The social context of Hobbes's political thought is ripe for reassessment in light of advances in the social history of seventeenth-century England in the past half-century. The evidence does not support C. B. Macpherson's claim that England had a “possessive market society” which became the social model for Hobbes's political theory, nor the case that Hobbes was a bourgeois ideologist. A new examination of his social theory, his social identity, his social prejudices and his understanding of what we today call social class instead produces a picture of an intellectual of the “middle sort” with strong aristocratic, pro-court sentiments. A clearer understanding of his social views would probably have prevented the current controversy over his political sentiments or channeled it in a different direction. The issues make a strong case for more social contextualization at the macro level of analysis in intellectual history.

This essay revises customary interpretations of Johann Gottfried Herder that stress the non-political or anarchical nature of his philosophy and his opposition to Enlightenment thought. Approaching his politics through the idea of Bildung, it argues that Herder first elaborated on this seminal concept in a series of early texts concerned with the reform of Russia. It analyses Herder's writings on Russia in the context of wider Enlightenment debates about the reform of the empire, and shows that Bildung was employed as a means to mediate between contrasting models of political action put forward by contemporaries such as Voltaire and Denis Diderot. An outline of the subsequent development of Bildung in his anthropological works reinforces the political intention behind the concept, and situates Herder's political thought firmly within late eighteenth-century controversies.

In the years around mid-century a number of periodizing terms entered Western historiography. These included the “Weimar Republic” and Frühneuzeit in Germany, “the age of Wilberforce” in Britain, and “the age of Jackson” in the United States, to name just a few. The appearance of these terms attested to the popularity that periodization, or the deliberate creation of historical periods, had within historical practice, and they were embraced variously as heuristics, as means of organizing the historical record, and as the root of synthesis. In this essay I trace the coinage of one term, “Harlem Renaissance,” from its emergence in the 1940s, through to the sharper profile it earned in the postwar years, and its institutionalization in the late twentieth century. In doing so I argue that Harlem Renaissance was neither a term nor a concept used by those who lived during the years it is now said to describe, and illuminate the alternative ways in which contemporaries apprehended their historical position. The context for the coinage and popularization of this term was the displacement of these earlier modes of interpretation by temporal ones, and the emergence of a mode of historical practice that stressed synthetic interpretation. By tracing the fluctuating ways in which a core analytical concept like periodization was handled between the mid- and the late twentieth century we might better grasp how historiographical orientations changed in these years.

This essay considers how Freud traveled in postwar Egypt through an exploration of the work of Yusuf Murad, the founder of a school of thought within the psychological and human sciences, and provides a close study of the journal he co-edited, Majallat ʿIlm al-Nafs. Translating and blending key concepts from psychoanalysis and psychology with classical Islamic concepts, Murad put forth a dynamic and dialectical approach to selfhood that emphasized the unity of the self, while often insisting on an epistemological and ethical heterogeneity from European psychoanalytic thought, embodied in a rejection of the dissolution of the self and of the death drive. In stark contrast to the so-called “tale of mutual ignorance” between Islam and psychoanalysis, the essay traces a tale of historical interactions, hybridizations, and interconnected webs of knowledge production between the Arab world and Europe. Moving away from binary models of selfhood as either modern or traditional, Western or non-Western, it examines the points of condensation and divergence, and the epistemological resonances that psychoanalytic writings had in postwar Egypt. The coproduction of psychoanalytic knowledge across Arab and European knowledge formations definitively demonstrates the outmoded nature of historical models that presuppose originals and bad copies of the global modern subject—herself so constitutively defined by the presence of the unconscious.

The German Jewish historian of political philosophy Leo Strauss is best known for mature works in which he proposed the existence of an esoteric tradition in political philosophy, attacked the liberal tradition of political thought, and defended a classical approach to natural right against its modern counterparts. This essay demonstrates that in his youth, beginning during a scholarly apprenticeship at the Berlin Akademie für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, Strauss championed “medievals” (rather than ancients) against “moderns,” and did so through a sparring match with his postdoctoral supervisor Julius Guttmann, whom he cast in the role of representative “modern.” While for Guttmann the stakes were scholarly, for Strauss they were political. Strauss's Weimar Jewish “medievalism” was a deliberate rejection of the tradition of modern Jewish thought Strauss associated with Guttmann's teacher Hermann Cohen, whom Strauss accused of neglecting the political distinctiveness of Jewish thought. While the conflict between Strauss and Guttmann has been neglected in much of the literature on Strauss, it served as the crucible in which many of his mature views, including his famous exoteric (sometimes called “esoteric”) writing thesis, began to take shape.

