This article pursues the origin and mutation of a fantastic story concerning an automaton in the shape of a young girl that was supposedly built by René Descartes. In recent decades it has been retold and reimagined so many times that the tale has become an iconic narrative in the context of the reassessment of Descartes's significance in intellectual history. But a close reading of the original story, found in a 1699 work entitled Mélanges d'histoire et de littérature by Vigneul-Marville, reveals an overtly stated agenda of saving the philosopher's moral reputation, which makes most recent interpretations of the story problematic. The vast majority of modern retellings demonstrate no awareness of the content or the significance of the first tale even as it has been used to shed light on Descartes, Cartesian ideas, and early modern thought in general.

The British philosopher F. C. S. Schiller (1864–1937) was a leading pragmatist in the early twentieth century. His critiques of formal logic and his attempts to construct a humanist logic, derived from an anti-foundationalist humanism, are recognized as lasting philosophical achievements. But scholars have failed to consider that Schiller was passionately committed to the British eugenics movement. This essay explores the relationship between Schiller's pragmatism and his eugenicism. It argues that Schiller represents the broad scope of pragmatism in the early twentieth century through his involvements not only with eugenics, but also with psychical research as well. Underneath Schiller's various undertakings lies a common theme: the self, conceived in voluntaristic, historicist, and concrete terms. By tracing the trajectory of this theme in Schiller's thought, this essay demonstrates that Schiller's eugenicism was confined to the presuppositions of his pragmatist logic, which steered Schiller's eugenicism toward a distinctively nondeterministic and non-social-Darwinist kind.

Historical epistemology is a form of intellectual history focused on “the history of categories that structure our thought, pattern our arguments and proofs, and certify our standards for explanation” (Lorraine Daston). Under this umbrella, historians have been studying the changing meanings of “objectivity,” “impartiality,” “curiosity,” and other virtues believed to be conducive to good scholarship. While endorsing this historicization of virtues and their corresponding vices, the present article argues that the meaning and relative importance of these virtues and vices can only be determined if their mutual dependencies are taken into account. Drawing on a detailed case study—a controversy that erupted among nineteenth-century orientalists over the publication of R. P. A. Dozy's De Israëlieten te Mekka (The Israelites in Mecca) (1864)—the paper shows that nineteenth-century orientalists were careful to examine (1) the degree to which Dozy practiced the virtues they considered most important, (2) the extent to which these virtues were kept in balance by other ones, (3) the extent to which these virtues were balanced by other scholars’ virtues, and (4) the extent to which they were expected to be balanced by future scholars’ work. Consequently, this article argues that historical epistemology might want to abandon its single-virtue focus in order to allow balances, hierarchies, and other dependency relations between virtues and vices to move to the center of attention.

Intellectual historians often invoke “romanticism” to account for the origins and conceptual shape of nationalism. In an Irish context, however, this approach has yielded false genealogies of influence and an impaired political understanding. Cast through a “romantic” prism, nationalism is divorced from its conditions of intelligibility, becoming unhelpfully isolated from questions about sovereignty, democratic legitimacy and the nature of modern citizenship. Thus all too often the irrationality that is made part of the definition of “romantic nationalism” is a function of the way that it is interpreted.

Georg Jellinek was one of the legal theorists who brought a new level of methodological sophistication to German public law scholarship at the turn of the twentieth century. Where previous research has called attention to his theory of conceptual “types” and his application of contemporary neo-Kantian epistemology to the law, this article explores his thinking on the nature of values and value judgments, and the possibilities for objectivity in the legal and political sciences. Jellinek sought to open an increasingly calcified legal positivism to the findings of the social sciences and to an inherently pluralistic, changing world of subjective values, but without abandoning the positivist ideals of legal certainty and the exclusion of political and other value judgments. Analyzing his response to this challenge opens a window onto his broader work in public law and political science, illuminating doctrines like the “two-sided” theory of the state and the “normative power of the factual,” which have achieved a lasting place in German legal and political theory. It also shows why Jellinek put aside the traditional ideal of bias-free objectivity for a surprisingly modern vision of a process of intersubjective agreement, driven by the institutions of free and open scholarly debate.

