Voltaire's first historical work (History of Charles XII, 1731) is frequently read as a piece of literary satire designed to ridicule the tradition of military heroes and warmongering monarchs. I offer a contrasting perspective and make the case that the book grapples with a problem both epistemic and poetic: how to narrate and make sense of an implausible or unbelievable past. In shedding light on this issue, this article questions widely held assumptions about the relationship between truth, plausibility, and history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It pushes back against the notion that Voltaire, like other neoclassical historians, had a rigid and naive understanding of the implausible as “fabulous” or “unhistorical.” Instead, I make the case that the implausible to Voltaire often pointed to a necessary and meaningful aspect of histories as narratives of the grand, the extraordinary, and the grotesque.

Few of the recent treatments exploring Leviathan's dramatic expansion of ecclesiological considerations have delved into the political circumstances that furnished Hobbes's immediate Parisian surroundings, as he penned the work during the 1640s. This paper examines French ecclesial debates that were triggered by the publication of a polemical collection of texts narrating the “rights and liberties of the Gallican church.” Many of the tracts included had been written during the accession crisis of the late sixteenth century, and advocated a sacralized view of kingship in order to exclude papal jurisdictional claims in France. This paper argues that innovations in Leviathan's sacred history mirror tropes employed by Gallican writers, so that Hobbes can be seen as adopting a parallel strategy in establishing Leviathan's Supreme Pastor. This explication suggests that Hobbes composed Leviathan to appropriate, rather than eliminate, claims associated with “spiritual” power for the civil sovereign, as critical to the exercise of sovereignty.

This article examines the concepts of revolution that political actors employed during the age of Atlantic revolutions (c.1760–1830) and how they used these concepts to analyze, compare, and connect the era's political events. The article begins by briefly recapitulating the evolving meanings of revolution in the seventeenth century and the early eighteenth. The capacious concept of a “revolution of government” that developed in the eighteenth century remained in regular use into the 1820s as a key conceptual tool to imaginatively connect otherwise disparate political movements/phenomena. Revolutionaries also created two new concepts, “total” and “limited” revolution, that were crucial to drawing political distinctions, especially between the American and French revolutions. These three concepts of revolution, I argue, all gave late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century actors an unusual degree of flexibility—which did not exist before or after the period—in describing the temporal and causal dynamics of revolutionary change.

Rousseau claims that the lawgiver must “persuade without convincing,” binding this legislative communication to the “first language,” which would, Rousseau writes, “persuade without convincing, and depict without arguing.” Drawing on a wide range of contextual sources, I show that this first language of Rousseau's is figurative, imagistic, and modeled on ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, which William Warburton claimed were “the uniform voice of nature” in his Divine Legation of Moses. More importantly, I demonstrate that Rousseau was himself using this lost ancient language to provide a figuration of his own: the “illusory image” of natural man. Through the Second Discourse, men could be persuaded that they were by nature free, preparing the way for a social contract in which they could legitimately give themselves law. This is an image that I argue has been effectively persuasive up to the present day—and our politics, like Rousseau's, thus seemingly rests on figurative foundations.

The term science sociale was first employed by Mirabeau père in 1767, not Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès in 1789, as historians until now believed. Taking this discovery as its starting point, this article examines the ways in which the idea of a science of society was successively conceptualized in the late eighteenth century by Mirabeau, Sieyès, and Nicolas de Condorcet. Situating their ideas in the context of evolving discussions over the reform of the French state, it argues that they developed three different versions of social science, and that these reflected different attempts to answer the question of how to achieve collective prosperity, justice, and happiness under modern conditions. This article further highlights the changing modes of historical temporality that informed those approaches, which shifted from a focus on the social forms of a mythical past, to a concern with the prevailing norms of the present, to an emphasis, finally, on the likely developments of an ever-perfecting future. In doing so, it shows that the history of early French social science is best understood not as a process of gradual advancement, but rather as one of serial reinvention.

