Abstract: The focus of this essay is on ancient and late antique views on the tolerance of insult. It explores the honor-centered structure of ancient and late antique thinking on this subject, and it draws out the implications of Christian attitudes toward tolerance of insult for the possibility of religious tolerance in late antiquity. The author concludes by contrasting the late antique conceptions

Abstract: The Talmud states: “God precedes afflictions with their remedy.” But what if that remedy exacerbates the affliction? Early modern Jewish culture faced precisely this dilemma: A growing scholarly anxiety—transmitting and mastering crucial legal texts—was preceded by its solution, print. Print, however, simultaneously exacerbated the affliction. My article analyzes this dynamic's development

Abstract: While it is generally known that the word terrorism originated in the French Revolution, the exact circumstances of its emergence are much less known. First used publicly by Tallien, the neologism had actually been shaped by Pierre-Louis Roederer. From the outset, the latter had given it a conceptual scope by integrating it into a reflection on the characteristics of the use of terror for

Abstract: This article aims to clarify the stakes of the reading of Dante that concludes Ernst Kantorowicz’s 1957 book The King’s Two Bodies. It does so by reconstructing the relevant argumentative contexts for appraising it, starting from the account of the sovereign individual that Kantorowicz developed in his 1940s lecture courses at the University of California, Berkeley. It argues that, for Kantorowicz

Abstract: Intellectual and diplomatic history have to a surprising degree evolved as separate historiographies, but they can be combined through a theme crucial to both: translation. Translation enabled intercultural negotiation but could also bring about inaccuracies, misunderstandings, or consciously skewed representations. This issue argues that a multitude of actors can be understood as “translators

Abstract: The new diplomatic history embraces an interest in the role of language in early modern diplomacy, especially in transcultural contexts. This article addresses the need for translation in inter-European relations by focusing on the connections between translation and diplomacy in mid-eighteenth century Stockholm. It shows that practices of translation had a real effect on who could engage

Abstract: Empires and nation states alike used maps to practically and discursively construct territory. Such maps were often intercultural productions, and thus illustrate the role of translation in diplomacy. This article analyzes border-making between and of the Russian, Qing, and Dzungar Empires in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, thus regionalizing Western Europe. This focus

Abstract: The article explores translation processes behind diplomatic negotiations between Japan and the Spanish overseas empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. It applies a multi-layered approach that integrates the translations of original diplomatic documents with their re-translation as historiographical source compilations in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Analyzing the different

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Books Received ________ Blair, Ann, Paul Duguid, Anja-Silvia Goeing, Anthony Grafton, eds. Information: A Historical Companion. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 2021. xx, 881p., ill., index. Thirteen chapters document the rise, technologies, and uses of information from the printing press to the internet, plus 101 encyclopedic entries from

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Notices Morris D. Forkosch Prize The Journal of the History of Ideas is pleased to announce the winner of the Morris D. Forkosch Prize ($2,000) for the best first book in intellectual history published in 2019: Lydia Barnett, for After the Flood: Imagining the Global Environment in Early Modern Europe, published by Johns Hopkins University

Abstract: Today the importance of epistolary networks for intellectuals in early modern Europe is well appreciated. Nevertheless, connections reaching outside the canon of celebrated humanists and scientists in the Republic of Letters are little studied. This article examines how Charles de Bovelles (1479–1567) used letters to establish a philosophical persona and publicize his contemplative approach

Abstract: Recent scholarship on the Scottish Enlightenment has emphasized the increasing importance, in the last decades of the eighteenth century, of the concept of race. Yet race was a conceptual, moral, and taxonomic puzzle for Scots intellectuals such as Adam Ferguson (1723-1816). While the influence of Ferguson's published works has received wide scholarly attention, the content of his teaching

Abstract: This article analyzes the making of a novel consciousness of historicity in Germany around 1800, one that regarded mountains as vaults of a shared and palpable past. Revisiting a paleontological debate about the origin of large mammal bones found in caves, it reads the science of Johann Christian Rosenmüller (1771–1820) as a social and political accomplishment. By attributing the fossils

Abstract: In 1876, the French philosopher Charles Renouvier published Uchronie, an obscure philosophical novel narrating an alternate history where Christianity fails to take root in the West. Far from being a literary divertissement, the novel rests on an articulated philosophy of history, which emphasizes the role of contingency and human freedom in opposition to the organicist and deterministic

Abstract: The article establishes heretofore neglected links between the German anti-English pamphlets during World War I, on the one hand, and right-wing antidemocratic theory after the war, on the other, by engaging with their central argumentative forms. Particularly the metaphors of the English as "merchants" or "peddlers" and England as a mechanical civilization in contradistinction to German

