Historians have recently begun to gather round imperial, and lately “global,” contexts in which Western political thought might be better understood. John Locke has been pulled along behind them; the contours of his account of private property have increasingly been explained by his personal connections to the colonies. But in his case, the imperial context does less interpretive work than it appears to. This article attempts to show why: it tells a different, more explicitly intellectual, story about why Locke's depiction of property took the shape that it did. It does so by underlining the extent to which seventeenth-century property debates took place in the spatial and temporal dimensions inhabited by sacred history. It then tries to explain why this might have mattered to Locke.

The Third Earl of Shaftesbury has been celebrated for his commitment to free public discourse regulated only by standards of politeness, a commitment exemplified by his defence of the freedom to ridicule. This article complicates this picture by tracing Shaftesbury's response to the early eighteenth-century crisis of public speech precipitated by the demise of pre-publication censorship and growing uncertainty about intellectual property in the print trade. Shaftesbury, the article shows, was a determined opponent of pre-publication censorship through licensing, but he was also aware of the dangers posed to religious liberty by, in particular, clerical attacks on toleration, and sought ways to curb them that included corrective action by the state. When the Whigs opted to impeach the High Church cleric Henry Sacheverell, whose supporters had capitalized on an unregulated print market to disseminate his sermons ridiculing Whig principles, Shaftesbury expressed satisfaction with this use of state power to silence him. But he did not stop there. The article reads Shaftesbury's 1710 Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author against the backdrop of the Sacheverell controversy, and shows how the earl used it to undercut Sacheverell's claim that clerical speech enjoyed special status.

Britons viewed speculative thinking as a primary cause of the French Revolution and the disorders that followed. In this context, Edmund Burke and others identified a form of enthusiasm that was theoretical, not religious, in nature, but which also corrupted reasoning to disastrous effect. This article investigates how this accusation was made against David Ricardo and his political economy, and the variable defences that he deployed. The result is to uncover the language that was used to appraise political economy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, along with the intellectual disciplines that were prescribed to protect economic reasoning from falling into fantasy.

Based on newly available archival records, this article examines the life and thought of Andre Gunder Frank from his years as a graduate student in development economics to the publication of his first and most influential book. A closer look at the evolution of Frank's thought provides new insight into the relationship of his brand of “neo-Marxist” development theories with both classical Marxism and modernization theory. Frank interpreted Marxist political debates according to the categories of thought of 1950s American development economics, and in doing so he both misinterpreted fundamental aspects of Marxism and simultaneously generated lively theoretical debates that remain relevant today.

Freud's most sustained account of the power of sexual sublimation to fuel scientific and artistic genius is found in his Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, published in 1910. This article argues that Freud chose Leonardo as the perfect example of sublimation because of his close reading of the then quite popular historical novel Leonardo da Vinci, written by a poet and author of the Russian Silver Age, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii. The central point of Freud's theory of sublimation, that sexuality is at the root of human knowledge and creativity, is developed by Merezhkovskii, but from the religious-philosophical perspective of Silver Age symbolism. Freudian sublimation, as a psychological theory, was developed in dialogue with a Russian religious understanding of Eros and its power. Freud essentially rewrote Merezhkovskii's story of Leonardo, reducing Merezhkovskii's philosophy of Eros to the more “scientifically” grounded theory of sexual sublimation.

For nearly a century, the interpretation of Vladimir Sergeevich Solov′ev (1853–1900) has been locked in a “mythopoeic method” of the Symbolist conceit rooted in Europe-wide fin de siècle cultural developments. Solov′ev's posterity has come to see him as a mystic prophesying the folly of reason and mass politics, whereas his contemporaries saw him as the model for both Ivan and Alyosha Karamazov in Fedor Dostoevskii's The Brothers Karamazov—a dramatization of the “politics of the self” within the secularization frame. The story of the gap between these two images reveals the historicity of the Symbolist conceit. More broadly, it shows how the Russian authors of this myth participated in transnational prewar and interwar discourses about mass politics, culture, and violence that expand the typical chronological and geographical boundaries associated with these developments.

Hannah Arendt's essay on Bertolt Brecht has often been understood as an indictment of Brecht's postwar accommodation with the Stalinist regime in East Germany, in line with Arendt's supposed commitment to a firm separation between poetry and politics. Offering the first full reconstruction of the transnational history of Arendt's writing on Brecht, this article shows instead that Arendt's essay was a defense of Brecht against the polemics it is often taken to exemplify. Joining poetry to politics by holding both at a distance from philosophy, Arendt assigned poetry the vocation of disruptive faithfulness to factual reality, which allowed her to praise Brecht on political grounds and to leverage forbearance for his political “sins.” Indeed, by narrating Brecht's “sins” and “punishment” against the grain of Cold War discourse about the poet, Arendt's essay emulated aspects of the poetic practice she admired in Brecht's writing.

This article explores the intellectual and political meanings surrounding scholarly reconstruction and reimagining of the Renaissance in pre- and post-war Japan, analyzing in particular the work of Hayashi Tatsuo, Watanabe Kazuo and Hanada Kiyoteru, through comparison with some of the dominant perspectives on the same subject produced during the same years in Europe and America. It focuses specifically on authors from other Axis countries, namely Hans Baron and Eugenio Garin. For although Italian and German scholarship has been seminal in setting out new ways of interpreting the Renaissance, beyond this criterion, the selection of the intellectuals whose work I shall investigate does not follow strictly disciplinary lines. Instead, they have been selected because of their relevance in proposing an image of the Renaissance that played an important role in post-war public intellectual debates about crisis and rebirth in post-war Japan.

The two decades following the Second World War were marked by geopolitical and pedagogical ferment, as researchers and policymakers debated the role of language teaching in a rapidly changing world. As European empires collapsed amid Cold War competition for global influence, limited colonial education systems gave way to new discourses connecting postcolonial educational expansion, international development aid, and language teaching. This article reveals increasing American interest in the connections between development and vehicular English from 1945 to 1965. Drawing on the work of anglophone reformers, American elites promoted English as a development tool, and institutionalized policies designed to spread it abroad. The rise of the idea of global English in the United States, the article shows, was rooted in an instrumental conception of language, which framed English as a politically neutral vehicle for communication, yet this discourse was contradicted by the United States’ strategic ambitions.