-
Mobilizing William Godwin, the “Father of British Anarchism”: History, Strategy, and the Intellectual Cultures of Post-war British Anarchism Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2024-03-13 Matthew S. Adams, John-Erik Hansson
This article examines the reconfigurations of British anarchist politics and culture, focusing on the reception of William Godwin by three influential anarchist writers and activists: George Woodcock, Colin Ward, and Albert Meltzer. It argues that mobilizing Godwin was an important part of their efforts to define, and then defend, a particular version of anarchist intellectual culture in Britain, each
-
Racial Feudalism Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2024-03-13 Keidrick Roy
Recent scholarship has examined Alexis de Tocqueville's underexplored assertion that American racial stratification functioned as an extension of European feudalism. However, Tocqueville was not alone in his insights. At least a half-dozen nineteenth-century African American writers and thinkers, including Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Maria Stewart, Harriet Jacobs, Sojourner Truth
-
Beyond Babel: East India Company Genre and Colonial Romanticism in an Indo-Persian Diary Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2024-02-23 Rishad Choudhury
Scholarship largely holds that the “Persianate world”—a transregional sphere of cultural exchange mediated by an Indian Ocean lingua franca—was put paid to by a colonizing English East India Company. Against that historiography, this article reveals how colonial and Indo-Persian modern textual trends were coproduced. Reading a first-person account of the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, written in 1815–17
-
The Specter of Female Masculinity: How Women Shaped the Ex-gay Movement in the 1970s and 1980s Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2024-02-23 Chris Babits
Starting in the 1970s, the “ex-gay movement,” a loose collection of conservative Christian counselors and therapists, experienced sizable growth in the United States. Importantly, women played a prominent role in the expansion of the ex-gay movement in the ensuing decades, both as counselors and as counselees. This article highlights the tension that arose between the patriarchal gender norms and the
-
The Third Earl Grey, Liberalism, and the British Empire Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2024-02-23 Jonathan Parry
This article suggests that Henry, third Earl Grey, had a vision of a liberal British world, which he hoped to implement through a political career. It was based on strong executive governance, representative politics, and the abolition of protection and slavery. It relied on the free market and good race relations to bring progress. He rejected the idea that legislation could impose improvement on
-
Rawson Rawson and Early Victorian Poverty Knowledge Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2024-02-15 E. A. Heaman
This article scrutinizes Rawson W. Rawson over seven years, from 1837 to 1844, during which he served as founding editor of the Journal of the Statistical Society of London and then as civil secretary to successive Canadian governors-general. Rawson studied poverty in London, amplified criticisms of Malthusian Poor Law disciplines in Scotland, and applied that logic to Indigenous poverty on the colonial
-
A Revolution in Property: Tocqueville and Beaumont on Democratic Inheritance Reform Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2023-09-26 Thomas James Holland
Among the most controversial reforms investigated by Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont was the idea of using inheritance as an instrument to diffuse property ownership. This article offers the first comparative account of the development of this concept across each of their major works. By situating their interventions within wider inheritance law debates, it is demonstrated how their evolving
-
Tempering the Marital Mind: Civic Regimens of Love and Marriage in German Mid-Eighteenth-Century Moral Weeklies Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2023-09-26 Andreas Rydberg
This article contributes to the historiography of romantic marriage in the eighteenth century by analyzing discourses on marital love and happiness in the moral weeklies of the German writers Georg Friedrich Meier and Samuel Gotthold Lange. Meier and Lange raise overarching questions about why so many marriages are unhappy and argue that long-term marital contentment requires spouses to discover and
-
The Metaphysical Universe of Michel ʿAflaq and His Party: A Reappraisal of the Baʿth Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2023-09-14 Spenser R. Rapone
This article offers a reassessment of Arab Socialist Baʿth Party founder Michel ʿAflaq's thought in the context of decolonization and global intellectual history. Engaging with ʿAflaq's thinking in terms of its metaphysical foundations and its relationship to universality, this work examines four key concepts in his oeuvre: resurrection (baʿth), faith (īmān), spirit (rūḥ), and unity (waḥda). In essence
-
From Lifeless Numbers to the Vital Nerve of Democracy: Dolf Sternberger's Metaphorical Argumentation against Proportional Voting Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2023-09-07 Timo Pankakoski
This article analyzes Dolf Sternberger's post-World War II argumentation against proportional representation. Sternberger is central in the intellectual history of German democratization. However, he expressed his misgivings about parties and proportionality in a perplexingly antidemocratic register. Proportionality was anonymous, mechanical, dead, and purely mathematical, relying on “mere numbers”
