This article restores the context of political action to Burke's thinking about politics. It begins with the specific case of his interventions in the parliamentary debate over the Quebec Bill in 1774, and proceeds from this focal point to establish the centrality of the theme of conquest to his political motivation and understanding in general. Burke's preoccupation with conquest drove him to examine eighteenth-century British politics within a set of comparative historical frameworks. These frameworks encompassed the trajectories of both modern European and imperial politics and ancient historical development. The objective of Burke's politics of conquest was to overcome the destructive influence of the spirit of conquest. That objective involved deciding upon and justifying courses of action with reference to these comparative historical frameworks of understanding. Careful investigation shows that while Burke's approach to this task was powerfully influenced by Montesquieu, his arguments invariably entailed serious criticism of Montesquieu's conclusions. Properly understood, these criticisms show that Burke himself did not endorse the political principles that were later taken to constitute “Burkian conservatism”. The article draws the conclusion that a thorough grasp of the politics of conquest in Burke's thinking will force us to reposition him in the history of political theory.

This article seeks to establish a new perspective for understanding Catholic intellectual history in the German territories during the mid-nineteenth century. By analyzing scholars' efforts to revamp “Catholic Wissenschaft” in the context of a broader revival movement, it reveals how both “liberals” and “ultramontanes” engaged in a form of devotional activism which made Catholicism the measure of social action and scholarly practice alike. Important differences notwithstanding, scholars of all stripes saw their task as transforming Catholicism into a relevant tool for meeting the needs of the age. Rooting their efforts in the broader Catholic revival movement in this way, the article proposes “Catholic modernity” as a salient category for interpreting the significance of their work, and for better integrating it into the broader framework of German history.

Hannah Arendt's well-known examinations of the problem of evil are not contradictory and they are central to her corpus. Evil can be banal in some cases (Adolf Eichmann) and radical (the phenomenon of totalitarianism) in others. But behind all expressions of evil, in Arendt's formulations, is the imperative that it be confronted by thinking subjects and thoroughly historicized. This led her away from a view of evil as radical to one of evil as banal. Arendt's ruminations on evil are illuminated, in part, by concerns that she shared with her fellow New York intellectuals about the withering effects of mass culture upon individual volition and understanding. In confronting the challenges of evil, Arendt functioned as a “moral historian,” suggesting profitable ways that historians might look at history from a moral perspective. Indeed, her work may be viewed as anticipating a “moral turn” currently afoot in the historical profession.

“‘Histoire du livre’”, remarked Robert Darnton in a much celebrated essay from 1982, “‘Geschichte des Buchwesens’…‘history of books’ or ‘of the book’ in English-speaking countries—its name varies from place to place, but everywhere it is being recognized as an important new discipline”. In the twenty-five years since Darnton's original observation book history has if anything continued to flourish. With a number of multi-volume national histories of the book now at various stages of completion, an international infrastructure of research centres, teaching programmes and publishers’ lists, quite clearly something has been happening.

Having accepted the invitation to revisit my essay of 1982, “What Is the History of Books?”, I find that I can do it only in the first person singular and therefore must ask to be excused for indulging in some autobiographical detail. I would also like to make a disclaimer: in proposing a model for studying the history of books twenty-four years ago, I did not mean to tell book historians how they ought to do their jobs. I hoped that the model might be useful in a heuristic way and never thought of it as comparable to the models favored by economists, the kind in which you insert data, work it over, and arrive at a bottom line. (I do not believe that bottom lines exist in history.) It seemed to me in 1982 that the history of books was suffering from fissiparousness: experts were pursuing such specialized studies that they were losing contact with one another. The esoteric elements of book history needed to be integrated into an overview that would show how the parts could connect to form a whole—or what I characterized as a communications circuit. The tendency toward fragmentation and specialization still exists.

The Order of Books was published in France in 1992 and translated into English in 1994. I have to confess that I had not reread it since, and perhaps I would have never read it again had I not been invited to do so for this exercise. The central aim of that book was to try to understand something of how in the period between the fourteenth and the eighteenth century the written word was classified, organized, and perceived by all the actors involved within the trajectory of the text, from authors to publishers and printers, from the printing shop to the library. I will begin by recounting some of the factors in my own intellectual life that I believe led up to that book, and go on to reflect on the arguments that I posited in 1992, in the hope of giving some account of the ways in which that earlier work might today be supplemented.

In contributing to this symposium on book history, I was asked to reflect on my A Social History of Knowledge (hereafter SHK), which was published in 2000, describing how I came to write it and what has happened to the field since, and considering the question of whether I might write my essay differently if I were beginning it today. Following this, I shall devote the remainder of the article to a sketch for a future project on the history of knowledge.

