part by the linguistic and cultural “turns” that swept the entire discipline of American history in the 1980s and 1990s. Like many a narrative, this one undoubtedly imposes too clear a pattern of meaning on a messier reality, but also like many a narrative, it has powerfully shaped the professional identities of American intellectual historians by giving them a sense of where they have been and how they arrived at their current place. That current place is a hospitable one, in many ways, for in the last couple of decades American historians seem to have grown increasingly receptive to the notion that ideas have mattered in history.

Unlike the memory of the querulous and time-bending White Queen in Through the Looking Glass, mine befits her complaint, inclined as I am to thinking backwards when asked to contemplate the state of our field. Backwards, then, I go in the first section of this essay, after a few opening comments on the situation of our field at the present moment. Thereafter, I describe the emergence of cultural history and summarize some of its strengths and weaknesses, to the end of reflecting on its implications for intellectual history.

American anthropologists have a PR problem. We know it, and it bothers us. A left-of-center discipline finds it difficult to get across its cultural criticism in a country with center-right mass media. To make matters worse, the discipline is cursed by the fact of having ancestors who hang around, whose contemporary public presence seems greater than anything the anthropologists of this world can muster. The greatest of these anthropological ghosts is Margaret Mead, whom some anthropologists have never forgiven for her celebrity. Even for those of us who admire her, her presence and that of a few other ancestral figures, like Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict, throw a glaring light on our own lack of a public voice.

When I entered graduate school in the fall of 1966, planning to study American intellectual history and perhaps intellectuals specifically, all the talk among the more advanced graduate students was a recently published book, The New Radicalism in America, 1889–1963: The Intellectual as a Social Type (1965), by Christopher Lasch. I read it eagerly, but I was not sure what to make of it. The author, Christopher Lasch, offered a very complex analysis of intellectuals’ lives and their social location—or lack of it. It gave as much space to their psychological needs as to their ideas. That seemed to diminish them. Just what did he intend? I wondered.

These selected excerpts from a conversation now running nearly a quarter-century about The American Intellectual Tradition: A Sourcebook exemplify the efforts made by specialists in American intellectual history to decide just what constitutes the core of their field. An anthology designed for undergraduates has practical limitations, to be sure, that prevent its table of contents from ever serving as a complete map of a field. Specific research questions, not arguments over canons, properly remain the deepest center of gravity of any cohort of scholars. But assignments to students are one important indicator of what scholar–teachers take to be important, and these assignments are not unrelated to choices these same individuals make about the topics of their monographic contributions. Hence the lively correspondence that my coeditor, Charles Capper, and I have carried on with dozens of colleagues concerning the six editions of the only collection of sources for this field currently in print offers a window on how American intellectual history has changed in the last generation and what are its current directions.

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.