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 teaching of history with patriotism and opposed historiographical “pan-Germanism” in ways favorable to French cultural and territorial claims. Meanwhile, the growing internationalization of the field stimulated scholarly competition across the West and spurred reflections about nationals’ epistemological privilege over national histories, methodological nationalism, and the invention of national historiographical traditions. Uncovering the anxieties of continual debate with foreign historians and the nationalist right wing, this article offers a prehistory of present-day dilemmas over global, national, and nationalist histories in an international field characterized by structural inequalities and academic competition.

This paper examines the career and thought of French political philosopher Blandine Kriegel (b. 1943) from the standpoint of the most striking paradox they present: though she was a student of Michel Foucault, who was famous for his critique of central role that political thinking has traditionally accorded the state, Kriegel has, since the mid-1970s, been one of the foremost champions of the concept of état de droit—the state as the embodiment of the “rule of law”—in French political debates. At a time when post-1968 critics of Marxism and totalitarianism (notably the so-called nouveaux philosophes) were arguing that states were inherently despotic, Kriegel mounted an original defense of the state, which, she argued, had played a central role in establishing legal rights that freed individuals from the “slavery” of civil society. She was able to do this, in part, by drawing on several suggestive elements found in Foucault's work: his concept of biopolitics, the claim that individuals and subjectivity are constituted through power relations, and the insight that war and sovereignty represent alternative ways of conceptualizing power. In this way, she used aspects of Foucault's political thought to arrive at a decidedly non-Foucauldian appreciation of the modern state.

This article offers a new reading of the place of Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism in the history of totalitarianism theory. Building on a novel genealogy of Marxist theories of totalitarianism, the article traces this inheritance into Arendt's early work on the subject, demonstrating that her “languages” (in the Pocockian sense) were basically continuous with those of interwar Marxism. The article proceeds in three stages. First, it reconstructs two core languages of interwar Marxism (imperialism and Bonapartism). Second, it shows how these languages underpinned a central controversy in Marxist theories of totalitarianism during World War II, a debate conducted in the languages of imperialism and Bonapartism and turning on the relationship between the political and the economic. Third, it shows that Arendt wrote in these languages and contributed to the same debate. In conclusion, this striking affinity with Marxism in Arendt's early work is contrasted with the emergence of classical totalitarianism theory—a project with which Arendt was soon eager to associate herself and which makes a unified and consistent reading of The Origins of Totalitarianism so difficult.