The history of the book is everywhere, so widely diffused that it merits comparison with the famously elusive Scarlet Pimpernel, whose pursuers sought him without success. Like that figure, book history passes among us in disguise, reluctant to reveal its presence even as it gains ever-greater recognition. In some quarters, it lurks within the domain of bibliography, a field of scholarship dedicated to describing the histories of printed texts and, in the service of this enterprise, concerned with the details of book-making. Elsewhere, book history installs itself within descriptions of libraries and education, sharing, with the first of these, a concern for how old books were accumulated and classified and, with the second, for the many ramifications of literacy and the fashioning of schoolbooks. Together with the history of journalism it studies how news was disseminated and ponders the significance of periodicals, be these newspapers or magazines. Political history has been another convenient site of disguise in the wake of efforts to connect the public sphere and concepts of nation with the emergence of print culture. And, of course, book history has enjoyed a long and fruitful kinship with literary history, a relationship freshly energized in recent decades as literary historians turned to describing the rise and remaking of a canon and to emphasizing the mediations that all texts undergo—the “sociology of texts,” to borrow a phrase made famous by D. F. McKenzie. To this list we can add the version of intellectual history that reconstructs the reading of a person or group and employs this data to generalize about the coming of the Enlightenment and similar formations.

Karl Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte can be read as a guidebook, but it is also a site of pilgrimage for those seeking to come to terms with the Marxist legacy, from within and from without. This essay examines the reading and citing of The Eighteenth Brumaire by Marxist and non-Marxist political analysts, historians of the Second Republic, and cultural theorists. Invoking this text and claiming to rescue it from the distorted glosses others have given it, readers both confront and evade their own political and intellectual anxieties.

Although history is the pre-eminent part of the gallant sciences, philosophers advise against it from fear that it might completely destroy the kingdom of darkness—that is, scholastic philosophy—which previously has been wrongly held to be a necessary instrument of theology.

Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)

Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)

“A public can only attain enlightenment slowly,” Kant famously observed. His use of the term “public” (Publikum), of course, is notoriously slippery, and even now, after decades of academic discussion of Öffenlichkeit and l'opinion publique, it regularly trips up the unsuspecting undergraduate intent on answering Kant's central question: What is enlightenment? And yet it is clear that whatever else he meant, Kant envisioned a central role for the scholar (Gelehrter) in constituting the public, and furthering enlightenment. And so we might say, in a Kantian gloss, that scholars attain enlightenment, and knowledge of the Enlightenment, only slowly.

Susan Layton, Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, paperback version 2005; first edition 1994)

Harsha Ram, The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003)

In the last decades of the Russian Empire, Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire made for favorite reading among the intelligentsia. Today imperial themes have become increasingly important in American academia; historians and literary scholars who study Russia are no exception. The two studies under review explore the spirit and the letter of the Russian Empire in the moment of boom and glory preceding its collapse. Published in 1994, Susan Layton's Russian Literature and Empire was the pioneering study of the subject. Published in 2003, Harsha Ram's The Imperial Sublime is so different from Layton's book that the differences, rooted in the American rather than the Russian imperial experience, deserve reflection in their own right. While Layton looked at the world through the emancipatory optic of postcolonialist and feminist movements, Ram manifests a different kind of sensibility, one which is alert to the scale and beauty of the victorious power. In a sad but understandable way, Susan Layton's ethical concerns give way to Harsha Ram's aesthetic ones.

Eric Sundquist, Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005)

As measured by that deadly but inescapable phrase “quantity and quality,” Eric Sundquist is perhaps the most productive American literature scholar of his generation. Since 1979, when he was still in his twenties, he has authored half a dozen books while editing another half-dozen. All have made an impact and many of these have been highly influential—his first book, Home as Found: Authority and Genealogy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, was among the very first to read canonical American works through the lens of contemporary literary and psychoanalytic theory; his edited collection American Realism: New Essays (1982) proved pivotal in reviving the critical energy in a major but long-dormant literary and historical period. To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (1993) was by implicit design and to powerful effect nothing less than a rewriting of the foundational work of American literary history and criticism—F. O. Matthiessen's monumental American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941). I will spend some time describing To Wake the Nations not only because of the book's exceptional importance but because its eloquent introduction provides the closest thing to a critical credo that Sundquist has written. His description there of his critical ideals—particularly of “justice,” boundary-crossing and “verification”—will help orient our approach to Strangers in the Land, which remains loyal to these ideals as it extends his interest in race and ethnicity, black and white, to the tormented subject of blacks and Jews, united by a “bond of alienation.” (52).