This essay reconstructs the career of the 18th-cetnury Neapolitan publicist Giuseppe Maria Galanti, who championed the genre of anthropological geography in the Kingdom of Naples. Although little attention has been paid to Galanti by the English-language historiography, the person and work of the Neapolitan publicist has loomed large in Italian studies on the Enlightenment. In landmark Italian studies, Galanti has been hailed as a clear-sighted reformer committed to the improvement of socioeconomic conditions within the Kingdom. Likewise, the geographical literature he wrote has been read not as such but rather in light of its program of socioeconomic reform. However important that same program was, undue emphasis upon it has conflated his empirical approach to political geography with a connotation of realism that fundamentally has obscured the place of Galanti's project in the history of anthropology and, in particular, the emergence of European ethnography. By reconstructing the career of Galanti, it is my hope to provide a privileged window on what motivated a precocious ethnographer of Europe to undertake the unusual and arduous project of visiting and describing the provinces of his kingdom, on why he chose to conceptualize the terrain of the Kingdom as an object of philosophical study, and on how he understood his vocation in relation to the alternatives available to him as a man of Enlightenment. While bearing in mind the political aims of Galanti's work, this essay will also return it to the context in which it was first conceived and piloted—namely the ethos, epistemology, and professional culture of the human sciences of the Enlightenment city of Naples, which, it can be said, smacked of a Rousseauian contempt for the “civilization” of the capital, for its learned professions, and for the cosmopolitan theories of Europe's most urbane philosophes.

This article seeks to revise the conventional portrait of the historian E. A. Freeman (1823–92) as an arch-racist and confident proponent of Aryan superiority. Focusing on the relatively obscure Comparative Politics (1873), it is argued that, while attitudes towards race were hardening in the later nineteenth century, Freeman combined the insights of the practitioners of the Comparative Method and the Liberal Anglican philosophy of Thomas Arnold to define the Aryan race as a community of culture rather than of blood. Explicitly rejecting biological interpretations of race, Freeman and the practitioners of the Comparative Method used the Aryan concept to denote a community of languages, myths, laws and political institutions and, in recognizing the instability of culture, articulated an account of progress that was cyclical rather than unilinear. It will be demonstrated that Freeman's Aryan universalism issued in anxieties concerning the future stability of the West and a fear that recapitulation might be engendered by contemporary political expansionism and contact with the rival civilization of the despotic East.

Recent scholarly comment on the relation between Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James offers an either–or choice between conflating the two thinkers in a proto-postmodern, antifoundationalist cast or dividing them into mutually exclusive categories of idealist believer and relativist skeptic. Contending that neither of these positions captures the pragmatist adumbrations in Emerson or the transcendentalist retentions in James, this essay turns to James's annotations of Emerson's writings as a singularly revealing yet largely neglected source of information about the exact nature of the Emerson–James connection. This evidence points to a pluralistic and distinctly literary formulation of intuitive insight as the key for opening up the Emerson–James relation and for framing it with a precision hitherto missing in discussions of these thinkers. The balance of the essay presents an analytic overview of the various aspects and implications of Emerson's and James's ideas of intuition. Combining doubt and belief, skepticism and faith, realism and idealism, a particular formulation of intuition is the answer that Emerson and James both offer to the problem of modernity—the problem of locating a source of value that is both of the self and beyond the self.

This essay cross-examines both the correlation and the disjunction between art philosophy and political reason in the thinking of the French Jewish art philosopher, Kant specialist and socialist politician Victor Basch (1863–1944). Two interwoven lines of questioning will be in play. One considers the extent to which Basch's theory of beauty, which was primarily grounded in a psychological theory of Einfühlung, was a corollary to his political ideas and practices. The other line of inquiry raises questions about how Basch's political position, namely his anti-facist defending of republican values, became influenced by his work on aesthetics. By answering both questions, this article challenges the traditional historiography of interwar aesthetics. The esaay shows how conceptual debates of aesthetics were not just sterile theoretical products, but to a large extent offered an apparatus to diagnose and orientate a rapidly changing world. Therefore this essay develops a reflection about the gaze needed to take in the complex historical situations from which aesthetic reflections grew, and which in turn they addressed.

This article reconstructs J. G. A. Pocock's debt to Hannah Arendt's political philosophy in The Machiavellian Moment and argues that her presentation of classical politics in The Human Condition and her account of the secular nature of American foundation in On Revolution were important sources for Pocock's analysis of American liberal insecurity. However, a contextualization of The Machiavellian Moment within Pocock's immediate intellectual and professional milieu indicates that he placed himself in critical relation to Arendt's civic republican theory and located her philosophy of history in the same spectrum as the American political tradition he sought to historicize. While they did share a similar perspective on the ethical and political value of locating oneself within a long historical durée, their different conceptions of the problem of continuity for secular political structures provides a crucial context for their disparate responses to the discourse of political crisis in the United States in the late 1960s and the 1970s.

