During the Coinage Crisis of 1695, John Locke successfully advocated a full recoinage without devaluation by insisting on silver money's “intrinsick value.” The Great Recoinage has ever since been seen as a crucial step toward the Financial Revolution and it was long regarded as Locke's most consequential achievement. This article places Locke's intervention in the context of the postrevolutionary English state at war and reads his monetary pamphlets as an integral, if largely neglected, part of his political philosophy. Instead of taking Locke's insistence on “intrinsick value” itself at face value, I argue that it was precisely money's fragile conventionality that threatened its role as a societal bond of trust. In response to this fragility and corruptibility, Locke tied money by fiat to an initially arbitrary but unalterable quantity of metal. While Locke's argument contributed to the modern naturalization of money, it arose from a paradoxical political act of monetary depoliticization.

Voltaire's Letters Concerning the English Nation (Lettres philosophiques) have left the indelible impression that the French philosophe was fundamentally marked by his exposure to English thought in the late 1720s. On the map of his epistolary correspondence, however, England is hardly to be found. What are we to make of this discrepancy? In this article, we demonstrate that the missing letters to England are unlikely to be the result of a data glitch, but rather reflect a lack of interest in contemporary English matters. The only England that Voltaire seems to have cared about lay in the past, during the reign of Charles II. Moreover, this period of English history was (in his view) intrinsically French, given the English monarch's close ties to Versailles. Voltaire's limited admiration of English thought, accordingly, formed part of his broader philosophy of history, which was centered at the court of Louis XIV.

As part of Benjamin Constant's academic “revival,” scholars have revisited the political and religious elements of his thought, but conclude that he remained uninterested in the nineteenth century's major social and economic questions. This article examines Constant's response to what would later become known as “the social question” in his Commentary on Filangieri's Work, and argues that his claims about poverty and its alleviation highlight central elements of his political liberalism, especially on the practice of citizenship in the modern age. By interpreting social issues through his original political lens of “usurpation,” Constant encouraged skepticism of social legislation and identified the political implications of a “disinherited” poor class. The lens of usurpation ultimately limited the scope of Constant's solutions to poverty. But his attention to social and economic issues prompts us to reexamine the category of “the social” and its uses in the history of liberal thought, particularly the place of class concerns in the French liberal tradition.

This article explores the political thought of C. F. G. Masterman (1873–1927), a leading figure in the movement of New Liberalism in Britain at the beginning of the twentieth century. The article emphasizes the distinctive color his Christian beliefs and Anglican loyalties lent to his progressive Liberal ideals; this adds a new dimension to the existing historiography of the New Liberalism, which, until recently, has neglected the religious influences on its development. The article further underlines Masterman's concern to harness the cause of religious freedom and the disestablishment of the Church of England to social reform; he did so through reviving the older Gladstonian alliance between Liberalism and Nonconformity. It argues that his religiosity—focused on the Church of England—was central to his thought, and was frequently expressed in the language of prophecy he imbibed from Thomas Carlyle and other nineteenth-century seers.

Antonio Gramsci's notion of “passive revolution” has often been understood as a distinctive historical narrative, political concept, or theory of state formation. This article proposes to consider it instead as a “heuristic formula” within the “lexical architecture” of the Prison Notebooks. Based upon a diachronic and contextualist analysis of the usage of the formula, I argue that Gramsci's research on passive revolution emerged as a critical element within the development of his own distinctive conception of the “sublation” and “actualization” of the slogan of “the revolution in permanence.” Attending to this dialectical relationship allows the political and strategic dimensions of passive revolution to be highlighted, and suggests new paths of research for the debate about its analytic fertility and contemporary relevance.

Jean-Paul Sartre's 1961 famous and infamous preface to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth has engendered the common impression of Sartre as an intellectual who was particularly hostile to Europe. In revising this perception, this article reviews Sartre's engagement with the idea of Europe over many decades. This certainly included critique, but also nuanced and positive considerations of what Europe and being European meant. This thinking about Europe is to be situated, first, in terms of Sartre's evolving philosophical project to reconcile freedom and facticity, and second, in political and intellectual contestations over Europe in the context of fascism and the Second World War, postwar international relations, and the emergence of the Third World. Sartre's contribution to these debates was an adumbration of a “knotted Europe,” the provincialization of Europe whilst retaining a commitment to universalism, and a notion of Europe as an ongoing project rather than an ossified identity.

This article introduces non-Western policy sciences into the burgeoning field of the intellectual history of Earth system governmentality, a field that studies the ideas, institutions and material systems that enable action at the global scale. It outlines the rise of debates on the idea of the governability of the global biosphere in late Soviet Russia (1970s–1980s), focusing particularly on the extension of Vladimir Vernadskii's famous theory of the biosphere and its governance (the stage of the noosphere) into computer modeling and systems analysis. As a result, a new notion of governance as guidance through milieu arose to conceptualize global governance of the biosphere. This conceptual innovation was part of Soviet scientists’ attempt to liberalize the centrally commanded Soviet governmental system.

