This essay examines the significance of the Bhagavad Gita for V. D. Savarkar's interpretations of religion, nationalism, and the idea of Hindu India. As one of the intellectual founders of Hindu nationalism, Savarkar has emerged as the most controversial Indian political thinker of the last century, gaining notoriety for his program to ‘Hinduize Politics and Militarize Hindudom’, for his anti-Muslim and anti-Christian politics, and for his advocacy of violence in everyday life. By bringing together key selections from Savarkar's seminal historical writings, the essay also traces how Savarkar developed the concept of ethical warfare from the Gita for his political purposes of contesting colonial power and creating a Hindu nation. It also shows that Savarkar adopted history writing as his main literary form for his engagement with the Gita and its principles, thereby departing from the existing hermeneutical traditions of studying the Gita. For Savarkar, the creation of historical knowledge that embodied key ideas from the Gita was necessary for transforming the individual and the nation. He claimed that it ultimately motivated individuals to adopt violence for the creation of Hindu India.

This forum explores new directions in global intellectual history, engaging with the methodologies of global and transnational history to move beyond conventional territorial boundaries and master narratives. The papers focus on the period between the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, an era in which the growth of cities, burgeoning print cultures and new transport and communications technology enabled the accelerated circulation and exchange of ideas throughout the globe. The proliferation of conferences, world fairs, and international congresses, the growing professionalization and definition of academic disciplines, and the enhanced circulation of scholarly journals and correspondence enabled intellectuals around the world to converse in shared vocabularies. Much of the scholarship on early twentieth-century intellectual history in the non-Western world has been viewed through the binary relationships of metropole and colony, or as nationalist reactions to colonial domination. This cluster widens the framework to consider the way in which intellectuals formed scholarly networks and gathered multiple influences to articulate new visions of community and society within a wider world of ideas. The multiplicity of imperial and transnational pathways allowed not only for “centers of calculation” in colonial metropoles, but also for points of convergence and encounter outside Europe. As these papers show, the routes by which ideas travelled brought forth a global republic of letters, composed of diverse “centers” for the collection and production of knowledge by intellectuals operating in different parts of the world.

Criticized as a nostalgic anachronism by those who oppose her version of political theory and lauded as symbol of direct democratic participation by those who favor it, the Athenian polis features prominently in Hannah Arendt's account of politics. This essay traces the origin and development of Arendt's conception of the polis as a space of appearance from the early 1950s onward. It makes particular use of the Denktagebuch, Arendt's intellectual diary, in order to shed new light on the historicity of one of her central concepts. The article contends that both critics and partisans of Arendt's use of the polis have made the same mistake: they have presumed that the polis represents a space of face-to-face immediacy. In fact, Arendt compared the polis to a series of analogues, many of which are not centered on direct exchanges between political actors and spectators. As a result, Arendt's early work on the polis turns out to anticipate many of the concerns of her later work on judgment, and her theory of the polis becomes a theory of topics.

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar was the theorizer of Hindutva (1923)—the project to radically reconfigure India as a Hindu majoritarian state. Assessments of Savarkar's earlier The Indian War of Independence (1909), a history of the 1857 Indian “Mutiny,” have generally subsumed this tract into the logic of Hindutva. This article offers a reassessment of The Indian War of Independence and situates it within the political and intellectual context of fin de siècle western India. I suggest that this history of Indian rebellion propagated a novel iteration of Indian popular sovereignty predicated on Hindu–Muslim unity. I read Savarkar as adapting the ideas of Giuseppe Mazzini and Johann Kaspar Bluntschli to challenge what he regarded as the fissiparous logic of late colonial liberalism. Finally, this article argues that Savarkar's account of the mutual constitution of general will and the personalism of sovereignty must be read as a previously unacknowledged instance of Indian populism.

