This essay considers the relationship between the Bhagavad Gita as a transnational text and its changing role in Indian political thought. Indian liberals used it to mark out the boundaries between the public sphere they desired and a reformed Hinduism. Indian intellectuals also used the image of Krishna to construct an all-wise founder figure for the new India. Meanwhile, in the transnational sphere of debate, the Gita came to represent India itself in the works of theosophists, spiritual relativists and a variety of intellectual radicals, who approved of the text's ambivalent view of the relationship between political action and the World Spirit. After the First World War, Indian liberals, notably Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, philosopher and later India's second president, used Krishna's words to urge a new and humane international politics infused with the ideal of “detached action”.

This article draws on archival sources to offer the first thoroughgoing account of how John Rawls moved from his undergraduate Christian ethics to the mature moral theory that undergirded A Theory of Justice. Identifying the liberal Protestant (rather than neo-orthodox) convictions at the heart of Rawls's senior thesis, it shows how he found an alternative postwar grounding for these views by applying Wittgenstein's later arguments about concepts, criteria, and inductive reasoning to ethics. The article places Rawls in the context of a whole community of mid-century American ethical theorists drawing upon Wittgenstein and trumpeting forms of moral “naturalism,” many of whom shared Rawls's Protestant heritage. It suggests that we can only make sense of the reliance of Rawls's moral theory on personal recognition, emotion, and a universal vision if we sideline the traditional dichotomies of the secularization debate and regard the postwar ethics of Rawls and his cohort as “post-Protestant.”

In the second half of the nineteenth century, British liberal ideology contained an open-ended vision of international order. The vision usually included a notion of an incipient or immanent international society composed of civilized nations. The fundamental distinction between civilized and barbarian nations meant that while this perceived society was international, in no sense was it global. In this essay we outline some of the broader characteristics of the internationalist outlook that many liberals shared and specifically discuss the claims about international society that they articulated. Liberal internationalism was a broad church and many (but not all) of its fundamental assumptions about the nature and direction of international progress and the importance of civilization were shared by large swathes of the intellectual elite. These assumptions are analysed by exploring the conceptions of international society found in three of the most influential thinkers of the time, T. H. Green, Herbert Spencer and Henry Sidgwick. Finally, the essay turns to the limitations of this vision of international society, especially in the context of the role of empire.

This essay argues that today's dominant understanding of secularization—as an epochal transition from a society based on religious belief to one based on autonomous human reason—first appeared in philosophical histories at the beginning of the nineteenth century and was then anachronistically applied to early modern Europe. Apart from the earlier and persisting canon-law use of the term to refer to a species of exclaustration, prior to 1800 the standard lexicographical meaning of “secularization” was determined by its use in public law and diplomacy to name the civil conversion of ecclesiastical property and jurisdiction. Prior to the same point the most important use of the adjective “secular” was in political jurisprudence as a synonym for temporal, civil, and political, to name a religious–political settlement from which rival theologies had been excluded as the condition of its negotiation. But this usage was domain-specific, was quite compatible with religious devotion, and had nothing to do with the putatively secular character of the spheres of philosophy or the natural sciences, thence “society”. Far from seeing a shift from religious belief to autonomous rationality, early modernity in fact witnessed a significant intensification of religious belief and practice under the impact of rival confessional movements. It also emerges that the nineteenth century was characterized not by the supersession of confessional religions—or their conversion into rational religion or moral philosophy—but by their remarkable persistence and adaptation to new circumstances. In light of this, the essay argues that the variant philosophical-historical conceptions of secularization—as the epochal supersession of religious belief by human rationality—should not be understood as theories of a putative process but as “combat concepts”. These were internal to an array of rival cultural-political factions that first emerged in early nineteenth-century Protestant Germany and that continue to do battle today.

Gandhi's critique of the modern state was central to his political thinking. It served as a pivotal hinge between Gandhi's anticolonialism and his theory of politics and was given striking institutional form in his vision of decentralized peasant democracy. This essay explores the origins and implications of Gandhian antistatism by situating it within a genealogy of early twentieth-century political pluralism, specifically British and Indian pluralist criticism of state sovereignty and centralization. This essay traces that critique from the imperial sociology of Henry Sumner Maine, through the political theory of Harold Laski and G. D. H. Cole, to Radhakamal Mukerjee's reworking of these strands into a normative–universal model of Eastern pluralism. The essay concludes with a consideration of Gandhi's ideal of a stateless, nonviolent polity as a culmination and overturning of the pluralist tradition and as integral to his distinctive understanding of political freedom, rule, and action.