The title of Dagmar Herzog's exciting new book, Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes, immediately raises a series of questions. If we understand the Cold War as a particular moment in history ranging from the 1940s to the 1980s, but also as a time of intense politicization, we might wonder about the juxtaposition of “Cold War” and “Freud”—the juxtaposition of history and politics with psychoanalysis. When Freud invented psychoanalysis at the end of the nineteenth century, his primary motivation was to treat individuals in their idiosyncrasy through the “talking cure” and the process of transference with the analyst. In that sense, psychoanalysis, at least as Freud exposed it in his initial case studies, had little to say about collective phenomena such as politics. Furthermore, in his more theoretical writings, one of Freud's explicit goals was to develop a theory of subjectivity that went beyond historical specificity. Of course, social and familial configurations affected the psyche in distinctive ways, but neurosis, psychosis, and perversion were subjective structures rather than historical developments. Freud's main concepts—whether it be the unconscious, the drives, desire, the Oedipus complex—characterized human subjectivity in general. They pointed to the uniqueness of the self as opposed to the animal who was ultimately governed by nature, biology, and instincts. In other words, at first glance, Freudian psychoanalysis was not meant to be historical or political.

Psychoanalysis is at once a system of thought, a toolkit for cultural diagnosis and criticism, and a therapeutic practice. In Dagmar Herzog's exciting new book Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes, psychoanalysis is among the most transformative intellectual events of the twentieth century and is itself transformed by that century's roiling forces, shaping and profoundly shaped by politics and culture. Foregrounding the historicity of psychoanalysis requires Herzog to wrest psychoanalysis from its own claims to historical transcendence. “While psychoanalysis is often taken to be ahistorical in its view of human nature,” Herzog writes, “the opposite is the case” (2). After Freud's death, during the heyday of psychoanalysis in the 1940s and 1950s, through challenges to its authority in the 1960s and 1970s, to what Herzog calls its “second golden age” in the 1980s, the analytic frame offered by psychoanalysis (and the debates it generated) helped people grapple with the aftermath of the horrors of the Second World War and offered novel ways of thinking about the most important questions of the postwar decades: about aggression, guilt, trauma, the capacity for violence, indeed about “the very nature of the human self and its motivations” (1).

Close on the thematic heels of her groundbreaking Sex after Fascism, Dagmar Herzog offers us in her new book Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes a further elaboration on her earlier thesis about the complex relationship between sex and politics. Sex after Fascism made an immensely productive but counterintuitive argument, one that crucially relied on the proposition of three historical periods, each defined by its particular relationship with sex(uality). Herzog claimed, first, that German fascism was not sexually repressive; second, that the immediate postwar environment was, on the contrary, sexually repressive; and third, that the “sexual revolution” beginning in the late 1960s and expanding into the 1970s was consciously contesting fascist repression, while in fact it was actually and unconsciously in dialogue with the more immediate past of the postwar era. Her tour de force argument here was that this historical sequencing had the overall effect of obscuring, indeed repressing, the sex-positive policies of the Nazis and therefore “misunderstanding” not only fascism itself but also—and especially—fascism's (sexual) appeal. Herzog suggested that not only did the generation of the 1968-ers espouse a politics of the missed object; more nefariously, the repression of fascism's sexual appeal also opened the road to all sorts of varieties of historical revisionism.

By 1939, W. H. Auden was able to publish a poem in memory of Sigmund Freud saying, “if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd, to us he is no more a person now but a whole climate of opinion.” Indeed, despite the opposition to Freud's new discipline from the medical establishment and some members of the public, psychoanalysis in its various proliferations had become popular in Europe as early as before World War II, and its terminology had become part of everyday language. More importantly, it propounded new possibilities for diagnosing personal problems and understanding sociopolitical issues. When Freud was asked in 1923 whether he would like to “psycho-analyze Europe in the hope of finding a cure for her ills,” he replied, “I never take a patient to whom I can offer no hope.” But as the twentieth century progressed, Freud and his followers developed ideas that engaged directly and indirectly with the personal and political questions of the age of catastrophes.

