Few of the recent treatments exploring Leviathan's dramatic expansion of ecclesiological considerations have delved into the political circumstances that furnished Hobbes's immediate Parisian surroundings, as he penned the work during the 1640s. This paper examines French ecclesial debates that were triggered by the publication of a polemical collection of texts narrating the “rights and liberties of the Gallican church.” Many of the tracts included had been written during the accession crisis of the late sixteenth century, and advocated a sacralized view of kingship in order to exclude papal jurisdictional claims in France. This paper argues that innovations in Leviathan's sacred history mirror tropes employed by Gallican writers, so that Hobbes can be seen as adopting a parallel strategy in establishing Leviathan's Supreme Pastor. This explication suggests that Hobbes composed Leviathan to appropriate, rather than eliminate, claims associated with “spiritual” power for the civil sovereign, as critical to the exercise of sovereignty.

Recent studies have identified the revival of the idea of democracy in early nineteenth-century French thought. This article recovers one important reason behind this revival: democracy became a response to another debate that emerged during that period—the “social question.” Although not well known in the English-speaking world, Louis Blanc was one of the most important socialist figures during the July Monarchy in France. Examining Blanc's Organization of Labor, this article shows how Blanc mobilized democracy to challenge the July Monarchy's exclusionary representative government and its reduction of the “social question” to pauperism. Blanc argued that industrial competition created a system of domination and proposed democratic reorganization of labor as a way to promote the common good. Blanc reformulated the “social question” as a democratic question, arguing that poverty and class domination can be solved not by administrative measures but through democratic participation in work and in the republic.

This article argues that the emotion of shame explains how John Stuart Mill and the Jamaica Committee developed intellectual arguments in response to the brutal suppression by Governor Edward Eyre of the Morant Bay rebellion in post-emancipation colonial Jamaica in 1865. Positioning the emotions as integral to cognitive systems, the article traces Mill and the committee's arguments against their opponents, the Eyre Defence Committee. The Jamaica Committee was not solely concerned with liberal imperial order. Instead, under Mill's leadership, the committee sought to reconstruct and defend the pre-rebellion political culture that freedpeople in Jamaica had developed. The committee also demonstrated the illegality of martial law. There were, nonetheless, differences between Mill and other committee members, including Charles Buxton and Frederic Harrison. Shame, the emotion experienced when a subject fails to meet the values to which they are attached, helps to explain these differences. Shame also helped to generate the possibility of reforming the colonial political relationship.

Few scholars have ventured into the realm of the reception and representations of the USSR among Italian Fascists during the years 1928–36; that is, between Stalin's consolidation of power and the Spanish Civil War. This article contends that far from being absolute antagonists from the very beginnings, many Fascists found aspects of Stalinism and the USSR instructive and impressive. While for some the USSR represented a genuine attempt to revolutionize the social, economic, and cultural structures of everyday life, for others the revolutionary credentials of the Soviets were a sham. It was precisely the complex nature of these interpretations that gave Fascist visions of the USSR their nuance and open-mindedness. Finally, this article argues that the representations that emerged during these pivotal years convinced many Fascists that theirs was the “correct” and “superior” form of interpreting and enacting the totalitarian aspirations embedded in the modern revolutionary tradition.

This article identifies Algeria as a significant, if obscure, topos in Arendt's writing. It traces various moments of this encounter across Arendt's oeuvre, in well-known texts, such as The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and “On Violence” (1969), as well as in lesser-known writings, such as “Why the Crémieux Decree Was Abrogated” (1943). In pursuing this trajectory, the article argues that Arendt's sustained engagement with Algeria reflects an ongoing and ambivalent negotiation with French imperialism. While Arendt continually falls back on an apologetic discourse concerning the French imperial nation-state, her text nonetheless hints at an important geometric lesson about the space–time of its legal structure: the differential temporalities governing its regime of assimilation and its regime of decree. Through a parallel recasting of Arendt's famous distinction between power and violence, this article delimits colonial rule in Algeria as a question of speed.

This article explores why neoliberals associated with the Mont Pelerin Society disagreed on the legitimacy of a guaranteed income in the 1960s and 1970s in the United States. Participants in this debate are categorized along a spectrum between “libertarians” like Milton Friedman and George Stigler, who favoured a minimum-income plan, and “paternalists” like Henry Hazlitt, who opposed one in any form. While these figures were united in their desire to roll back the welfare state, the two means they advocated to achieve this task were in stark contradiction in their assumptions. Divisions over a guaranteed income commonly reflected wider disagreements on economic methodology, consumer choice, citizenship, policing, and the moral implications of dependency. Previous analysts have tended to emphasize unity amongst neoliberals on the model of the “paternalist” paradigm. By recovering the origins of the libertarian paradigm, this article demonstrates instead that there was never an orthodox neoliberal approach to welfare reform. “What does neoliberal welfare reform do?” is shown to be a question requiring more complex answers than have been recognized in the literature.

