This essay is about the relationship between the moral and political thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the related concepts of autonomy, social science and industrialism. Its aim is to show why these three concepts throw more light both on Rousseau's theory of the relationship between democratic sovereignty and representative government, and on his explanation of the sharply counterintuitive historical trajectory followed by democracy in its passage from ancient to modern times.

In the Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau presents himself as declaiming in “the Lyceum of Athens” but in the presence of Plato and Xenocrates. Why should Rousseau's arguments be heard in such precincts, and why, moreover, is Aristotle missing from them? Rousseau's response to the topic proposed by the Dijon Academy, on which the Discourse was based, may be correspondingly interpreted as a response to Aristotle's philosophy of nature and of the ways in which that philosophy informs the Politics in particular. The critique Rousseau thereby offers of an Aristotelian discourse of nature and society invokes a similar challenge once presented by ancient Epicureanism, and reflects the extraordinary revival of interest in Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things, a poem that became the focus of intense critical scrutiny during the Enlightenment. We may therefore understand why the Discourse on Inequality was read as an “Epicurean” text by certain contemporaries, and recognize particular critical objectives served by Epicurean philosophical resources that were further deployed in works like the Social Contract and Letters Written from the Mountain, reflecting Rousseau's engagement with Genevan reform politics of the 1750s and 1760s.

This article pursues the origin and mutation of a fantastic story concerning an automaton in the shape of a young girl that was supposedly built by René Descartes. In recent decades it has been retold and reimagined so many times that the tale has become an iconic narrative in the context of the reassessment of Descartes's significance in intellectual history. But a close reading of the original story, found in a 1699 work entitled Mélanges d'histoire et de littérature by Vigneul-Marville, reveals an overtly stated agenda of saving the philosopher's moral reputation, which makes most recent interpretations of the story problematic. The vast majority of modern retellings demonstrate no awareness of the content or the significance of the first tale even as it has been used to shed light on Descartes, Cartesian ideas, and early modern thought in general.

This article examines the changing nature of fear in Enlightenment France. While the growing power of the absolutist state reduced many traditional sources of insecurity, fears of state power proliferated during the eighteenth century, prompting leading figures of the French Enlightenment to turn their attention to the problem of political fear: its sources, its effects, and the means for overcoming it. One of the unifying aspects of the Enlightenment was its commitment to reducing the burden of fear in human existence. From that standpoint, however, political fear posed a particular challenge since the objects on which it focused could not be dismissed as purely imaginary. Unlike such traditional religious terrors as hell, purgatory, and the Devil, police agents, police spies, and prisons really existed. And yet political fears too were mediated—and magnified—by collective imaginaries. The fear of imprisonment stands out as a key example of such a phenomenon. Best-selling prison memoirs published in the early 1780s sought to mobilize public opinion against lettres de cachet (administrative arrest warrants) by evoking the horrors of imprisonment, and especially its psychological torments: solitude, tedium, uncertainty about the future, and the looming threat of insanity. In these works, prisoners inhabit a separate self-contained world, helpless before the omnipotent will of their jailers, who rule over them like “oriental despots.” The wide dissemination of terrifying images of the prison contributed to building the public pressure for the abolition of lettres de cachet during the Revolution, but the enormous commercial success of the memoirs suggests that some readers found the depictions of life behind prison walls darkly fascinating as well as terrifying. Much the same could be said of readers’ responses to the exposés of Revolutionary prisons published after Thermidor, the Gothic novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the fictional universe of the Marquis de Sade, all of which drew heavily on the carceral imaginary invented under the Old Regime.

Since the early twentieth century, historians of political thought have read Immanuel Kant's interventions into debates over the French Revolution—his essay on “Theory and Practice” (1795), and his tract on Perpetual Peace (1793)—against Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Kant is said to have upheld the sovereignty of pure reason for political practice, over and against Burke's stubborn traditionalism. What this dichotomy ignores, however, is that Kant's first public comments on the Revolution were directed not against Burke's Reflections, but against a heavily edited German version of the text published in 1793 by Kant's former student, Friedrich Gentz (1764–1832). The central thrust of Gentz's translation was that while Kant's normative theory of politics was admirable, it needed to be complemented with a prudential grasp of statecraft in order to be made practicable. Without prudence, the rights of man would remain an empty ideal. In responding to Gentz, Kant entered into a debate over whether philosophical reason and political prudence are mutually compatible. His dogmatic refusal to endorse such an alliance, even in the face of the Terror, places his political thought in an unfavourable light.

The British philosopher F. C. S. Schiller (1864–1937) was a leading pragmatist in the early twentieth century. His critiques of formal logic and his attempts to construct a humanist logic, derived from an anti-foundationalist humanism, are recognized as lasting philosophical achievements. But scholars have failed to consider that Schiller was passionately committed to the British eugenics movement. This essay explores the relationship between Schiller's pragmatism and his eugenicism. It argues that Schiller represents the broad scope of pragmatism in the early twentieth century through his involvements not only with eugenics, but also with psychical research as well. Underneath Schiller's various undertakings lies a common theme: the self, conceived in voluntaristic, historicist, and concrete terms. By tracing the trajectory of this theme in Schiller's thought, this essay demonstrates that Schiller's eugenicism was confined to the presuppositions of his pragmatist logic, which steered Schiller's eugenicism toward a distinctively nondeterministic and non-social-Darwinist kind.