This article traces the origins and evolution of a popular interpretation of Adam Smith as a “Chicago-style” economist, and it challenges the idea that the “Chicago Smith” is simply a misinterpretation of Smith's ideas. To that end, it reexamines the role that the Chicago school of economics played in developing and propounding a distinct vision of Adam Smith, not only within the profession of economics, but also for the broader American public in the twentieth century. I argue that the readings, teachings, and interpretations of Smith from Chicago economists across different generations are more than just superficial symbolism, claims of intellectual authority, or rhetorical window dressing. Chicago’s engagement with Smith’s ideas constitute important interpretive and substantive arguments about the essence of Smith’s contribution to economics and the role that Smith’s ideas could play in shaping public policy.

Considerable attention has been paid to the ideas of critics of the British Empire in the period of its most rapid expansion and rather less to the views of those who supported it strongly. This article investigates the arguments of what are called “ultra-imperialists”, showing how they used the language of character, stiffened by elements from earlier languages of virtue, to justify the possession of empire. They argued that character had been critical in making Britain an imperial power and also claimed that, without the stimulus to action and duty provided by the defence and the governance of empire, character would atrophy, and the nation would suffer catastrophic and irreversible decline. The article ends by comparing the “ultra” position with that of, firstly, the larger body of more pragmatic supporters of empire and, secondly, the small group of radical anti-imperialists who feared that empire was destructive of character.

The 1929 ‘Davos encounter’ between Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer has long been viewed by intellectual historians as a paradigmatic event not only for its philosophical meaning but also for its apparently cultural-political ramifications. But such interpretations easily lend legitimacy to a broader and recently ascendant intellectual-historical trend that would reduce philosophy to an allegorical expression of ostensibly more ‘real’ or instrumentalist meanings. However, as this essay tries to show, the core of the dispute between Cassirer and Heidegger is irreducibly philosophical: the Davos debate brought into focus the emergent themes of the so-called “Kant-crisis” of the 1920s, and cast new light upon neo-Kantian doctrines as to the status of objectivity and the possibility for intersubjective consensus in both knowledge and ethics. The Davos encounter cannot be retroactively decided on political or cultural grounds, since it concerns just that unresolved tension between transcendentalism and hermeneutics that is itself constitutive of intellectual history as a discipline.

In recent years, there has been a deepening convergence between scholarship on global intellectual history and on legal history. To take just one example, a recent book on international law, by Arnulf Becker Lorca (2014), carries “global intellectual history” in its subtitle—a stance related to the author's emphasis on the constitutive role in the field of non-European legal actors. A sustained reflection on the convergence between legal studies and global intellectual history, however, still remains a desideratum, at least in the sense that we do not yet have even a basic platform where scholars with different space/time and (trans-) cultural specialization come together to reflect on how studying legal concepts gains from global intellectual history. This forum, which results from a conference organized at Heidelberg University in 2016, attempts a preliminary intervention here. The introductory remarks are not meant to be conclusive; they invite responses.

The two decades following the Second World War were marked by geopolitical and pedagogical ferment, as researchers and policymakers debated the role of language teaching in a rapidly changing world. As European empires collapsed amid Cold War competition for global influence, limited colonial education systems gave way to new discourses connecting postcolonial educational expansion, international development aid, and language teaching. This article reveals increasing American interest in the connections between development and vehicular English from 1945 to 1965. Drawing on the work of anglophone reformers, American elites promoted English as a development tool, and institutionalized policies designed to spread it abroad. The rise of the idea of global English in the United States, the article shows, was rooted in an instrumental conception of language, which framed English as a politically neutral vehicle for communication, yet this discourse was contradicted by the United States’ strategic ambitions.

