Prussia's Edict on Religion of 1788 forbade sermons that undermined popular belief in the Holy Trinity and the Bible. Scholars have assumed that this act was counter-enlightened because it limited the free use of reason in public. An analysis of two court cases related to the edict reveals, however, that both the edict and its “enlightened” opponents within the state assumed that public expression should be disciplined. With respect to the enlightened bureaucratic elite that opposed the edict, it identifies two factors that impelled them toward the disciplining of public communication: 1) German universities created an elite social group that assiduously cultivated its own intellectual sphere, and 2) having access to state power gave each member of the elite something to lose if the process of the Enlightenment proved politically or socially destabilizing. As a result, the fight over the Edict on Religion cannot be understood in terms of an Enlightenment/counter-Enlightenment dichotomy, but must be seen as a debate within the German elite about the level of social discipline that was sufficient for maintaining domestic tranquility.

The slavery debates in the antebellum United States sparked a turning point in American theology. They forced moderately antislavery Protestants, including William Ellery Channing, Francis Wayland, and Horace Bushnell, to reconcile their contradictory loyalties to the Bible and to antislavery reform. Unable to use the letter of the Bible to make a scriptural case against slavery in itself, the moderates argued that although slavery had been acceptable in biblical times, it had become a sin. Antislavery Protestantism required a theory of moral progress, a deeply unorthodox idea that became fundamental to the development of late nineteenth-century liberal Protestantism. The antislavery argument from moral progress, along with the moral progress represented by abolition, established a progressive conception of revelation that would be further developed by late nineteenth-century liberal theologians, including Newman Smyth, Lyman Abbott, and Theodore Munger.

As the American political controversies of the 1850s were as much about the category of the political as about slavery, property, or territorial expansion, so did Emerson's focus shift from a philosophical exploration of politics to a lived experience of conflict and a new poetics of political writing. The essay “Politics,” published in 1844, explored an idealist vision emerging from Transcendentalism, but the engagement with British power and cultural authority that took place during his long visit in 1847 and 1848 opened up an existential challenge to the premises of that essay. Although critical of intellectual rigidity and closed minds, Emerson finds himself drawn to the inner assurance of British society. The marginal status of English Traits (1856), Emerson's account of his travels, is reflected in the relative paucity of critical discussion of the book. English Traits represents, however, not only the confrontation with British pragmatism but a new perspective on the relationship between ideas and power. As the orientation of this text is away from Transcendentalist hermeneutics and toward irony, one way of reintegrating English Traits into American intellectual history is to alter its status as a detour in Emerson's writing career, lacking in real significance, and instead to read it as one of the symptomatic literary productions of the 1850s.

The meaning of “identity” in its contemporary sense of “who—or what—I am” is of relatively recent vintage. It became current as a concept of individual and group psychology only through Erik Erikson's work in the 1950s and its extension to collectivities in the social and political upheavals of the 1960s. But an important strand of European literature began calling the possibility of fixed self-definition into question in the 1920s, occasionally even deploying the word “identity” explicitly. In the work of Hermann Hesse, Virginia Woolf, Luigi Pirandello, Robert Musil, Hermann Broch and Franz Kafka, the dualistic representation of selfhood prevalent in much of prewar modernism gave way to the image of an infinitely fragmented and ontologically unfounded self not exhausted by any, or even the sum, of its many possible designations. For these authors, the events and aftermath of World War One desacralized a whole range of abstract collective identities—national or imperial citizen, cultured European, gebildete bourgeois, manly male, the spiritual “eternal feminine”—which had furnished the most deeply rooted and honored individual identities of prewar Europe. As a consequence, identity itself was undermined. The paradox of the birth of identity is that it was discovered in the negation of its very possibility.

Few intellectual historians of nineteenth-century Europe would deny that the tradition of art music that evolved between the revolutionary watershed at the end of the eighteenth century and the international wars and domestic convulsions of the first half of the twentieth century—a body of musical works from Haydn and Mozart to Mahler and Strauss that has been passed down to us in canonized form as the “imaginary museum” of “classical music” —was an enormously significant dimension of European cultural and intellectual history, especially in German-speaking central Europe. In the territories of the German Confederation, the Kingdom of Prussia and the Habsburg Empire, and later in the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires, the production, performance and consumption of classical music was not just an important element in the history of aesthetic and cultural forms but also a privileged site for imagining and enacting the organization of individuals into historical subjects (the Bildung of modern individuals) and for the integration of individuals into collectivities through processes of subjective identification. Broad interest in the relations between agency and identity among historians, including European intellectual historians, should have drawn many of them, one would have thought, toward investigation of the ways the cultural work undertaken by music was connected to, and interacted with, the cultural role of the textual and visual arts, or of how musical performance and experience helped European individuals organize and perform their self-activity and self-consciousness in relation to the past, to other individuals within the networks of communal relations, and to the transcendent. The history of music would appear to be critical for understanding historical experiences of the relations between memory and expectation at both the individual and communal levels.

Anglophone historians of modern Europe know Karl Barth primarily as the intellectual leader of the anti-Nazi Church Struggle and the principle author of the Barmen Declaration of 1934, which spoke a dramatic “No” to National Socialism's attack on the German churches. But Barth was also arguably the most important—and most prolific—theologian of the twentieth century. Aside from his unfinished magnum opus, the fourteen-volume Church Dogmatics, he published more than one hundred books and articles, and he quite literally wrote until the day he died in 1968. Barth's output has elicited an equally impressive secondary literature, produced mostly by students of theology and amounting to around fourteen thousand titles in twenty-five languages. As might be expected, theologians differ in their interpretations of Barth, seeing him as a formative voice in “neo-orthodox” Protestantism, a left-wing socialist, a fitting subject of deconstructionist philosophical theology, a thinker who showed the way “past the modern,” or a “critically realistic dialectical theologian.” In view of this record it may come as a surprise to find that until recently the Swiss was still “habitually honored but not much read,” as theologian George Hunsinger wrote in 1991. Hunsinger was not the only observer to see that Barth's work was never fully integrated into the corpus of theological culture in Europe and the United States despite the scholarly interest in his thought. This situation may be changing, as a transatlantic “Barth renaissance” now gathers momentum, nearly forty years after the great theologian's death.