At what point can a social democrat be described as neoliberal? In 1982, Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck (1930–2020) left the Social Democratic Party, although he claimed to remain a social democrat by principle. Lindbeck was a central representative of the neo-Keynesian turn in economics after 1970. At the same time, he was a principled believer in the welfare state. This essay places Lindbeck, somewhat asymmetrically, in the context of two other Swedish economists: social democrat, eventually libertarian, Ingemar Ståhl, and trade union economist Gösta Rehn. My purpose in comparing these three economists is to examine the boundaries between an evolving social-democrat project and emergent neoliberal ideas. There were important connections of conversation, collaboration and friendship between these three actors. Yet they took different paths. The article proposes that understanding the relationship between social democracy and neoliberalism can be productively done through an emphasis on three things: the relationship between egalitarian objectives and economic instrumentalities in the social-democrat project, specific meeting points between social-democrat and neoliberal repertoires of ideas as proposed in the problem of the mixed economy, and the interplay of personal biographies and economic expertise.

This article aims to contribute to recent discussions about the status of the “aesthetic” in the history of liberalism, by considering the ways in which ideas about music—specifically a “love of music [that is] both aesthetic and ethical”—has shaped liberal thought. Focusing on the work of the prominent twentieth-century liberal Isaiah Berlin (1909–97), and drawing from unpublished correspondence and neglected published writings, it introduces music as a form through which Berlin approached thinking about the tension between sensation and idea, or feeling and thinking, thereby shaping his approach to intellectual history.

This article offers a reading of the intersections of ancient and modern imperialism in Alfred Zimmern's 1911 monograph The Greek Commonwealth: Politics and Economics in Fifth-Century Athens. The first section looks at Zimmern's use of ancient and modern comparisons and shows that, far from modernizing the ancient Greeks, as scholars have argued, he in fact insistently drew attention to the differences between the ancient and modern worlds. The second section examines the complexities of Zimmern's narrative of the Athenian empire, in particular the tension between politics and economics intimated by the book's subtitle and foregrounded by its structure. The article as a whole sets Zimmern's account in the context of Edwardian reflections on ancient and modern imperialism and shows, with the help of his own reflections, that his use of historical parallels was designed to encourage thought about modern political and economic problems as well as action to remedy them.

This article examines the topic of postcolonial subject formation in the work of Moroccan historian and theorist Abdallah Laroui (1933–) by analyzing his evaluation of the notion of authenticity. I trace understandings of self-identity for Moroccans and other Arab populations that Laroui articulates in his work from the 1960s through the 2000s, and situate his interventions in relation both to relevant political developments and to contributions of other Arab intellectuals on this question, across this time period. Rather than interpret Laroui as a proponent of undifferentiated universalism in his reading of modern history, as many of his critics and commentators do, I demonstrate how he departs from such an approach by calling attention to the notion of particularism, which he defends as a counterpoint to authenticity. The article concludes with a discussion of Laroui's abandonment of a positive, alternative conception of cultural and political subjectivity by the late twentieth century, and considers what the implications of this shift in his thought are.

Statistics, ableism and domestic colonialism were inextricably intertwined in Britain over the long nineteenth century, based on both engineering people deemed to be “backward” and improving “waste” land, which together were used to justify farm colonies for the disabled, bookended by two key moments. The first is Sir John Sinclair's introduction of descriptive statistics into the English language in order to provide a foundation for domestic colonization which, as the founding president of the British Board of Agriculture and Internal Improvement, he promoted. He also enlisted Jeremy Bentham, who published his own domestic colonization plan (massive pauper panopticons on waste land) rooted in the statistics of his pauper population table. The second key moment occurs at the beginning of the twentieth century, when Sir Francis Galton develops key statistical arithmetic methods as the foundation for eugenics and his defense of compulsory segregation of the mentally disabled into domestic farm colonies.

In 1884, during the period of the Socialist Laws, August Bebel took the time to publish a historical work entitled Die mohamedanisch- arabische Kulturperiode. In it Bebel positioned Islam and the early caliphates as the unacknowledged link between Greco-Roman traditions of knowledge and the blossoming of European culture that, he argued, had occurred since the Renaissance. He also used the book as an opportunity to reject claims that Christianity had played this key role in world historical progress. Through an examination and contextualization of Bebel's writings on Islam, this article shows how he viewed the role of different religious traditions within world history and how his views intersected with contemporary questions regarding the relationship between religion and socialism. The article also examines how Bebel's work fits within a longer tradition of socialist solidarity with the Ottoman Empire.

