This paper will present a comparative analysis of the ethnographic writings of three colonial travellers trained in medicine at the University of Edinburgh: William Anderson (1750–78), Archibald Menzies (1754–1842) and Robert Brown (1773–1858). Each travelled widely beyond Scotland, enabling them to make a series of observations of non-European peoples in a wide variety of colonial contexts. William Anderson, Archibald Menzies and Robert Brown in particular travelled extensively in the Pacific with (respectively) James Cook on his second and third voyages (1771–8), with George Vancouver (1791–5) and with Matthew Flinders (1801–3). Together, their surviving writings from these momentous expeditions illustrate a growing interest in natural-historical explanations for diversity among human populations. Race emerged as a key concept in this quest, but it remained entangled with assumptions about the stadial historical progress or “civilization” of humanity. A comparative examination of their ethnographic writings thus presents a unique opportunity to study the complex interplay between concepts of race, savagery and civilization in the varied colonial contexts of the Scottish Enlightenment.

This article examines News from Nowhere, William Morris's late nineteenth-century utopian romance. It seeks, first, to establish John Stuart Mill as a crucial influence on the text. It argues that, in News from Nowhere, Morris engaged extensively with Mill's mid-century essay On Liberty. It shows how Morris dramatized Mill's “harm principle”; how he challenged the notion that custom must necessarily be antithetical to the “spirit of liberty”; and how he enacted Mill's stricture that “if opponents of all important truths do not exist,” then they must be invented. The article seeks, second, to contest the view that Morris was writing in indignant response to Edward Bellamy's portrait of utopia, Looking Backward. The article argues, instead, that it was rather the Fabians who incurred Morris's indignation. It attempts to demonstrate that if News from Nowhere was indeed an answer to another book, it was an answer to Fabian Essays.

This article widens the scope of the history of Hegel's reception in turn-of-the-century French philosophy by thematizing an often neglected moment, namely the years 1897 to 1927. Before the so-called “Hegel renaissance,” in fact, the Hegelian dialectics was generally understood as a “panlogist” doctrine aimed at dissolving the concrete individual in the abstract dimension of the concept or in the all-encompassing realm of Absolute Spirit. However, even at the beginning of the century, attempts were made to provide a more positive assessment of Hegelian philosophy. The author reconstructs this panlogist controversy by analyzing the points of view of some prominent philosophers of the time, namely Charles Renouvier, René Berthelot, Émile Boutroux, Émile Meyerson and Léon Brunschvicg. The aim of the article is to provide a deeper understanding of the historical continuities and discontinuities characterizing Hegel's reception in France.

Scholars of political thought, sociology, and the arts have yet to fully explore the impact of positivism on modernist design theory and practice. This paper offers an intellectual history of the works of three generations of positivist sociologists who built on each other's works. They are Auguste Comte and Richard Congreve, Frederic Harrison and Charles Booth, and Patrick Geddes and Victor Branford. These actors developed different types of sociological survey, established a network of urban interventions, and proposed a series of planning programs and manifestos. It will be argued that their intention was to systematically reconcile international and domestic issues to realize a modern eutopia. Following this analysis, it will be shown that a similar language and practice appeared in the work of a diverse range of such modernist designers as Patrick Abercrombie, Sybella Gurney Branford, Louis Sullivan, H. P. Berlage, and Le Corbusier, among others.

This article traces the origins and evolution of a popular interpretation of Adam Smith as a “Chicago-style” economist, and it challenges the idea that the “Chicago Smith” is simply a misinterpretation of Smith's ideas. To that end, it reexamines the role that the Chicago school of economics played in developing and propounding a distinct vision of Adam Smith, not only within the profession of economics, but also for the broader American public in the twentieth century. I argue that the readings, teachings, and interpretations of Smith from Chicago economists across different generations are more than just superficial symbolism, claims of intellectual authority, or rhetorical window dressing. Chicago’s engagement with Smith’s ideas constitute important interpretive and substantive arguments about the essence of Smith’s contribution to economics and the role that Smith’s ideas could play in shaping public policy.

