Walt Rostow wanted his landmark contribution to modernization theory, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-communist Manifesto (1960), to offer an alternative to Marxist analysis, and in service of that effort he sought to replace class with nation as the agent of history. Britain figured prominently in the resulting account, functioning as everything from a trailblazing pioneer to an idiosyncratic anomaly to a cautionary tale for weak-kneed Americans, but it never explicitly offered the model for other nations to follow that historians today associate with the text. In explaining how that misreading came to dominate discussions of Stages, this essay rethinks a US historiography that collapses modernization theory with American exceptionalism, and a UK historiography premised on the claim that Britain made the modern world. Attending to the function of Britain in Stages reinserts British history into postwar conceptions of world history—not as a paradigmatic case, but nevertheless as a significant one.

This essay examines Isaiah Berlin's ambivalent relationship with the ideas and practices of Jewish nationalism and the ways in which this ambivalence shaped some of the key premises of his political thought. Drawing upon extensive archival research in his unpublished letters from the mid-1930s to the late 1950s, this essay reconstructs Berlin's attempt to reconcile himself with the national idea. This attempt forced him to enrich his liberalism, and pushed him to develop “Diaspora Zionism” and adopt the Jewish normalization discourse. In the course of those intra-Jewish debates Berlin also began to conceptualize freedom as an opportunity concept, an idea that would later become central both in Berlin's famous negative concept of freedom and in his pluralism. Adopting a dual perspective, which considers Berlin as both a British liberal and a Russian-Jewish émigré intellectual, I therefore offer to see the Jewish Zionist writings as complementary rather than secondary to Berlin's “liberal” enterprise.

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.

This article explores continuities between the antiquarian erudition of humanist historians and Enlightenment philosophical histories, showing that supposedly revolutionary developments in eighteenth-century historiography emerged from an older scholarly tradition. It focuses on the research of the Royal Academy of Inscriptions and Letters, a learned society in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France that went from serving as a propaganda tool for promoting King Louis XIV's absolutist regime to becoming the first modern historical research institute and a cradle of the Enlightenment. The article examines the emergence of what might be called “cultural history” or “the history of culture” (histoire des moeurs, as eighteenth-century authors called it). It analyzes how the academicians studied pagan beliefs and speculated about the functions of ancient myths and cults, thus transforming the views about the origin of religion and its role in society. The article also discusses how the academicians made sense of customs and daily practices and how they understood the causes of the progress and decline of civilizations.

This article explores Rawls's evolving orientation to “the tradition of political philosophy” over the course of his academic career, culminating in Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2001). Drawing on archival material, it argues that Rawls's fascination with tradition arose out of his own pedagogical engagement with the debate around the “death of political philosophy” in the 1950s. Throughout, I highlight the significance of Rawls's teaching—beginning with his earliest lectures on social and political philosophy at Cornell, to his shifting views on “the tradition” in his published works, culminating in the increasingly contextually minded and irenic approach on display in Political Liberalism (1993) and Justice as Fairness. This neglected aspect of the “historical Rawls” offers insight into how Rawls himself might have read “John Rawls” as a figure in the history of political thought—and reveals that he spent a lot more time contemplating that question than one might think.

This article examines the use of David Hume's political writing by the extra-parliamentary opposition writers of the 1760s and early 1770s. The disturbances surrounding the publication of North Briton 45 and Wilkes's abortive attempts to become MP for Middlesex attracted a level of public support which was remarkable for its size, social diversity and ideological coherence. Hume, as is well known, reacted angrily to this growth in popular politics, condemning both the “mobs” that swept through London in the latter part of the decade and the Ministry's failure to deal with them. However, while Hume may have been highly critical of the Wilkites, the Wilkites frequently used ideas and quotations from the Scotsman's work in their anti-Ministerial polemics. My discussion traces the various ways in which Hume was employed in Wilkite political discourse, and aims to establish the significance of these appropriations for our understanding both of Hume's later life and of the radical politics of the period.

The mythical scientist in early twentieth-century America cut a lone figure, “impersonal as the chill northeast wind” and “oblivious of everything save his experiment.” He toiled through the night in his laboratory, “a place unimpressive and unmagical save for the constant-temperature bath with its tricky thermometer and electric bulbs,” as if working in the lab were a prayer that promised illumination—“alone, absorbed, [and] contemptuous of academic success and of popular classes,” he knew all about material forces, but he was blind to the vital force that created all others. Accustomed to the “beautiful dullness of long labors,” he remained “illimitably ignorant” of literature, art, and music. He believed that unerring techniques in experimentation, impartial observations, and exquisitely minute calculations would bring progress—a steady march toward the truth. He chose the highest calling in the world because he was “intensely religious—so religious that he will not accept quarter-truths, because they are an insult to his faith.” He was “so devoted to Pure Science . . . that he would rather have people die by the right therapy than be cured by the wrong. Having built a shrine for humanity, he wanted to kick out of it all mere human beings.” This autocratic figure, brilliantly insane and tyrannically honest, embodied the cult of science and objectivity.

