In the summer of 1673, in what Koenraad O. Meinsma once qualified as “one of the most inexplicable events in Spinoza's life,” the philosopher left his residence in The Hague to travel to Utrecht and stayed there for some three weeks. This event has garnered much interest, for two main reasons. In the first place, it is agreed that something must have induced the rather homebound Spinoza to undertake the journey, especially since Utrecht was occupied at the time by the French, rendering travel dangerous. The paucity of available sources has kept most scholars from suggesting a motive, but those who have been so bold are virtually unanimous in positing that Spinoza traveled on a diplomatic or political mission, referring in support to his first biographer Johannes Colerus's report, gathered from the philosopher's landlord Hendrik van der Spyck, that at his return he was greeted by a frenzied crowd that was ready to lynch him as a “spy, murmuring that he treated with the French of matters pertaining to state and nation,” with Spinoza countering that “many among the highly placed know why I went to Utrecht.” A second reason for the interest is formed by the connection the trip offers between Spinoza and the French general in Utrecht, Louis II de Bourbon (1621–86), the prince of Condé, renowned not only for his military exploits but also for his interest in the arts and sciences, as evinced in his patronage of dissident thinkers like Isaac La Peyrère of pre-Adamite fame. Condé thus figures in all early accounts of Spinoza's trip, and yet the conflicting nature of these accounts, combined with the paucity of firsthand sources, has left later scholars debating at length the precise nature of the prince's involvement as Spinoza's inviter, as his host, and as his ready benefactor.

Hugo Grotius’s account of sovereign power in De iure belli ac pacis occupies a contested place in recent genealogies of modern sovereignty. This article takes a fresh approach by arguing that Grotius’s legal arguments do not do their work alone. They function within a broader horizon of what he calls “morals,” a field of reasoning that has debts to scholastic moral theology and Aristotelian moral science. Grotius's conception of sovereignty represents a modulation between law and “morals,” which allows him both to separate his scientific jurisprudence from the science of politics and nevertheless to reply to the political scientists on their own ground. The context of “morals,” however, is not narrowly political but inter-political, generating a potential tension between popular aspirations to sovereignty and the international order. Grotius’s “moral” handling of the issue offers an invitation to reflect on our current preoccupation with much the same concerns.

This article makes the case that the early modern debate over political representation was deeply intertwined with a theological debate over the Fall. The “resemblance” theory of representation adopted by English Parliamentarians was first formulated by Calvinists to make the case that Adam represented humanity, despite the fact that humanity had never authorized him to act in their name. The Royalist rejoinder, which treated authorization as a necessary and sufficient condition of representation, began life instead as a Pelagian response to Calvinist orthodoxy. This theological dispute provides a crucial context for the interventions of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke.

This article reconsiders the Catholic reaction to the French Revolution, focusing on Nicola Spedalieri's On the Rights of Man (1791) and on the debate that its publication sparked in Italy and beyond. The outbreak of the Revolution and the polarization of public opinion between the supporters of the new regime and its relentless opponents convinced Spedalieri, a well-reputed Catholic theologian, of the need to find a via media between these two extremes. Assuming the re-Christianization of the postrevolutionary world as his goal, Spedalieri argued that some aspects of revolutionary political culture were acceptable from a Catholic standpoint as long as the revolutionaries, in turn, agreed to abandon secularization and to uphold the traditional confessional organization of the state. It was not modernity itself, he claimed, that should be rejected, but secularization, for a different modernity from that conceived by the revolutionaries—a confessional modernity, combining revolutionary politics and confessional states—was possible. Far from gaining immediate acceptance, Spedalieri's ideas were harshly criticized during the 1790s and then set aside by the triumph of reactionary Catholicism during the Restoration. However, they resurfaced later in the nineteenth century and ultimately played a decisive role in the development of the church's attitudes toward modern culture, for they carved a path for Catholics to fight secularization from within and to reshape modernity accordingly.

This essay investigates the intellectual history of one of the purportedly most “revolutionary” concepts of post-1945 international thought—the concept of supranationality. While the literature has generally analyzed the concept as a direct continuation of progressive cosmopolitan ideas, or, to the contrary, as a political watchword formulated after 1945 to promote the European project, this essay highlights other, more ambiguous origins for the concept. It retraces the early uses of the concept in French debates. It argues that the irruption of supranationality in the political and legal vocabulary was far from revolutionary, as is typically claimed—without referring directly to the writings of the great classical philosophers. Rather, the concept drew on earlier discourses whose emergence can be identified in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates, ranging from Catholic thought to international law. To retrace the genealogy of supranationality in the decades preceding the supranational vogue of the 1950s contributes to illuminating the complex intellectual origins of the European Union and of international thought more generally.