-
Better to Receive Than to Give Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2023-08-25 Daniel Wickberg
Three generations ago, intellectual historians wrote books in which central texts and intellectual figures were held to be the sources of entire bodies of thought. The metaphors of “influence” and “origins” were common; particular arguments associated with those texts and thinkers were imagined as shaping and creating traditions of thought. Adjectives like “Lockean,” “Jeffersonian,” “Nietzschean,”
-
The Introduction of Modern Western Philosophy in the Ottoman Empire: Armenian Thinkers Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2023-08-03 Aret Karademir
The literature on the introduction of modern Western philosophy in the late Ottoman Empire is predominantly ethnocentric. This is because it reduces the Ottoman version of modern Western philosophy to the philosophical discourses of Muslim/Turkish intellectuals at the expense of non-Muslim Ottomans’ philosophical activities in languages other than Turkish. This article challenges such ethnocentrism
-
Writing Back from the Academy: Uncovering the Unnamed Targets of Makereti's Revisionist Anthropology Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2023-07-07 Emma Gattey
The second Māori student to enrol at the University of Oxford, Makereti studied anthropology in the intellectual epicentre of the British Empire from 1927 to 1930, participating in transnational academic networks by writing about her own people. Her work was published posthumously as The Old-Time Maori, now acclaimed as an unprecedented work of Māori auto-ethnography. Exploring a forgotten seam of
-
Three Versions of Social Science in Late Eighteenth-Century France Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2023-05-30 Thomas Lalevée
The term science sociale was first employed by Mirabeau père in 1767, not Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès in 1789, as historians until now believed. Taking this discovery as its starting point, this article examines the ways in which the idea of a science of society was successively conceptualized in the late eighteenth century by Mirabeau, Sieyès, and Nicolas de Condorcet. Situating their ideas in the context
-
Ideas of Revolution in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2023-05-26 Nathan Perl-Rosenthal
This article examines the concepts of revolution that political actors employed during the age of Atlantic revolutions (c.1760–1830) and how they used these concepts to analyze, compare, and connect the era's political events. The article begins by briefly recapitulating the evolving meanings of revolution in the seventeenth century and the early eighteenth. The capacious concept of a “revolution of
-
Inventing Ordinary Anarchy in Cold War Britain Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2023-05-17 Sophie Scott-Brown
When you think of 1960s anarchism, community playgrounds and financial planning for tenants’ associations may not spring to mind, yet these, along with similar topics, were Anarchy's (1961–1970) staple fare. The A5 monthly, edited by British journalist Colin Ward (1924–2010), maintained a steady output of ‘anarchist applications’ in the spheres of education, housing, and community development. Although
-
A “Great Power” Man or World Stater? The International Thought of Charles Kingsley Webster, 1886–1961 Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2023-04-26 Andrew Ehrhardt
This article examines the international thought of Charles Kingsley Webster, one of Britain's most important diplomatic historians of the twentieth century. Though best remembered as one of the first historians of the Congress of Vienna and a biographer of Lord Castlereagh and Lord Palmerston, Webster also served as one of the key planners for the United Nations Organization in the Foreign Office during
-
Catholicism and Modernity in Irish Political Thought: The Case of Aodh de Blácam Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2022-12-06 Seán Donnelly
The political thought of Ireland's revolutionary generation has, in recent years, attracted increasing attention from scholars. However, the historiography of the Irish revolution and its aftermath remains marked by an enduring tendency to critique, rather than contextualize, the types of nationalist and religious motivations proffered commonly to justify political action in the early decades of the
-
“The Regeneration of Society”: Thomas Ernest Hulme and the Early British Reception of Georges Sorel Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2022-11-22 Tommaso Giordani, Henry Mead
The article examines T. E. Hulme's reading of Georges Sorel as a politically transversal thinker of moral renewal. It argues that, by distancing Sorel from syndicalism and by reading him as a thinker of moral absolutes, this interpretation constituted an act of resignification. This is shown by contrasting Hulme's reading with the dominant patterns of the British reception of Sorel. What emerges is
-
Taking Off the Neoliberal Lens: The Politics of the Economy, the MIT School of Economics, and the Strange Career of Lawrence Klein Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2022-10-03 Timothy Shenk
Over the last decade, a narrative centered around the rise of neoliberalism has become the dominant framework for explaining recent US, and often global, history. Although this neoliberal lens has repeatedly proven its value, it also obscures major continuities running across the twentieth century. This article highlights one striking example of continuity that becomes easier to see after taking off
