How does a new state, born by way of revolution, produce its social and political institutions? This article explores this question by looking at the case of Greece after independence from the Ottomans (1830). It focuses on the Greek civil jurists and provides a history of a liberal political program that was manifested in Roman-law jurisprudence. As elsewhere in Europe, so too for jurists in Greece, Roman law was both a consistent method for lawmaking and a powerful political ideology, one that linked private property to personal liberty, and to equality of conditions. As in several other colonial and postimperial settings, it developed as a language of statehood and a “territorial” program that associated sovereignty with the reorganization of space within the state. As in a very few other cases, there it became a means of practical statecraft, which the jurists turned against other political programs, including that of the monarchy.

This article uses the work of French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and his contemporaries to explore the central role played by internal or mental images in late nineteenth-century understandings of mental function. It argues that the assumed existence of internal images allowed scientists and clinicians of the time to integrate experimental psychological work on mental pathologies such as memory dysfunction, hysteria, hypnosis, and hallucination into contemporary research on brain physiology. The internal image—a general term that embraced concepts such as “memory images,” “sensory images,” and multi-faceted “language images”—linked older ideas about how memory, perception, and consciousness worked with new research on cerebral localization that dominated studies of the brain throughout Europe and the United States. For practitioners of the new physiological (also called experimental) psychology, internal images offered a physiological mechanism for explaining how sensory perceptions are transformed into memories, how memories create perceptions of the self, how the brain generates ideas, and how all these processes can go awry.

G. K. Chesterton's anti-Semitism has attracted much scholarly attention, but his views on Islam have largely passed without comment. This article situates Chesterton's writings in relation to historical views of Islam in Britain and the political, cultural and religious context of the early twentieth century. Chesterton's complex and contradictory opinions fail to support easy conclusions about the immutability of prejudice across time. His views of Islam are at times orientalist and at other times critical of imperialism and elitism. As well as drawing on medieval Catholic ideas about the “heresy” of Islam, Chesterton also links Islam with Protestant Christianity. From another perspective, his views of Islam draw on liberal traditions of humanitarian interventionism and democratic patriotism. Finally, he also used Islam as a symbol of a corroding modernity. This study suggests the need for a historically sensitive genealogy of the evolution of anti-Muslim prejudice which is not predetermined by the politics of the early twenty-first century.

This article scrutinizes a little-known venture in Turkish republican intellectual history, namely Turkish neo-spiritualism. Combining the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Western trend of modern spiritualism with its local dynamics and sociocultural structures, Turkish neo-spiritualism integrated the spiritual philosophies and practices of Western spiritualism with various doctrines of Islamic mysticism (Sufism). It thus sheds light on the complex ways in which a form of knowledge that was originated and disseminated from the West was not derivative in its “imported” version. The article demonstrates how modern spiritualism attained new meanings and connotations in Turkey by merging with indigenous cultural codes and memory, and how it responded to (or was shaped within) local sociopolitical as well as intellectual contexts, particularly including the top-down secularism of the early Turkish Republic.

This article examines a particular moment in the twentieth century when a burgeoning internationalist movement in Britain in the wake of the First World War coincided with growing nationalist activities in the non-European world, notably in Asia. It explores the intellectual implications of this juncture through the lens of two prominent British internationalists, G. P. Gooch and H. G. Wells, who were central figures in a series of discussions on “world history” that emerged in Britain around this time. Through a close study of their world-historical visions, the article demonstrates how the sequence of Asian nationalist “awakenings” (first in Japan, then after 1905 in India and China) was interpreted by British liberals as evidence of mankind's universal progress towards a uniform (Western) modernity. The effect of burgeoning Asian nationalism, in other words, was ironically to reinvigorate a highly Eurocentric liberal account of world order. The article builds on this analysis to consider the broader implications for our own present intellectual engagement with the world-historical challenge of Europe's Eurocentric past.

This article examines the “new professions” as alternative settings where women thought and wrote about the international. Presenting the case studies of Fannie Fern Andrews, Mary Parker Follett and Florence Wilson, it shows that, in emerging professional and disciplinary contexts that have hitherto lain beyond the purview of historians of international thought, these women developed their thinking about the international. The insights they derived from their practical work in schools, immigrant communities and libraries led them to emphasize the mechanics of participation in international affairs and caused them to think across the scales of the individual, the local group and relations between nations. By moving beyond the history of organizations and networks and instead looking for the professional settings and audiences which enabled women to theorize, this article shifts both established understandings of what counts as international thought and traditional conceptions of who counts as an international thinker.

The Unemployed of Marienthal (1933) has long been esteemed as a classic of twentieth-century social science; its portrait of the effects of joblessness on individual minds and social institutions has inspired generations of researchers. But this reception has largely overlooked the political origins and implications of the study. This essay resituates Marienthal in the context of its creation and dissemination: the distinctive Marxism of interwar Austria. Specifically, it demonstrates that Marienthal introduced social-psychological methods and findings into Marxist debates about the present state and future prospects of the working class. Led by Paul F. Lazarsfeld, the Marienthal researchers adopted the Austro-Marxist goal of creating a model proletariat through a program of “anticipatory socialism.” But by finding that unemployment confounded efforts to reform the working class, Marienthal undermined the very program it aimed to support. In fact, the essay shows, Marienthal authorized arguments that the unemployed were unreliable political actors—“declassed” workers as likely to become reactionaries as revolutionaries. The essay concludes by considering whether Marienthal embodied a distinctively Austro-Marxist “style” of thinking and research.