In 1949, French intellectual David Rousset publicly called on Nazi camp survivors to bear witness to the existence of a “concentration camp universe” in the Soviet Union. Rousset, a former Buchenwald internee and an influential author, demanded that his fellow survivors identify in unqualified terms with the suffering of Soviet prisoners. Even as he colluded with Cold War governmental agencies, Rousset claimed that the imperative to oppose concentration camps existed “beyond” political or ideological commitments. This essay analyzes the arguments about suffering, politics, and memory made by Rousset and his contemporary critics, notably Jean-Paul Sartre. It responds to Rousset's admirers who have overlooked distinctive aspects of his project: his rhetoric of apoliticism, his demand for complete identification with victims, his exclusive interest in limit-case abjection as opposed to injustice in general, his interpretation of the Nazi camps that centered on forced labor rather than on genocide, and his avoidance of the language of human rights.

A founding editor of Modern Intellectual History (MIH), an acclaimed biographer of Adam Smith and a prolific essayist on all aspects of the Scottish Enlightenment, from its origins to its aftermath, Nicholas Phillipson needs little introduction to the readers of this journal. However, Phillipson's recent retirement from his editorial duties on MIH provides a suitable moment to celebrate one of the pioneers in our field. When the current editors set out to commission a historiographical overview of Phillipson's oeuvre and career, I was honoured to be asked and delighted to accept.

The history of the social sciences in the United States—like many other fields of intellectual history—confirms John Dewey's observation: “Intellectual progress usually occurs through sheer abandonment of questions together with both of the alternatives they assume—an abandonment that results from their decreasing vitality and a change of urgent interest. We do not solve them: we get over them.” As Dewey suggests, two fine new books mark intellectual progress in the field through a change of generational interest. As he also implies, new perspectives leave important issues behind.1

Academic disciplines, including departments of history, emerged slowly and unevenly in the second half of the nineteenth century. Professional societies, including the American Historical Association (AHA) at its founding in 1884, were generally tiny organizations, a few would-be specialists collecting together to stake a claim on a distinct scholarly identity. Fields of study were necessarily fluid—interdisciplinary because they remained, to a large degree, predisciplinary. As fields went, the study of religion appeared especially amorphous; it was spread out across philology, history, classics, folklore, anthropology, archaeology, psychology, sociology, and oriental studies. Adding to the complexity more than simplifying it was the persisting claim that the study of religion belonged specifically (if not exclusively) to theology and hence to seminaries and divinity schools. Elizabeth A. Clark's Founding the Fathers illuminates the importance of Protestant theological institutions in shaping the study of religion in nineteenth-century America, suggesting, in particular, how well-trained church historians pointed the way toward disciplinary consolidation and specialization. Marjorie Wheeler-Barclay's Science of Religion, by contrast, explores the leading British intellectuals responsible for extending the study of religion across a broad swath of the new human sciences. Together these two books offer an excellent opportunity to reflect on what religion looked like as a learned object of inquiry before religious studies fully crystallized as an academic discipline in the middle third of the twentieth century. Clark opens the introduction to her book with an epigraph from Hayden White: “The question is, What is involved in the transformation of a field of studies into a discipline?” (1). What indeed?

The term “modernity” is often introduced by means of a storyline moving from one to another of opposed terms. One thinks of Sir Henry Maine's status and contract, Ferdinand Tönnies's Gemeinschaft and Gessellschaft, and Henry Adams's Virgin and the dynamo. In such narratives, modernity comes with an increasing awareness of the fluid and apparently random nature of events characterizing modern existence (other terms, such as anomie, alienation, and disenchantment, also come to mind). Darwin's description, in chapter 4 of The Origin of Species, of the process of natural selection offers a defining instance of both change and its haphazard nature. While he doesn't use the phrase “random variation,” Darwin, as he apologetically notes at the beginning of chapter 5, uses the word “chance” repeatedly to name the occasional and sometimes critically important biological changes that he can't explain.