This article explores positivist universalism, one of the central aspects of contemporary approaches in political theory, through the study of the Young Turks’ political thought. Current scholarship portrays the Young Turks as champions of a national cause, limited to overthrowing despotism and relaunching the Constitution of 1876 in the Ottoman Empire. This neglects their broader aim to guarantee peace, order, and progress, both at home and abroad, by adopting Comtean universal positivism, and it distorts their vision of society, politics, and history. From their base in Paris the Young Turks challenged the Eurocentric conception of universalism, suggesting a more egalitarian and comprehensive conception that has yet to be recognized. This article shows that, transcending the conventional boundaries between Western and non-Western political thought, the Young Turks’ political ideology presents an early example of the formation of a modern, pluralist worldview, and that their core conceptions had a deep impact on the founding of Turkish republicanism.

Colleagues hailed the Rutgers University historian Warren Susman as a pioneer in the field of cultural history and popular culture when he died in 1985 at the age of fifty-eight. Although well known, Susman had published just a handful of essays, a collection of which was published only the year before his death. Despite his reputation, this work was not widely reviewed and when it was, not uniformly positively. This essay explores the disjunction between his work and his reputation and, through an analysis of archival sources, including Susman's newly available personal papers, argues that Susman's importance lies less in his contributions to the field of cultural history than in his understanding of the relationship between historical work and the critical intellectual heritage of progressivism. The essay traces Susman's early professional career and historical work, including his unpublished doctoral study of expatriate intellectuals and his critical engagement with the legacy of the Progressive historians, and his mid-career efforts to join with other left scholars in establishing a new socialist party. Susman's career allows for the analysis and better understanding of the progressive tradition in historical scholarship, the changes in intellectual and cultural history in the 1960s, and the way historians have understood their role in social reform.

Jawaharlal Nehru was both a historian and a self-conscious agent of historical change. This essay explores his political thought by bringing these two perspectives together. I argue that his approaches to a number of issues, including the state project that has been his most significant legacy, shared a concern with linking together the past, present and future. My concern here is primarily with the post-1947 phase of Nehru's career, which was marked by key shifts in his political thought due to a perceived transformation of temporal experience and an altered relationship with history. By attending to the way his thought worked through notions of temporality and historicity, this article offers insights into Nehru's understanding of technological modernity, violence, socialism, the individual, the nation and the role of the state.

In the lecture “Science as a Vocation,” Max Weber gave a reckoning not only of his own scholarly life, but also of our fate in a world bereft of wonder. Self-possessed intellectuals command knowledge with authority. Yet their technical prowess also points up intractable limits. Calculation falters in securing value, whether in its moral or economic guises. If “we live as did the ancients when their world was not yet disenchanted of its gods and demons,” Weber mused, we nonetheless do so “in a different sense.” Once-knowing entities have shed their skins, to assume the mien of “impersonal forces.” These remarks assemble elements of Weber's religious sociology within a single frame, from the “this-worldly asceticism” of the Protestant ethic to portrayals of rationality as an “iron cage,” where spirits—much less the Spirit—dare not tread.

Tom Paine, it turns out, may have done almost as much to shape public discourse in the early national period of the United States as he did in moving aggrieved colonists to take up arms against King George III in the Revolutionary period. As historians have documented time and again, the arguments in Paine's Common Sense (1776), especially “On Monarchy and Hereditary Succession,” worked as an elixir to transform mixed opinions about dealing with Parliamentary overreach into an unalloyed determination to throw off the king. The four books reviewed here point to the same sort of conclusion about the importance of Paine's The Age of Reason, published in two parts in 1794 and 1795 and then reprinted almost as often over the next few years as Common Sense had been at the outset of the War of Independence. With the latter work, however, Paine accomplished more through the opposition he generated than by the readers he convinced. Although a few doughty Loyalists had ventured to take on Common Sense, that opposition was as nothing compared to the groundswell of denunciation that arose in the 1790s to defuse what Americans of many stripes considered Paine's incendiary provocations. Thoroughly researched and persuasively argued monographs from Eric Schlereth, Jonathan Den Hartog, and Sam Haselby provide, in effect, an account of why The Age of Reason caused such a stir, how those who regarded its arguments as threatening damnation for individuals and poison for the republic mobilized for their own counterpurposes, and then what resulted from the ambiguous success that this mobilization achieved.

What is it in the drama of Heidegger's existential query that keeps us so busy, nearly a century since its introduction into the philosophical discourse? Is it its darkness? Or is it the absolute demand for a dangerous “opening to the world” while shutting down any possibility for self-disclosure? Or maybe, just maybe, it is Heidegger's critical self-reflection, a stance as remarkable as his refusal to take responsibility and practice self-restraint when considering his own biased views and complacency with the Nazi regime?