Abstract: This article examines the widespread and varied reception of Hilaire Belloc's The Servile State (1912) in Australia from the time of its publication to the mid-twentieth century. Belloc's claim that market capitalism was giving rise to a series of legislative reforms which entrenched the inferior, servile status of the working classes was of particular interest in Australia where innovations

Abstract: This review essay discusses recent research on sovereignty and the performing arts from both historical and theoretical perspectives. I argue that Elden, Ospovat, Welch, and Wolff approach early modern symbolic communication not simply as culture but also as political acts. During the turbulent transition from Absolutism to Enlightenment, performances at the court played a crucial role in

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Notices Morris D. Forkosch Prize The Journal of the History of Ideas is pleased to announce the winner of the Morris D. Forkosch Prize ($2,000) for the best first book in intellectual history published in 2019: Lydia Barnett, for After the Flood: Imagining the Global Environment in Early Modern Europe, published by Johns Hopkins University

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Early Modern Iberia, Indexed:Hernando Colón's Cosmography Seth Kimmel The aspiration to comprehensiveness that characterized early modern cosmography was inseparable from the humanist fantasy of a universal library. This was true not least because in seeking to fulfill their field's claim to knowledge about the cosmos as a whole, cosmographers

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Human Character and the Formation of the State:Reconsidering Machiavelli and Polybius 6 Jeffrey Dymond This article aims to contribute to a growing debate over the sources of a crucial opening chapter in Machiavelli's Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio (1517)—a chapter widely regarded as foundational for the political theory developed

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: At the Bottom of the Soul:The Psychologization of the "Fundus Animae" between Leibniz and Sulzer Alessandro Nannini INTRODUCTION The concept of the ground of the soul—Grund der Seele or fundus animae—is well established within the theological tradition:1 for example, the "depths of a person's heart" (βάθος καρδίας ἀνθρώπου) is featured

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Not Six Million nor Thirty Thousand:From "Holocaust Revisionism" to "State Terrorism" Denial in Argentina, 1945–2016 Matías Grinchpun INTRODUCTION: "NOT SO MANY" In early 2016, Dario Lopérfido—then Buenos Aires city's minister of culture—made headlines when he claimed that "there were not thirty thousand desaparecidos (disappeared) in

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Notices Morris D. Forkosch Prize The Journal of the History of Ideas is pleased to announce the winner of the Morris D. Forkosch Prize ($2,000) for the best first book in intellectual history published in 2019: Lydia Barnett, for After the Flood: Imagining the Global Environment in Early Modern Europe, published by Johns Hopkins University

The oft-cited theatricality of Adam Smith's impartial spectator is contentious and rests on a generalized notion of theatre. This essay argues both that Smith, like his predecessors in sentimental moral philosophy, thought of spectatorship theatrically and that Smith's spectatorship framework is rooted in French neoclassical dramaturgy. Smith's formulation of sympathy in the Theory of Moral Sentiments

Mill's statement that "poetry is overheard" is often read as a definition of the lyric in miniature and is associated with social retreat. Yet Mill saw his encounter with the Wordsworthian lyric as a corrective to utilitarian social theory, and as a supplement to Adam Smith's theory of sympathy. Mill suggests that the writings of James Mill and Jeremy Bentham overlook the bond connecting individuals

For his conception of the ius gentium, Aquinas took as his starting point the canon law doctrines of Gratian, who himself had adopted ideas from Isidore of Seville. Aquinas's conception of the ius gentium was different of Gratian's and relied to a large extent on the civilian interpretation of Roman law texts. This article analyzes how the decretists, the first interpreters of Gratian, arrived at a

This essay interrogates the role of the charkha (spinning wheel) in Mohandas Gandhi's thought. It argues that spinning deserves to be recognized as belonging in the realm of other high concepts and practices, such as non-violence, that have garnered much more academic attention. The article explores the centrality of the charkha to Gandhi's ideology, emphasizing underappreciated facets such as its

There is no consensus on the precise role of ecclesiastical independents in shaping the revolutionary politics of the New Model Army. This essay explores how they crucially stretched the notion of non-dominating freedom across the social order and applied it more generally to the army's social and political contexts. It then turns to how this understanding of freedom informed the army's view of social

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw a resurgence of interest in the supernatural in Scotland as elsewhere in the United Kingdom. A number of intellectual figures responded by proposing naturalistic explanations for supernatural phenomena, drawing on the legacy of Scottish Enlightenment philosophy. These included the geologist and antiquarian Samuel Hibbert and the phrenologist George

René-Louis de Girardin is remembered for having invited Rousseau to hisErmenonville estate. Girardin believed it necessary to further the debate on gardens on the basis of a principle of continuity that rejects any idea of enclosure. This made it possible to establish an agricultural model that increased production and finally allowed the monopoly in grain sales to be broken. At the service of l'idéologienobiliaire