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.

This article challenges the historiographical commonplace that twentieth-century American management discourse was dominated by bureaucratic aspirations to objective expertise and rational planning. Proposing the category of “entrepreneurial management” to describe the countervailing tendency, it demonstrates the persistence of intellectual interest in managers who used the personal qualities of leadership to enlist enthusiasm among subordinates for their firm's initiatives. By the mid-twentieth century, these managerial leaders were commonly described as “entrepreneurs.” Through a reading of early twentieth-century writing on “human factor” management and Depression-era “human relations” theory, the article shows that intellectual interest in entrepreneurial leadership thrived during a period typically characterized as the height of scientific management and corporate bureaucracy. Analyzing Peter F. Drucker's postwar management writing in detail, the article concludes by arguing that the “entrepreneurialism” of the late twentieth century did not represent a break with the established managerial project, only the strengthened authority of one existing tendency within a variegated intellectual field.

The story of American intellectual history's decline, fall, and phoenix-like rebirth in recent decades has become trite with the retelling: knocked from its position of prominence by the new social history and plunged into the chastened soul-searching of the famed Wingspread Conference of 1977, only to find itself rescued in part by the linguistic and cultural “turns” that swept the entire discipline of American history in the 1980s and 1990s. Like many a narrative, this one undoubtedly imposes too clear a pattern of meaning on a messier reality, but also like many a narrative, it has powerfully shaped the professional identities of American intellectual historians by giving them a sense of where they have been and how they arrived at their current place. That current place is a hospitable one, in many ways, for in the last couple of decades American historians seem to have grown increasingly receptive to the notion that ideas have mattered in history.

Hugo Grotius’s account of sovereign power in De iure belli ac pacis occupies a contested place in recent genealogies of modern sovereignty. This article takes a fresh approach by arguing that Grotius’s legal arguments do not do their work alone. They function within a broader horizon of what he calls “morals,” a field of reasoning that has debts to scholastic moral theology and Aristotelian moral science. Grotius's conception of sovereignty represents a modulation between law and “morals,” which allows him both to separate his scientific jurisprudence from the science of politics and nevertheless to reply to the political scientists on their own ground. The context of “morals,” however, is not narrowly political but inter-political, generating a potential tension between popular aspirations to sovereignty and the international order. Grotius’s “moral” handling of the issue offers an invitation to reflect on our current preoccupation with much the same concerns.

This article explores the reception of discourses about land and property in Islamic jurisprudence in colonial Bengal. I argue that Hanafi fiqh provided a sophisticated conceptual repertoire for framing claims to property that agrarian political actors in Muslim Bengal drew upon. Yet the dominant framework for understanding property claims in postclassical jurisprudence was ill-fitted to claims of the kind that agrarian movements in colonial Bengal were articulating. As a result, twentieth-century agrarian movements in the region spoke the language of fiqh, but nonetheless inhabited the ideological landscape of a much broader twentieth-century world of political aspirations and norms.

This article analyzes how debates concerning Brazilian race relations, miscegenation, and racial democracy unfolded in France in the 1950s. During those years, Gilberto Freyre and those critical of him emerged in French social scientific discourse, offering distinct visions concerning race, culture, and the possibility of harmonious coexistence in a world structured by racial, social, and colonial inequalities. Certain French social scientists such as Lucien Febvre and Fernand Braudel embraced Freyre's vision as a possible source for racial and cultural mixing, whereas others, especially Alfred Métraux and Florestan Fernandes, directly criticized his work. Roger Bastide mediated between the two, translating Freyre's Casa-Grande & Senzala and coauthoring a UNESCO-based study on blacks and whites in São Paulo that largely repudiated Freyre's claims. I argue that in a period in which decolonization was already underway, Freyre piqued the interest of French social scientists looking to overcome the growing antagonism between colonizer and colonized, even if other models of cultural integration and autonomy contested the validity of Brazil's so-called racial democracy.

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.

For nearly half a century, Quentin Skinner has been the world's foremost interpreter of Thomas Hobbes. When the contextualist mode of intellectual history now known as the “Cambridge School” was first asserting itself in the 1960s, the life and writings of John Locke were the primary topic for pioneers such as Peter Laslett and John Dunn. At that time, Hobbes was still the plaything of philosophers and political scientists, virtually all of whom wrote in an ahistorical, textual-analytic manner. Hobbes had not been the subject of serious contextual research for decades, since the foundational writings of Ferdinand Tönnies. For Skinner, he was thus an ideal subject, providing a space for original research on a major figure, and an occasion for some polemically charged methodological manifestos. Both of these purposes animated his 1965 article “History and Ideology in the English Revolution,” and his 1966 article “The Ideological Context of Hobbes's Political Thought”. The latter of these remains to this day one of the most widely cited scholarly articles in the fifty-year run of Cambridge's Historical Journal. Among other results of these early efforts was the scholarly controversy during which Howard Warrender chided Skinner for having reduced the “classic texts in political philosophy” to mere “tracts for the times”.