This essay explores the publication and reception of John Stuart Mill's Principles of Political Economy in late imperial Russia. First published during the era of the Great Reform, Mill's Principles was discussed within the context of the Russian debate on capitalism and land reform. It became popular not only among economists and university students but also the intelligentsia who dominated the debate on capitalism in Russia until the last decade of the century. In reading the Principles, they focused primarily on Mill's discussion of social questions and the ethics of capitalism rather than on the theoretical subjects of economics. In Russia, as in England, the reception of Mill's ideas was not uniform, reflecting the readers’ diverging political views and assumptions. In Russia, however, the tendency towards selective reading was more pronounced and the labels attached to Mill were more extreme.

Historical epistemology is a form of intellectual history focused on “the history of categories that structure our thought, pattern our arguments and proofs, and certify our standards for explanation” (Lorraine Daston). Under this umbrella, historians have been studying the changing meanings of “objectivity,” “impartiality,” “curiosity,” and other virtues believed to be conducive to good scholarship. While endorsing this historicization of virtues and their corresponding vices, the present article argues that the meaning and relative importance of these virtues and vices can only be determined if their mutual dependencies are taken into account. Drawing on a detailed case study—a controversy that erupted among nineteenth-century orientalists over the publication of R. P. A. Dozy's De Israëlieten te Mekka (The Israelites in Mecca) (1864)—the paper shows that nineteenth-century orientalists were careful to examine (1) the degree to which Dozy practiced the virtues they considered most important, (2) the extent to which these virtues were kept in balance by other ones, (3) the extent to which these virtues were balanced by other scholars’ virtues, and (4) the extent to which they were expected to be balanced by future scholars’ work. Consequently, this article argues that historical epistemology might want to abandon its single-virtue focus in order to allow balances, hierarchies, and other dependency relations between virtues and vices to move to the center of attention.

This article is an account of the mid-Victorian conservative reaction to the increasing prominence of the notion of nationality in British debates on European affairs. Conservatives perceived the idea of nationality as a threat, which they tried to deflect by deploying three sets of arguments. They attempted to marginalize the notion by reframing nationality as neither a valuable nor a fundamental aspect of political life; they argued that the sentiment of nationality increased aggression in international affairs and was a threat to the European order; and they argued that nationality was often incompatible with constitutional liberty and a proper patriotism, thereby presenting liberals’ support for nationality as inconsistent with their own values. This conservative rejection and problematization of nationality in mid-Victorian Britain has been absent from existing scholarly work, which has focused on the qualified acceptance of the notion by Victorian liberals and Edwardian conservatives.

Prior to World War II, the founder and key theorist of Poland's Christian Democratic movement—the Silesian political revolutionary Wojciech Korfanty—developed a sophisticated “Catholic rights-talk” in conversation with trends in Western European Catholic thought. In the wake of the Holocaust, however, both in ephemeral political opposition on Polish soil and in subsequent exile, Poland's Christian Democrats abandoned their interwar rights discourse. This essay explores that shift, locating its source in interwar Polish Catholic anti-Semitism. Given the Holocaust's perverse fulfillment of Polish Christian Democracy's crucial 1930s advocacy of restricting the political and economic life of Poland to rights-endowed Christians—necessitating the removal of Jewish “non-persons”—the Poles’ transnational postwar advocacy vacillated between Cold War cooperation with American-aligned governments and a desire to participate in the governance of a Poland that, even if Communist, had finally become a “nationally homogeneous state.”

This article focuses on how late Ottoman intellectuals selectively read the sociologist Emile Durkheim and used his thoughts to rediscover and reform their own classical, normative Islamic and social theories. Emile Durkheim, a late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French thinker who combined philosophy with social and political issues, powerfully inspired one of the late Ottoman intellectual circles that aimed to provide theoretical underpinnings for a significant transformation of Turkish society. The article takes a closer look at the school of Ziya Gökalp, the acknowledged pioneer of social thought in Turkey, highlighting also lesser-known works of some of his followers, and how they perceived—in distinct ways—Durkheim's views in a Gökalpian manner, seeking a new synthesis with Islamic legal and religious interpretations to modernize their society in connection with the past. It thus explores some creative Ottoman appropriations of Durkheimian methodology for a different cultural environment.

Intellectual historians often invoke “romanticism” to account for the origins and conceptual shape of nationalism. In an Irish context, however, this approach has yielded false genealogies of influence and an impaired political understanding. Cast through a “romantic” prism, nationalism is divorced from its conditions of intelligibility, becoming unhelpfully isolated from questions about sovereignty, democratic legitimacy and the nature of modern citizenship. Thus all too often the irrationality that is made part of the definition of “romantic nationalism” is a function of the way that it is interpreted.