This article examines the role of psychiatry in the life and work of Frantz Fanon. It focuses on Fanon's relationship to institutional psychotherapy, which he discovered at the hospital of Saint-Alban through the figure of François Tosquelles. Institutional psychotherapy confirmed, on a clinical level, what Fanon had already intuited in his early work. If alienation was always political and psychic

By drawing from Schmitt's postwar notebooks, this article reconstructs Schmitt's criticism of utopian political thought as part of his broader critique of technicity. This paper begins with Schmitt's conceptual history of utopianism within the context of two "de-localizations" of space and human nature. It then unearths Schmitt's unique understanding of utopia as the annihilation of space and the negation

This article examines J. S. Mill's philosophical logic as the basis for his political philosophy. In particular, it explores how he understands the logical mechanism of political discourse in his work A System of Logic and how this understanding supports his defense of freedom of thought and discussion in his On Liberty (chapter 2). While it is well known in the scholarly literature that Mill draws

While Grotius does not offer a new theory of marriage, nonetheless marriage seems to crop up in the most unlikely of places in The Rights of War and Peace. Marriage, as it arises out of natural law, becomes a model for thinking about topics vital to the early modern international: conduct in war, trade, sovereignty, and subordination of peoples; theorizing hierarchy and obligation of unequals; forging

This article presents a reassessment of the seventeenth-century debate over the origin of the Hebrew vowel points. Previous accounts have treated this debate from the perspective of Protestant scholarship, with the reception of Louis Cappel's Arcanum punctationis revelatum (1624) used to measure progress or reaction according to how far scholars accepted or rejected-the latter for theological reasons-the

Why compare Aby Warburg, talented cultural and art historian, creator of the eponymous library, and Leo Frobenius, pioneer of primitive art studies and the father of modern Africanism? Not merely for biographical reasons. The work of Warburg and Frobenius offers two clear examples of a cultural and scientific trend between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, which

What is too often lacking in contemporary interpretations of Immanuel Kant's racial thinking is a more thorough overview of the context and of the literature that he used to support his ideas. This article is mainly limited to Kant's brief discussion on race mixing at the end of this 1785 essay. He presented there the cases of the gypsies, the black Portuguese, and the Jews on St. Thomas in order to

In this article I explore how William Godwin depicted the social operation of media, and argue that his writing highlights a crosscurrent of alethic thought in Romantic-period Britain. I examine his direct assessments of the social merits of book-reading and conversation, revealing his ambivalence regarding sources of epistemic authority. I argue that he inherited this ambivalence from his Dissenting

By the 1880s, the Universities' Mission to Central Africa had stations scattered all over East Africa. African adherents came to the mission's Zanzibar headquarters for school and returned to the mainland as clergy and teachers. Despite their wide dispersal, the members of the mission maintained strong connections; in this piece, I trace these connections through the idea of the Upelekwa, a Swahili

Well-studied in historiography, nineteenth-century debates on Portugal's decadence ("decadência") left a deep and long-lasting impression in this country's historical culture. The idea that Portugal had reached its apogee and was inexorably losing ground in the concert of other European peoples led its intellectuals to search in the past for elements capable of inspiring a national rebirth. Among the

In 1748 Montesquieu simultaneously published his immense Spirit of the Laws and republished his brief Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline. Both the date of publication and the evidence of the texts themselves correct contemporary scholars' tendency to discount the status of the Considerations as the unique partner of the Laws. Reading the two works together

This article uses computational and statistical methods for analyzing the concept of liberty 1600-1800. Based on a bespoke set of tools for parsing conceptual structures it contributes to the literature on the concept of liberty and engages with the thesis concerning negative liberty first put forward by Isaiah Berlin and subsequently modified by Quentin Skinner.

Crucial to accounts of complexity is the history of the concept of emergence. Pride of place is generally given to G. E. Lewes, who in 1879 offered a theory of "emergents," of the unpredictable and incommensurate effects which follow from the crossing of causes. This essay recovers an earlier tradition; it focuses on experiments in seventeenth-century materials science, which explain emergent properties

In recent works on the Enlightenment and the origin of modern Western thought, there is often a dichotomy between Moderate versus Radical Enlightenment. This essay evaluates the early experiences of freedom of print in Sweden and Denmark against the backdrop of such assertions. Sweden and Denmark were widely diverging polities but they obtained officially recognized freedom of the press at almost the

During the French Revolution, several decrees were issued ordering the bells of suppressed churches to be melted and converted to money and cannons. Through examples drawn from literary and historical sources, this essay explains this fateful condemnation by showing how bells were part and parcel of pre-revolutionary anti-clerical writing. This essay also argues that the conflicting attitudes toward

