In Enlightenment-era France, theologians, philosophers, and politicians contested the nature and prerogatives of human personhood with particular vehemence. Yet historians have tended to reduce these struggles to a narrative of ascendant individualism. This essay seeks to recover non-individualist formulations of the self in eighteenth-century France, and, in doing so, to offer a more nuanced account of subjectivity during the period. Out of debates over Christian mysticism, radical philosophy, and republican politics emerged two distinct and conflicting modes of formulating the self 's relationship to its ideas and actions. On one side, mainstream philosophes joined Descartes, Locke, and orthodox Catholic theologians in elaborating the individual's capacity to accumulate existential goods in terms of a discourse of self-ownership. Opposition to this view, in contrast, challenged such claims by employing a discourse of dispossession, which stressed the human person's resignation to, and ultimate identification with, a totalizing force outside the self. The essay traces a specific genealogy of this discourse in the writings of Fénelon, Rousseau, and the Illuminist theologian Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, in the context of intellectual polemics ranging from the role of self-love in Christian devotion to the virtues of self-sacrifice in a republican polity. If the Fénelonian doctrine of spiritual abandon called on believers to surrender their particular desires in the love of God, Rousseau likewise demanded that citizens place their property and their persons under the direction of the general will. Saint-Martin, for his part, applied Rousseau's politics of alienation to his vision of a theocratic republic in the wake of the French Revolution, thereby posing the mystic ideal of dispossession as a means of transforming the self and its world along communal, rather than individualist, lines.

While popular nationalism flourished in the United States from the time of the Revolution onward, reflective treatments of what it meant to be, specifically, a “nation” were rarely produced until the Civil War era. Historians have generally treated northern Civil War theorists of the nation as importers of European ideas of organic nationhood to serve conservative and statist purposes. The most notable mid-century theorists—Francis Lieber, Elisha Mulford, Orestes Brownson, John William Draper, Frederick Douglass, and Charles Sumner—were a more diverse set, however. They brought to the subject different theoretical and political assumptions and produced different models of the American nation, and they accommodated their borrowed conceptions to native materials. If their initial aim was to strengthen the authority and unity of the wartime nation, they soon struggled with the multiracial nation that was emerging from the war. The unity they posited in the nation contended with invidious racial, ethnic, and religious distinctions. In the end, Lieber, Brownson, Mulford, and Draper found diversity difficult or impossible to reconcile with their visions of national unity. Only Sumner and Douglass managed to construct models of the nation that were both heterogeneous and united: their postwar views serve as counterpoint to the tortured efforts of the other writers. In the language of current theory, these writers divided over whether the United States was a civic or an ethnic nation, although not all their exclusions and inequalities emanated from an ethnic model of the nation, nor all their inclusions and liberties from a civic one.

Acknowledgments are now a constitutive and almost compulsory part of academic productions. This essay, based on some 1,000 books in the humanities and social sciences, traces the sociogenesis of this academic genre. Focusing on the paratextual nature of acknowledgments, it examines the following questions: What do the lists of names in them mean? What effects are expected from these carefully written, or at least calculated, pieces? Acknowledgments reveal authorial strategies, the staging of a public persona, the pursuit or display of symbolic capital in a highly competitive world. But they can disclose more than that. They may also show a private person, depict an imagined Eden, recall a generosity. Acknowledgments involve a complex discourse. What they tell us is that the intellectual field is also a community, that in the “battleground” of learning there is a place for the gift, indeed that the giving of gifts still remains one of the means—perhaps even the principal one—of the advancement of learning.

In recent decades, questions surrounding the concept of the “self,” whether by that name or such cognate terms as “subjectivity” or “identity,” have come to occupy a prominent place in historical scholarship, literary and gender studies, social theory and philosophy. Most recently, Jerrold Seigel's The Idea of the Self has provided not only a vast new historical map of this conceptual terrain but a challenging new way of exploring it. My purpose here is to examine both, and the thematic and methodological questions they raise for this major contemporary field of inquiry.

Steven Conn, History's Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004)

Maureen Konkle, Writing Indian Nations: Native Intellectuals and the Politics of Historiography, 1827–1863 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004)

New histories of indigenous and colonized peoples have revitalized some ancient questions. When and where does a properly historical discourse begin and why? The profession has traditionally given two different answers to the “when” and “where” queries. One venerable account holds that history proper begins with the Greeks and takes Herodotus (or Thucydides, depending on the political climate) for its founding patriarch. The second answer holds that historical consciousness only begins with modernity, and that real historical discourse—including the beginnings of professional, disciplined historiography—starts in Europe.

Marc Fumaroli, Chateaubriand: Poésie et terreur (Paris: Fallois, 2003)

Has the time come to revive François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848), author of Atala and René, the novels that defined romanticism in France and, above all, of the immense Mémoires d'outre-tombe (“Memoirs from beyond the grave”), perhaps the most ambitious of all French autobiographical projects? What does an eighteenth-century provincial nobleman's son, author of fanciful tales of encounters with North American “noble savages,” apologist for medieval Christianity, and unsuccessful proponent of a Bourbon restoration after 1815, have to say to twenty-first-century readers? The first important study of Chateaubriand's career, the nineteenth-century literary critic Sainte-Beuve's Chateaubriand et son groupe littéraire sous l'Empire, written in 1849, firmly assigned the great romantic author to an earlier phase of French letters. Commenting on the just-published posthumous Mémoires, Sainte-Beuve admitted that the work revealed Chateaubriand's “immense talent as a writer,” but damned the work by saying that “he reveals himself in all his egotistical nakedness.” The distinguished French literary scholar Marc Fumaroli has now set out to reverse these verdicts on the man and the Mémoires.

John Skrentny, The Minority Rights Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002)

Richard King, Race, Culture and the Intellectuals, 1940–1970 (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Press, 2004)

Since June 1964, all three branches of the federal government have supported the goal of racial justice in the United States. John Skrentny, in The Minority Rights Revolution, explains how that goal and related ones have been implemented over the last sixty years. He argues that key policy developments since that time were driven less by mass movements and much more by elite “meaning entrepreneurs.” Well before the 1964 Civil Rights Act was made law, in the immediate post-World War II years, a bevy of transatlantic intellectuals responded to Nazi race policy by seeking a universalist vision that would unite humanity. Richard King, in Race, Culture and the Intellectuals, explores how intellectuals pursued that anti-racist universalist vision and then how African and African-American intellectuals in the 1960s, in particular, rejected universalism and began, instead, to pursue racial justice through cultural particularism. King's traditional intellectual history, when combined with Skrentny's sociological analysis of how elites managed ideas to pursue specific policies, reveals how American society, in pursuit of racial justice, moved from the simple stated ideals of the 1964 Civil Rights Act—equal opportunity and access—to the complexities of affirmative action and an embrace of “diversity” in American life.