This article suggests that Henry, third Earl Grey, had a vision of a liberal British world, which he hoped to implement through a political career. It was based on strong executive governance, representative politics, and the abolition of protection and slavery. It relied on the free market and good race relations to bring progress. He rejected the idea that legislation could impose improvement on colonial peoples. His program was quickly derailed, because of turbulent representative politics in Britain and the colonies after 1848. Later political developments made any integrated liberal vision of empire even more impractical. Studying Grey's arguments, and their fate, can help the task of defining British imperial liberalism. It is best understood as an attempt to check (Tory) vested interests, rather than as an ideology of interventionist improvement. Its priorities and tensions make most sense in relation to the concepts, assumptions, and turning points that dominated British politics.

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.

Scholarship largely holds that the “Persianate world”—a transregional sphere of cultural exchange mediated by an Indian Ocean lingua franca—was put paid to by a colonizing English East India Company. Against that historiography, this article reveals how colonial and Indo-Persian modern textual trends were coproduced. Reading a first-person account of the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, written in 1815–17 by a prince from a Mughal successor state under Company rule, the article argues that the travelogue's unprecedented form of a diary, and its uncharacteristically affective contents for Indo-Persian prose, drew on emerging genres and Romantic ideologies in British India. But while this resulted in a new kind of Indo-Persian ego-document, this text of Indian Ocean travel remained, however, anchored in Mughal concepts of moods and manners. As such it betrayed transitional tensions that compel a reconsideration of how colonialism led ultimately to the passing of a precolonial Persianate Babel.

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.

Recent scholarship has examined Alexis de Tocqueville's underexplored assertion that American racial stratification functioned as an extension of European feudalism. However, Tocqueville was not alone in his insights. At least a half-dozen nineteenth-century African American writers and thinkers, including Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Maria Stewart, Harriet Jacobs, Sojourner Truth, and especially Hosea Easton, have also described America's racial hierarchy as a continuation of antecedent European feudal social structures. Not only do their perspectives on what I call racial feudalism in America lend credence to Tocqueville's hypothesis that the afterlife of medieval social frameworks continued to persist in the post-Enlightenment United States, but also black Americans establish a distinctive body of knowledge that must be read alongside Tocqueville to render a more complete understanding of antebellum US social hierarchy.

Istanbul's intellectual life saw an evolutionist paradigm shift during the Hamidian period (1876–1908). Two generations of intellectuals used their privileged education and the burgeoning printing press to popularize evolutionism to advance global and local claims. On the one hand, selective readings of evolutionism allowed them to claim Ottoman adherence to a superior Caucasian race and to claim belonging to the circle of “civilized nations.” On the other hand, by hailing themselves champions of a new positivist age, oppositional evolutionists sought to challenge the Hamidian establishment and the kind of Islam it represented. Because examinations of Ottoman evolutionism in the Hamidian period reveal the interconnections between new globalized ways of ordering the world, the rise of new Ottoman elites, and conflicting strategies to guarantee imperial survival in the asymmetrical age of empire, they allow transcending narratives centered on the (ir)reconcilability of Islam and evolutionary theories.

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.

This article analyzes Dolf Sternberger's post-World War II argumentation against proportional representation. Sternberger is central in the intellectual history of German democratization. However, he expressed his misgivings about parties and proportionality in a perplexingly antidemocratic register. Proportionality was anonymous, mechanical, dead, and purely mathematical, relying on “mere numbers” and “summing up” as opposed to living, dynamic, and organic political relations—ultimately not a form of political electing at all. Sternberger intentionally mobilized age-old topoi and metaphors which interwar antidemocratic authors had used against parliamentary democracy in its entirety, now skillfully redirecting their force against proportional representation more specifically. Sternberger's intricate metaphorical system linked his anti-proportional views to his theory of active civic engagement and ultimately served pro-democratic aspirations in the altered historical situation. His case exemplifies broader continuities between interwar and postwar discourses and highlights the need to read metaphorical argumentation in historical contexts and pragmatically rather than merely semantically.

