This article challenges the notion of French “influence.” It traces a network of like-minded reformers in France and the Balkans that came together in the early nineteenth century to further popular education. Examining interactions between actors in a cultural, scientific, and political center (France) and their allies on the periphery (in present-day Greece and Romania), the article reassesses these relationships, revealing the extent to which French individuals and organizations depended on such partnerships. Conceiving of joint Franco-Balkan reform agendas as programs of development, it offers a model and a vocabulary for the study of French soft power in post-Napoleonic Europe.

The Victorian historian E. A. Freeman (1823–92), following Thomas Arnold, promoted the innovative idea of the “unity of history,” according to which history was a linked, recurring cycle without the artificial boundary of periods. In recent research, however, it is little noticed that, along with this “unity” theory, Freeman also emphasized the ruptures and the divisions in history. It is even less noticed that Freeman devised a unique periodization, which abolished AD 476 as the date marking the fall of Rome. Thus the very idea of the “unity of history” seems to contradict the use of periods. The former stressed a historical continuum while the latter denoted historical ruptures. This article argues that Freeman's notion of “race” could, in most cases, solve the apparent tension between these two “divergent” ideas (unity versus periods). Nevertheless, it is also argued that in some exceptional cases Freeman identified other factors besides race (e.g. religion) as transforming the innate racial belonging and the predestined course of history.

Recent literature on the moral economy of nineteenth-century German historiography shares with older scholarship on Leopold von Ranke's methodological revolution a tendency to refer to “the” historical discipline in the third person singular. This would make sense as long as historians occupied a common professional space and/or shared a basic understanding of what it meant to be a historian. Yet, as this article demonstrates, in a world sharply divided over political and religious issues, historians found it difficult to agree on what it meant to be a good historian. Drawing on the case of Ranke's influential pupil Georg Waitz, whose death in 1886 occasioned a debate on the relative merits of the example that Waitz had embodied, this article argues that historians in early imperial Germany were considerably more divided over what they called “the virtues of the historian” than has been acknowledged to date. Their most important frame of reference was not a shared discipline but rather a variety of approaches corresponding to a diversity of models or examples (“scholarly personae,” in modern academic parlance), the defining features of which were often starkly contrasted. Although common ground beneath these disagreements was not entirely absent, the habit of late nineteenth-century German historians to position themselves between Waitz and Heinrich von Sybel, Ranke and Friedrich Christoph Dahlmann, or other pairs of proper names turned into models of virtue, suggests that these historians experienced their professional environment as characterized primarily by disagreement over the marks of a good historian.

This article explores the significant yet neglected topic of environmental awareness in nineteenth-century French political economy, and the French school of “industrialism” in particular. It focuses on the work of the one-time Saint-Simonian and political economist Michel Chevalier (1806–79) as an interesting example of an environmentally sensitive political economy of “industrialism.” The article reveals how Chevalier's political economy was informed by a sophisticated and environmentally conscious understanding of nature that came to mark scientific and engineering thinking in early nineteenth-century French academic circles. It shows how this understanding of nature was transmitted through publications and lectures of scientists and engineers within leading French academic institutions such as the Ecole polytechnique and the Ecole des mines. The article demonstrates that Chevalier's scientific and engineering education at these institutions shaped his understanding of nature and society as intimately interconnected and mutually impacting. The article then explores how his view of nature and society developed in a more decidedly Romantic direction during his time as a Saint-Simonian. The Romantic sensibility of this time was short-lived, but a keen environmental awareness dating back to Chevalier's student days remained a significant feature of his later reflections in political economy. It was this particular quality of Chevalier's political economy that set it apart both from the French liberal school of political economy, with its very low environmental awareness, and from the more fully ecological political economy of the kind advanced by his fellow Saint-Simonians Pierre Leroux and Jean Reynaud. Finally, the article shows what has not been widely appreciated: that an environmentally sensitive political economy, of which Chevalier's was a good example, was endorsed by a large body of nineteenth-century French scientific and administrative opinion.

The First World War is often alluded to as “the war to end all wars,” a phrase credited to H. G. Wells at the outbreak of the conflict. Rather than a self-proclaimed product of war enthusiasm in 1914, his declaration represented a consistent vision of warfare that Wells circulated in much of his work: that a major war would cause the collapse of the nation state and facilitate the rise of a utopian, technocratic world state. Although partly a cultural product of his own times, Wells mythologized himself as a misfit in all times: a sociopolitical critic antithetical to the madness of his own society. This study asserts that rather than an attempt at prophecy, it is this misfit image that informed his declaration in 1914 and societal responses to it.

This article situates francophone anticolonial thinkers—including Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Frantz Fanon—within the “humanism debate” in postwar French thought. Drawing on their poetry, prose, speeches, and interviews, this article reconstructs their critique of the humanist tradition that had identified the capacity for reason as the essence of “man.” It then traces their dialogue with approaches to this critique, including existentialism, phenomenology, and surrealism, that circulated in the metropole. The particular ways in which anticolonial thinkers built upon such approaches merit our attention because they force us to revise our understanding of the politics motivating the turn to so-called “antihumanism” in the 1960s. Drawing on recent studies that have highlighted proposals for federalist alternatives to empire entertained prior to national independence, this article suggests that the “federalist imagination” helped to inspire the distinctive mode of criticism developed by certain anticolonial thinkers and taken up by later scholars.

