Historical scholarship often relies on intermittent adjustments rather than radical innovation. Through a close reading of three different universal histories published between 1690 and 1760, this essay argues that the secularization of world history in the age of Enlightenment was an incomplete and often unintended process. Nonetheless, one of the most significant changes in this period was the centering of universal history in Europe, a process that accompanied the desacralization of the story of man. Once human progress was embraced as a universal process, the story of the development of the arts and sciences gradually eclipsed the non-European cultures that had formerly played a central role in the Christian narrative of human history.

Considerable attention has been paid to the ideas of critics of the British Empire in the period of its most rapid expansion and rather less to the views of those who supported it strongly. This article investigates the arguments of what are called “ultra-imperialists”, showing how they used the language of character, stiffened by elements from earlier languages of virtue, to justify the possession of empire. They argued that character had been critical in making Britain an imperial power and also claimed that, without the stimulus to action and duty provided by the defence and the governance of empire, character would atrophy, and the nation would suffer catastrophic and irreversible decline. The article ends by comparing the “ultra” position with that of, firstly, the larger body of more pragmatic supporters of empire and, secondly, the small group of radical anti-imperialists who feared that empire was destructive of character.

Since the 1830s thinkers in both the United States and India have sought to establish analogies between their respective countries. Although many have felt the US black experience to have obvious parallels in India, there has been a fundamental disagreement about whether being black is comparable to being colonized or to being untouchable. By examining these two competing visions, this essay introduces new topics to the study of black internationalism, including the caste school of race relations, B. R. Ambedkar's anti-caste movement, and the changing significance of India for Martin Luther King, Jr.

This essay examines Isaiah Berlin's ambivalent relationship with the ideas and practices of Jewish nationalism and the ways in which this ambivalence shaped some of the key premises of his political thought. Drawing upon extensive archival research in his unpublished letters from the mid-1930s to the late 1950s, this essay reconstructs Berlin's attempt to reconcile himself with the national idea. This attempt forced him to enrich his liberalism, and pushed him to develop “Diaspora Zionism” and adopt the Jewish normalization discourse. In the course of those intra-Jewish debates Berlin also began to conceptualize freedom as an opportunity concept, an idea that would later become central both in Berlin's famous negative concept of freedom and in his pluralism. Adopting a dual perspective, which considers Berlin as both a British liberal and a Russian-Jewish émigré intellectual, I therefore offer to see the Jewish Zionist writings as complementary rather than secondary to Berlin's “liberal” enterprise.

The cultural world of French elites was profoundly shaken by the long sequence of events we now refer to as the French Revolution. The legal, political, and social world in which elites moved was transformed by successive revolutionary regimes and, more generally, by what Benjamin Constant called “the torrent” of change that began with the Revolution in 1789. Individuals experienced excitement, hope, and enthusiasm, but also suffered trauma, insecurity, and loss. The effects of these experiences on elite sociability and culture are difficult to characterize precisely. Michelle Perrot and Anne Martin-Fugier have written that there was a tendency on the part of French elites during the nineteenth century to retreat increasingly into the sanctuary of their homes, where they practiced more exclusionary forms of sociability, and simultaneously adopted more defensive forms of politics. Alain Corbin reminds us that the vulnerability that accompanied the progress of individuation in nineteenth-century France frequently manifested itself as an obsession with self-scrutiny, as represented by the enriched forms of interior monologue found in diaries and in Romantic poetry and literature. This retreat and concomitant self-scrutiny can be seen as a further refinement of the delicacy and sense of shame—of what we call modesty—that Norbert Elias suggested over sixty years ago was a central characteristic of the advance of European manners.

Tom Stoppard, The Coast of Utopia (London: Faber and Faber, 2002)

Part I: Voyage

Part II: Shipwreck

Part III: Salvage

In a recent article in the London Review of Books, Perry Anderson sang a dirge over the decaying corpse of the Russian liberal intelligentsia. A “spirit of opposition…had defined the Russian intelligentsia since the 19th century—and for long periods [had] been its virtual raison d'être…whatever its internal disputes, [it] had always taken its role as Kulturträger for granted” (8). But then in the early 1990s it helped to saw off the branch it was sitting on, and plunged itself, unwittingly, into an economic and cultural abyss. It had used its cultural clout to support and legitimate Yeltsin's market reforms. The result was the decimation of all the institutions, from universities to film studios and the press, which had guaranteed the intelligentsia's existence and enabled it—not just despite, but because of the censorship—to maintain its role as the late Soviet system's permanent and often salaried opposition.

Theodore Ziolkowski, Clio the Romantic Muse: Historicizing the Faculties in Germany (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004)

Thomas Albert Howard, Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern German University (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)

William Clark, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006)

In the same symbolic way that the modern political world can be traced to revolutionary Paris, and the modern economic world to industrial Manchester, so modern academia and modern scholarship trace their origins to Germany at the turn of the nineteenth century. There and then the study of history, philosophy, philology, linguistics, and, somewhat later, the natural sciences was transformed in content and methodology onto the lines that would characterize them until deep into the twentieth century. Some argue that the period from 1770 to 1830 launched a still more fundamental transformation in the very structure of academic knowledge: the creation of modern “disciplines” as the new social and intellectual forms through which knowledge would be classified, produced, and communicated.

Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work (New York: Knopf, 2005)

Robert Milder, Exiled Royalties: Melville and the Life We Imagine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)

Edgar A. Dryden, Monumental Melville: The Formation of a Literary Career (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004)

Reading Melville in relation to intellectual history is both necessary and hard. His writings explore (among other things) political and legal theory, theology, aesthetics, natural philosophy, and what he once called “ontological heroics.” Yet if Melville engages ideas as intensely as any United States literary figure, his work remains difficult to locate within intellectual traditions. Largely an autodidact, Melville read eclectically; and unlike Emerson, Thoreau, and Fuller—all of whom have occasioned intellectual biographies—he left no extensive journals or letters from which to reconstruct his education and mind. We have the checkmarks, scores, and occasional comments of his partially recovered marginalia, important evidence that can raise as many questions as answers regarding influence and intention. Melville's novels, short fiction, and poetry thus bear the heaviest burden of proof as to his thinking, though these texts are also tricky, not only because of their famously complex structures and ambiguities, but also because they tend to subvert the intellectual systems they inhabit. Melville's tendency to push ideas to their limits is part of his achievement and appeal, and befitting his image as a roughhewn sailor there is a kind of skeptical restlessness to his thought. To appreciate Melville's relation to ideas is to pursue a commensurately unbounded mode of inquiry that includes (among other things) literary criticism, cultural history, and biography.

Anita Burdman Feferman and Solomon Feferman, Alfred Tarski: Life and Logic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)

Murray G. Murphey, C. I. Lewis: The Last Great Pragmatist (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005)

The lives of analytic philosophers and logicians do not prima facie appear to be the stuff of popular intellectual biographies. Who but former students or specialists would want to know the details of lives devoted to academic pursuits that, so it would seem, all but exclude personal expression? Demonstrative cultural documents such as Also sprach Zarathustra lay claim to our attention in part because they are the product of minds in dynamic tension with the culture that surrounded them, but Gödel's undecidability proof, for example, owes nothing of its importance to its author's social or psychological life at the time he wrote it. The life of the analyst or logician would, in short, appear to be beside the point—window dressing at best, obfuscating at worst.