This essay considers how Freud traveled in postwar Egypt through an exploration of the work of Yusuf Murad, the founder of a school of thought within the psychological and human sciences, and provides a close study of the journal he co-edited, Majallat ʿIlm al-Nafs. Translating and blending key concepts from psychoanalysis and psychology with classical Islamic concepts, Murad put forth a dynamic and dialectical approach to selfhood that emphasized the unity of the self, while often insisting on an epistemological and ethical heterogeneity from European psychoanalytic thought, embodied in a rejection of the dissolution of the self and of the death drive. In stark contrast to the so-called “tale of mutual ignorance” between Islam and psychoanalysis, the essay traces a tale of historical interactions, hybridizations, and interconnected webs of knowledge production between the Arab world and Europe. Moving away from binary models of selfhood as either modern or traditional, Western or non-Western, it examines the points of condensation and divergence, and the epistemological resonances that psychoanalytic writings had in postwar Egypt. The coproduction of psychoanalytic knowledge across Arab and European knowledge formations definitively demonstrates the outmoded nature of historical models that presuppose originals and bad copies of the global modern subject—herself so constitutively defined by the presence of the unconscious.

Arab intellectual history has been experiencing a resurgence of late, positioned as it is between the ascendancy of global intellectual history and the continued resilience of area studies. Such a precipitous conjuncture has led to a proliferation of Arab intellectual histories that belie the orientalist fallacy of the region as a “no idea producing area,” as once infelicitously described by Charles F. Gallagher. And yet the task of scholars of the Arab world is surely more complex than merely adding intellectuals and writers who have heretofore been ignored to the catalogue of intellectual history.

A founding editor of Modern Intellectual History (MIH), an acclaimed biographer of Adam Smith and a prolific essayist on all aspects of the Scottish Enlightenment, from its origins to its aftermath, Nicholas Phillipson needs little introduction to the readers of this journal. However, Phillipson's recent retirement from his editorial duties on MIH provides a suitable moment to celebrate one of the pioneers in our field. When the current editors set out to commission a historiographical overview of Phillipson's oeuvre and career, I was honoured to be asked and delighted to accept.

In the postwar decade, UNESCO aimed to create an international public sphere to secure peace. The organization made extensive use of photographs to do so, including the photographic archive of works of art and photojournalism from the ruined cities of Europe. However, photography was not simply a transparent medium for communicating internationalist ideals; it was a formative influence in shaping UNESCO's effort to build “peace in the minds of men”. This essay analyses the conception of photography as a universal language articulated in UNESCO-sponsored forums, the use of photography in UNESCO publications concerning human rights and educational reconstruction, and the internationalist ideals of world culture and world citizenship relevant to UNESCO's early work. Analysis reveals that UNESCO's use of photography was less the valuable deployment of a universal language suited to an internationalist agenda than it was the universalizing of certain cultural values in pursuit of the organization's utopian vision.

A striking aspect of the initial reception of John Rawls is that he was embraced by leading market-liberal theorists such as Friedrich Hayek and James Buchanan. This article investigates the reasons for the free-market right's sympathetic interest in the early Rawls by providing a historical account of the dialogue between Rawls and his key neoliberal interlocutor, James Buchanan. We set out the common intellectual context, notably the influence of Frank Knight, that framed the initial work of both Buchanan and Rawls and brought them together as seeming allies during the early 1960s. We then analyze a significant theoretical divergence between the two in the 1970s related to their contrasting responses to the politics of those years and to differences over the importance of ideal theory in political thought. The exchanges between Buchanan and Rawls demonstrate that Rawlsian liberalism and neoliberalism initially emerged as entwined critiques of mid-twentieth-century political economy but could not sustain that alliance when faced by the new claims for civil and social rights that became a marked feature of politics after the 1960s.

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.

This article reconsiders Sartre's seminal 1945 talk, “Existentialism is a Humanism,” and the stakes of the humanism debate in France by looking at the immediate political context that has been overlooked in previous discussions of the text. It analyses the political discussion of the term “humanism” during the French national elections of 1945 and the rumbling debate over Sartre's philosophy that culminated in his presentation to the Club Maintenant, just one week after France went to the polls. A consideration of this context helps explain both the rise, and later the decline, of existentialism in France, when, in the changing political climate, humanism lost its centrality, setting the stage for new antihumanist criticisms of Sartre's work.