Castigated as theoretically naive by Perry Anderson, or praised as culturally sensitive by later writers, the political thought of the “first New Left” has often been understood in relation to F. R. Leavis's cultural criticism. This article seeks to reframe the writings of E. P. Thompson, Stuart Hall, Charles Taylor and Alasdair Macintyre from this period as interventions in a fundamentally sociological debate about the nature of capitalism in the managed economy of postwar Britain.

When European clocks first arrived in seventeenth-century Japan they generated a commotion. The highly complex but also very precise instruments had been brought to Nagasaki by the Dutch East India Company that monopolized the sparse and highly regulated trade between Japan and Europe for more than two centuries. As an expression of the technological sophistication achieved in early modern Europe, mechanical clocks were hi-tech products of their time. They operated with a spring to store the energy, and their making required highly developed skills in casting and metalwork. The new technology made it possible to emancipate the measurement of time from sunshine and to achieve an evenness of temporal rhythms, not only during the day, but also at night.

Enlightenment scholars have had some difficulty in getting the German Enlightenment in focus. If one's conception of the Enlightenment has been shaped by reading Peter Gay and Robert Darnton, then the German Enlightenment fails to fit their model. France offers us the picture of an intelligentsia, largely located in the capital, maintaining a degree of independence with some help from patrons, and in many cases opposed to the governing regime. Whether, like Gay, one focuses on the high-profile frequenters of the Paris salons, or, like Darnton, on half-starved hack writers, one has something approaching the modern conception of the intellectual, and hence a flattering genealogy for present-day intellectuals. It is easy to forget that philosophes could also be professional administrators, like the economist Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, and that Enlightened thinking was also diffused throughout the provinces by academies and scholarly networks.

In the 1970s, when I began to take interest in Burke, not only was there was no collected Correspondence, but there was not even any modern edition of his Works. I successively purchased secondhand copies of the six-volume Bohn edition, and then (in the flush of a modest pay rise) of the Boston Little, Brown edition. The interpretive work was not extensive, and heavily influenced by two kinds of presentist preoccupation—both distinctively anglophone. One was the preoccupation with Burke's “contribution” to elements of the English Constitution—party government, the nature of representation, financial management—and his success in characterizing its customary, gradualist, pragmatic political culture, subsequently identified as “conservatism.” The other—prominent in American readings—comprised energetic attempts to recruit Burke into Cold War polemics: the clash between Burke and the French Revolutionaries (and their British supporters) presaging the clash between Marxism–Leninism and Western, free-market democracy. For scholars of a Straussian persuasion this involved reading into Burke a commitment to neo-Thomist natural law. These parameters spun an intellectually vertiginous confusion of issues. Quite how Burke's opposition to Paine was supposed to cohere with their shared defence of the America he (Paine) helped to create raised a number of historical issues. But instead of resolving these it was the implications of merely supposing them to be coherent that constituted the interpretive field. Controversies focused on whether Burke's political identity was conservative or liberal—anachronistic lexical markers, further complicated by their different connotations on either side of the Atlantic—and on how to characterize the “philosophical core” of his thinking. These too were contested in often disarmingly proleptic categories: liberal, utilitarian, collectivist. Looking back, this ideological fog was only made possible by the absence of any reasonably clear sense of eighteenth-century political-theoretical discourse within the categories and preoccupations of which to situate the man.

Ever since the resurgence of the sub-discipline in the 1960s, the foremost achievements of the history of political thought have dealt with the early modern period. The classics of the genre—Laslett's edition of Locke, Pocock's Machiavellian Moment, Skinner's Foundations—have all dealt with that period, and it is hard to think of any works on the nineteenth century that have quite the same stature. Of all the canonical political thinkers, John Stuart Mill is perhaps the one who has proved resistant to the contextualist method. There is a vast literature on Mill, and many historians have written penetratingly about him—Stefan Collini, William Thomas, Donald Winch—but there has hitherto been no historically grounded study of his thought to rival, say, John Dunn on Locke or Skinner on Hobbes, or even a host of learned monographs. Before Varouxakis's book, no study of Mill had been published in Cambridge University Press's flagship series in intellectual history, Ideas in Context. But all that has changed. In these two works, published more or less concurrently, we have two triumphs for contextualism. They demonstrate in impressive detail just why it matters in reading Mill to get the history right.

In a recent collection of essays assessing the thought of William James in transatlantic perspective, Berkeley historian emeritus David Hollinger opened his contribution by recounting two memorable exchanges:

The rise of the social sciences in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America has been an especially fruitful topic for intellectual historians over the past four decades. An early, prominent explanation of the new levels of institutional power and intellectual authority achieved by the social sciences stressed the sense of interdependence created by the expansion of the market and the rise of new communications technologies. Others have emphasized intellectual struggles for authority among religious, popular, and scientific approaches to knowledge. Still others have laid the credit, or blame, for the ascension of the social sciences on liberal elites’ consolidation of their power after the collapse of monarchical authority and the successful repression of Marxist challenges. Two celebrated accounts have argued that ideological conditions, whether pervasive beliefs in American exceptionalism or visions of “scientific democracy,” shaped the development of the social sciences and their claims to intellectual authority. In the case of specific disciplines, like sociology and political science, the most supple histories have shown how broad changes in the structure of American capitalism created the conditions of possibility for new forms of knowledge about the social world, while more subtle intellectual shifts created openings for particular practices.