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 examines the reconfigurations of British anarchist politics and culture, focusing on the reception of William Godwin by three influential anarchist writers and activists: George Woodcock, Colin Ward, and Albert Meltzer. It argues that mobilizing Godwin was an important part of their efforts to define, and then defend, a particular version of anarchist intellectual culture in Britain, each with its own unique history and strategic perspectives regarding social and political change. These competing conceptualizations of Godwin's legacy and significance therefore reflected both their independent political and intellectual concerns and developing rifts in the broader anarchist movement, especially between proponents of gradualism and those of more militant forms of anarchism. Ultimately, for all three, Godwin became a cipher for internal ideological struggles in anarchist politics, as his pliable ideas were mobilized in the battle for the meaning of British anarchism.

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.

This article reintroduces Italian antifascist intellectual Nicola Chiaromonte to anglophone twentieth-century intellectual history by foregrounding Chiaromonte's transatlantic exchange with the New York intellectuals. Drawing from Chiaromonte's unpublished notes and correspondence, as well as his published writing in English and Italian, it elaborates how what I call Chiaromonte's “negative utopianism” migrated concepts and concerns from the political-philosophical context of 1930s Paris to 1940s New York. Though descriptions of Chiaromonte in New York accentuate his rejection of Marxism within sectarian radical circles, I resituate this tension vis-à-vis the philosophical clash between Chiaromonte's speculative, phenomenological conceptual framework and his US milieu's scientific rationalism and naturalistic pragmatism. Thanks to his influence on Dwight Macdonald's politics magazine, Chiaromonte became a contact point with the ideals animating the antifascist resistance and the theoretical transformations inaugurated by the decentered subject—one whose promotion of relationality and limit as grounds for recentering the transatlantic left had longer echoes.

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.

Using an intellectual-history lens, this article offers insights into the spread of phenomenology across Central Europe and its social–political significance in the second half of the twentieth century, particularly its impact on the formation of the Eastern European dissident movement and furnishing it with ideas. Specifically, the article explores the role that phenomenology played in defining one of the core concepts underlying Central European dissidence: the idea of hope. Tracing the story of three public intellectuals—Leszek Kołakowski, Józef Tischner, and Václav Havel—it suggests why the school founded by Edmund Husserl had been embraced by some and rejected by others, and how their particular interpretations of hope had been indebted to phenomenology.

This article contributes to an understanding of postimperial civilizational thinking within British conservatism by engaging with the work of Kenneth Minogue, an understudied but important thinker. Minogue played a key role in reframing an older discourse, centred on empire, in the register of free-market economics and global “competitiveness.” During the 1970s and 1980s, he was a significant figure on the New Right, critiquing university radicalism, feminism, and multiculturalism. During the 1990s his thought took a civilizational turn, and he condemned the liberal projects of political elites for undermining the West's traditional competitive ethos. The bureaucracy of the European Union and the economic rise of East Asian “state societies” were particular concerns for Minogue and led him to champion the concept of the Anglosphere as a distinct civilization.

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.

At the California State Polytechnic University in San Luis Obispo, where I teach, the subjects traditionally defined as “science”—physics, chemistry, biology—make their institutional home in the College of Science and Mathematics. The history department, on the other hand, is housed in the College of Liberal Arts, alongside philosophy, English, psychology, and the umbrella “social sciences” of sociology, anthropology, and religious studies, to name a few. Why, one might ask, have these fields been organized this way? What exactly distinguishes science from the liberal arts? Meanwhile, within the College of Science and Mathematics, highly credentialed professors offer courses in astronomy and chemistry, but not astrology and alchemy. Why not? My students might respond that the answers are obvious: alchemy is not real science, of course, and whereas science is objective and empirical, the liberal arts are subjective and interpretive. But where did these distinctions originate? Who determines and maintains them? What, if anything, can the history of these categories tell us about the waxing and waning of scientific authority in the twentieth century?

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.