Among the most important ideas in Cold War nuclear strategy and arms control was that of “stability”—the notion that by protecting weapons for use in retaliation, the superpowers would be less likely to fight a thermonuclear war. Conventional wisdom among strategists and historians of strategy has long held that stability was inherent to the logic of rational nuclear deterrence. This essay shows the conventional wisdom to be mistaken. It examines the technical practice of Thomas Schelling, who introduced the stability idea in a classic 1958 paper. Celebrated as a game theorist, Schelling was actually trained as a Keynesian macroeconomic modeler during the second half of the 1940s. In 1958, he used Keynesian techniques to frame deterrence as a stable system of dynamic adjustment, akin to the stable macroeconomic system he had modeled as a young economist. Among Schelling's fellow strategists, stability quickly became popular as a rationalization for their preferred nuclear deployment policies.

The anthropologist Margaret Mead is widely known for stating that human nature is “almost unbelievably malleable,” meaning that individual identity—including gender—is shaped more by culture than by biology. Many feminists, notably Betty Friedan, seized on this idea as a tool for dismantling sexist biases but were dismayed when Mead's later work seemed to relegate women to a biologically determined, maternal role. Mead, however, argued strenuously in print and correspondence that she never intended to set nature against nurture, for she believed that identity grew from the interplay of the two. The historical context for Mead's thinking changed, as the menace of eugenic politics in the 1930s yielded to the existential threat of nuclear annihilation after 1945, but Mead never fundamentally changed her mind about the production of gender.

This article discusses the historical context of the famed dissident intellectual Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s (1923–69) travelogue documenting his visit to Israel in early 1963, posthumously titled Safar beh velayat-e ʿezraʾil (Journey to the Province of the Angel of Death), focusing on (1) the political and intellectual context and reception of his controversial essay, in particular the brief infatuation of Iranian anti-Soviet socialists in the League of Iranian Socialists with socialist Zionism; (2) Al-e Ahmad’s discussion of political sovereignty and theo-politics in modern Israel and the important insights and observations provided therein; and (3), finally, the shifting sands of Al-e Ahmad’s engagement with Israel and Zionism and their relation to how he understood the politics of anticolonialism in the context of modern Iran following the 1953 coup d’état, which overthrew the nationalist government of Mohammad Mosaddeq, the Shah’s “White Revolution” and the Arab–Israeli War of 1967. The development of his views from ones of curiosity, fascination and ambivalence to condemnation echo less a simplistic and psychologized “return to religion” or “quest for authenticity” than an integration of the category of coloniality in relation to a wider field of struggles then unfolding across the global South during the 1960s, and provided the basis for a critique of not only Iranian social democrats, but several leading lights of the French left.

More than a century ago, the German Catholic historian Sebastian Merkle made the case for a specifically Catholic engagement with the Enlightenment. His audience was largely Protestant academics, who assumed that Protestantism and modernity went hand in hand. But Merkle also refuted wholesale condemnations of the Enlightenment by conservative Catholics, who blamed the movement for the ills that had beset the Church since the French Revolution and which were at the root of the liberal attack on Catholicism up through the Kulturkampf. Merkle insisted that a moderate and constructive Catholic Enlightenment had embraced some aspects of modernity, and that it was important to acknowledge this historical reality in order to fully bring the Church into the modern age.

In 1858 an aged and weakened James Stephen, the once-formidable “Over-Secretary of the Colonies” whose influence on the course of British imperial administration included such momentous tasks as drafting the bill to end slavery in the colonies and contributing to much of the administrative–constitutional groundwork for colonial self-government, wrote his son James Fitzjames words of encouragement on his rising writing career: “Time was when I enjoyed a repute as a writer of Edinburgh Reviews and from the bottom of my heart I hope as I sincerely believe that you will eclipse me even more than the elder Mill has been eclipsed by the younger.” For all the power he had exercised in the Colonial Office, and for all the worldly success that Fitzjames might enjoy in the legal profession he had been practicing for a half-decade at that point, there was something unique about literary fame that James wished his son to have.

For the five hundred years since Thomas More first depicted the island of Utopia, the portrayal of an ideal social system has intrigued generations of authors. The concept served a double purpose: it applied to an ideal place (eutopia) but also an imaginary, unrealizable one (utopia). Although the search for utopia started from the Classical Age, More invented the genre and hundreds of utopian thinkers followed in his footsteps trying to predict how life would unfold and provide a detailed description of an ideal (or nonideal) future society. From H. G. Wells and Aldous Huxley to Arthur C. Clarke and Ursula Le Guin, successful and popular authors showed a deep concern for future living and working conditions. If the past is another country, the growing literature of utopian thought suggests that the future can be a whole continent. Several undiscovered countries lay in waiting and intellectual historians have often been fascinated by the dense explorations of the utopian writers.

Over the last decade or so, intellectual historians in and beyond the US field have deepened their engagement with the historical profession's “transnational turn.” This welcome development should hardly be a surprise; after all the turn, which began for Americanists in the late 1990s, owed a good part of its erudition and its energy to some of the most distinguished intellectual historians of that time. Thomas Bender convened four conferences at NYU's La Pietra villa—itself part of some intellectual-history footnotes in the early twentieth century—and also made major scholarly and organizational contributions to the field. Two of the most frequently cited works that made the case for the “internationalization of US history”—avant la lettre—were by similarly preeminent intellectual historians Daniel Rodgers and James Kloppenberg. Other scholars, like David Hollinger, encouraged such work in their students before undertaking a more robustly transnational approach themselves. A wealth of scholarship in recent years has not just continued this tradition but expanded it, with intellectual historians individually and collectively pursuing their subjects across geographic borders as well as methodological boundaries. Two recent edited collections showcase work by scholars (mostly mid-career or younger) and contemplate the possibilities and the limits of different scales and methods of investigating the past in its broadest contexts.