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 centers on the early writings of Isaac Breuer (1910–17), arguing that Breuer's radicalization of neo-Kantianism anchors his revolutionary call to politicize Jewish Orthodoxy. Moreover, it contends that neo-Kantianism, which is normally associated with liberal or social-democratic politics, was given a thoroughly antiliberal reading by Breuer that led to an antiliberal Orthodox politics. While the rise of non-Zionist political Orthodoxy is often regarded as an obsolete traditionalism unattuned to the nature of mass politics, Breuer's politicization of Orthodoxy reveals a coherent antiliberal political theory that addresses the aporias of the democratic age. Breuer uses neo-Kantianism to develop an anti-Weberian “science of politics” which attempts to overcome the modern plurality of values by positing Judaism as coercive public morality. Reading Breuer's Jewish writings through the lens of his quarrels with Weber, Stammler, and Cohen, this article explores Breuer's attempt to overcome the association of Kantian morality with liberalism, by legitimizing coercion politically, philosophically, and theologically. This enabled Breuer to criticize apolitical forms of Jewish Orthodoxy, Zionist programs to politicize Judaism, and democratic politics more generally.

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.

How does Durkheim's thought relate to colonialism, imperialism, and postcolonial theory? To answer these questions, I first examine his explicit discussions of empire and colonialism, which are more extensive than previously thought. I then explore the implications of his general perspective—particularly his theories of anomie and morality—for discussions of colonialism and empire. I find that Durkheim was very critical of violent forms of colonialism and imperialism and that he firmly rejected the civilizational and racist discourses that underpinned modern European, and French, colonial conquest. He rejected forms of empire that exist “without internal acquiescence from their subjects,” and that engage in “conquest via annexation” and military imperialism. As an alternative he advocated an “international system of states” based on a universal but socially and historically grounded morality. The article examines the ways Durkheim's thinking pushed beyond existing French understandings and criticisms of colonialism. I then examine the afterlives of his ideas in later research on colonialism by French sociologists. The conclusion considers postcolonial critiques of Durkheim and adumbrates a Durkheimian theory of colonialism and empire.

This article examines Morgenthau's switch from international law to international politics, arguing that it was fundamental to his emergence as a founder of postwar realism in the United States. More precisely, it sets this switch in the context of a far-reaching but largely overlooked debate among American jurists during the 1930s on the question of peaceful change: of how to revise an international order or major aspects of it by means other than war. This debate provided Morgenthau with a solution to the impasse reached by his project in international law before World War II, allowing him to transform what appeared to be a problem from the vantage point of international law into a structural element of an approach to international politics—of his realism.

This article offers a new account of the rise of judicial power in modern Germany. Strong judicial control of the government is often associated with the constitutional ethos that emerged in postwar West Germany as a reaction to Nazi rule. This article locates the origins of German judicialization in the political struggles of the Weimar era. It shows how the assumption of a power to judicial review by Germany's highest court, the Reichsgericht, was the product of the successful cooperation of the judiciary with conservative political parties on the issue of property rights in the young republic. These were at the centre of two controversies examined in the article: the expropriation of princes of former ruling houses and the consequences of the hyperinflation of 1923. In both cases the Reichsgericht used an understanding of property as an inalienable right to radically reinterpret Germany's first democratic constitution, which had in fact granted the legislature extensive power to modify property relations. This suited the judiciary's own objective of assuming stronger controls over legislative action and bolstered the political position of conservative forces in Weimar politics. What emerged was a supra-positive constitutionalism that sought to supersede the written constitution. These political realities were an essential context for theoretical debates on the extent and limits of judicial power between theorists such as Carl Schmitt, Hans Kelsen, Hermann Heller, Franz Neumann, and Ernst Fraenkel. An examination of the complex interaction of parliamentary, judicial, and popular politics concerning the issue of property reveals that German judicial empowerment amounted to an attempt to rewrite the Weimar Constitution and limit the scope of Germany's democratic revolution.

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 demonstrates how postwar racial liberalism simultaneously catalyzed and constrained mid-twentieth-century black intellectual labor by examining the production, reception, and subsequent reinvention of John Hope Franklin’s seminal 1947 black history survey, From Slavery to Freedom. Seeking to exploit growing postwar interest in histories of race, Franklin’s publishers, Knopf, continuously promoted Franklin as an authentic yet non-threatening black spokesperson who could explain the latest realities of blackness to concerned white liberals. While this double-edged praise accelerated Franklin’s rise to academic prominence, he increasingly smuggled a quiet radicalism within his text in the eight editions published during his lifetime, affirming American ideals while simultaneously illuminating their hypocrisies. Examining From Slavery to Freedom’s afterlives thus offers a panoramic narrative of black history’s evolution that spans the twentieth century, revealing the uneasy alliances and improvisations through which black scholars popularized black history while navigating the relentlessly racialized tensions of a white-dominated academy and nation.