Hannah Arendt's early writings, focused on Jewish politics in the 1930s and 1940s, are in many ways her most directly political work. Yet certain problematic concepts in these texts, notably the idea of the “Jewish nation,” have led many to disregard it. A shift in the themes of Arendt's work following the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951 has resulted in further divisions being drawn between the pre- and post-Origins work. This essay opposes both these positions. By mapping out the causes and development of Arendt's thought on the “Jewish nation,” in particular through her critical engagement with Zionism and her support of a binational or federal political solution in Israel and Palestine, the influence of Arendt's early thought on Jewish politics is shown to form the basis of a more general theory of politics, further developed in her later work on the nature of the political.

Georg Jellinek was one of the legal theorists who brought a new level of methodological sophistication to German public law scholarship at the turn of the twentieth century. Where previous research has called attention to his theory of conceptual “types” and his application of contemporary neo-Kantian epistemology to the law, this article explores his thinking on the nature of values and value judgments, and the possibilities for objectivity in the legal and political sciences. Jellinek sought to open an increasingly calcified legal positivism to the findings of the social sciences and to an inherently pluralistic, changing world of subjective values, but without abandoning the positivist ideals of legal certainty and the exclusion of political and other value judgments. Analyzing his response to this challenge opens a window onto his broader work in public law and political science, illuminating doctrines like the “two-sided” theory of the state and the “normative power of the factual,” which have achieved a lasting place in German legal and political theory. It also shows why Jellinek put aside the traditional ideal of bias-free objectivity for a surprisingly modern vision of a process of intersubjective agreement, driven by the institutions of free and open scholarly debate.

Before his death in 1987, Jacob Taubes played an important role in postwar German academic philosophy and religious thought. Best known for his leftist political theology and scholarship on the history of Western eschatology, Taubes's thought was influential on mid-twentieth-century debates in Germany about secularization and modern political theology. Outside his relationship with Carl Schmitt, however, Taubes has received little attention in histories of postwar European thought, and few attempts have been made to understand his idiosyncratic work on its own terms. This essay presents new contexts for understanding Taubes and his political-theological critique of the ideological dominance of liberalism in postwar Germany. By analyzing Taubes's thought through the lens of his intellectual quarrel with Hans Blumenberg over secularization, it reassesses his contributions to postwar debates about the political temporality appropriate to a secular and non-utopian social theory, and the consequences of these debates for broader critiques of political liberalism.

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.

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 early 1940s, Felice Balbo and Giaime Pintor judged and re-envisioned Europe from a shared observation point in Turin with two institutional settings: the publishing house Giulio Einaudi Editore and the Italian Committee for the Armistice with France. Their privileged perspective—so far little known outside Italy—offers interesting clues about forms of opposition to Fascism and National Socialism by a generation that grew up under dictatorship. Drawing on unpublished sources and memoirs, this essay retraces a dialogue among friends, showing how young members of the Italian intelligentsia designed eccentric scenarios to overcome a nazified Europe. An overly enthusiastic reception of American culture, illusions about impending insurrections in Germany, and a general attraction to German culture helped Balbo and Pintor in becoming active antifascists.

Colleagues hailed the Rutgers University historian Warren Susman as a pioneer in the field of cultural history and popular culture when he died in 1985 at the age of fifty-eight. Although well known, Susman had published just a handful of essays, a collection of which was published only the year before his death. Despite his reputation, this work was not widely reviewed and when it was, not uniformly positively. This essay explores the disjunction between his work and his reputation and, through an analysis of archival sources, including Susman's newly available personal papers, argues that Susman's importance lies less in his contributions to the field of cultural history than in his understanding of the relationship between historical work and the critical intellectual heritage of progressivism. The essay traces Susman's early professional career and historical work, including his unpublished doctoral study of expatriate intellectuals and his critical engagement with the legacy of the Progressive historians, and his mid-career efforts to join with other left scholars in establishing a new socialist party. Susman's career allows for the analysis and better understanding of the progressive tradition in historical scholarship, the changes in intellectual and cultural history in the 1960s, and the way historians have understood their role in social reform.

This article begins with a remark by Jean-Pierre Vernant in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France about the inadequacy of Max Weber's historical sociology for the study of ancient religions. Despite posing shared research questions and often reaching similar conclusions, Vernant, one of the most influential twentieth-century ancient historians, neither engaged nor acknowledged Weber and thereby secured his absence in the field of ancient religions generally. Vernant's narrative of the historical emergence of Greek rationality is at direct odds with Weber's views on the matter in Sociology of Religion and elsewhere, and I argue that, beyond methodological concerns, Vernant's fundamentally Durkheimian position inherits early twentieth-century polemics between French and German sociologists. Vernant's relationships with Marcel Mauss, Ignace Meyerson, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, and his participation in the French Resistance, moreover, reaffirmed his Durkheimian views about society and committed him to a long tradition of anti-German scholarship. I conclude with a brief coda on the historiographical implications of these observations for the study of religion and its relation to social life.