Voltaire's first historical work (History of Charles XII, 1731) is frequently read as a piece of literary satire designed to ridicule the tradition of military heroes and warmongering monarchs. I offer a contrasting perspective and make the case that the book grapples with a problem both epistemic and poetic: how to narrate and make sense of an implausible or unbelievable past. In shedding light on this issue, this article questions widely held assumptions about the relationship between truth, plausibility, and history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It pushes back against the notion that Voltaire, like other neoclassical historians, had a rigid and naive understanding of the implausible as “fabulous” or “unhistorical.” Instead, I make the case that the implausible to Voltaire often pointed to a necessary and meaningful aspect of histories as narratives of the grand, the extraordinary, and the grotesque.

If cochlear implants continue to meet with much resistance from parts of the Deaf community and beyond, this reflects constructions of speech that have been at the core of conceptions of humankind for over three centuries. Starting in the 1750s, Julien Offray de La Mettrie advocated for deaf people's potential for speech. This was also the time of the creation of schools for deaf children, which led to a surge of debate about teaching sign language versus speech. The reception of the speaking machine of Canon Mical, a now forgotten inventor, offered another context in which to question the source of the expressive power of language. By retracing debates about the mechanical nature of articulated speech, the potential limits of communication, and what really constitutes its expressive power, we can better understand how the experience of current technology develops out of conflicts first introduced at the birth of modernity.

By recovering the pre-critical foundations of Immanuel Kant's political idealism, this article elucidates his fundamental concern with reorienting the “point of view” of real princes and sovereigns to the cause of peace. I trace this priority to Kant's reading of Pierre Bayle, whose skepticism illustrated that the true nature of princes rendered Saint-Pierre's ideal of peace “not possible.” Beginning in 1756, Kant reframed perpetual peace as the ultimate political honor for those unmoved by strict moral necessity, promising them a legacy that was entwined with the providential course of human history. This appeal to honor identified the first necessary phase of political change, accounting for ruling motives that might otherwise lead to wars of conquest and expansion. This view of Kant's shrewd attempt to steer the “point of view” of real power, which persisted into his final political writings in the 1790s, challenges dominant readings of a Kantian politics concerned solely with the distant realization of ideal institutions.

The article explores the interaction of the German, Jewish, and Christian traditions in the first part of the twentieth century in Central Europe to show three cases, in which these traditions merge into one. I name the result of this interaction “Jewish–Christian religiosity.” The name conveys a desire, common to the cases discussed, to overcome the traditional distinctions between Jews and Germans and Jews and Christians. It also conveys the belief that spirituality could bridge the gap between people and promote a more open society for all. All three cases expand notions first conceived by Romantic and idealist thinkers in order to facilitate interest in arcane Jewish sources like the Kabbalah and Hasidism. As the article suggests, eclectic worldviews like those discussed here may appear unfamiliar, but they continue intellectual and cultural trends that were discussed in the literature before.

This article traces the influence of theology on one particular strand of secularization theory that emerged from the work of Ernst Kantorowicz and Marcel Gauchet. It shows how Kantorowicz's classic text, The King's Two Bodies, was deeply indebted to the insights of one of the leading Catholic theologians of the twentieth century: the French Jesuit Henri de Lubac. By tracing the influence of de Lubac's work on Kantorowicz and, through him, on the secularization theory developed by Marcel Gauchet, the article uncovers a surprising convergence between theology and the secular disciplines. In the process, it draws attention to the limitations of secularization narratives that focus on the premodern theological origins of modern political concepts, by showing how they struggle to account for the ongoing role and relevance of theology in a modern context.

This article provides a new look at Francoist sociology by exploring the impact of the early Cologne school of sociology in Spain prior to and after the Spanish Civil War. It starts by explaining Helmuth Plessner's critical argument on the Renaissance and the Reformation, delving into its echo in Spain. Following the influence of Schelerian material value ethics on Spanish philosophy of right, the second section focuses on a critical analysis of José Ortega y Gasset's sociological concepts. Going deeper into academic debate around Freyerian Wirklichkeitswissenschaft, the third section explores the parameters of early Francoist sociology's academic implementation up to the 1950s. Summarizing the analytical results, this article concludes by evaluating the early Cologne school of sociology's persistence in Francoist Spain in terms of a growing rhetoric associated with the rejection of alleged errors.

This article shows that John Rawls's political thought began not with Christian faith, but with a deep, secular despair about the role of propaganda and ideology in political life. I offer the first extended discussion of Rawls's earliest paper, “Spengler's Prophecy Realized,” which argued that democracy necessarily deteriorated into plebiscitary dictatorship as the masses willingly handed power to whomever controlled the press. I argue that Rawls's earliest work mobilized currents of reactionary political thought—especially that of Oswald Spengler—which Rawls encountered at Princeton student publications. These currents reacted against the then widespread pedagogical project of rejecting “naturalism” and fostering faith in the rationality of democracy. In this light, Rawls's later wartime personalist theology appears as a reversal of perspective, affirming the possibility of a community governed not by propaganda, but by genuine interpersonal revelation. I conclude by asking where these concerns travel and settle in Rawls's mature thought.

