Dr John Moore's four-volume account of his Grand Tour in the company of the Duke of Hamilton was one of the most successful European travel books of the late eighteenth century. Moore's text, I argue, is a philosophical travel narrative, an examination of manners, customs and characters, analogous to the philosophical histories of the Scottish Enlightenment. Intended as a critique of the superficial observations of much travel literature, it argues for a greater degree of closeness between the traveler and the native, one based on sympathetic conversation rather than observation, but accompanied by a more distanced analysis, based on conjectural history, of the hidden processes that explain manners and character. Difference should be understood through a combination of sympathy and analysis that makes travel and its accounting valuable.

The history of the social sciences in the United States—like many other fields of intellectual history—confirms John Dewey's observation: “Intellectual progress usually occurs through sheer abandonment of questions together with both of the alternatives they assume—an abandonment that results from their decreasing vitality and a change of urgent interest. We do not solve them: we get over them.” As Dewey suggests, two fine new books mark intellectual progress in the field through a change of generational interest. As he also implies, new perspectives leave important issues behind.1

The Whiggish story of ever-evolving liberty issuing from the Revolutionary decades and progressing straightforwardly over the next two centuries is dead. But so too, it seems, on the evidence of these two good books, is the revisionist tale of either “republican virtue” (often trumpeted by progressives) or “evangelical piety” (often trumpeted by Christian conservatives) governing the American mind and its understanding of rights, obligations, and collective identity. Both Steven K. Green and David Sehat see the narrative arc of American history as a continual tension between the religious and secular understandings of the American Constitution. Sehat is more doubtful that the Jeffersonian–Madisonian doctrine of separation of church and state ever commanded broad assent. The “myth” that America was born religiously free, though peddled by liberals, he argues, actually disables secularists who are struggling to create a public realm truly free from religious coercion. Green more readily accepts the proposition that the germ of religious freedom grew from its eighteenth-century origins along a non-continuous but nonetheless clearly secularizing trajectory.

According to Gerbi's classical study, the “dispute of the New World” entered a new phase in the 1780s, one marked by voices coming from the Americas. New questions were then raised about the writing of history, its method, scope and proofs. This essay pursues a dual-track enquiry, confronting the History of America (1777) by the Presbyterian minister William Robertson, a leading figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, with the Storia antica del Messico (1780–81) by the Mexican exiled Jesuit Francisco Javier Clavijero. The two works, one written from the centre of the world's commercial expansion, the other from the Pontifical States, were engaged in a sophisticated dialogue, which yields two alternative, competing conceptions of history and of humankind. To Robertson's philosophical history, which developed from a long-distance perspective, characteristic of Enlightenment, Clavijero responded by reassessing the Jesuit and antiquarian tradition, based on closeness, local expertise and direct observation.

Academic disciplines, including departments of history, emerged slowly and unevenly in the second half of the nineteenth century. Professional societies, including the American Historical Association (AHA) at its founding in 1884, were generally tiny organizations, a few would-be specialists collecting together to stake a claim on a distinct scholarly identity. Fields of study were necessarily fluid—interdisciplinary because they remained, to a large degree, predisciplinary. As fields went, the study of religion appeared especially amorphous; it was spread out across philology, history, classics, folklore, anthropology, archaeology, psychology, sociology, and oriental studies. Adding to the complexity more than simplifying it was the persisting claim that the study of religion belonged specifically (if not exclusively) to theology and hence to seminaries and divinity schools. Elizabeth A. Clark's Founding the Fathers illuminates the importance of Protestant theological institutions in shaping the study of religion in nineteenth-century America, suggesting, in particular, how well-trained church historians pointed the way toward disciplinary consolidation and specialization. Marjorie Wheeler-Barclay's Science of Religion, by contrast, explores the leading British intellectuals responsible for extending the study of religion across a broad swath of the new human sciences. Together these two books offer an excellent opportunity to reflect on what religion looked like as a learned object of inquiry before religious studies fully crystallized as an academic discipline in the middle third of the twentieth century. Clark opens the introduction to her book with an epigraph from Hayden White: “The question is, What is involved in the transformation of a field of studies into a discipline?” (1). What indeed?

