This article challenges the historiographical commonplace that twentieth-century American management discourse was dominated by bureaucratic aspirations to objective expertise and rational planning. Proposing the category of “entrepreneurial management” to describe the countervailing tendency, it demonstrates the persistence of intellectual interest in managers who used the personal qualities of leadership to enlist enthusiasm among subordinates for their firm's initiatives. By the mid-twentieth century, these managerial leaders were commonly described as “entrepreneurs.” Through a reading of early twentieth-century writing on “human factor” management and Depression-era “human relations” theory, the article shows that intellectual interest in entrepreneurial leadership thrived during a period typically characterized as the height of scientific management and corporate bureaucracy. Analyzing Peter F. Drucker's postwar management writing in detail, the article concludes by arguing that the “entrepreneurialism” of the late twentieth century did not represent a break with the established managerial project, only the strengthened authority of one existing tendency within a variegated intellectual field.

This article examines the ways in which Protestant ministers, laypeople and foreign missionaries mediated between religious and secular ideologies in Brazil and took part in international theological debates. It concentrates on a group of church pastors and lay writers based in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro who produced and circulated Christian literature widely across evangelical networks. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Protestants engaged with both the local reverberations of the Catholic revival, with its impact on the hierarchy and devotional practices of the Brazilian Church, and the secularist leanings of the Brazilian intelligentsia. Focusing on a variety of high- and low-level publications, including periodicals, tracts, theological compendia, religious controversies and sermons, the article examines how Brazilian evangelicals appropriated Protestant theology and channeled its concepts and ideas into local arguments.

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 closely prefigured the philosophy of John Locke and represented a source of valuable philosophical ideas. Immanuel Kant, his allies, and later Idealists such as Hegel adopted this empiricist interpretation, despite their otherwise deep philosophical disagreements with Meiners and Tiedemann. Tracing eighteenth-century German debates around Stoicism reveals how it came to be considered a form of empiricism. As well as contributing to recent scholarship on the reception of Stoicism, the article suggests a major point of intersection between currents of the Enlightenment usually only treated separately.

For over two decades, historians of the early modern world have been charting the practices, principles, and ideologies of the “Republic of Letters,” an intellectual community forged via paper, not place. Few, however, have ever ventured to consider America's place in this scholarly republic. This article charts in new detail the aspirations—and shortcomings—of eighteenth-century American efforts to participate in a truly transnational, intellectual community. Focusing on the life of Ezra Stiles (1727–95), it will dig into hundreds of unpublished, untranslated manuscripts, as well as scores of overlooked early modern periodicals and publications. What emerges is a glimpse into how Stiles especially strove to place America on the intellectual map of the early modern world. Stiles's plan was to lay the academic groundwork for his new nation by forging connections between universities and promoting a unified intellectual front to the Republic of Letters abroad. In one sense, this vision was remarkably shrewd, standing out as one of the first efforts to connect colonial universities. On the personal level, however, this (over)emphasis on institutions came at a cost. Too preoccupied with the colonial American universities and too little focused on publication, Stiles would ultimately struggle to be recognized as a citizen of the scholarly republic.

Sylvia M. Payne was one of the first women to practice psychoanalysis in Britain. Though she became president of the British Psychoanalytical Society, not a single scholarly work is dedicated to Payne's intellectual ideas—a substantial historical lacuna, especially when compared with the research on Ernest Jones, one of Sigmund Freud's early disciples and the president who preceded her. This essay presents the first exploration of her early work. It focuses on her belonging to a group of British analysts who challenged Sigmund Freud's thinking on sexual difference. The full scope of this challenge, I argue, as it emerged in interwar Britain, has remained unexamined until today. Adding to the scholarship on the prominent and lesser-known roles of women in psychoanalysis, the article shows that Payne made significant contributions to the field; she also developed the work of Melanie Klein, on whom we also need more research. The study describes the life and work of a woman who has been neglected in the historiography of twentieth-century intellectual history. It engages with broader methodological questions of how to define the political, historical role of female psychoanalysts of her generation.

The following article prints a new manuscript by John Locke: a commentary on A Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie (1669) by Samuel Parker (1640–88), the religious controversialist. Locke's interest in Parker's work has been known to scholars since 1954, when notes by Locke of roughly one thousand words were purchased by the Bodleian Library. The article reports the discovery of an unknown portion of this commentary: a manuscript of roughly three thousand words in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The article transcribes the manuscript, reconstructs its provenance, and reexamines Locke's engagement with Parker's Discourse. This engagement occurred in the period following Locke's composition of the first recensions of his Essay Concerning Toleration (1667–8), as Locke contemplated a refutation of Parker's ecclesiology. The discovered manuscript provides the first evidence of Locke's commitment to the principle that minimalistic theism would suffice for peaceable coexistence in any civil society.

This article tells the story of the eccentric and unknown writer Albert William Alderson (1880–1963), a British South African office clerk whose father had helped found the De Beers diamond mining corporation with Cecil Rhodes. Alderson, despite having no academic background, wrote two books and several pamphlets arguing that world peace could be achieved by eliminating all the languages in the world other than English; he buttressed this claim with an elaborate account of the causes of war taken from his reading in world history, but also with extraordinary statements on the relation of language to personal agency. Although Alderson's arguments cannot be taken seriously, they are illuminating as an example of “naïve” liberalism pushed to its limit; that is, as a case-study in heterodoxy comparable to Carlo Ginzburg's Menocchio. I conclude by suggesting that his work helped inspire one influential reader—C. K. Ogden, the founder of Basic English.