Was there an Enlightenment in Ireland? Was there even a distinctively Irish Enlightenment? Few scholars have bothered even to pose this question. Historians of Ireland during the era of Protestant Ascendancy have tended to be all-rounders rather than specialists; their traditional preoccupations are constitutional clashes between London and Dublin, religious conflict, agrarian unrest and popular politicization. With few exceptions there has been no tradition of intellectual history, and little interest in the methodological debates associated with the rise of the “Cambridge school”. Most advances in our understanding of Irish philosophical writing have consequently originated outside Ireland's history departments. One by-product of recent work on the Scottish Enlightenment has been the rediscovery of the “Molesworth Circle” by two scholars engaged in a painstaking reconstruction of Francis Hutcheson's early career in Dublin. At the other end of the century, meanwhile, some of the most exciting and ambitious attempts to conceptualize the republicanism of the United Irishmen have come from a leading historian of revolutionary France, James Livesey. His previous research on the “commercial republicanism” of Montesquieu, Adam Ferguson and Brissot has suggested a new framework for understanding Irish radicals such as Wolfe Tone, Thomas Addis Emmet and, in particular, Arthur O'Connor.

Dan Edelstein is a prolific author. In less than two years he has produced not one but two books. His first, The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution, was published by The University of Chicago Press in October 2009. Its Irish twin, The Enlightenment: A Genealogy, appeared with the same press in the fall of 2010. Each of these books deals with a much-studied subject—respectively the Terror and the Enlightenment—the kind of subject, in other words, about which even the most recent literature alone can fill entire libraries. Yet in both cases, Edelstein manages to make a contribution of startling originality and importance. It is clear that this literary scholar—Edelstein is a professor of French and Italian at Stanford University—is one of the most important new voices in the field of eighteenth-century French intellectual history. In this review, I will start by discussing both of his books separately. I will then conclude with some reflections on what Edelstein's work contributes to our understanding of eighteenth-century intellectual history when read as a whole.

Sometime in the 1760s, a Constantinople-born, French-educated Muslim arrived at the port of Balassor in north-east India. Known variously as Mustapha or Monsieur Raymond, he had, he later wrote, “with a mediocre dictionary and a bad grammar”, and by conversing with the ship's captain en route from Bombay, “learned enough of English . . . as I might delight in Bolingbroke's Philosophical works”. This student of contemporary intellectual history soon put his knowledge to work, securing a position translating for Robert Clive, the conquering hero of the English East India Company's new imperial administration in India. Subsequently falling from favour, Mustapha crossed over to seek employment with the English company's French rivals, earning himself a spell in prison as a spy. He also travelled to Mecca, where he gained the honorific “Haji” but lost his fortune, his cabinet of curiosities and his collection of books and manuscripts. He then became the keeper of a zenana (to the Europeans, a harem or seraglio), and he entered the world of publishing. In 1789, in Calcutta, Mustapha had printed for himself a pamphlet-length diatribe on the iniquitous administration of the law in British Bengal entitled Some Idea of the Civil and Criminal Courts of Justice at Moorshoodabad. In the same year he was also involved, as the pseudonymous editor “Nota Manus”, in the publication of a three-volume English translation of a Persian work of Indian history—Ghulam Hussain Khan Tabatabai's Seir Mutaqherin, or View of Modern Times (written in 1781–2)—which dealt with the British conquest and administration of Bengal, and offered a stern critique of the new rulers who seemed to have “an aversion to the Society of Indians, and a disdain against conversing with them”. Finally, Mustapha (who called himself a “Semi-Englishman” who had the interests of his “adopted countrymen” at heart) claimed to have published in London a work of futurology entitled State of Europe in 1800. In his encounters with Europeans, his travels within and beyond India (although he never made it to England as he had planned), and his involvement in the production of historical and geographical knowledge, Mustapha was deeply interested in that which shaped his own fortunes: the relationships of knowledge and power between Europe and other parts of the world.

The classics appear conspicuously in the pamphlet wars of the American Revolution, though in the opinion of Bernard Bailyn (written many years ago), their presence is “window-dressing” and their influence “superficial.” They are “everywhere illustrative, not determinative, of thought” (my italics). Up the scale in influence comes Enlightenment rationalism, also “superficial” but only “at times”—that removes the foreigners, ancient and modern. Then, further up the scale are English common-law writers, “powerfully influential” though still insufficiently “determinative”; above them, a “major source,” New England Puritan thought and culture; and finally, at the top, seventeenth-century British “heroes of liberty” and the “early eighteenth-century transmitters of this tradition,” e.g. Commonwealth men, Bishop Hoadly. Who would have thought that the bishop of Winchester weighed in the balance more heavily than Plato and Aristotle? Only once in passing does Bailyn even mention Machiavelli, to whom J. G. A. Pocock, Quentin Skinner, and Harvey C. Mansfield would grant large prominence in the development of Revolutionary thought.