Peter Drucker (1909–2005) is celebrated as perhaps the greatest management guru, and one of the greatest futurists, of the twentieth century, but he has rarely been taken seriously as an intellectual. Raised in Vienna among a cohort of émigré academics that included Schumpeter, Hayek, and von Mises, among others, Drucker was both deeply learned and incredibly prolific. This essay seeks to rehabilitate Drucker as a humanistic social thinker, reinterpreting his earliest writings in German, his two major treatises on totalitarianism and the crisis of capitalism published after he emigrated to the US, his debate with Polanyi and engagement with Kierkegaard, and his early postwar writings on management theory and the knowledge society. It identifies in Drucker's Protestant faith a deep and abiding set of intellectual, ethical, and spiritual commitments helping him to navigate a path out of Nazi Germany and assume a position of enormous influence in American business life.

Gottlob Frege is considered a founder of analytic philosophy and mathematical logic, but the traditions that claim Frege as a forebear never embraced his Begriffsschrift, or “conceptual notation”—the invention he considered his most important accomplishment. Frege believed that his notation rendered logic visually observable. Rejecting the linearity of written language, he claimed Begriffsschrift exhibited a structure endogenous to logic itself. But Frege struggled to convince others to use his notation, as his frustrated pedagogical efforts at the University of Jena illustrate. Teaching Begriffsschrift meant using words to explain it; rather than replacing spoken language, notation became its obverse in a bifurcated style of argument that separated deduction from commentary. Both registers of this discourse, however, remained within Frege's monologue, imposing a consequential passivity on his students. In keeping with Frege's visual understanding of notation, they learned by silently observing it, though never in isolation: notation and language were always mixed together.

This article traces a history of the literary critic and theorist Raymond Williams’s idea of the “structure of feeling”, the formation of which is situated within debates about the place of artistic and moral values in democratic politics during the 1940s and 1950s. It demonstrates that the “structure of feeling” was intended to circumvent an equation of collective normative legislation with totalitarianism in the early cultural Cold War, by conceiving the definition of values as a process upon which all individuals in a society were always, necessarily, engaged. In articulating this quasi-democratic account of the production of artistic and moral standards, Williams also sought to escape the various theories of “minority culture” that dominated literary and cultural criticism in mid-century Britain. However, his concept of the “structure of feeling” required him to maintain a privileged role for artistic and intellectual arbiters, which constrained his vision of a properly democratic culture. In conclusion, the article argues that the problem of “democratic values” that Williams addressed in his work of the 1950s was a major factor in the marginalization or exclusion of moral criticism from political argument in Britain after 1945, and suggests that this passage of intellectual history may therefore be of considerable importance to contemporary debates about the lineages and reform of, in a broad sense, neoliberal political economy.

This article examines how the work of Bruno Bettelheim remained influential in debates concerning the meaning of autism as well as its treatment in France well after it was marginalized in the United States. The persistence of Bettelheim's work among French audiences speaks to how the French understanding of autism diverged from its conception in the United States thanks to the social and cultural interest in psychoanalysis in French society and the perceived effectiveness of his form of treatment. The conflation between Bettelheim and the psychoanalytic approach to autism meant that advocates for other approaches needed to rebut his influences well into the 1980s and 1990s, which further reinforced his position as a prime representative for the problems of psychoanalysis for parents. The durability of Bettelheim's presence in these debates also underscores the perceived relationship between disability and motherhood in the case of autism and how Bettelheim buttressed that assumption for the French rooted in anxieties about the dangers of bad mothering. Bettelheim's ideas solidified the intersection of intellectual ascendance and social acceptance of psychoanalysis in France and anxieties about motherhood during the emergence of autism within the public discourse.

This paper reframes the intellectual genealogy of Baʿthism in modern Syria through a close reading of the writings of one of its founding figures, Michel ʿAflaq. Rereading ʿAflaq's most important texts is part of a broader reconsideration of the intellectual history of modern Syria between nationalism and liberalism, revolution and reaction. While recognizing the traces of nineteenth-century German idealist philosophy and Romantic nationalism in ʿAflaq's thought, this piece complicates the conventional understanding of his work by showing a striking resemblance with the left-personalism of Emmanuel Mounier and the Esprit group. This unexplored connection constitutes a “missing link” in the intellectual genealogy of Baʿthism. As such, this article contributes to a more expansive and complicated global history of personalism. At the same time, this reconsideration of Michel ʿAflaq suggests a more compelling account of the making of modern Syria, a history with roots more tangled than historians have hitherto imagined.