Recent studies have identified the revival of the idea of democracy in early nineteenth-century French thought. This article recovers one important reason behind this revival: democracy became a response to another debate that emerged during that period—the “social question.” Although not well known in the English-speaking world, Louis Blanc was one of the most important socialist figures during the July Monarchy in France. Examining Blanc's Organization of Labor, this article shows how Blanc mobilized democracy to challenge the July Monarchy's exclusionary representative government and its reduction of the “social question” to pauperism. Blanc argued that industrial competition created a system of domination and proposed democratic reorganization of labor as a way to promote the common good. Blanc reformulated the “social question” as a democratic question, arguing that poverty and class domination can be solved not by administrative measures but through democratic participation in work and in the republic.

If cochlear implants continue to meet with much resistance from parts of the Deaf community and beyond, this reflects constructions of speech that have been at the core of conceptions of humankind for over three centuries. Starting in the 1750s, Julien Offray de La Mettrie advocated for deaf people's potential for speech. This was also the time of the creation of schools for deaf children, which led to a surge of debate about teaching sign language versus speech. The reception of the speaking machine of Canon Mical, a now forgotten inventor, offered another context in which to question the source of the expressive power of language. By retracing debates about the mechanical nature of articulated speech, the potential limits of communication, and what really constitutes its expressive power, we can better understand how the experience of current technology develops out of conflicts first introduced at the birth of modernity.

For over two decades, historians of the early modern world have been charting the practices, principles, and ideologies of the “Republic of Letters,” an intellectual community forged via paper, not place. Few, however, have ever ventured to consider America's place in this scholarly republic. This article charts in new detail the aspirations—and shortcomings—of eighteenth-century American efforts to participate in a truly transnational, intellectual community. Focusing on the life of Ezra Stiles (1727–95), it will dig into hundreds of unpublished, untranslated manuscripts, as well as scores of overlooked early modern periodicals and publications. What emerges is a glimpse into how Stiles especially strove to place America on the intellectual map of the early modern world. Stiles's plan was to lay the academic groundwork for his new nation by forging connections between universities and promoting a unified intellectual front to the Republic of Letters abroad. In one sense, this vision was remarkably shrewd, standing out as one of the first efforts to connect colonial universities. On the personal level, however, this (over)emphasis on institutions came at a cost. Too preoccupied with the colonial American universities and too little focused on publication, Stiles would ultimately struggle to be recognized as a citizen of the scholarly republic.

From the 1670s Stoic philosophy had been closely associated with atheism and the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza. However, in 1771 the historian Christoph Meiners published a short essay on the concept of apatheia that revived interest in Stoic philosophy within the German lands. Over the following years, he and his colleague Dieterich Tiedemann developed a novel interpretation claiming that Stoicism closely prefigured the philosophy of John Locke and represented a source of valuable philosophical ideas. Immanuel Kant, his allies, and later Idealists such as Hegel adopted this empiricist interpretation, despite their otherwise deep philosophical disagreements with Meiners and Tiedemann. Tracing eighteenth-century German debates around Stoicism reveals how it came to be considered a form of empiricism. As well as contributing to recent scholarship on the reception of Stoicism, the article suggests a major point of intersection between currents of the Enlightenment usually only treated separately.

This article argues that the emotion of shame explains how John Stuart Mill and the Jamaica Committee developed intellectual arguments in response to the brutal suppression by Governor Edward Eyre of the Morant Bay rebellion in post-emancipation colonial Jamaica in 1865. Positioning the emotions as integral to cognitive systems, the article traces Mill and the committee's arguments against their opponents, the Eyre Defence Committee. The Jamaica Committee was not solely concerned with liberal imperial order. Instead, under Mill's leadership, the committee sought to reconstruct and defend the pre-rebellion political culture that freedpeople in Jamaica had developed. The committee also demonstrated the illegality of martial law. There were, nonetheless, differences between Mill and other committee members, including Charles Buxton and Frederic Harrison. Shame, the emotion experienced when a subject fails to meet the values to which they are attached, helps to explain these differences. Shame also helped to generate the possibility of reforming the colonial political relationship.