This essay provides a close study of the international horizons of Kallol, a Bengali literary journal, published in post-World War I Calcutta. It uncovers a historical pattern of Bengali intellectual life that marked the period from the 1870s to the 1920s, whereby an imperial imagination was transformed into an international one, as a generation of intellectuals born between 1885 and 1905 reinvented the political category of “youth”. Hermeneutics, as a philosophically informed study of how meaning is created through conversation, and grounded in this essay in the thought of Hans Georg Gadamer, helps to reveal this pattern. While translocal vistas of intellectual life were always present in Bengali thought, the contours of those horizons changed drastically in the period under study. Bengali intellectual life, framed within a center–periphery imperial axis in the 1870s, was resolutely reframed within a multipolar international constellation by the 1920s. This change was reflected by the new conversations in which young Bengalis became entangled in the years after the war. At a linguistic level, the shift was registered by the increasing use of terms such as bideś (the foreign) and āntarjātik (international), as opposed to bilāt (England, or the West), to name the world abroad. The world outside empire increasingly became a resource and theme for artists and writers. Major changes in global geopolitical alignments and in the colonial politics of British India, and the relations between generations within Bengali bhadralok society, provide contexts for the rise of this international youth imagination.

The slavery debates in the antebellum United States sparked a turning point in American theology. They forced moderately antislavery Protestants, including William Ellery Channing, Francis Wayland, and Horace Bushnell, to reconcile their contradictory loyalties to the Bible and to antislavery reform. Unable to use the letter of the Bible to make a scriptural case against slavery in itself, the moderates argued that although slavery had been acceptable in biblical times, it had become a sin. Antislavery Protestantism required a theory of moral progress, a deeply unorthodox idea that became fundamental to the development of late nineteenth-century liberal Protestantism. The antislavery argument from moral progress, along with the moral progress represented by abolition, established a progressive conception of revelation that would be further developed by late nineteenth-century liberal theologians, including Newman Smyth, Lyman Abbott, and Theodore Munger.

Having put an end to his first great movement of non-cooperation following the First World War, Gandhi sat down to learn the lessons of this early experiment in mass politics. In 1926 he went on to impart these lessons to his fellow workers in the Sabarmati Ashram by way of a series of lectures on the Bhagavad Gita. Gandhi was interested in exploring the relations between violence and non-violence, which he thought were so intimate that one could very easily turn into the other. Seeking out the Archimedean point that made such a turning possible, the Mahatma had occasion to criticize any ethics that would divide good from evil on the basis of a moral calculus. How, he asked, was an ethics possible that recognized the intractability of ignorance and compulsion? Any ethical system that relied upon knowledge and choice, he thought, was either deluded or true only for a very small elite. A common ethics, then, had to be one which recognized ignorance and compulsion not negatively, as posing limits to moral life, but rather in the form of positive virtues like duty and obedience. Gandhi's commentary on the Gita was therefore an attempt to think about moral action in the context of ignorance and compulsion, which he did by focusing on the integrity of the act itself divested of the idealism lent it by any moral calculus.

This essay shows that the central core of Tocqueville's book, its condemnation of the centralist state of the Old Regime, can be placed in a specific tradition in French political thought—the legitimist critique of centralization. Long before the publication of L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution, the legitimists had made the problem of centralization into one of their central themes, and they had come to attribute all of France's ills to the centralist legacy. As this essay illustrates, the particular vocabulary and arguments used by the legitimists to describe the nefarious effects of centralization on the French body politic showed a considerable resemblance to the language used by Tocqueville in L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution. Indeed, this resemblance is so striking that, while direct influence is difficult to pinpoint, the legitimist publicists and political thinkers discussed in this essay—many of whom were friends or acquaintances of Tocqueville's—contributed in an important way to shaping the linguistic universe in which L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution was created.