This article analyzes the relationship between living systems theory (LST) and the army's military doctrine in the 1980s. General Donn Starry, Colonel Mike Malone, and Major James Cary worked with James G. Miller, the founder of LST, to make the army more efficient at fighting a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. LST conceptualized that living organisms organized matter and energy and that its components could function because they worked as a part of the whole to adapt to their environment. The article reveals how these officers employed LST as a framework to model a reciprocal relationship between individual agency and collective unity in the army's hierarchical organization. Situating this doctrinal reform in the years after the end of the draft and the mainstreaming of neoclassical economics in the 1980s, it finds that the army officers were using LST to replace Robert McNamara's mechanical strategic paradigm used in the Vietnam War.

This article examines Morgenthau's switch from international law to international politics, arguing that it was fundamental to his emergence as a founder of postwar realism in the United States. More precisely, it sets this switch in the context of a far-reaching but largely overlooked debate among American jurists during the 1930s on the question of peaceful change: of how to revise an international order or major aspects of it by means other than war. This debate provided Morgenthau with a solution to the impasse reached by his project in international law before World War II, allowing him to transform what appeared to be a problem from the vantage point of international law into a structural element of an approach to international politics—of his realism.

The conventional approach to Isaiah Berlin's writings has been to treat them discursively, as philosophical texts. While such approaches are insightful, there is more to Berlin's writings than his arguments. Among his literary strategies is a comparative approach that involves the use of metaphors, similes, and analogies. As I will argue, Berlin's use of metaphor constitutes a core component of his work, where his meaning is often suggestive more than precise. Berlin's intention seems to be to exhibit those aspects of experience reflective of uncertainty, where our choices are not determined by necessity. Such an intention ostensibly exhibits his value pluralism, as well as an oft-neglected sensitivity to the forms of language. By resorting to metaphors Berlin accomplishes several things: he shows how the intelligibility of experience is partially imagistic, he illustrates how meaning can be structured comparatively but nondiscursively, and he exemplifies the importance of these things for decision making.

In postwar France a proliferation of thinkers sought to move away from the dialectic of negation and synthesis. Two such writers turned to Jean-Jacques Rousseau as the source of a non-dualistic reflection. In 1962, Claude Lévi-Strauss laid claim to him as the “founder of the sciences of man,” and, inspired in part by his contact with Buddhism, he created a non-dualist version of the philosophe as a foil to Sartre. In 1989, Monique Wittig would also take up Rousseau, but in order to challenge Lévi-Strauss's notion of the exchange of women. In her hands, Rousseau also became a non-dualist through whom she could formalize the insights of gay and lesbian community life as a theory of sex abolition: “the science of the oppressed.” With archival materials, close readings, and historical contextualization, this article explores the genesis and interactions of both interpretations and situates them on the broader horizon of postwar thought.

This article explores how rumors of monarchical sodomy at the turn of the eighteenth century became entangled with newly emerging conceptions of the nation and nationalized space. After the 1688 Revolution in England, accusations of the king's sodomy increasingly mobilize territorial rather than theological understandings of sodomy's danger, transforming sodomy's terror from a satanic threat to the Christian kingdom to a national threat to the English nation. While historical studies on the territorialization of sovereignty often focus on structural transformations to the state, these accounts rarely attend to transformations in political feeling. This article shows how a novel discourse of national sodomy helped unsettle long-standing attachments to the king as the embodiment of sovereign power. Moreover, this article methodologically innovates the study of state sovereignty by attending to conceptual problems of political attachment through the study of an affectively loaded concept such as sodomy.

When, why and how did the subjects of individual and national self-determination come to overlap and what were the effects of this overlap when it occurred? Usually in the history of European political thought, the subject of self-determination is associated with the concept of autonomy, while the subject of national self-determination is associated with the concept of the nation-state. The aim of this article is to examine the relationship between these two concepts mainly in the light of an earlier tension between the concepts of the people and of the nation as agents of political authorization and between Roman law and the legacy of Monarchomach thought particularly, but not exclusively, in eighteenth-century France. It is designed to show of how this cluster of tensions was described and discussed first by Rousseau, Kant and Hegel, and then, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, by such figures as Mill, Tocqueville, Bluntschli, Bosanquet, Hauriou, Schmitt and Strauss. The point of the article is to suggest that the modern, two-sided, relationship between parties and states is more of a continuation of the earlier conceptual relationship between nations and peoples than is usually assumed.

The First World War is often seen as marking a transition from a world of empires to that of nation-states. As perhaps the inaugural global event, it is understood as making possible the international order we still inhabit. Yet the war also gave rise to powerful movements that sought to oppose and even dismantle this order. Soviet communism provided one such challenge and pan-Islamism another. While Lenin's desire to convert a war between states into one between classes turned into the dream of an alternative international order, the world's largest pan-Islamist movement in India retained its non-statist imagination. Like Gandhi's Noncooperation Movement, of which they were a part, India's pan-Islamists radicalized the language of empire rather than turning to religion for a new internationalist ideal. And they did so by aiming to escape the war as a global event.