This essay shows how Adam Smith addressed concerns about economic decline not only by proposing quantifiable categories through which relative decline could be measured, but also by characterizing the century as the proper timescale in which such quantities could be observed. What sometimes appears up close to be a process of decline and fall, Smith suggested, could, with a shift to a more distant long view, be explained instead as part of a normal business cycle. William Playfair then used Smith's emphasis on quantification to develop elaborate graphic techniques—what we now call the time-series line graph and the pie chart—to visualize more easily the patterns Smith sought to identify. Collectively, the reordering of temporal scale by Smith and Playfair helps us to rethink not only discourses of decline, but also our understanding of the temporalities of political economy as a problem of historical distance that needs to be thought about beyond temporal terms.

There has been a lot of ink spilled lately regarding the various symptoms generated in French intellectual, cultural, and political life by a malady diagnosed as the triumph of neoliberalism and American consumerism at the end of the Cold War. In recent years, some French scholars afflicted with the disease have revisited and revised well-worn political models, and others returned defensively to the tradition of French secular republicanism as an antidote to “multiculturalism” and “communitarianism” (what Americans would call identity politics), which French authors often envision as American imports. This defensiveness on both the French left and right responds to the apparent exhaustion of nationalism, of revolutionary ideals, and of French identity. Joan Scott's recent book on The Fantasy of Feminist History does a particularly incisive job of revealing the various investments in secular republicanism as themselves forms of sexism and racism or nostalgia, especially on the right. She cites a discussion in which Mona Ozouf, Phillipe Raynaud, and others argue that the particularly “French” form of “seduction” and heterosexual coupling encourages men to exercise dominance through gallantry if they want to win over women. Gallantry civilizes society by using sexual difference as armor against an imagined leveling and sameness represented by those who cannot understand seduction as a means metaphorically of reconciling the differences that inevitably arise in democracies—feminists, “militant homosexuals,” and Muslims who refuse to play by French rules. Here the play of difference relies on a rigid gender difference—and the subordination of women—that sells itself as natural and quintessentially French.

The abolitionist John Brown. Freedom fighter? Terrorist? The choice is unsatisfying for any number of reasons, least of all for the anachronistic nomenclature and the moral obviousness of his cause. Of course Brown was right, we can easily say, to take up the fight against that “peculiar institution” of barbarous slavery. Insofar as the federal government stood in the way of historical progress, perhaps he also was justified in striking the arsenal at Harper's Ferry in 1859 as the first salvo of the American Civil War, demonstrating by his pitiful action that the Union would have to choose sides and fight. Yet no less clear today is the sheer difficulty of justifying such antistate violence. Since the 1970s and especially since September 11, 2001, with comparable moral obviousness, insurgent and terroristic violence have generally been condemned as threats to social stability and political coherence. The very liberal-democratic traditions that might otherwise superficially heroize someone like John Brown recoil at the disorder he personified. The truth of Brown's adventurism is clearly more complicated than the postcard version, and his crazed biblical prophetism, nasty 1856 murder spree in Kansas, and patronizing wish to play Moses to southern blacks must be read alongside successful efforts by the government and pro-slavery camp to brand him an incorrigible fanatic—a label that Brown himself and other abolitionists embraced as their own. What Brown represents, however, is an access point to the deep history of ideas about fanaticism and terrorism in the modern West, a history filled with paradoxes and ambiguities that nonetheless revolve around the basic fact—avoided with ease by contemporary pundits and prognosticators—that for the past several centuries we have met the enemy, and he is us.

The term “modernity” is often introduced by means of a storyline moving from one to another of opposed terms. One thinks of Sir Henry Maine's status and contract, Ferdinand Tönnies's Gemeinschaft and Gessellschaft, and Henry Adams's Virgin and the dynamo. In such narratives, modernity comes with an increasing awareness of the fluid and apparently random nature of events characterizing modern existence (other terms, such as anomie, alienation, and disenchantment, also come to mind). Darwin's description, in chapter 4 of The Origin of Species, of the process of natural selection offers a defining instance of both change and its haphazard nature. While he doesn't use the phrase “random variation,” Darwin, as he apologetically notes at the beginning of chapter 5, uses the word “chance” repeatedly to name the occasional and sometimes critically important biological changes that he can't explain.

