This article contributes to the historiography of romantic marriage in the eighteenth century by analyzing discourses on marital love and happiness in the moral weeklies of the German writers Georg Friedrich Meier and Samuel Gotthold Lange. Meier and Lange raise overarching questions about why so many marriages are unhappy and argue that long-term marital contentment requires spouses to discover and confirm each other's qualities and abilities on a daily basis. Each must reflect and affirm the other while also practicing a kind of de-escalation in conflict situations, for instance by withdrawing and calming oneself before facing problems anew. I argue that this apparently modern therapeutic approach to marital relationships was part of a civic morality in the making, a morality that pointed forward to the emergence of a modern individual self while also being rooted in a long tradition of spiritual exercises and therapeutic regimens.

Among the most controversial reforms investigated by Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont was the idea of using inheritance as an instrument to diffuse property ownership. This article offers the first comparative account of the development of this concept across each of their major works. By situating their interventions within wider inheritance law debates, it is demonstrated how their evolving visions of democracy forced them to innovatively combine two normative arguments: (i) diffusing property ownership via inheritance was a precondition for placing democracy upon stable political foundations, and (ii) this could counter the rise of pauperism and the extreme wealth inequality of nineteenth-century industrial society. Far from being an anachronistic republican notion, such reforms were long considered too radical to be implemented in England and Ireland.

This article scrutinizes Rawson W. Rawson over seven years, from 1837 to 1844, during which he served as founding editor of the Journal of the Statistical Society of London and then as civil secretary to successive Canadian governors-general. Rawson studied poverty in London, amplified criticisms of Malthusian Poor Law disciplines in Scotland, and applied that logic to Indigenous poverty on the colonial frontier. The statisticians sought generic definitions of property and agency that sometimes challenged a more binary logic of civilization. But in Canada, Rawson's very critique of dispossession became an instrument of that dispossession.

Although the establishment of history as a discipline has been examined extensively for European, North American, and, partly, Asian contexts, the Ottoman case still constitutes a neglected issue in the study of the global history of historiography and, in broader terms, of modern intellectual history. The present article focuses on the late Ottoman intellectual world and explores the making of the historical discipline in the Ottoman Empire. It argues that this transformation was the consequence of a number of interrelated factors, such as the turbulent developments in late Ottoman politics, Ottoman(ist) efforts to forge a “national” historical master narrative after the 1908 Constitutional Revolution, and Ottoman historians’ engagement with European historical thought and writing. Besides examining these factors and the ways in which they interacted, the article deals in detail with the works of late Ottoman historians to probe the Ottoman case of the professionalization of history.

The article examines T. E. Hulme's reading of Georges Sorel as a politically transversal thinker of moral renewal. It argues that, by distancing Sorel from syndicalism and by reading him as a thinker of moral absolutes, this interpretation constituted an act of resignification. This is shown by contrasting Hulme's reading with the dominant patterns of the British reception of Sorel. What emerges is the striking, and self-aware, originality of Hulme's positions. This originality, we argue, was made possible by the European scope of Hulme's intellectual horizon, which gave him the resources to read Sorel differently. Finally, we ask why Hulme read Sorel in this way. We suggest that Hulme was working through a contradiction between his relativistic philosophical education and an increasing need for political commitment. Sorel's ethics of commitment grounded in myth were a way to move from Bergsonian openness to a metaphysics capable of conceptualizing moral and political absolutes.

This article argues for the importance of worker education for understanding the intellectual history of Marxism. It examines the work of the early Western Marxist Karl Korsch, who was deeply engaged in that project, showing that his most famous text, 1923's Marxism and Philosophy, can be read as a reflection on its problems and goals, especially the demand that the theory taught to the workers should “express” their life experience and struggle. The article ends with a discussion of the way in which the project of worker education can help us think through the geographical specificities of Marxism. In adjusting the pedagogical project to “express” new populations, especially in countries without a large industrial working class, intellectuals and party leaders entertained broad revisions to Marxist theory.