-
Intellectual History, Context, and Robert Brandom Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2022-09-30 David L. Marshall
What does it mean “to put an idea in context”? Does it mean explaining the idea as the effect of a certain set of causes? Or articulating the range of responses to an issue that are recognizably conventional in a particular place and time so that the force of any given response can be assessed? Something else? Intellectual historians answer this question about context in a variety of ways, but I think
-
The Bullet That Ended Chivalry: Voltaire's Histoire de Charles Xii As A Celebration Of The Implausible Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2022-09-28 Caio Moraes Ferreira
Voltaire's first historical work (History of Charles XII, 1731) is frequently read as a piece of literary satire designed to ridicule the tradition of military heroes and warmongering monarchs. I offer a contrasting perspective and make the case that the book grapples with a problem both epistemic and poetic: how to narrate and make sense of an implausible or unbelievable past. In shedding light on
-
Kant on Peace, Honor and the “Point of View” of Princes, 1755–1795 Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2022-09-27 Olivier Higgins
By recovering the pre-critical foundations of Immanuel Kant's political idealism, this article elucidates his fundamental concern with reorienting the “point of view” of real princes and sovereigns to the cause of peace. I trace this priority to Kant's reading of Pierre Bayle, whose skepticism illustrated that the true nature of princes rendered Saint-Pierre's ideal of peace “not possible.” Beginning
-
“Algiers and the Algerian Desert”: Decolonization and the Regional Question in France, 1958–1962 Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2022-09-16 Muriam Haleh Davis
This article demonstrates how Algerian decolonization played a key role in shaping the discipline of territorial planning (aménagement du territoire) in metropolitan France. A number of liberal economists, including François Perroux, articulated notions of economic space that eschewed the nation-state as a unit of analysis. In colonial Algeria, this discourse was subsequently adopted by officials who
-
From the Three Bodies of Christ to the King's Two Bodies: The Theological Origins of Secularization Theory Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2022-09-09 Sarah Shortall
This article traces the influence of theology on one particular strand of secularization theory that emerged from the work of Ernst Kantorowicz and Marcel Gauchet. It shows how Kantorowicz's classic text, The King's Two Bodies, was deeply indebted to the insights of one of the leading Catholic theologians of the twentieth century: the French Jesuit Henri de Lubac. By tracing the influence of de Lubac's
-
Clio between Revolution and Collapse: The Making of the Historical Discipline in the Late Ottoman Empire Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2022-09-02 Erdem Sönmez
Although the establishment of history as a discipline has been examined extensively for European, North American, and, partly, Asian contexts, the Ottoman case still constitutes a neglected issue in the study of the global history of historiography and, in broader terms, of modern intellectual history. The present article focuses on the late Ottoman intellectual world and explores the making of the
-
Freedom at the Center Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2022-09-02 Stephen J. Whitfield
Of course it's brilliant. The Free World represents the hugely ambitious culmination of the efforts of a scholar of exceptional talent to explicate mid-century American culture, and to put it within a broad political and social context. With its immense attention to detail, The Free World frequently offers such fresh readings of a wide variety of topics that perhaps only subspecialists can profess
-
The Cambridge “Gang” Meets Iranian Intellectual History: Reimagining Conservatism In Context Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2022-09-01 Alexander Nachman
The Iranian humanities publication Farhang Emrooz (Today's Culture) published a series of articles on the Cambridge school of intellectual history in May 2016. The journal's colloquium, while hardly the only intervention on the Cambridge school by Iranian scholars, constitutes perhaps the most sophisticated exploration to date of the relationship between the school and Iranian intellectual history
-
“Inhuman Destiny”: Naturalism, Propaganda, and Despair before Rawls's Conversion Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2022-08-23 Robert Cheah
This article shows that John Rawls's political thought began not with Christian faith, but with a deep, secular despair about the role of propaganda and ideology in political life. I offer the first extended discussion of Rawls's earliest paper, “Spengler's Prophecy Realized,” which argued that democracy necessarily deteriorated into plebiscitary dictatorship as the masses willingly handed power to
-
“Welfare without the Welfare State”: Milton Friedman's Negative Income Tax and the Monetization of Poverty Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2022-08-15 Daniel Zamora Vargas