Current interpretations of the political theory of Judith Shklar focus to a disabling extent on her short, late article “The Liberalism of Fear” (1989); commentators take this late essay as representative of her work as a whole and thus characterize her as an anti-totalitarian, Cold War liberal. Other interpretations situate her political thought alongside followers of John Rawls and liberal political philosophy. Challenging the centrality of fear in Shklar's thought, this essay examines her writings on utopian and normative thought, the role of history in political thinking and her notions of ordinary cruelty and injustice. In particular, it shifts emphasis away from an exclusive focus on her late writings in order to consider works published throughout her long career at Harvard University, from 1950 until her death in 1992. By surveying the range of Shklar's critical standpoints and concerns, it suggests that postwar American liberalism was not as monolithic as many interpreters have assumed. Through an examination of her attitudes towards her forebears and contemporaries, it shows why the dominant interpretations of Shklar—as anti-totalitarian émigré thinker, or normative liberal theorist—are flawed. In fact, Shklar moved restlessly between these two categories, and drew from each tradition. By thinking about both hope and memory, she bridged the gap between two distinct strands of postwar American liberalism.

John Locke was considerably interested and actively involved in the promotion of Protestant Christianity among American Indians and African slaves, yet this fact goes largely unremarked in historical scholarship. The evidence of this interest and involvement deserves analysis—for it illuminates fascinating and understudied features of Locke's theory of toleration and his thinking on American Indians, African slaves, and English colonialism. These features include (1) the compatibility between toleration and Christian mission, (2) the interconnection between Christian mission and English geopolitics, (3) the coexistence of ameliorative and exploitative strands within Locke's stance on African slavery, and (4) the spiritual imperialism of Locke's colonial vision. Analyzing evidence of Locke's interest and involvement in Christian mission, this article brings fully to light a dimension of Locke's career that has barely been noticed. In so doing, it also illustrates how the roots of toleration in the modern West were partly evangelical.

This article argues that positive perceptions of American westward expansion played a major (and so far overlooked) role both for the domestic German debate about the necessity of overseas expansion and for concrete German colonial policies during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During and after the uprising against colonial rule (1904–7) of the two main indigenous peoples, the Herero and the Nama, of German South-West Africa (Germany's only settler colony), colonial administrators actively researched the history of the American frontier and American Indian policies in order to learn how best to “handle” the colony's peoples. There exists a substantial literature on the allegedly exceptional enchantment of Germans with American Indians. Yet this article shows that negative views of Amerindians also influenced and shaped the opinions and actions of German colonizers. Because of its focus on the importance of the United States for German discussions about colonial expansion, this article also explores the role German liberals played in the German colonial project. Ultimately, the United States as a “model empire” was especially attractive for Germans with liberal and progressive political convictions. The westward advancement of the American frontier went hand in hand with a variety of policies towards Native Americans, including measures of expulsion and extinction. German liberals accepted American expansionism as normative and were therefore willing to advocate, or at least tolerate, similar policies in the German colonies.

Between World War I and World War II, the students of Columbia University's John Dewey and Frederick J. E. Woodbridge built up a school of philosophical naturalism sharply critical of claims to value-neutrality. In the 1930s and 1940s, the second-generation Columbia naturalists (John Herman Randall Jr, Herbert W. Schneider, Irwin Edman, Horace L. Friess, and James Gutmann) and their students who later joined the department (Charles Frankel, Joseph L. Blau, Albert Hofstadter, and Justus Buchler) reacted with dismay to the arrival on American shores of logical empiricism and other analytic modes of philosophy. These figures undermined their colleague Ernest Nagel's attempt to build an alliance with the logical empiricists, accusing them of ignoring the scholar's primary role as a public critic. After the war, the prestige of analytic approaches and a tendency to label philosophies either “analytic” or “Continental” eclipsed the Columbia philosophers’ normatively inflected naturalism. Yet in their efforts to resist logical empiricism, the Columbia naturalists helped to construct a sturdy, canonical portrait of “American philosophy” that proponents still hold up as a third way between analytic and Continental approaches.