In the years around mid-century a number of periodizing terms entered Western historiography. These included the “Weimar Republic” and Frühneuzeit in Germany, “the age of Wilberforce” in Britain, and “the age of Jackson” in the United States, to name just a few. The appearance of these terms attested to the popularity that periodization, or the deliberate creation of historical periods, had within historical practice, and they were embraced variously as heuristics, as means of organizing the historical record, and as the root of synthesis. In this essay I trace the coinage of one term, “Harlem Renaissance,” from its emergence in the 1940s, through to the sharper profile it earned in the postwar years, and its institutionalization in the late twentieth century. In doing so I argue that Harlem Renaissance was neither a term nor a concept used by those who lived during the years it is now said to describe, and illuminate the alternative ways in which contemporaries apprehended their historical position. The context for the coinage and popularization of this term was the displacement of these earlier modes of interpretation by temporal ones, and the emergence of a mode of historical practice that stressed synthetic interpretation. By tracing the fluctuating ways in which a core analytical concept like periodization was handled between the mid- and the late twentieth century we might better grasp how historiographical orientations changed in these years.

This article examines how the work of Bruno Bettelheim remained influential in debates concerning the meaning of autism as well as its treatment in France well after it was marginalized in the United States. The persistence of Bettelheim's work among French audiences speaks to how the French understanding of autism diverged from its conception in the United States thanks to the social and cultural interest in psychoanalysis in French society and the perceived effectiveness of his form of treatment. The conflation between Bettelheim and the psychoanalytic approach to autism meant that advocates for other approaches needed to rebut his influences well into the 1980s and 1990s, which further reinforced his position as a prime representative for the problems of psychoanalysis for parents. The durability of Bettelheim's presence in these debates also underscores the perceived relationship between disability and motherhood in the case of autism and how Bettelheim buttressed that assumption for the French rooted in anxieties about the dangers of bad mothering. Bettelheim's ideas solidified the intersection of intellectual ascendance and social acceptance of psychoanalysis in France and anxieties about motherhood during the emergence of autism within the public discourse.

This article explores positivist universalism, one of the central aspects of contemporary approaches in political theory, through the study of the Young Turks’ political thought. Current scholarship portrays the Young Turks as champions of a national cause, limited to overthrowing despotism and relaunching the Constitution of 1876 in the Ottoman Empire. This neglects their broader aim to guarantee peace, order, and progress, both at home and abroad, by adopting Comtean universal positivism, and it distorts their vision of society, politics, and history. From their base in Paris the Young Turks challenged the Eurocentric conception of universalism, suggesting a more egalitarian and comprehensive conception that has yet to be recognized. This article shows that, transcending the conventional boundaries between Western and non-Western political thought, the Young Turks’ political ideology presents an early example of the formation of a modern, pluralist worldview, and that their core conceptions had a deep impact on the founding of Turkish republicanism.

By tracing the career of influential YMCA missionary Sherwood Eddy, this essay brings to light the origins of Christian internationalism in 1920s America. Far more than mere boosterism for Woodrow Wilson's League of Nations, and far more than mere “pacifism” or Social Gospel “idealism”(reductive categories with which activism in the period is often associated), Christian internationalism in the interwar period was a movement defined by three broad and far-reaching impulses. First, it was characterized by the proliferation of new enterprises such as travelling seminars, conferences and publications devoted to reflection on the ethics of international relations. Second, it comprised a holistic, oppositional and radical political orientation that went beyond legalist internationalism and encompassed agitation against imperialism and racism. Third, the movement was premised on a fundamental critique of the idea of America as a “Christian nation”. Eddy's career highlights the unique importance of the missionary enterprise in giving shape to these impulses in the 1920s and beyond.

This article reexamines Marx's early conception of history by returning to his 1845–6 manuscripts, long known as The German Ideology. On conventional interpretations of these manuscripts, Marx sought to explain the entire historical process through a theory of the systematic development of productive forces. This article reveals that concern to be an artifact of subsequent editorial practices and argues that a different concern animated the manuscripts for Marx himself—namely to grasp the nature of individual epochs, particularly the present one, which he doubted that a generalized theory of history could help him to do. In “Saint Max,” perhaps the most neglected of these early manuscripts, Marx developed the concept of a “mode of production” into a historical lens, one that could aid the work of social critique by bringing into focus how the present is made and might be made anew.