Some twenty years ago, the American sociologist Robert Wuthnow found in an opinion survey that his subjects consistently expressed extraordinarily conflicting attitudes toward money, proclaiming in one breath that Americans are too materialistic, and then in the next breath unashamedly affirming money's central importance, and wishing they had more of it. At the time, Wuthnow argued that these strikingly contradictory results probably reflected something in the national mood during a time of economic stagnation. But I think we are safe in guessing that his findings are not too different from what a similar survey of Americans would find at almost any time in the recent past. The ambivalences he detected in his survey have about them the ring of truth, the feel of something enduring. Even conspicuous comets of material ambition may be trailed by long tails of moral misgiving; and something like the reverse, conspicuous rectitude veiling grand acquisitive passion, may also be the case. Prosperity generates an “embarrassment of riches,” as Simon Schama put it, which is why “the tensions of a capitalism that endeavoured to make itself moral were the same whether in sixteenth-century Venice, seventeenth-century Amsterdam, or eighteenth-century London.”

William R. Hutchison had a complaint. Though he was a dean of American religious history and a gatekeeper of the field at Harvard, Hutchison could not shake the feeling that the discipline was going in the wrong direction. In 1989, when he wrote an introduction to his edited volume, Between the Times, his fellow religion scholars were busy examining trans-denominational movements like revivalism, smaller religious practices like voodoo in New York, and “dissenters and other outsiders” to the mainstream. But their efforts had ignored what Hutchison considered the most important subject of all, the Protestant denominations that had guided American life since the American Revolution.

For the past three decades, conservative Christian Americans have enjoyed a great deal of scholarly attention. Historians have produced rich accounts of the evangelical conquest of early America, the twentieth-century rise of the Christian Right, and the advent of the culture wars. They have gleefully overturned the consensus historians’ confidence in America's unifying liberal impulse. They have refuted the prophets of secularization who once foretold the demise of organized religion. In the process, they all but abandoned the archives of mainline denominations—where generations of their colleagues once toiled in order to trace the histories of the mainline Protestant establishment—for the missions, ministries, and megachurches of ascendant evangelicals. The study of liberal religion has come to seem like the brittle great-aunt of American religious historiography, wheezing at the margins as her younger and more boisterous relations take center stage. She is still alive, barely—but some whisper that in her old age she has become rather boring.

Are artists crazy? Are creators more likely to be mad, or madder, than the rest of us? Does mental distress deepen artistic vision? Correlate to genius? Is the drive to fashion a personal pictorial or plastic universe pathological? Bettina Gockel's hefty Tübingen Habilitationsschrift, “The Pathologizing of the Artist: Artist Legends in Modernity,” documents the significant amount of mental energy expended exploring these and related questions from the mid-nineteenth century into the 1920s. Matthew Biro's The Dada Cyborg argues that the Dadaists’ montages, assemblages, and raucous agitational activities in the public sphere of World War I-era Berlin indicate modernity's disruption of stable subject positions and suggest instead hybrid, “cyborgian” identities. These included challenges to normative notions of sanity, but also to those of gender, ethnicity, race, and national and political allegiance. James van Dyke's study of the Weimar- and Nazi-era career of painter Franz Radziwill, a World War I veteran and self-taught reactionary modernist realist, provides a detailed case study of an artist whom one might, in retrospect, suspect of a degree of grandiosity and careerism bordering on the pathological, but who was driven by a complex of motivations as political as they were personal.

“One book is a book, two books is a trend,” goes an old adage in publishing. And what of three books? The 2012 publication of Angus Burgin's The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression and Daniel Stedman Jones's Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics, together with the 2011 publication of Nicholas Wapshott's Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics, suggests that the intellectual history of conservatism is not merely a trend, but an interest that is here to stay. At least the study of free markets, that is, for the books under consideration here focus more on conservative economic ideas than on religious or cultural ideals, capturing the intellectual history of free markets in the twentieth century through the Mont Pelerin Society, transatlantic policy, and the debate between John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek. While remarkably similar in subject and source, these are three different books, distinguished from each other in interpretation, execution, and focus. All three, however, display a similar temperament, assessing conservative ideas in an evenhanded if not overtly sympathetic tone suggesting that scholars have finally found a shared register through which to consider the most controversial and politically consequential ideas of the late twentieth century. They also converge upon a perhaps surprising synthesis, positioning free-market thought not only at the interstices of America and Europe, but between and across left and right, conservative and liberal.