While previous research on the rise of neoliberalism has focused on elite networks of economists, politicians, journalists, and business leaders, this article investigates the attractiveness of Milton Friedman's ideas at the time of the neoliberal breakthrough from a bottom-up perspective. A close reading of mostly favorable letters by two hundred viewers in response to the 1980 television documentary series Free to Choose indicates that neoliberalism's popular legitimacy was based on a broad yet fragile coalition. Four different and in many ways contradictory viewer narratives can be distilled from the letters: (i) a conservative narrative, (ii) a reactionary narrative, (iii) a left libertarian narrative, and (iv) a populist narrative. Although in 1980 Friedman was, and today still is, perceived as a conservative economist, the letters show that under the surface of public debate his reach as a public intellectual far exceeded the realms of postwar conservatism as Friedman was supported by people who were situated further to the right and the left. Perhaps more than the elite sources of the neoliberal project, Friedman's lay reception thus highlights neoliberalism's complex and contradictory history in a plastic manner.

This article positions the early career of the Japanese activist and writer Tsumura Takashi as anticipating, from an intellectual and historical-media standpoint, the surge of interest in gendai shisō (“contemporary thought,” i.e. French theory) in 1980s Japan. Often understood as the devolution of theory into a mere commercial fad, the gendai shisō boom—in its reliance on a host of writers who worked at a distance from traditional academic publishing networks—promoted an ethos of interdisciplinary and transgressive knowledge production. Tracing Tsumura's interest in structuralism and post-structuralism as an outgrowth of his participation in the student movement, the article provides a prehistory of gendai shisō in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It argues that Tsumura's creative appropriation of structuralism and post-structuralism took place at a crucial juncture when the academic print networks that had legitimated intellectuals in postwar Japan were being hollowed out from within and without.

There can be little doubt that the history profession is experiencing a turn to the present. The post-2016 “crisis of democracy” has only dramatized it. Long-standing anxieties over presentism have crumbled under the weight of recent events. They have proven little match for Brexit, Trump, the rise of strongmen in the world writ large, racial injustice, and the pandemic. The turn to the present, however, is at times marked by undeniable provincialism—one that consistently offers a narrow perspective for understanding new and emerging global realities. Some historians, for instance, have taken on the role of liberal watchmen ready to strike the tocsin against suspected fascism, but they regularly do so by focusing on Europe's fascist past of the 1930s to explain the contemporary order. Or consider the economic crisis brought on by the coronavirus pandemic. In the search for solutions, scholars proved quick to make historical comparisons to the great war economies of World Wars I and II, but appeared little bothered by the possibility that taking inspiration from Europe's age of extremes might “lead us to look for enemies and scapegoats.” So with the George Floyd protests: certain scholars and pundits likened them to the 1968 student protests in France and the United States, even as other scholars pointed out the historical shortcoming of the comparison.

Over the last few years, scholars have intensely debated whether the contemporary radical right should be described as fascist. While some have insisted that its ideology, political strategy, and social basis strongly echo fascist precedents, others have insisted they substantially diverge from them. This essay explores the content and rhetoric of this dispute. It claims that the key fault line between proponents and opponents of the fascist label was not their intellectual or political agenda, but instead in their approach to political polemics. While some operated within the tradition of polemical writings and believed that the invocation of fascism was necessary for political mobilization, others remained skeptical of its value. The essay therefore situates the “fascism debate” in the long history of arguments over the value and limits of historical analogies and polemical writing.

This essay makes a theoretical and methodological intervention into the historical discipline by arguing that there is a serious and necessary role for historians to engage with the realities of our contemporary world. Using the Black Lives Matter movement and the global uprisings of 2020 as a case study, the author rejects long-standing critiques of presentism in the historical discipline. Instead, she argues that the history of transnational black activism and protest engaged by activists in the African diaspora throughout 2020 were indicative of the ways in which the realities of the past continue to materially inform the lives of real people in the present. The author calls the process of excavating these connections between the past and the present “historical sankofa”—a concept borrowed from the Akan tradition of Ghana.

