Elie Halévy's legacy is bounded by the two primary objects of his scholarly interest: the history of modern Britain and the study of French socialist doctrines. Taken together, his writings on temperate English politics and occasionally intemperate French socialists cemented his status as a leading French liberal of his generation. Read out of context, the tone of his criticism of wartime socialization and the growth of wartime governments has given him a conservative reputation in some circles and inspired a backlash among historians seeking a more progressive Halévy in his prewar writings. Meanwhile, the depth of his historical study of Britain has elicited several discussions of Halévy's turn from philosophy to history at the end of the 1890s. The portrait of Halévy that emerges in light of his historical studies of England and of French socialism is detailed, accurate, and flattering, but, like any portrait, it is incomplete. Before he was a historian, Halévy was a philosopher, and before he mastered his craft in the early twentieth century, Halévy struggled to find his voice in the late nineteenth.

Elie Halévy became famous as a historian of England in the years before World War I, due to his lectures on England at the Ecole libre des sciences politiques, his three-volume analysis of utilitarianism published between 1901 and 1904, a 1906 article on the birth of Methodism, and the 1912 book L’Angleterre en 1815. In these last two works he argued—in what became known as the Halévy thesis—that English Protestantism, and especially the evangelical forms of English Protestantism associated with Methodism, were a key element of Britain's sociopolitical stability. This deep-seated religiosity, he argued, was supportive of British liberalism and British philanthropy; it was responsible for an England that, in his own words, “governs itself, in place of being governed from above.”

Liberalism in France has typically been concerned with political, rather than economic, issues. Its classic texts—those of Constant, Guizot, and Tocqueville—were written in the aftermath of the Revolution, and reflected on the historical and political problems that grew out of it: the nature of the modern state, the rights and duties of the individual, and the nexus of institutions that mediated their relationship. These writings defined the contours of modern French liberalism, and became a key resource for thinkers in the late 1970s, notably Pierre Rosanvallon and Marcel Gauchet, who were looking for ways to revitalize the liberal-democratic project. In his 1985 study of Guizot, Rosanvallon could regret that “the question of liberalism in French political culture of the nineteenth century is ‘missing’ in contemporary thought.”1 If the task of political theory was to recover this intellectual tradition, what were the terms of the recovery? Which ideas were missing from the conceptual landscape of the 1970s to inspire it?

Eighteenth-century Irish intellectual history has enjoyed a revival in recent years. New scholarly resources, such as the Hoppen edition of the papers of the Dublin Philosophical Society and the recently published Berkeley correspondence, have been fundamental to that revival. Since 1986 the journal Eighteenth-Century Ireland: Iris an dá chultúr has sponsored a complex conversation on the meaning and legacy of the eighteenth century in Irish history. Work in the journal and beyond deploying “New British” and Atlantic histories, as well as continuing attention to Europe, has helped to enrich scholarly understanding of the environments in which Irish people thought and acted. The challenge facing historians of Ireland has been to find categories of analysis that could comprehend religious division and acknowledge the centrality of the confessional state without reducing all Irish experience to sectarian conflict. Clearly the thought of the Irish Catholic community could not be approached without an understanding of the life of the Continental Catholic Church. Archivium Hibernicum has been collecting and publishing the traces of that history for a hundred years and new digital resources such as the Irish in Europe database have extended that work in new directions. The Atlantic and “New British” contexts have been more proximately important for the Protestant intellectual tradition.

The interpretation of liberalism as a project that not only masks, but enables, political domination has long held currency in South Asian historiography. Recently, the subject of liberalism and empire in both francophone and anglophone contexts has returned to discussions in broader imperial historiography. One especially pressing question that emerges from these approaches is how to analyze intellectuals of colonized countries, such as India, who themselves claimed liberal terminologies and pressed forth liberal arguments. Are they to be assessed by the same criteria as European liberals who argued for the rights of the individual, the free press, and individual property rights?

That Elie Halévy's The Growth of Philosophical Radicalism is a classic text of history and theory is a judgment repeated too often to be in doubt. But what makes it a classic? The most obvious sign—that it is widely recommended as a standard work in its field generations after its publication—raises the question of why and how a text becomes a leading work or “master” piece. Literary classics are sometimes said to fuse style, substance, and significance in a mysterious alchemy that continues to stimulate thought beyond the original context. Similarly, discussions of historical works that enlarge the imagination sometimes center on the literary qualities of these texts. Most famously, Hayden White dwells on their allegedly fruitful exploitation of a preexisting “linguistic protocol” such as tragedy or irony. White also notes, however, that a necessary condition for any work of history to resonate powerfully with its audience is that readers are subconsciously prepared to be moved by it.