Following Hans Blumenberg, this essay studies the genealogy of the idea of originality in a medieval metaphor characterizing the church interior as a "meadow" or λειμῶν (leimôn). Scholars focusing on this metaphor have neglected its use as a description of artistic process. Procopius of Caesarea, John of Damascus, and Leo VI, "the Wise." form the basis of this study, which argues that compiling anthologies

Scholars have generally depicted kabbalists within an air of exclusivity. During the second quarter of the eighteenth century, however, a handful of Jewish mystics in Padua, led by Moses HayimLuzzatto, opened their secret society to others interested but not adept in Kabbalah in an attempt to establish a "perfected community" and attain the long-awaited messianic redemption. This article explores the

Abstract:This review essay discusses recent Anglophone research on melancholy from both historical and cultural-critical traditions. I argue that these works offer a way for reconceptualizing early modern melancholy as a problem of accounting for passions and motives. The early modern archive of melancholy can help us articulate anti-depressive melancholy as a social problematic rather than merely

Abstract:This article probes the interplay of religious belief and early modern textual culture in Francisco Zumel's 1588 vita of Peter Nolasco. Like many hagiographers before and after, Zumel drew on earlier saint's lives to supply missing details; to choose his diverse set of sources, however, turned to bibliomancy, opening Laurentius Surius's hagiography collection De probatis sanctorum historiis

Abstract:This collection celebrates the semicentennial of the publication of Hans Blumenberg's The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. The question that inspired Blumenberg may continue to provoke readers today, when challenges to secularism have emerged both in academic discourse and in political life: Can modernity ground its own normativity without appealing to the religious past? Or must we abandon the

Abstract:Blumenberg's The Legitimacy of the Modern Age was published in the same year as Foucault's The Order of Things (1966). Both books attempt to grasp certain not altogether self-evident changes in the Western history of knowledge and attempt new methods of considering these discontinuities and the so-called "thresholds" between epochs. Beyond such general points of shared interest, one must ask

Abstract:This essay reconstructs the secularization debate between Blumenberg and Löwith. It explores what a genealogy of secular modernity can and cannot accomplish, asking how to build on Blumenberg's legacy without repeating his errors. Blumenberg absorbed the skepticism of a genealogy of secularism and responded with an unrealistic image of disconnected modernity, while also understanding that

Abstract:Especially in the second part of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, Hans Blumenberg considered philosophical modernity through a reflection on theodicy. Theodicy even appeared here as constitutive for modernity, although this philosophical project of defending God against the existence of evil had been challenged several times in the past centuries. This role of theodicy in Legitimacy has been

Abstract:This article explores an ideological basis for a Stuart royal empire in early modern Britain that encompassed not just the three kingdoms of the Atlantic archipelago but also the overseas possessions held by the Crown. It argues that contemporaries articulated and acknowledged, especially from the 1620s into the 1680s, a fully realized entity, headed by the Stuart monarchs, and that royalism

Abstract:This paper explores how Blumenberg narrates the history of modernity as a second overcoming of Gnosticism. This detour through late antiquity illuminates the full meaning of his idea of modernity. Blumenberg develops important methodological insights about historical change, the threshold between epochs, etc. that appear in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. We see the central role of the interpretation

Abstract:This article examines Bodin's distinction between sovereignty and government ("la police") in the Six Livres de la République (1576) in the intellectual context of the Wars of Religion, and argues that the terminology of "la police" requires investigation in order to clarify its meaning. It demonstrates how Bodin distinguished his understanding of political science from his contemporaries

Abstract:The notion of a "theoretical attitude" [theoretische Einstellung or Haltung] is of central importance to Blumenberg's work, and particularly so in his writings on the history of science. From The Legitimacy of the Modern Age onwards, Blumenberg used this notion to insist on a continuity between scientific and humanistic modes of inquiry despite their different methodologies, and he attached

ABSTRACT:This paper addresses the topic of seventeenth-century religious freedom of speech, focusing on the concepts conceived by Adam Boreel, an early member of the Dutch Collegiants. First, it gives historical information on Adam Boreel and the Collegiant movement. Second, it examines Boreel’s ideas concerning freedom of prophesying, highlighting how Boreel perceived this freedom and religious enthusiasm

Abstract:This article argues that the recent rise of "anti-gender ideology," reproductive nationalism, and related discourses is best seen as an attempt to rework the boundaries of national sovereignty in a time of crisis. By focusing on the case of Estonia, the article shows how discourses which linked demographic decline to supranational, totalitarian, and utopian "experimentation" was articulated