This article examines W. E. B. Du Bois's transnational political thought during his work with the UN and the NAACP in the 1940s. Focusing on unpublished speeches, essays, and correspondence, it explores how he exploited the conceptual elasticity of terms like “colonial status” and “colonial peoples” in order to build a transnational majority on a global scale. The conceptual capaciousness of the term “colony” and its cognates allowed him to connect disparate forms of domination and dependence across boundaries of race, nation, and empire, thus binding colonial and semicolonial peoples together in a common program of international action. The fruition of these efforts, I argue, was Du Bois's 1948 petition to the UN, An Appeal to the World. Through the appropriation of international legal discourse, he sought to politicize the jurisdictional bifurcation of domestic and international politics embedded in the UN Charter and expand the spatial scale of democracy by placing civil rights struggles in imperial context.

Why did the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) pursue a nonviolent, collaborative, and parliamentary path to power? How did it secure major electoral successes? The answers to both queries have much to do with the PKI's adaptation of Maoism. Although scholars recognize that Maoism was influential on PKI theory and praxis, they have hitherto underevaluated the extent to which PKI leaders, notably Dipa Nusantara Aidit and Muhammad Hatta Lukman, engaged with Mao's ideas and how such ideas informed policy. Through textual exegesis of PKI leaders’ writings and speeches, our article argues that the PKI's “Indonesianization” of Marxism–Leninism drew from several Maoist texts, but differed in its composition in a number of important ways. “Indonesianization” entailed cross-class alliances, the political agency of the peasantry, willingness to cooperate with parties across the political spectrum, and, most innovatively, a nonviolent agenda. The PKI also demonstrated an adaptive willingness to learn from all, while remaining beholden to none. Our goal is to show how PKI leaders spoke back in their dialectical engagement with Maoism, as Maoism, for them, did not constitute a static, orthodox, or monolithic “thing.” Instead, Maoism was for Aidit and Lukman an ideological system within which lay an ideological discourse, critical interpretive paradigm, historical revolutionary experience, military strategy, and blueprint to socialist development against which to juxtapose their ideas and grand visions.

This article demonstrates how Algerian decolonization played a key role in shaping the discipline of territorial planning (aménagement du territoire) in metropolitan France. A number of liberal economists, including François Perroux, articulated notions of economic space that eschewed the nation-state as a unit of analysis. In colonial Algeria, this discourse was subsequently adopted by officials who sought to integrate Muslim Algerians into the French Republic. Discussions on territorial planning in late colonial Algeria echoed debates in the United States regarding the “social uplift” of African Americans in the South, which also attempted to stem the rising tide of separatism. In the 1950s, liberal understandings of the relationship among cultural specificity, territorial scale, and economic development were challenged by a host of actors, including Algerian nationalists who espoused ideas that would later appear in the analyses of world systems theorists. After the victory of the Algerian FLN (Front de libération nationale) in 1962, discussions on regional identities provided an important tool for political claims on both sides of the Mediterranean. Moreover, techniques of territorial planning developed in Algeria were imported to the Hexagon in the aftermath of Algerian independence.

Recent years have witnessed a marked revival of guaranteed-income proposals. Among these, Milton Friedman's negative income tax is one of the most successful ideas to establish a universal floor of income for every citizen. Elaborated in the early 1940s, it attracted widespread attention among economists and policy makers in the aftermath of Johnson's War on Poverty. This contribution will, however, focus on the intellectual setting under which Friedman envisioned a new way to think about poverty. Tracing back the origin of the proposal in the context of the New Deal, this article shows how Friedman hollowed out redistributive considerations from the hierarchies of needs, notions of duty, or citizenship that were common in the British welfarist conception and preexisting notions of equality where the state played a key role by replacing it with a monetary and market-friendly conception of poverty.

The Iranian humanities publication Farhang Emrooz (Today's Culture) published a series of articles on the Cambridge school of intellectual history in May 2016. The journal's colloquium, while hardly the only intervention on the Cambridge school by Iranian scholars, constitutes perhaps the most sophisticated exploration to date of the relationship between the school and Iranian intellectual history. It also excavates what Professor Ḥātam Qāderī defines as conservative currents of historiography in England and Iran. How, this article asks, is Cambridge-style history presented as a conservative approach and what might the school's Iranian reception tell us about the purpose of such a presentation? Furthermore, how do Qāderī and his peers attempt to reform Iranian historiography by diverging from other historiographical currents in Iran?

Political economy, as a field of study, now generally refers to work on the interplay of state actors and the macroeconomy. As practiced by economists, political scientists, and legal scholars, political economy concerns the behavior of central bankers, the impacts of changes in the tax code, world trade negotiations. It has to do with policy. But to historians of economics, the term “political economy” is more likely to call to mind thinkers who engaged in economic reasoning a century or more ago: Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, Karl Marx. For many historians of economics, “political economy” functions as a shorthand: “economics” avant la lettre. Evoking a time before the formal disciplinization of “economics,” “political economy” suggests a more humanistic perspective, “economics” a more scientistic one. Whereas the term “economics” has been used to refer to an academic discipline, practiced by disinterested intellectuals, the term “political economy,” in both its usages, highlights the close connection between economic ideas and political action.