In 1921, John A. Ryan, a priest and professor at Catholic University in Washington, DC, and one of his students, the Reverend Raymond McGowan, published A Catechism of the Social Question. The first question in it reads, “What do we mean by the social question?” Answer: “A question denotes a problem or a difficulty which demands solution. A social question is one that concerns society, or a social group. The social question means certain evils and grievances affecting the wage-earning classes, and calling for removal or remedy.”

Historians of Africa can no longer overlook race. To scholars of African-diaspora studies (who often work under the rubric of Africana studies, black studies, and African American studies), the recognition of this fact is long overdue. With the rise of the area-studies paradigm in the 1950s, North American scholars of Africa became preoccupied with the rise of nationalism and the writing or critique of national histories. The future was defined by national development, while the study of the past was centered on the search for a pristine precolonial identity. Consequently, a world of nations took precedence in scholarly writing over concerns about the management of empires, colonies and, strikingly, races. Even as Africanist scholars came to reevaluate the successes and failures of the postcolonial experience across Africa in the 1970s, they frequently lamented the persistence of ethnic conflict, but not of ongoing forms of racial hierarchy. Race, insofar as it was treated at all, tended to be confined to the “colonial episode” and to settler states, like South Africa.

Since Dilthey's template study of 1890, the Prussian state's attempt to censor Kant's religious writings has typically been seen as the work of a reactionary politics bent on imposing religious orthodoxy as a bulwark against the spread of Aufklärung. This essay offers a revisionist interpretation, arguing that the attempted censoring was a by-product of a set of a long-standing Religionspolitik designed to achieve religious toleration through a system of regulated public confessions. Reaffirmed in the Religious Edict (1788) and the Censorship Edict (1788), Prussian policy required acceptance of a plurality of public confessions whose stability was preserved through the restriction of public proselytizing and the acceptance of private religious freedom. In breaking with this religious settlement, through their public advocacy of a true “religion of reason”, the Protestant religious rationalists of the theological Aufklärung breached the embargo on public proselytizing, leading eventually to government's attempt to censor Kant's own “pure moral religion”.

“Occult,” a 1902 international encyclopedia of religion tells us, is derived “from Latin occultus—Hidden,” and is applied to the assumption that insight into and control over nature is to be obtained by mysterious or magical procedures and by long apprenticeship in secret lore. The physical science of the middle ages, alchemy and astrology, and in modern times spiritualism, theosophy, and palmistry contain various factors of occult lore. Such doctrines, known as occultism, fall outside the realm of modern science. See MAGIC.

Aurobindo Ghose was a major nationalist intellectual of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who rose to prominence as one of the most radical leaders of the Swadeshi movement before retreating to the French colony of Pondicherry to dedicate his life to spiritual exercises and experiments. Aurobindo, like so many others of the nationalist period, produced a major commentary on the Bhagavad Gita. I will argue that his appeal to the Gita in the late 1910s represented, however, not a continuation of his nationalist project, but rather a radical reformulation of it in the wake of the defeat of the Swadeshi mobilization of 1905–8.

The paper is concerned with disputes over sovereignty and global commerce in the 1760s and 1770s. The eighteenth-century revolution in economic science has been identified with agricultural reforms, and with the definition of national economies. The economists of the time, including Turgot, Mirabeau, Dupont de Nemours, Baudeau and Adam Smith, were also intensely interested in the merchant sovereigns of the French, English and Dutch East India companies, and in the new colonial ventures of the post-Seven Years War period. Their writings on global commerce were sometimes extraordinarily detailed (about herrings, for example, or bye-laws) and often untheoretical. Turgot was for a brief period minister of the navy and of the colonies. The older Mirabeau described the “Spaniard” as “the true Mogul of America,” and the cod of the North Atlantic as “the inexhaustible Peru of the Dutch.” But the economists’ writings on global connections were the occasion for some of their most profound reflections on the political consequences of laissez-faire, on theories of sovereignty, on the difficulties of transporting information or instructions over very large distances, and on the changing relationships between power, law and commerce. The disputes over long-distance commerce provide an interesting insight, the paper suggests, into ways of thinking which were at the same time scientific and administrative, global and provincial.