Recent years have witnessed a marked revival of guaranteed-income proposals. Among these, Milton Friedman's negative income tax is one of the most successful ideas to establish a universal floor of income for every citizen. Elaborated in the early 1940s, it attracted widespread attention among economists and policy makers in the aftermath of Johnson's War on Poverty. This contribution will, however
-
Jewish–Christian Religiosity: A Study in Twentieth-Century Central European History Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2022-08-12 Amir Engel
The article explores the interaction of the German, Jewish, and Christian traditions in the first part of the twentieth century in Central Europe to show three cases, in which these traditions merge into one. I name the result of this interaction “Jewish–Christian religiosity.” The name conveys a desire, common to the cases discussed, to overcome the traditional distinctions between Jews and Germans
-
Speaking Machines, the Trial of Articulation, and Deaf Education in Modern France Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2022-08-01 Sabine Arnaud
If cochlear implants continue to meet with much resistance from parts of the Deaf community and beyond, this reflects constructions of speech that have been at the core of conceptions of humankind for over three centuries. Starting in the 1750s, Julien Offray de La Mettrie advocated for deaf people's potential for speech. This was also the time of the creation of schools for deaf children, which led
-
“Typical Protestant Mistakes”: The Influence of the Cologne School of Sociology in Early Francoist Spain Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2022-08-01 Carl Antonius Lemke Duque
This article provides a new look at Francoist sociology by exploring the impact of the early Cologne school of sociology in Spain prior to and after the Spanish Civil War. It starts by explaining Helmuth Plessner's critical argument on the Renaissance and the Reformation, delving into its echo in Spain. Following the influence of Schelerian material value ethics on Spanish philosophy of right, the
-
After the New Left: On Tsumura Takashi's Early Writings and Proto-“Contemporary Thought” in Japan Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2022-07-04 Jeremy Woolsey
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
-
Dialogues between Past and Present in Intellectual Histories of Mid-Twentieth-Century Africa Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2022-06-22 Emma Hunter
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
-
Practices Make Pertinent: Prospecting and Histories of the Present Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2022-06-22 Todd Shepard
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
-
The Present as a Foreign Country: Teaching the History of Now Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2022-06-22 Patrick Iber, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen
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
-
Historical Sankofa: On Understanding Antiblack Violence in the Present through the African Diasporic Past Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2022-06-21 Alaina M. Morgan
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
-
Intellectual History and the Fascism Debate: On Analogies and Polemic Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2022-06-21 Udi Greenberg
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
-
Losing the Present to History Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2022-06-21 Faisal Devji
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
-
Past and Present in Japanese Historiography: Four Versions of Presentism Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2022-06-21 Louise Young
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
-
Political Thought and the Emotion of Shame: John Stuart Mill and the Jamaica Committee during the Governor Eyre Controversy Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2022-06-10 Jake Subryan Richards
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
-
Getting Tough or Rolling Back the State? Why Neoliberals Disagreed on a Guaranteed Minimum Income Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2022-06-08 Daniel Coleman
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
-
Introduction: Whose Present? Which History? Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2022-06-08 Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins
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
-
“Dear Professor”: Exploring Lay Comments to Milton Friedman Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2022-05-30 Maurice Cottier
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
-
Arendt and Algeria Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2022-05-26 Adam Y. Stern
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
-
Hobbes in France, Gallican Histories, and Leviathan's Supreme Pastor Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2022-04-07 Amy Chandran
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
-
For a New Social History of the Enlightenment: Authors, Readers, and Commercial Capitalism Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2022-03-31 David A. Bell
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
-
Sex, Sovereignty, and the Biological in the Interwar Arab East Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2022-03-30 Susanna Ferguson
This article frames the history of anticolonialism in the Arab world as a history of gender, sex, and power. By thinking with early twentieth-century Arab intellectuals, it revises the assumption that the heterosexual body enters into politics primarily as a site of regulation and control. Europeans justified colonialism in the Arab East by arguing that Arabs were like children who needed tutelage