By recovering the pre-critical foundations of Immanuel Kant's political idealism, this article elucidates his fundamental concern with reorienting the “point of view” of real princes and sovereigns to the cause of peace. I trace this priority to Kant's reading of Pierre Bayle, whose skepticism illustrated that the true nature of princes rendered Saint-Pierre's ideal of peace “not possible.” Beginning in 1756, Kant reframed perpetual peace as the ultimate political honor for those unmoved by strict moral necessity, promising them a legacy that was entwined with the providential course of human history. This appeal to honor identified the first necessary phase of political change, accounting for ruling motives that might otherwise lead to wars of conquest and expansion. This view of Kant's shrewd attempt to steer the “point of view” of real power, which persisted into his final political writings in the 1790s, challenges dominant readings of a Kantian politics concerned solely with the distant realization of ideal institutions.

Few books on political economy have become as influential as Capital, volume 1. After Karl Marx, in 1867, published the first volume of Capital on the capitalist mode of production, the book was published again in Russian in 1872, in a second German edition in 1872–3 and in French—as Le capital—in 1872–5. The publishing process of the French edition started in December 1871 in the wake of the Paris Commune. This article aims to investigate the conditions that led to the initiation of this process. We specifically argue that by looking at the Paris Commune and its aftermath, we are in a better position to understand the new possibilities it created for publishing Marx's work in French, the connections it facilitated, and the way it shaped the publishing process of Le capital.

Few scholars have ventured into the realm of the reception and representations of the USSR among Italian Fascists during the years 1928–36; that is, between Stalin's consolidation of power and the Spanish Civil War. This article contends that far from being absolute antagonists from the very beginnings, many Fascists found aspects of Stalinism and the USSR instructive and impressive. While for some the USSR represented a genuine attempt to revolutionize the social, economic, and cultural structures of everyday life, for others the revolutionary credentials of the Soviets were a sham. It was precisely the complex nature of these interpretations that gave Fascist visions of the USSR their nuance and open-mindedness. Finally, this article argues that the representations that emerged during these pivotal years convinced many Fascists that theirs was the “correct” and “superior” form of interpreting and enacting the totalitarian aspirations embedded in the modern revolutionary tradition.

The article explores the interaction of the German, Jewish, and Christian traditions in the first part of the twentieth century in Central Europe to show three cases, in which these traditions merge into one. I name the result of this interaction “Jewish–Christian religiosity.” The name conveys a desire, common to the cases discussed, to overcome the traditional distinctions between Jews and Germans and Jews and Christians. It also conveys the belief that spirituality could bridge the gap between people and promote a more open society for all. All three cases expand notions first conceived by Romantic and idealist thinkers in order to facilitate interest in arcane Jewish sources like the Kabbalah and Hasidism. As the article suggests, eclectic worldviews like those discussed here may appear unfamiliar, but they continue intellectual and cultural trends that were discussed in the literature before.

Ellen Gates Starr and Vida Dutton Scudder are not the best-known names of the Progressive Era. Yet they were at the forefront of progressive reform in the 1880s through the 1910s, and they helped to create the ideas and institutions that defined the settlement house movement. Their prominent historical role demands that we pay serious attention to their alternative visions of progressivism. Starr and Scudder were more politically radical, and more religiously traditional, than many of their peers. Each woman integrated a radical embrace of social transformation with High Church Christian cosmology, creating a Catholic socialist progressivism that contrasts to both other settlement workers and the male leaders of Christian socialism. This article explicates Starr's and Scudder's belief systems and argues for their importance to the history of progressive reform and to the intellectual history of American social change. Although each thinker had her own emphasis—Starr foregrounded art, while Scudder focused on uniting Marxism with Catholicism—Starr, Scudder, and their friendship represent a lost destiny of the progressive movement: a worker-led movement grounded in religious faith.