The second Māori student to enrol at the University of Oxford, Makereti studied anthropology in the intellectual epicentre of the British Empire from 1927 to 1930, participating in transnational academic networks by writing about her own people. Her work was published posthumously as The Old-Time Maori, now acclaimed as an unprecedented work of Māori auto-ethnography. Exploring a forgotten seam of revisionist anthropology, this article argues that reappraisals of Makereti have failed to capture the magnitude of her project of Indigenous resistance writing. Through close reading of Makereti's personal papers and published work, this article uncovers the targeted revisionism of Makereti's scholarship—in particular identifying the unnamed targets of her critique—and how she used the epistemic tools of imperial and salvage anthropology to challenge colonial discourses about Māori. Makereti's engagement with Oxford illuminates Indigenous adaptation of a discipline and institutions often portrayed as sites of incorrigibly imperialist ideology.

This article offers a reassessment of Arab Socialist Baʿth Party founder Michel ʿAflaq's thought in the context of decolonization and global intellectual history. Engaging with ʿAflaq's thinking in terms of its metaphysical foundations and its relationship to universality, this work examines four key concepts in his oeuvre: resurrection (baʿth), faith (īmān), spirit (rūḥ), and unity (waḥda). In essence, ʿAflaq's metaphysics links the Arab nation with the past while his universalist aspirations open the way forward for the future. While numerous scholars in recent years have explicated the universal ambitions of anticolonial nationalists, the place of Arab nationalists and their relationship to decolonization are in need of greater scholarly attention. In turn, I argue that ʿAflaq's ambition of national resurrection ought to be understood as such a quest to realize the universal.

Of course it's brilliant. The Free World represents the hugely ambitious culmination of the efforts of a scholar of exceptional talent to explicate mid-century American culture, and to put it within a broad political and social context. With its immense attention to detail, The Free World frequently offers such fresh readings of a wide variety of topics that perhaps only subspecialists can profess to find familiar the evidence and interpretations that Louis Menand provides. It is emblazoned with bold personal opinions that keep the reader interested. At the Center is a very different book. It is a collective effort, and the authors seem to seek to avoid the kind of personalized style that Menand displays. But the effort that Casey Nelson Blake, Daniel H. Borus, and Howard Brick make to tie the disparate threads together distinguish At the Center from Menand's volume, and therefore offer an invaluable contrast. These books are aimed at different categories of reader, provide divergent temporal and geographic frames, and rarely overlap in attentiveness to the same material. Such variations can make for vigorous scholarly arguments about how to pack thought and culture into American historiography.

What does it mean “to put an idea in context”? Does it mean explaining the idea as the effect of a certain set of causes? Or articulating the range of responses to an issue that are recognizably conventional in a particular place and time so that the force of any given response can be assessed? Something else? Intellectual historians answer this question about context in a variety of ways, but I think all would recognize that this is a particularly important question for intellectual history as a field of inquiry. The book under review here may seem to be beyond the purview of Modern Intellectual History. After all, Robert Brandom's A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel's Phenomenology is a book written by a philosopher for philosophers. Perhaps it could be called history of philosophy (though even that is debatable), but it is certainly not intellectual history. Nevertheless, I think this is a book that intellectual historians should be dealing with. Why? Because, among other things, the book offers a compelling and illuminating answer to the question of what it is to put an idea in context. This is not because the book itself does contextual work. Brandom ignores almost everything that intellectual historians would regard as contextual for Hegel. Kant is a figure in the book, yet the broader tableau of early nineteenth-century German philosophy, politics, and culture is almost completely absent. But the book does offer a theory of concepts. In doing so, A Spirit of Trust also gives us an account of context. Here, I'll be arguing that this account of context is important for intellectual historians and helps us to understand more clearly debates that we have been having recently about how we do our work. In particular, I think Brandom helps us see that there is no necessary tension between putting ideas in historical contexts, on the one hand, and developing them critically, on the other. And this helps us overcome a binary between context and critique reinforced by a recent debate between Peter Gordon and Ian Hunter.