In 2008, just prior to his hundredth birthday, an immortality of sorts was conferred on the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss when his Oeuvres were published—leather-bound, gold-embossed, on Bible paper—in Gallimard's Pléiade collection. He died the following year and we are now beginning to see, for the first time, assessments of his achievement—including the two volumes under review—in a world without Lévi-Strauss. Patrick Wilcken's stylishly written biography is considerably shorter than Denis Bertholet's French biography of 2003, but is nonetheless the first in a position to take in the entire arc of the anthropologist's career—from his nineteenth-century-style expeditions to the Brazilian interior in the 1930s, via his wartime exile in New York, where the twin influences of the linguist Roman Jakobson and assorted surrealists led to the writing of a groundbreaking thesis, to the vanguard structuralist project, the international celebrity, the eventual disillusionment with modernism, the unexpected late references to Gobineau (from an antiracist ideologue), and the final years, when he claimed to feel like a “shattered hologram” and received the visit of a notoriously philistine president of France on his hundredth birthday. Wilcken steers his biography skillfully between the pitfalls of reverence and dismissiveness. It is useful, for instance, to be reminded by a skeptical John Updike that “with such a hunting license granted, parallels and homologies are easy to bag—child's play for a brain as agile as M. Lévi-Strauss” (quoted at 299). But it is equally good to learn of the frequency with which what Wilcken calls Lévi-Strauss's “hit-and-run tactics” would pay off, generating fresh perspectives (75).

It has become somewhat of a cliché to refer to May 1968 in France as an “interpretation in search of an event.” As many critics have pointed out, this designation fails to account for the real significance of the “events,” for the fact that May ’68 was one of the largest mass movement in French history—numerically, geographically, and sociologically—and one of the most acute political crises in postwar France. Yet, to refer to May ’68 as an interpretation does capture the extent to which the historiography of May ’68 has appeared, almost from the beginning, indistinguishable from its history, or, as Kristin Ross has put it, the extent to which May ’68 cannot be considered separately from its memory. At the risk of reducing some of these rich historiographical debates, we could say that, broadly speaking, two main issues have divided historians, philosophers, political theorists, and sociologists over the past forty years. The first has to do with the scope of the events, the degree to which the student leaders, the workers on strike, or the cultural legacy “mattered” more, or whether any of it mattered at all. The second line of contention has centered on the legacy of May ’68. According to some, May ’68 represented the acceleration of capitalism and modernization and it inaugurated an era of individualism and/or narcissism and political disengagement. In the eyes of these critics, ’68 was thus ultimately a conservative, or at least a libertarian, revolution. According to others, this was instead a truly radical period—socially, culturally, and politically—and this radicalism began to run out of steam towards the late 1970s. Instead of revolution, many intellectuals who had participated in May ’68 began to talk about ethics, morality, human rights, and the rule of law. Not surprisingly, commentators have once again differed on their reading of this “turn,” either condemning it or celebrating it, depending on their political bent. This “condemning” position has been articulated particularly forcefully by Kristin Ross in her excellent May ’68 and Its Afterlives. According to Ross, the “turn to ethics” marked a conscious “retreat from politics . . . that distorted not only May's ideology but much of its memory as well.” Ross's book is thus devoted to the analysis of this political radicalism—a radicalism that she situates in the union of intellectual contestation and workers’ struggle around what she calls “a polemics of equality”—and to the critique of its betrayal after 1976. On the other side of the spectrum, historians such as Tony Judt and Sunil Khilnani have praised this “ethical turn” as the moment in which French intellectuals were finally able to exorcise the (communist) revolutionary ideal that had haunted them throughout the twentieth century and to embrace liberalism.

The literature on the life and legacy of the American Protestant thinker Reinhold Niebuhr has long been driven by questions about Niebuhr's continued relevance. Like other contributions to the recent “Niebuhr revival,” each of the three books under consideration here raises this question—John Patrick Diggins's Why Niebuhr Now? (2011) by offering a series of “sympathetic reflections” on Niebuhr's central claim that human beings are both creatures and creators of history (ix); Daniel F. Rice's edited volume Reinhold Niebuhr Revisited (2009) by inviting a cadre of top Niebuhr scholars to make the case for Niebuhr's relevance to a new generation; and Rice's own Reinhold Niebuhr and His Circle of Influence (2013) by contending that close attention to Niebuhr's formative relationships sheds light on his ongoing relevance.