Today, it seems impossible to discuss historians’ encounter with post-structuralist theory, the ensuing triumphant surge of the cultural turn, and the establishment of what scholars have recently called the postcultural historiography without the help of such paramount concepts of post-structuralist analysis as contingency, variability, instability, open-endedness, and so on. Having defined the last forty years of theoretical and methodological developments in history, these nowadays conventional tools of critique and interpretation have grown to become synonymous with the post-structuralist conceptual promise and outcome. This article questions this standard and exceptionally generous account. What if, the article asks, we start our account not with the resolute assertion of the radical contingency and variability of the post-structuralist view of history, but with something more fundamental to it—its own fixed and totalizing presuppositions? To show how an intellectual agenda opposed to fixed and totalizing reasoning can end up operating with fixed and totalizing logics of its own, the essay turns to Michel Foucault and his momentous career, to be traced from the 1960s to the 1980s.

This article argues that Thoreau's concept of “labor” presented as a defense of poiesis—any generative, world-altering activity. Thoreau understood Nature's labor as the ultimate creation for humans to imitate. Human labor best approached this ideal in the absence of market-based divisions of labor, particularly when mental and physical labor were united (even undifferentiated beyond their contemporary, reified distinction, a distinction which deeply troubled Thoreau). Thoreau's epistemology undergirds my discussion of his theory of labor. As I argue, his attempts to transcend divisions between subject and object, between ideal and material—divisions pertinent to his intellectual influences and interlocutors—were isomorphic to his attempts to transcend divisions of mental and physical labor, insofar as sensuous knowing itself was laborious. As Thoreau sought to know Nature and bring human labor closer to it, he expressed a consistent, dialectically complex philosophy, in which political economy and aesthetics, science and poetry, ran in parallel.

This article traces the history of a scholarly vice of little renown: hypercriticism. Focusing on classical philologists and biblical scholars in nineteenth-century Germany, it examines how Hyperkritik developed from a technical philological term into a pejorative label that was widely invoked to discredit the latest trends in classical philology and, especially, biblical scholarship. Methodologically, this broad use of the term challenges historians’ preference for treating scholarly virtues and vices as norms tied to scholars’ research practices. The article therefore develops a rhetorical approach, complementary to the praxeological one, in which scholarly vice terms are interpreted as parts of a repertoire of scholarly “don'ts” on which both specialists and nonspecialists could draw in addressing the perceived ills of scholarly work.

Beginning with its emergence in the 1870s and carrying through to the wars of the 1990s, Yugoslav socialism was animated by various visions of supranational affiliation: from Balkan federalism to communist Slavism to the nonaligned movement and European unification. These projects were examples of what this article terms mediating spaces: strategies of spatial consolidation designed to mediate their constituent nations’ integration into global capitalist modernity. Throughout the long twentieth century intellectuals on the world periphery set out to secure political sovereignty and economic development at a scale between the national and the global. These spatial projects were particularly pronounced in Yugoslavia, where the fragmentation of multiethnic empires made questions of supranational unity especially urgent. Developing the concept of mediating spaces, this article proposes a mode of intellectual history that approaches the global not as the scope of intellectual mobility or the horizon of historical inquiry, but rather as a generative scale of human experience that conditioned the formation of modern radical thought.

This article offers a new account of the rise of judicial power in modern Germany. Strong judicial control of the government is often associated with the constitutional ethos that emerged in postwar West Germany as a reaction to Nazi rule. This article locates the origins of German judicialization in the political struggles of the Weimar era. It shows how the assumption of a power to judicial review by Germany's highest court, the Reichsgericht, was the product of the successful cooperation of the judiciary with conservative political parties on the issue of property rights in the young republic. These were at the centre of two controversies examined in the article: the expropriation of princes of former ruling houses and the consequences of the hyperinflation of 1923. In both cases the Reichsgericht used an understanding of property as an inalienable right to radically reinterpret Germany's first democratic constitution, which had in fact granted the legislature extensive power to modify property relations. This suited the judiciary's own objective of assuming stronger controls over legislative action and bolstered the political position of conservative forces in Weimar politics. What emerged was a supra-positive constitutionalism that sought to supersede the written constitution. These political realities were an essential context for theoretical debates on the extent and limits of judicial power between theorists such as Carl Schmitt, Hans Kelsen, Hermann Heller, Franz Neumann, and Ernst Fraenkel. An examination of the complex interaction of parliamentary, judicial, and popular politics concerning the issue of property reveals that German judicial empowerment amounted to an attempt to rewrite the Weimar Constitution and limit the scope of Germany's democratic revolution.