The discipline of anthropology has perhaps always been especially close to the exercise of state power, but, in the last two-thirds of the twentieth century, the nature of both anthropology and state power changed dramatically. This was a period when many anthropologists distanced themselves from earlier evolutionist accounts that traced a generalized human development from “primitive” to “civilized.” This evolutionist anthropology, as many scholars have shown, reflected and justified a range of imperialist practices by presenting European conquest as bringing progress to societies existing in a noncontemporary present. Two of the most important variants of post-evolutionist anthropology are the cultural relativism associated with Franz Boas (1858–1942) and the sociological universalism associated with Emile Durkheim (1858–1917). The state power that evolutionist anthropology had once supported also changed radically over the same period. The forms of domination exercised by the global North over the global South gradually shifted from direct colonial rule to the combination of military intervention and economic control that characterizes the postcolonial period. Anthropology, Talal Asad has written, is “rooted in an unequal power encounter between the West and Third World . . . an encounter in which colonialism is merely one historical moment.” Internally, the social welfare state continued its remarkable growth but also, in the 1960s and 1970s, faced challenges from those who rejected the patriarchy and heteronormativity that it often presupposed and reinforced. The two books under review reveal how new types of anthropology in the United States and France came to serve these new forms of state power in the twentieth century. In both cases anthropology adapted to these new political conditions by incorporating psychoanalysis to posit an especially strong bond between individual and culture that produced what one contemporary called an “oversocialized conception of man.”

The history of Swiss republicanism was memorably summed up by Orson Welles in the classic film The Third Man (1949): whereas the tumultuous and tyrannical politics of the Italian Renaissance produced a great cultural flourishing, Welles observed, “In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” Suggestive as it may be, Welles's contrast is as misleading as it is memorable. The Swiss were a fearsome military power at the beginning of the sixteenth century, admired by no less a Florentine than Niccolò Machiavelli, but by the eighteenth century they were no longer capable of defending themselves, and they were summarily occupied by the armies of revolutionary France in 1798. The nature of Swiss democracy was long contested, and in 1847 the Swiss fought a civil war over it. Finally, it must be said, cuckoo clocks were invented in the Black Forest region, on the other side of the Alps. As we shall see, the success of the Swiss watchmaking industry does in fact deserve a place in the history of liberty, but Jean-Jacques Rousseau turns out to be a more helpful guide for understanding its significance.

For over half a century, the American transformation of German philosophy and social thought has been a major theme of modern intellectual history. The main protagonists of this “cultural migration,” as the story traditionally has been told, were German-speaking scholars and writers who, fleeing Hitler's Europe, brought their erudition and indigenous methodologies to American shores. But beyond this beachhead lies a vast and unfamiliar terrain for the historian. What became of German texts and concepts as they traveled further inland? Who transported them—and for what ends? In The Closing of the American Mind, the philosopher Allan Bloom marveled at the ways in which nonacademic Americans had become complicit in the dissemination of German thought: “What an extraordinary thing it is that high-class talk from what was the peak of Western intellectual life, in Germany, has become as natural as chewing gum on American streets.” It was an extraordinary thing, but not a good one, as far as Bloom was concerned:

Sandrine Sanos has taken on a thorny topic in The Aesthetics of Hate: Far-Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism, and Gender in 1930s France. Sanos opens this compelling study of 1930s far-right French intellectuals by briefly discussing a scene in Jonathan's Littell's The Kindly Ones (Les bienveillantes). Greeted with praise and controversy on publication, Littell's highly charged 2006 novel was steeped in sinister perversions and vicious physical perpetrations straight out of Klaus Theweleit's encyclopedic two-volume Male Fantasies, dedicated to analyzing German anti-Semitic, anti-Bolshevist, and misogynist belligerence. In Sanos's description, the fictional protagonist of The Kindly Ones, an SS officer named Maximilien Aue, visits occupied Paris in 1943, where he enjoys the company of two now-infamous and very real French fascists—Robert Brasillach and Lucien Rabatet. Aue muses with the two anti-Semites on the possibilities of a uniquely fascist literature, enacts homosocial bonds over mutual hatred for Jews and communists, and exploits the abject sexual availability of men at a “faggot bar.” The pathology-filled narrative illuminates the mind of the protagonist even as it speaks to contemporary conceptions of the era's fanatical concern with self-regulation and masculinity.

In the middle of the 1960s, Harold Cruse was angry with his fellow “Negro intellectuals.” “The Negro movement is at an impasse,” he wrote in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, “precisely because it lacks a real functional corps of intellectuals able to confront and deal perceptively with American realities on a level that social conditions demand.” When his book was published in 1967, American race relations seemed to be vectoring toward another nadir. Urban unrest, declining job opportunities for African Americans, the escalating war in Vietnam, and the civil rights movements’ divide over “Black Power” were only parts of the “crisis” Cruse identified. To him, black intellectuals had failed to wrestle with the particularities of racism in the United States and thus had failed to offer meaningful solutions beyond what he deemed to be the dead-end roads of integration and black nationalism.

The tradition of civil disobedience in America seems to be in pretty good health. Recent examples, including the Occupy movement, disruption of the functioning of abortion clinics, and even the release of classified government documents by Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, suggest that it is alive and kicking. Yet a consideration of these examples also re-enforces how fuzzy the edges and undefined the essential core of civil disobedience are. Indeed, a main achievement of Lewis Perry's book under review here is to emphasize that what we now consider the definitive traits of civil disobedience—respect for the law in principle, willingness to accept punishment for violating an unjust law, and a commitment to nonviolence—have rarely all been present when civil disobedience has been engaged in. Perhaps Perry's minimalist description of civil disobedience is the best we can do: “the national heritage of resistance to unjust laws.”