In a recent essay the agent provocateur and philosopher Slavoj Žižek remarked that the Bhagavad Gita represented the perfect philosophy for post-capitalist society. By no means the first reaction to this text, this is only the most recent and arguably most controversial understanding of the philosophical content of the Gita, whose previous commentators have ranged from Nietzsche to Hitler. Less controversially, the modern composer Phillip Glass opened his opera Satyagraha with a dramatization of the discourse between Krishna and Arjuna that forms the Gita's content as a plea for a humanist politics. Though the text does not offer limitless possibilities for interpretation, what is certain is that the Gita has acquired an iconic status in modern times as a set of reflections on ethics, war, justice, freedom and action.

In the last fifteen years or so, Chinese intellectuals have been heatedly debating the complex relationships between China's prospects, China's past, and the modern predicament. In this context Wang Hui has emerged as one of China's most challenging and controversial intellectuals. His work is controversial. At a time when intellectuals take modernization as a goal, Wang has consistently voiced reservations. Readers find his works challenging because, instead of criticizing modernity or capitalism from simple moral tenets, Wang has always sought to redefine the terms of the debate through detailed and sensitive historical analysis. Hence amidst his busy life as editor, professor, and polemicist, Wang has devoted more than ten years to writing his magisterial four volume book The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought (Zhongguo sixiang de xingqi), in which he fundamentally rethinks the relationship between modernity and Chinese thought. However, Wang's book is not just an immense contribution to historical and historiographical scholarship; his work is a self-consciously political intervention. Specifically, he highlights the role of intellectual history as critique and attempts to recover repressed elements of the past in order to question the structures that govern the present. In the last line of the conclusion to his book he writes, “the history that modernity loftily and even proudly rejects contains the inspiration and possibilities for overcoming its crisis.” Taking China as his focus, Wang attempts to write this history.

Rather than renouncing empire after the fall of Napoleon, this essay argues, French liberal thinkers expressed a sustained preference for a strategy based on transnational connections, or what imperial historians describe as informal imperialism. The eulogy of European Christian civilization exemplified by François Guizot's lecture at the Sorbonne in 1828 served not only to legitimize French global ambitions, but also to facilitate cooperation with other European imperial powers, especially Britain, and indigenous collaborators. Liberal enthusiasm for the spread of Western civilization also inspired the emergence of a French version of free-trade imperialism, of which the economist Michel Chevalier proved a consistent advocate. Only when such aspirations were frustrated did liberals reluctantly endorse colonial conquest, on an exceptional basis in Algeria after 1840 and on a global scale after 1870. The allegedly abrupt liberal conversion to empire in the nineteenth century may instead be construed as a tactical shift from informal to formal dominance.

Historical scholarship often relies on intermittent adjustments rather than radical innovation. Through a close reading of three different universal histories published between 1690 and 1760, this essay argues that the secularization of world history in the age of Enlightenment was an incomplete and often unintended process. Nonetheless, one of the most significant changes in this period was the centering of universal history in Europe, a process that accompanied the desacralization of the story of man. Once human progress was embraced as a universal process, the story of the development of the arts and sciences gradually eclipsed the non-European cultures that had formerly played a central role in the Christian narrative of human history.

Le Miroir, published in Paris in 1833 by Hamdan ben Othman Khodja (c.1773–1842), was the first Algerian contribution to French public deliberation about France's emerging empire in North Africa. A work of a self-consciously liberal cosmopolitan, and modernizing, perspective, the Miroir was almost alone in French debates in making a principled argument for a complete French withdrawal from Algeria—what Khodja called a “liberal emancipation” of the country. The Miroir argued for an independent Algeria that might take its place in a nineteenth-century Europe of emerging nations, and that might engage with European states as a diplomatic equal. The work illustrates the constraints on those who sought to preserve some independence, discursive as well as political, in the face of European expansion, as well as the critical possibilities of liberal discourse at a moment when it was being marshaled in France and Britain in the service of empire.