-
Unravelling the Myth of Gandhian Non-violence: Why Did Gandhi Connect His Principle of Satyāgraha with the “Hindu” Notion of Ahiṃsā? Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2022-03-14 Eijiro Hazama
The purpose of this article is to unearth the genealogy of M. K. Gandhi's “non-violence,” the cardinal principle of satyāgraha. Previous works considered that Gandhi's concept of non-violence was essentially derived from the “ancient” Hindu–Jain precept of ahiṃsā (non-killing) common in the subcontinent. On the contrary, I will, by examining Gandhi's primary texts in Gujarati, Hindi, and English, demonstrate
-
Totalitarian Encounters: The Reception of Stalinism and the USSR in Fascist Italy, 1928–1936 Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2022-03-10 Jorge Dagnino
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
-
Eichmann in Plettenberg: Carl Schmitt reads Hannah Arendt Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2022-03-09 Niklas Plaetzer
This article makes use of primary sources to reconstruct Carl Schmitt's engagement with the work of Hannah Arendt. It focuses on Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963): a book that Schmitt called “exciting” and that made him sick “for a couple of weeks.” The article examines marginalia to explore the reasons behind this ambiguous reaction. It situates Schmitt's reading of Arendt in the aftermath of his 1945
-
Intellectual History as History of Engagement? The French Scholarship – CORRIGENDUM Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2022-02-14 Massimo Asta
-
The Search for Social Harmony at Harvard Business School, 1919–1942 Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2022-01-24 Ryan M. Acton
In the mid-1920s, Wallace Donham, the dean of Harvard Business School, recruited two intellectuals, Elton Mayo and Lawrence Henderson, to find solutions to the nation's ills. Like many intellectuals since the late 1800s, Donham, Mayo, and Henderson believed that laissez-faire modernization and competitive individualism had shattered the social bonds that had once harmonized the nation. Corporations
-
Writing the World at the End of Empire Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2022-01-19 Brandon R. Byrd
The mythmaking began in 1808. Soon after the Parliament of the United Kingdom passed an Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, the English abolitionist Thomas Clarkson published the first history of the movement that had led to the ban on the trafficking of enslaved Africans within the British Empire. It was a testament to British benevolence. A tribute to Christian virtue. “The abolition of the
-
On the Lives of Modern State Law Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2022-01-13 Samera Esmeir
Modern state law is an expansive force that permeates life and politics. Law's histories—colonial, revolutionary, and postcolonial—tell of its constitutive centrality to the making of colonies and modern states. Its powers intertwine with life itself; they attempt to direct it, shape its most intimate spheres, decide on the constitutive line dividing public from private, and take over the space and
-
The Figurative Foundations of Rousseau's Politics Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2022-01-10 Emma Planinc
Rousseau claims that the lawgiver must “persuade without convincing,” binding this legislative communication to the “first language,” which would, Rousseau writes, “persuade without convincing, and depict without arguing.” Drawing on a wide range of contextual sources, I show that this first language of Rousseau's is figurative, imagistic, and modeled on ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, which William
-
Thinking Outside the Circle: The Geistkreis and the Viennese “Kreis Culture” in America Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2021-12-21 Ohad Reiss-Sorokin
Besides their ideas and social networks, émigré intellectuals bring with them practices for engagement with intellectual work. This article focuses on one such practice: the intellectual Kreis [circle]. It focuses on the Geistkreis, an interwar Viennese interdisciplinary intellectual circle. Based on archival research, the article uses a number of case studies to show that the Kreis was employed by
-
For Science and Country: History Writing, Nation Building, and National Embeddedness in Third Republic France, 1870–1914 Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2021-12-15 Guillaume Lancereau
This article examines late nineteenth and early twentieth-century historiographical practices and convictions in Third Republic France. It shifts the focus from the question of whether French academic historians were nationalists to the issue of how they were nationalists. If republican academic historians took a critical stance on nationalist distortions of the past, they nevertheless associated the
-
From Atheists to Empiricists: Reinterpreting the Stoics in the German Enlightenment Modern Intellectual History Pub Date : 2021-11-02 Morgan Golf-French
From the 1670s Stoic philosophy had been closely associated with atheism and the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza. However, in 1771 the historian Christoph Meiners published a short essay on the concept of apatheia that revived interest in Stoic philosophy within the German lands. Over the following years, he and his colleague Dieterich Tiedemann developed a novel interpretation claiming that Stoicism