Histories of the present are premised upon the loss of their subject, which is paradoxically deprived of its integrity by being tied back to the past. Attending to the present has been the prerogative of anticolonial and Cold War writing, for which the disconnection of present from past was crucial. If Gandhi, a critic of historical consciousness as a modality of imperialism, represented the former, Arendt did the latter kind of thinking. Histories of the present disregard these forms of thought, which stress rupture over continuity. This makes them Eurocentric almost by definition, as well as anti-global in their conceptualization. The attack on the US Capitol in January 2021 offers us an example of how an event, understood provincially within a Euro-American history of the present, can be globalised to quite different effect.

This essay traces how China's changing presents have been represented in Anglo-American discourse and in China studies from the Cold War to today. It shows how, in popular opinion but also in academia, that discourse has displayed a stubborn tendency to explain—or rather explain away—China's presents, configuring them strictly in relation to pasts that can never be overcome and futures that are either never realized or always dangerously looming. This ideological framing has its roots in Cold War anticommunism, which was foundational to China studies in the US, but lingers on to this day, as China's coevalness is continuously denied.

For many intellectual historians, presentism is viewed as a cardinal sin—linked to unreflective anachronism and the inappropriate projection of present-day values onto a very different past context. However, by embracing the ways in which the present inevitably shapes our modes of inquiry, our historical interests, and even the moral underpinnings of our analysis, we can find in the present tools that can make our history better, and help make sense of historical debates and controversies. This essay gives an account of Japanese historiography organized around four versions of presentism. The first is political presentism, an analytic lens that emerged in the “objectivity debate” over what constituted politicized scholarship and reflected the political antagonisms of the Cold War in Asia. Consciously or unconsciously, political convictions shape our scholarship. The second version is the presentism of social context. Each decade that followed the Asia–Pacific War possessed its particular zeitgeist, and histories written during those moments were products of their time. The third form of presentism is the connection between past and present via analogy or likeness: using a past event or person to understand the present and vice versa. To analogize past and present means finding a correspondence that makes the past feel familiar and less “other.” The fourth version of presentism is the project of contemporary history: the past in the present, the past leading to the present, the present as the starting point for historical inquiry.

This contribution reflects on the theme of intellectual history and the present from the perspective of recent intellectual histories of mid-twentieth-century Africa. I focus on two aspects of the intellectual historian's work which relate to the importance of putting the past into dialogue with the present. First, using new histories of the historical event of mid-twentieth-century decolonization as a case study, I consider the potential offered by investigating ideas which have been eclipsed or forgotten and trying to understand when and why possibilities closed down. Second, I consider the role of the intellectual historian in deessentializing concepts that underpin contemporary public discussion, focusing in particular on the concept of “democracy.”

Most historians let collective memories guide their work, with what needs to be studied already understood to matter. This is particularly true for histories of the recent past, in which primary-source research serves, to quote Michel Foucault, “to refresh memory.” Memorial histories are of different types—including nationalist histories, militant histories, and family or group histories—and useful. There are other approaches to studying the past, however, that can help even those committed to memorial practices. This article draws from work by Bonnie G. Smith, Laura Doan, and Foucault to home in on two key historical practices: “primary-source work” and “historiography.” A sharper awareness of what these practices are, their possibilities, and, of pressing importance, their limits—what they cannot or tend not to reveal, what they in fact render more difficult to see—could help make debates about presentism more convincing. The article proposes “prospecting” as a way to identify research topics that might stimulate present-day discussions and also engage other scholars.

In recent years, historians have been in increased demand to use their expertise to help understand contemporary events. The forces that are driving news outlets and podcasts to enlist historians for their perspectives on the present are also drawing students into our college classes. This article explores how courses on contemporary US history can use students' desire for historical perspectives on their long now to teach them more broadly about the historian's craft. Working with and against the conceit of the “now,” courses on contemporary US history can provide students a novel way to learn historical theories and methods, identify and work with primary sources, interrogate periodization, and challenge different modes of ahistoricism. Properly conceived and executed, histories of the present offer a challenge to presentism by denaturalizing the familiar.

Despite the voluminous work devoted to the “social history of Enlightenment ideas” since the 1970s, surprisingly little has been done to integrate its findings into general interpretations of this moment in intellectual history. Attempts to understand the Enlightenment as a long-term global phenomenon have made it difficult to situate it within any social context other than that of globalization. This essay makes the case for relating the Enlightenment, as it developed within Europe and European overseas possessions, to the advance of commercial capitalism. Drawing on recent work on the history of capitalism, it argues that a burgeoning market economy vastly expanded the opportunities for ordinary readers to participate in intellectual life, and that this change dramatically influenced the production of intellectual work, not only in its form and genre, but in the causes advanced by writers, whose work increasingly took the form of a great project for collective human self-improvement.