Are artists crazy? Are creators more likely to be mad, or madder, than the rest of us? Does mental distress deepen artistic vision? Correlate to genius? Is the drive to fashion a personal pictorial or plastic universe pathological? Bettina Gockel's hefty Tübingen Habilitationsschrift, “The Pathologizing of the Artist: Artist Legends in Modernity,” documents the significant amount of mental energy expended exploring these and related questions from the mid-nineteenth century into the 1920s. Matthew Biro's The Dada Cyborg argues that the Dadaists’ montages, assemblages, and raucous agitational activities in the public sphere of World War I-era Berlin indicate modernity's disruption of stable subject positions and suggest instead hybrid, “cyborgian” identities. These included challenges to normative notions of sanity, but also to those of gender, ethnicity, race, and national and political allegiance. James van Dyke's study of the Weimar- and Nazi-era career of painter Franz Radziwill, a World War I veteran and self-taught reactionary modernist realist, provides a detailed case study of an artist whom one might, in retrospect, suspect of a degree of grandiosity and careerism bordering on the pathological, but who was driven by a complex of motivations as political as they were personal.

“One book is a book, two books is a trend,” goes an old adage in publishing. And what of three books? The 2012 publication of Angus Burgin's The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression and Daniel Stedman Jones's Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics, together with the 2011 publication of Nicholas Wapshott's Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics, suggests that the intellectual history of conservatism is not merely a trend, but an interest that is here to stay. At least the study of free markets, that is, for the books under consideration here focus more on conservative economic ideas than on religious or cultural ideals, capturing the intellectual history of free markets in the twentieth century through the Mont Pelerin Society, transatlantic policy, and the debate between John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek. While remarkably similar in subject and source, these are three different books, distinguished from each other in interpretation, execution, and focus. All three, however, display a similar temperament, assessing conservative ideas in an evenhanded if not overtly sympathetic tone suggesting that scholars have finally found a shared register through which to consider the most controversial and politically consequential ideas of the late twentieth century. They also converge upon a perhaps surprising synthesis, positioning free-market thought not only at the interstices of America and Europe, but between and across left and right, conservative and liberal.

It has become somewhat of a cliché to refer to May 1968 in France as an “interpretation in search of an event.” As many critics have pointed out, this designation fails to account for the real significance of the “events,” for the fact that May ’68 was one of the largest mass movement in French history—numerically, geographically, and sociologically—and one of the most acute political crises in postwar France. Yet, to refer to May ’68 as an interpretation does capture the extent to which the historiography of May ’68 has appeared, almost from the beginning, indistinguishable from its history, or, as Kristin Ross has put it, the extent to which May ’68 cannot be considered separately from its memory. At the risk of reducing some of these rich historiographical debates, we could say that, broadly speaking, two main issues have divided historians, philosophers, political theorists, and sociologists over the past forty years. The first has to do with the scope of the events, the degree to which the student leaders, the workers on strike, or the cultural legacy “mattered” more, or whether any of it mattered at all. The second line of contention has centered on the legacy of May ’68. According to some, May ’68 represented the acceleration of capitalism and modernization and it inaugurated an era of individualism and/or narcissism and political disengagement. In the eyes of these critics, ’68 was thus ultimately a conservative, or at least a libertarian, revolution. According to others, this was instead a truly radical period—socially, culturally, and politically—and this radicalism began to run out of steam towards the late 1970s. Instead of revolution, many intellectuals who had participated in May ’68 began to talk about ethics, morality, human rights, and the rule of law. Not surprisingly, commentators have once again differed on their reading of this “turn,” either condemning it or celebrating it, depending on their political bent. This “condemning” position has been articulated particularly forcefully by Kristin Ross in her excellent May ’68 and Its Afterlives. According to Ross, the “turn to ethics” marked a conscious “retreat from politics . . . that distorted not only May's ideology but much of its memory as well.” Ross's book is thus devoted to the analysis of this political radicalism—a radicalism that she situates in the union of intellectual contestation and workers’ struggle around what she calls “a polemics of equality”—and to the critique of its betrayal after 1976. On the other side of the spectrum, historians such as Tony Judt and Sunil Khilnani have praised this “ethical turn” as the moment in which French intellectuals were finally able to exorcise the (communist) revolutionary ideal that had haunted them throughout the twentieth century and to embrace liberalism.