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 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.

Scholars of modern South Asia have remained divided on the role of religion in the creation of Pakistan. Many have argued that Pakistan's “founder,” Muhammad Ali Jinnah, was a secularist, his argument for Pakistan resting on an abstract notion of Islam within an Enlightenment framework of conceiving minority, nation, and state. Why, then, did madrasa-trained Muslim scholars, the ulama, support his demand for Pakistan? This article explores the political thought of the most influential Muslim scholar immediately before partition, Shabbir Ahmad Usmani (d. 1949). I argue that Usmani viewed Pakistan as a particular kind of Islamic democracy. While he drew on medieval Muslim juridical and political discourses, Usmani's readings reveal his debt to Western political categories. By paying attention to the tensions and opportunities offered by this encounter of modern political conditions with Islamic intellectual thought, this article outlines an Islamic vision of the political that resonates beyond the politics of colonial India.

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.

Today, it seems impossible to discuss historians’ encounter with post-structuralist theory, the ensuing triumphant surge of the cultural turn, and the establishment of what scholars have recently called the postcultural historiography without the help of such paramount concepts of post-structuralist analysis as contingency, variability, instability, open-endedness, and so on. Having defined the last forty years of theoretical and methodological developments in history, these nowadays conventional tools of critique and interpretation have grown to become synonymous with the post-structuralist conceptual promise and outcome. This article questions this standard and exceptionally generous account. What if, the article asks, we start our account not with the resolute assertion of the radical contingency and variability of the post-structuralist view of history, but with something more fundamental to it—its own fixed and totalizing presuppositions? To show how an intellectual agenda opposed to fixed and totalizing reasoning can end up operating with fixed and totalizing logics of its own, the essay turns to Michel Foucault and his momentous career, to be traced from the 1960s to the 1980s.

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 what point can a social democrat be described as neoliberal? In 1982, Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck (1930–2020) left the Social Democratic Party, although he claimed to remain a social democrat by principle. Lindbeck was a central representative of the neo-Keynesian turn in economics after 1970. At the same time, he was a principled believer in the welfare state. This essay places Lindbeck, somewhat asymmetrically, in the context of two other Swedish economists: social democrat, eventually libertarian, Ingemar Ståhl, and trade union economist Gösta Rehn. My purpose in comparing these three economists is to examine the boundaries between an evolving social-democrat project and emergent neoliberal ideas. There were important connections of conversation, collaboration and friendship between these three actors. Yet they took different paths. The article proposes that understanding the relationship between social democracy and neoliberalism can be productively done through an emphasis on three things: the relationship between egalitarian objectives and economic instrumentalities in the social-democrat project, specific meeting points between social-democrat and neoliberal repertoires of ideas as proposed in the problem of the mixed economy, and the interplay of personal biographies and economic expertise.

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?

The work of Ronald Dworkin was central to the development of twentieth-century anglophone legal philosophy. This article offers the first discussion of a previously unknown and unpublished book manuscript by Dworkin which shows that he initially grounded his early legal thought in a wide-ranging methodological framework centered on ordinary language philosophy. Amidst heated debates over the draft for the Vietnam War, Dworkin developed a modified version of ordinary language analysis which, he contended, facilitated a critical stance towards what he called “conventional morality.” In this light, the widely acknowledged influence of the legal process school on Dworkin's early work appears as a transition from an earlier engagement with ordinary language philosophy. I conclude by tracing how Dworkin shifted towards the legal process school and how this reshaped the theoretical ambitions of his legal thought.

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.

Beginning with its emergence in the 1870s and carrying through to the wars of the 1990s, Yugoslav socialism was animated by various visions of supranational affiliation: from Balkan federalism to communist Slavism to the nonaligned movement and European unification. These projects were examples of what this article terms mediating spaces: strategies of spatial consolidation designed to mediate their constituent nations’ integration into global capitalist modernity. Throughout the long twentieth century intellectuals on the world periphery set out to secure political sovereignty and economic development at a scale between the national and the global. These spatial projects were particularly pronounced in Yugoslavia, where the fragmentation of multiethnic empires made questions of supranational unity especially urgent. Developing the concept of mediating spaces, this article proposes a mode of intellectual history that approaches the global not as the scope of intellectual mobility or the horizon of historical inquiry, but rather as a generative scale of human experience that conditioned the formation of modern radical thought.