This article examines late nineteenth and early twentieth-century historiographical practices and convictions in Third Republic France. It shifts the focus from the question of whether French academic historians were nationalists to the issue of how they were nationalists. If republican academic historians took a critical stance on nationalist distortions of the past, they nevertheless associated the teaching of history with patriotism and opposed historiographical “pan-Germanism” in ways favorable to French cultural and territorial claims. Meanwhile, the growing internationalization of the field stimulated scholarly competition across the West and spurred reflections about nationals’ epistemological privilege over national histories, methodological nationalism, and the invention of national historiographical traditions. Uncovering the anxieties of continual debate with foreign historians and the nationalist right wing, this article offers a prehistory of present-day dilemmas over global, national, and nationalist histories in an international field characterized by structural inequalities and academic competition.

The political thought of Ireland's revolutionary generation has, in recent years, attracted increasing attention from scholars. However, the historiography of the Irish revolution and its aftermath remains marked by an enduring tendency to critique, rather than contextualize, the types of nationalist and religious motivations proffered commonly to justify political action in the early decades of the twentieth century. Focusing on the intellectual output of one highly original and conspicuously under-researched thinker, Aodh de Blácam, this article seeks to make some contribution towards redressing this historiographical deficit. In addition to highlighting the richness of the engagement with international debates in political theory that obtained among many members of Ireland's revolutionary generation, de Blácam's work illustrates vividly the heterodox range of influences that shaped Irish nationalism between the wars and the diverse conceptions of modernity that were formulated in response to the social and economic upheaval of the period.

This article identifies Algeria as a significant, if obscure, topos in Arendt's writing. It traces various moments of this encounter across Arendt's oeuvre, in well-known texts, such as The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and “On Violence” (1969), as well as in lesser-known writings, such as “Why the Crémieux Decree Was Abrogated” (1943). In pursuing this trajectory, the article argues that Arendt's sustained engagement with Algeria reflects an ongoing and ambivalent negotiation with French imperialism. While Arendt continually falls back on an apologetic discourse concerning the French imperial nation-state, her text nonetheless hints at an important geometric lesson about the space–time of its legal structure: the differential temporalities governing its regime of assimilation and its regime of decree. Through a parallel recasting of Arendt's famous distinction between power and violence, this article delimits colonial rule in Algeria as a question of speed.

This article traces the influence of theology on one particular strand of secularization theory that emerged from the work of Ernst Kantorowicz and Marcel Gauchet. It shows how Kantorowicz's classic text, The King's Two Bodies, was deeply indebted to the insights of one of the leading Catholic theologians of the twentieth century: the French Jesuit Henri de Lubac. By tracing the influence of de Lubac's work on Kantorowicz and, through him, on the secularization theory developed by Marcel Gauchet, the article uncovers a surprising convergence between theology and the secular disciplines. In the process, it draws attention to the limitations of secularization narratives that focus on the premodern theological origins of modern political concepts, by showing how they struggle to account for the ongoing role and relevance of theology in a modern context.

The purpose of this article is to unearth the genealogy of M. K. Gandhi's “non-violence,” the cardinal principle of satyāgraha. Previous works considered that Gandhi's concept of non-violence was essentially derived from the “ancient” Hindu–Jain precept of ahiṃsā (non-killing) common in the subcontinent. On the contrary, I will, by examining Gandhi's primary texts in Gujarati, Hindi, and English, demonstrate the following: (1) during Gandhi's sojourn in South Africa (1893–1914) where he led his first satyāgraha campaign, he never associated the term ahiṃsā with satyāgraha; (2) his satyāgraha campaign was initially explained with the trans-religious and cosmopolitan concepts of Tolstoy and the nirguṇ bhaktas; (3) Gandhi first began to use the term ahiṃsā as a nationalist slogan linked with satyāgraha immediately after his return to India in 1915; (4) the English translation of ahiṃsā as “non-violence” was eventually coined by Gandhi after 1919 during his all-India satyāgraha campaign.