This deeply researched and beautifully crafted study takes as its subject a generation of women who came to maturity in America's Gilded Age. They were scientists and social workers, physicians and educators, and, perhaps most notably, Progressive reformers engaged in the pursuit of social justice. Claiming the newly available opportunities for higher education and professional employment, these women successfully pursued lives in uncharted territory. Barbara Sicherman introduces us to a less visible but equally salient factor in their journey to public identities marked by achievement and acclaim—their sustained and sustaining engagement with reading.

Mid-twentieth century American intellectual history is in the midst of a boom; a younger generation of historians, now half a century distant from the era, and less inclined than their immediate forerunners to be committed to a vision of the 1960s as a critical turning point in modern culture, is reshaping what has been an underdeveloped field. Recent studies of thinkers such as C. Wright Mills, Ayn Rand, Lionel Trilling, and Whitaker Chambers, and subjects such as postcapitalist social thought and pollsters in mass society, to name a few, have regenerated interest in an arena that had once been dominated by studies of the New York Intellectuals and Richard Pells's useful summaries and evaluations of prominent intellectuals of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. The newer intellectual history of this period appears to be premised on several ideas: that the so-called “liberal consensus” of the era was an ideological product of liberalism itself, rather than an adequate description of the contours of thought; that thinking in terms of clear and sharp distinctions between right and left doesn't help us understand the ways in which ideas, sensibilities, and intellectual commitments were configured at mid-century; that there is a great deal more continuity in social, political, and cultural thought than an image of the 1960s as cultural watershed would allow; and that the mid-century decades are, in the most profound sense, the first years of our own time, with all the characteristic epistemic, moral, and critical problems that have characterized thought and culture in the world in which contemporary Americans live. What the Progressive Era was for mid-century historians and intellectuals such as Richard Hofstadter and Henry May, the mid-century, and particularly the early Cold War era of the late 1940s and 1950s, is, for the historian of today, the root of the destabilizing conundrums of modernity, particularly the puzzle of the role of critical intellect in a mass-mediated environment of socialized knowledge, feeling, and being.

The emergence of the German Jewish philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) as the object of scholarly attention has been both surprising and rapid. In the decades since his early death while in exile in the United States, Cassirer never fell into complete oblivion. His works remained known to specialists in German intellectual history; his participation in a famous 1929 debate with Martin Heidegger in Davos, Switzerland, one of the most iconic moments in modern Continental thought, made his name familiar to most students of modern philosophy. Yet Cassirer lacked the widespread recognition given to contemporaries such as Heidegger or Walter Benjamin, and his work never became the center of historical or philosophical study. This neglect stemmed, in part, from dismissal by his peers; as Edward Skidelsky explains in his new study, Rudolf Carnap found him “rather pastoral,” Isaiah Berlin dismissed him as “serenely innocent,” and Theodor Adorno thought he was “totally gaga” (125). The last few years, however, have seen the rise of a remarkable new interest in Cassirer in both Germany and the English-speaking world. Among this recent literature, Edward Skidelsky's and Peter Gordon's works lead the small “Cassirer renaissance” and offer the best English-language introduction to his thought. Both Gordon and Skidelsky ambitiously seek to relocate Cassirer at the forefront of modern German and European thought. Gordon goes as far as to call him “one of the greatest philosophers and intellectual historians to emerge from the cultural ferment of modern Germany” and one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century (11). In making such bold statements, Gordon and Skidelsky clearly set their sights beyond the person himself; they aspire to highlight a central strand of thought that enjoyed a powerful presence in early twentieth-century Germany but fell into neglect in the postwar era. In doing so, they seek to reevaluate the nature and legacy of Weimar thought, its complex relationship with the period's unstable politics, and its relevance today.

Academics are falsely rumored to have a low regard for religion. Although Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, authors of The God Delusion and God Is Not Great, respectively, made atheism a best-selling subject in the United States, it is not coincidental that Hitchens and Dawkins are English. They were educated in a country where a strident antipathy toward religion is not unpatriotic. American atheists with as much brass are rare. Kicking religion around cannot be an American sport because, from colonial to contemporary times, religion has been a central component of American culture. To be sure, a lot of scholarly criticism has been directed at right-wing Christian and Islamic movements. But scholars whose personal views on faith incline them to echo Hitchens's mordant formula that “religion poisons everything” should probably look for a country other than the United States to study. The recent books of historians and sociologists of American religion have taken a tone toward the subject that has ranged from gentle to friendly.

The term “intellectual” is a French coinage that dates to the years preceding the Dreyfus affair. Nevertheless, the concept has a distinguished pedigree that can be traced back to Voltaire's heroic interventions under the ancien régime—most notably, the Calas affair—as well as Victor Hugo's vehement protests against Louis Bonaparte's petty caesarism. The first intellectuals were, as a rule, littérateurs. They were interlopers who relied on the renown they had accrued in their field of expertise to hazard moral pronouncements about actualités or current events. By virtue of their literary or scientific prestige—or, to use a contemporary locution, their “cultural capital”—they hoped to shame the political authorities into rectifying a gross miscarriage of justice. As Jean-Paul Sartre once put it, intellectuals are “those who involve themselves in matters that are none of their business.”