The footprint of Dagmar Herzog's scholarship has moved from Germany to the United States, then back again, before expanding outwards across Europe as well as to spaces drawn into Europe's orbit by conquest. Historically specific intersections between gender, religion, and politics are her specialty, with sexuality and sex as crucial sightlines in the constantly shifting landscapes that these always-moving parts compose. No historian currently writing in English on the late modern period, arguably, more acutely captures the intensity and conflicts that absorb individuals as well as larger groups as they live in and through these distinct topographies. This she does, in part, through the depth and the breadth of her research, which allow Herzog to reveal connections and disjunctures in ways that grab the reader's attention as well as explain the stakes. Her writings reveal an ability to listen to sources and care about what they intimate that is more often seen in certain scholars of the medieval or other exotic histories that rely on scarce or sketchy sources. For historians of the modern era, between the birth of ideology and ready access to endless and dense types of documentation, what Herzog continues to do is a revelation.

I am grateful for the observations of these five wonderful and thought-provoking interlocutors: Camille Robcis, Todd Shepard, Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, Regina Kunzel, and Michal Shapira. They have prompted me to read a whole range of clarifying texts—from Jacques Derrida's reflections on Friedrich Nietzsche to the work of classicist James Davidson on Michel Foucault and George Devereux (as well as more writings by Devereux) to historian Chris Waters's recovery of Edward Glover, and from literary scholar Shoshana Felman's brilliant Jacques Lacan-inspired rescue operation for psychoanalytic textual interpretation (in the special issue of Yale French Studies she edited in 1977) to Charles Shepherdson's turn-of-the-millennium revisionist take on Lacan and Foucault in Vital Signs. They have prompted me, too, to reconsider key texts by Sigmund Freud. And I am glad that the interlocutors challenge me with questions. These include: why the Left abandoned psychoanalysis (Robcis); how I have come to think about practices and desires and the relationships between “the sexual” and other realms of human existence (Shepard and Stewart-Steinberg, each in their own way); how a more integrated and comprehensive master narrative of psychoanalysis might be written, connecting the first and second halves of the twentieth century (Shapira); and how to delve more deeply into the role of analysands in shaping what counts as psychoanalysis (Kunzel).

The United States is a deeply Christian country, but over the last sixty years American public culture has become increasingly detached from religious concerns. Christian activists, when not speaking within the Republican Party, have had to assert their privilege in a way that they never had to do in the past. In spite of their efforts, the role of Christianity in culture and politics has seen a more or less continuous decline. This essay examines how and why that process occurred. It puts forward a schematic narrative that relies on the concepts of public reason, the avant-garde, and an overlapping consensus to explain how different people came together in the mid-twentieth century to secularize and liberalize American public life.

“The Enlightenment,” Anthony Pagden writes in the conclusion to The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters, “quite simply created the modern world.”1 It would have been more prudent to say that the Enlightenment created “the conditions of possibility” of modernity; or, more prudent still, that it was critical to forming certain values and institutions that we (or some of us) consider modern. Precisely because the latter way of putting it is so anemic, it is one of the rare few statements that would be acceptable across the spectrum of opinions in debates over the last half-century about the Enlightenment and modernity. Acceptable, though, only because it provides a terrain for waging a thicket of wars, at once ideological and disciplinary, between a historians’ Enlightenment and a philosophers’ Enlightenment and within each of these camps.

The publication between 2014 and 2017 of four substantial historical biographies of Sigmund Freud raises a number of questions that should be of interest to intellectual and cultural historians. Both Freud's reputation as a pioneering empirical investigator and brilliant theorist of human subjectivity, and his influential role in framing public discussion of the unconscious dynamics and conscious expressions of the “psyche” or the “soul” have been declining for a number of decades. Apparently we have finally reached that point in time at which W. H. Auden's famous comment (in his 1939 elegy) that Freud was “a whole climate of opinion under whom we conduct our different lives” no longer resonates.1 Unlike the last major historical Freud biography, Peter Gay's Freud: A Life for Our Time (1988), which still worked assiduously to sustain the contemporary presence and thus cross-cultural and cross-temporal validity of Freud's discoveries as empirically grounded, universal rational truths, recent works by Frederick Crews, Joel Whitebook, Élisabeth Roudinesco, and Peter-André Alt attempt to historicize Freud's work in a more critical and fundamental fashion. The perspectives governing all of these studies are self-consciously “historical.” They build their interpretations of Freud's work and their judgements regarding its claims on investigations of the temporally situated, personal, sociocultural and theoretical contexts which conditioned and therefore limited or “relativized” its meaning and its truth. For three of the biographers (all except Crews) this also implies that Freud's work was not so much a completed articulation of an investigative method (either positivist or hermeneutical) that unveiled a singular interpretation or “discovery” of a general truth as the representation of an open-ended process of investigating and thinking through the problem of the origin, development and nature of the human “soul.” From this perspective the attempt to grasp Freud's work as a fully articulated truth or completed interpretation that can now be seen as historically limited or framed by specific cultural contexts is to read Freud's life and work within assumptions about closed cultural systems or temporally bounded climates of opinion, assumptions that have themselves become a part of the historical past.