“Humanitarian” (humanitaire) came into use in French contemporaneously with the emergence of romantic socialism, and in the context of the rebuilding of post-revolutionary French society and its overseas empire beginning in the 1830s. This article excavates this early idea of humanitarianism, documenting an alternative genealogy for the term and its significance that has been overlooked by scholars of both socialism and humanitarianism. This humanitarianism identified a collective humanity as the source of its own salvation, rather than an external, well-meaning benefactor. Unlike liberal models of advocacy, which invoked individualized actors and recipients of their care, socialists privileged solidarity within their community and rejected the foundational logic of liberal individualism. In tracing this history, this article considers its importance for contemporary debates about humanitarianism’s imperial power dynamics.

This article analyses the post-First World War emergence of intellectual relief. This is defined here as aid given to intellectuals and scholarly institutions. Relief included the provision of food and medicines to individuals as well as the supply of relevant scholarly literature and laboratory equipment to academic institutions. After 1918, significant humanitarian interventions targeted Central and Eastern Europe, which had been ravaged by war and its myriad consequences. The article argues that intellectual relief, while frequently using the language of the “crisis of civilization,” was part of the broader effort to safeguard the postwar liberal democratic order against Bolshevism. The article pays particular attention to the League of Nations' Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (CIC) to show how states like Hungary used intellectual deprivation to agitate for treaty revision. It argues that the CIC's development was shaped by the wider dynamics of intellectual relief.

This article analyzes how debates concerning Brazilian race relations, miscegenation, and racial democracy unfolded in France in the 1950s. During those years, Gilberto Freyre and those critical of him emerged in French social scientific discourse, offering distinct visions concerning race, culture, and the possibility of harmonious coexistence in a world structured by racial, social, and colonial inequalities. Certain French social scientists such as Lucien Febvre and Fernand Braudel embraced Freyre's vision as a possible source for racial and cultural mixing, whereas others, especially Alfred Métraux and Florestan Fernandes, directly criticized his work. Roger Bastide mediated between the two, translating Freyre's Casa-Grande & Senzala and coauthoring a UNESCO-based study on blacks and whites in São Paulo that largely repudiated Freyre's claims. I argue that in a period in which decolonization was already underway, Freyre piqued the interest of French social scientists looking to overcome the growing antagonism between colonizer and colonized, even if other models of cultural integration and autonomy contested the validity of Brazil's so-called racial democracy.

The story of Western philosophy in the late twentieth century is, first and foremost, a tale of the discipline's division into two distinct discourses—analytic and Continental philosophy. This article argues that institutional dynamics of American higher education played a decisive role in the creation of this divide. Through quantitative analysis of the hiring and promotion of philosophers, it demonstrates how hierarchies and informal academic networks established boundaries for mainstream American philosophy that excluded modern European thought. Following the end of World War II, as American universities expanded, philosophy departments nearly tripled in size. However, the discipline was dominated by a Brahmin caste of elite departments that hired its own graduates almost exclusively. In this environment, the invidious distinction between the “elite” analytic departments and heterodox departments at the discipline's periphery was mapped onto the styles of philosophy practiced at those schools, and shaped America's reception of “Continental” European philosophy.

Gordon Wood stoked a strong response from his fellow early American historians in 2015 when, in the pages of the Weekly Standard, he accused the Omohundro Institute of Early American History, publishers of the prestigious William and Mary Quarterly, of abandoning interest in the development of the United States. “A new generation of historians is no longer interested in how the United States came to be,” Wood argued. “That kind of narrative history of the nation, they say, is not only inherently triumphalist but has a teleological bias built into it.” Wood blamed the shift away from the nation on historians’ interest in such issues as race and gender: “The inequalities of race and gender now permeate much of academic history-writing, so much so that the general reading public that wants to learn about the whole of our nation's past has had to turn to the history books written by nonacademics who have no PhDs and are not involved in the incestuous conversations of the academic scholars.” Of the William and Mary Quarterly, Wood concluded, “without some kind of historical GPS, it is in danger of losing its way.”

The study of US foreign relations (what is now often called “America and the World”) has been in a protracted “religious turn” for at least a decade. One of the most prominent statements of the turn was Andrew Preston's article in Diplomatic History from 2006, “Bridging the Gap between the Sacred and the Secular in the History of American Foreign Relations.” Preston, a trained diplomatic historian who made an indelible contribution to the turn with his later Sword of Spirit, Shield of Strength: Religion in American War and Diplomacy (2012), called for “paying more attention” to religion in the field of American foreign relations. More precisely he urged historians to make of religion “a systematic rubric under which various moments in the history of American foreign relations, or the whole history itself, can be analyzed and explained.”