Jean Barbeyrac was dismayed by the intrusion of theological controversy into the study of modern natural law theory. Yet the longest of the many annotations that he included in his own edition of Grotius was concerned with a theological matter. In this footnote, Barbeyrac attacked Grotius's understanding of Christian ethics as supererogatory; that is, as containing a distinction between the dictates of duty and the counsels of a higher holiness or perfection. The heart of his objection to this view was that it had pernicious psychological effects, that it fostered bigotry and immorality. He reiterated this psychological concern in his later work on the Christian Fathers. This objection to the real-world damages caused by the theory of supererogation was closely linked to his fear of skepticism and his quarrel with Bayle. Barbeyrac's rejection of supererogation also places him within an important strand of early modern thinking about the moral psychology of religion and about the ways in which religious belief could become an obstacle to moral behavior.

The hypothesis that the beast of the Gévaudan (an intriguingly mysterious killer that roamed southern France in the 1760s) might be an African hyena was not simply a popular and amusing misconception; it reflected an important dimension of the critical spirit driving eighteenth-century science. By historicizing natural discovery and its motivations, this essay uncovers aspects of Enlightenment natural history—namely an attraction to the unknowable and a desire for uncertainty, both reflected in the fascination with the sublime—that only became more marked as the frontiers of knowledge receded. In doing so, the essay shows the distinctively hybrid character of an Enlightenment mentality that savored both illumination and darkness.

The British–Irish Union of 1801 remains a significant and controversial moment in the histories of both countries, but understandings of its genesis are restricted inscope. This article seeks to place the Union in a new historical context: the crisis of the European states system that accompanied the French Revolution. It considers the position held by the Union in the critique of Kant's famous essay on “Perpetual Peace” (1795) advanced by one of his most influential students, the publicist and state official Friedrich Gentz (1764–1832). Gentz argued that the consolidation of the British state offered a model for the regeneration of European society. Only unitary forms of sovereign authority could exercise the responsible political agency required for the restoration of peace in the wake of the Revolution. The decline of small states and composite polities supported the durable civil liberty and commercial development necessary to mankind's moral development in history.

This essay considers how American Enlightenment moralists and Evangelical religious revivalists responded to “Jacobinism” at the College of New Jersey, which later became Princeton University, from 1800 through 1817. At this time, disruptive student activities exemplified alleged American “Jacobin” conspiracies against civil society. The American response to “Jacobins” brought out tensions between two different competing intellectual currents at the College of New Jersey: a revival of Christian religious principles led by Princeton trustee Reverend Ashbel Green and, in contrast, the expansion of Samuel Stanhope Smith's system of moral education during his tenure as college president from 1795 through 1812. As a moralist, Smith appealed to Scottish Common Sense philosophy in teaching the instinctive “rules of duty” as a way to correct unrestrained “passions” and moderate “Jacobin” radicalism. In doing so, Smith developed a moral quasi-relativism as an original feature of his moral philosophy and contribution to American Enlightenment intellectual culture. Green and like-minded religious revivalists saw Princeton student uprisings as Smith's failure to properly address irreligion. This essay shows the ways in which “Jacobinism” and then the emerging age of religious revivalism, known as the Second Great Awakening, arrived at the cost of Smith's “Didactic Enlightenment” at Princeton.

Two legal publications that Carl Schmitt produced during the First World War contain the first expressions of his maximally authoritarian interpretation of the state of emergency. Yet, when read in conjunction with his wartime journals, we find that his production of these texts is contextualized by a profound, private struggle over whether to accept or reject the political values they articulate. What is most surprising about Schmitt's self-presentation in these journals is the degree to which, during the early war period, he expresses a visceral anti-authoritarianism and concern for decidedly liberal ideals such as the rights of the individual and the separation of powers. But it is also in these journals that we observe the process—culminating in a moment of existential decision during the winter of 1915–16—through which he came to see such liberal commitments as untenable on both personal and political-theoretical levels simultaneously.

This essay argues that Jean-Paul Sartre's notion of “dialectical reason”, as elaborated in his Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), had a decisive impact on the composition of Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1961). The relationship between the two works has not before received a thorough textual exposition. Such an exposition, it is suggested, also entails revising the view of the nature of Fanon's work that has become entrenched in anglophone scholarship. Instead of a self-grounding theorist who more resembles the postcolonialists who would succeed him, this essay presents a view of Fanon as a situated theorist, drawing on those resources that could best help him to articulate the task at hand. The notion of “dialectical reason” allowed him to break from his previous understanding of decolonization as the attainment of reason through struggle, and see the “praxis” of revolution as, itself, self-realizing reason. To perceive this allows us better to seize on the thinking that guides his discussions of objectification under colonialism, anticolonial violence, and the role of the national bourgeoisie, and, thus, to clear up a number of controversies.

Despite intense scholarly interest in the “Anglo-Marxism” that rose to prominence in Britain from the mid-1950s, its intellectual lineaments and lineages have yet to be fully accounted for. This is particularly the case with the concept of “experience,” which was a central category in the work of two of the most influential figures of the early “New Left” in Britain: Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson. This essay traces a conceptual history of “experience” from its emergence in Cambridge literary criticism during the 1920s and 1930s, and in the quasi-Marxist literary culture of the 1930s, to the confluence of these two currents in the work of Williams and Thompson. Reassessing the nature of each thinker's engagement with Leavisite literary and cultural criticism, and of Thompson's attempted reformulation of Marxism, it argues that recovering their widely differing usages of “experience” illuminates their distinctive conceptions of “culture” as a site of political action.

When groups of historians studying the American South got together in the late 1970s there was a clannish feel, mostly white, mostly male. Mostly southern, too, and while non-southerners were not unwelcome they were noticed. Why are you interested in studying us? was asked politely, with a hint of a hidden punchline, a question for outsiders. So it is a strange turn that an outsider, Michael O'Brien, a soft-spoken, level Englishman, began a career in that decade which would make him one of the leading historians of the South in the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Maybe even stranger is that he did this as a historian of southern intellectual life.

The digital age has been a boon for intellectual historians, particularly those of us who work on early modern Europe and America. The mass digitization of old books has made research more efficient than ever: first editions are there for the downloading on Google Books, Gallica, Liberty Fund, Project Gutenberg, and elsewhere. The creation of such large-scale databases as Early English Books Online (EEBO), Eighteenth-Century Collection Online (ECCO), the Making of the Modern World (formerly Goldsmiths’–Kress), or, on a more modest level, the ARTFL project's FRANTEXT, has also breathed new life into old texts. Books that lay forgotten for generations can now be rediscovered thanks to the magic of search engines. To be sure, this power has not always been wielded for good: students today can “cite anything, but construe nothing,” stringing together KWICs (keywords in context), and reading only a surrounding sentence or two (if that). But however they are used, these tools and platforms have transformed our daily work habits.

In many respects these books, like their authors, are very different. John Dunn has spent his career as a professional political theorist calling into question the dominant idioms of his discipline. In addition to historical research on political thought and revolutions, and studies of contemporary West African politics, this enterprise has included exposing the assumptions of liberal and Marxist ideologies. Since the 1970s, running alongside this tremendous range of concerns, Dunn has also repeatedly returned to explore the history and theory of democracy. His latest book should be seen in the context of this extended preoccupation. It has its origins in the Stimson Lectures, delivered at Yale University in 2011, resulting in what the author describes as a compact study devoted to “a very large subject.” Herein lies the first contrast with Jonathan Israel's new book. Israel has produced a large-scale intellectual history, building on a series of studies of the European Enlightenment, which began to appear at the start of the new millennium. Before that, Israel had written on colonial Mexico, European Jewry, and early modern Dutch history. It was his work on the Netherlands that led him to the thought of Spinoza, which then drew him to the ideas of the Enlightenment. As an Enlightenment scholar his approach has been characterized by a certain obduracy: a fixed commitment to a morally charged thesis. This approach can again be contrasted with Dunn’s: while Dunn's book is a sceptical assault on moral complacency, Israel's is a more didactic performance, unflinchingly committed to the righteousness of its cause. As a result, ideology collides with dispassionate inquiry, arguably simplifying both.

It is said we are in trouble, we humanists. “The humanities are under pressure all over the world, Rens Bod begins (xii). James Turner ends, “Without question, the humanities now face greater flux than they have routinely endured in the past century” (385). The trouble and the flux seem to take two forms. There is the usual business of intellectual disciplines forming and re-forming, of new paradigms restructuring institutions, a process that one might regard as discomforting but sometimes healthy. But there is the other business of universities being governed by anti-intellectuals, aficionados of the spreadsheet, counted beans, and the alumni dinner. These predators roam campuses, sneer at libraries, abolish departments, and plan the day when, the cost-effective triumphant, scholarship will be little more than a digital ghost. At the University of Essex, lately Marina Warner was coldly informed of this new order, defined by a “Tariff of Expectations” (seventeen targets to be met) and a “workload allocation” handed down from on high. There was an indifference to what had gone before, what creative people had once hoped for for Colchester. “That is all changing now,” the executive dean for humanities briskly explained. “That is over.” The past, that is. Fed up, Warner resigned, hearing too loudly “the tick of the deathwatch beetle” in the fabric of the house she wished to inhabit, a university that valued scholarship and the life of the mind, as it once had.

Often repeated but little understood, the injunction to “take religion seriously” is as ubiquitous today as it is vague. As the phrase itself suggests, such a project is defined first and foremost by what it is not. It represents a reaction against a moment when religion was not “taken seriously” by historians, a moment when the dominance of Marxian approaches consigned religion to the status of an epiphenomenon whose truth lay outside itself—an expression of more fundamental social or economic forces. But beyond rejecting this form of demystification, what does it mean to “take religion seriously”? Does this entail an affirmation of the truth claims professed by the religious actors we study, or at least a “suspension of disbelief,” in the memorable words of Amy Hollywood?1 What political commitments, if any, are implied in the admonition to “take religion seriously,” and what role does it prescribe for religion in the presumptively secular public sphere? More vexing still is the question scholars of religion are now asking with increasing urgency: does the term “religion” in fact denote a coherent entity?2 Precisely what, in other words, are we being asked to “take seriously”?

In 1952, Bill Gaines, the entrepreneurial comic book publisher, embarked on a new venture. He had already made a name for himself by introducing the “horror” comics (Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Terror) that had rapidly acquired an eager readership. Those titles summoned up repressed aspects of postwar culture, reveling in sadism, sexual infidelity, and grisly torture. But the id knows many pathways, and in 1952 Gaines launched a humor magazine called Mad. The title was a celebration of unreason. As its icon, Mad boasted Alfred E. Neuman, a grinning half-wit who lived by the mantra, “What, me worry?”