During the Coinage Crisis of 1695, John Locke successfully advocated a full recoinage without devaluation by insisting on silver money's “intrinsick value.” The Great Recoinage has ever since been seen as a crucial step toward the Financial Revolution and it was long regarded as Locke's most consequential achievement. This article places Locke's intervention in the context of the postrevolutionary English state at war and reads his monetary pamphlets as an integral, if largely neglected, part of his political philosophy. Instead of taking Locke's insistence on “intrinsick value” itself at face value, I argue that it was precisely money's fragile conventionality that threatened its role as a societal bond of trust. In response to this fragility and corruptibility, Locke tied money by fiat to an initially arbitrary but unalterable quantity of metal. While Locke's argument contributed to the modern naturalization of money, it arose from a paradoxical political act of monetary depoliticization.

In the summer of 1673, in what Koenraad O. Meinsma once qualified as “one of the most inexplicable events in Spinoza's life,” the philosopher left his residence in The Hague to travel to Utrecht and stayed there for some three weeks. This event has garnered much interest, for two main reasons. In the first place, it is agreed that something must have induced the rather homebound Spinoza to undertake the journey, especially since Utrecht was occupied at the time by the French, rendering travel dangerous. The paucity of available sources has kept most scholars from suggesting a motive, but those who have been so bold are virtually unanimous in positing that Spinoza traveled on a diplomatic or political mission, referring in support to his first biographer Johannes Colerus's report, gathered from the philosopher's landlord Hendrik van der Spyck, that at his return he was greeted by a frenzied crowd that was ready to lynch him as a “spy, murmuring that he treated with the French of matters pertaining to state and nation,” with Spinoza countering that “many among the highly placed know why I went to Utrecht.” A second reason for the interest is formed by the connection the trip offers between Spinoza and the French general in Utrecht, Louis II de Bourbon (1621–86), the prince of Condé, renowned not only for his military exploits but also for his interest in the arts and sciences, as evinced in his patronage of dissident thinkers like Isaac La Peyrère of pre-Adamite fame. Condé thus figures in all early accounts of Spinoza's trip, and yet the conflicting nature of these accounts, combined with the paucity of firsthand sources, has left later scholars debating at length the precise nature of the prince's involvement as Spinoza's inviter, as his host, and as his ready benefactor.

Whoever has travelled in the New England States will remember, in some cool village, the large farmhouse, with its clean-swept grassy yard … In the family “keeping-room,” as it is termed, he will remember the staid, respectable old bookcase, with its glass doors, where Rollin's History, Milton's Paradise Lost, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, and Scott's Family Bible, stand side by side in decorous order, with multitudes of other books, equally solemn and respectable.

This paper will present a comparative analysis of the ethnographic writings of three colonial travellers trained in medicine at the University of Edinburgh: William Anderson (1750–78), Archibald Menzies (1754–1842) and Robert Brown (1773–1858). Each travelled widely beyond Scotland, enabling them to make a series of observations of non-European peoples in a wide variety of colonial contexts. William Anderson, Archibald Menzies and Robert Brown in particular travelled extensively in the Pacific with (respectively) James Cook on his second and third voyages (1771–8), with George Vancouver (1791–5) and with Matthew Flinders (1801–3). Together, their surviving writings from these momentous expeditions illustrate a growing interest in natural-historical explanations for diversity among human populations. Race emerged as a key concept in this quest, but it remained entangled with assumptions about the stadial historical progress or “civilization” of humanity. A comparative examination of their ethnographic writings thus presents a unique opportunity to study the complex interplay between concepts of race, savagery and civilization in the varied colonial contexts of the Scottish Enlightenment.

This article examines News from Nowhere, William Morris's late nineteenth-century utopian romance. It seeks, first, to establish John Stuart Mill as a crucial influence on the text. It argues that, in News from Nowhere, Morris engaged extensively with Mill's mid-century essay On Liberty. It shows how Morris dramatized Mill's “harm principle”; how he challenged the notion that custom must necessarily be antithetical to the “spirit of liberty”; and how he enacted Mill's stricture that “if opponents of all important truths do not exist,” then they must be invented. The article seeks, second, to contest the view that Morris was writing in indignant response to Edward Bellamy's portrait of utopia, Looking Backward. The article argues, instead, that it was rather the Fabians who incurred Morris's indignation. It attempts to demonstrate that if News from Nowhere was indeed an answer to another book, it was an answer to Fabian Essays.

Voltaire's Letters Concerning the English Nation (Lettres philosophiques) have left the indelible impression that the French philosophe was fundamentally marked by his exposure to English thought in the late 1720s. On the map of his epistolary correspondence, however, England is hardly to be found. What are we to make of this discrepancy? In this article, we demonstrate that the missing letters to England are unlikely to be the result of a data glitch, but rather reflect a lack of interest in contemporary English matters. The only England that Voltaire seems to have cared about lay in the past, during the reign of Charles II. Moreover, this period of English history was (in his view) intrinsically French, given the English monarch's close ties to Versailles. Voltaire's limited admiration of English thought, accordingly, formed part of his broader philosophy of history, which was centered at the court of Louis XIV.

Hugo Grotius’s account of sovereign power in De iure belli ac pacis occupies a contested place in recent genealogies of modern sovereignty. This article takes a fresh approach by arguing that Grotius’s legal arguments do not do their work alone. They function within a broader horizon of what he calls “morals,” a field of reasoning that has debts to scholastic moral theology and Aristotelian moral science. Grotius's conception of sovereignty represents a modulation between law and “morals,” which allows him both to separate his scientific jurisprudence from the science of politics and nevertheless to reply to the political scientists on their own ground. The context of “morals,” however, is not narrowly political but inter-political, generating a potential tension between popular aspirations to sovereignty and the international order. Grotius’s “moral” handling of the issue offers an invitation to reflect on our current preoccupation with much the same concerns.

This paper situates Alfred Russel Wallace's spiritualist writings from his book Miracles and Modern Spiritualism (1875) against the backdrop of Victorian anthropology. It examines how he constructed his argument, and the ways in which he verified the trustworthiness of his evidence using theories and methods drawn from anthropology. Spirit investigations relied on personal testimony. Thus the key question was: who could be trusted as a credible witness? While much has been written on Wallace's inquiries into spirit phenomena, very little scholarship has taken seriously his remark about how his studies of spirits and mediums were a “new branch of anthropology.” Wallace's aim of aligning his spirit investigations to the practices of British anthropology fed into larger disciplinary discussions about the construction of reliable anthropological data. Most notably, like many of his Victorian anthropological counterparts, Wallace grounded his research in a double commitment to firsthand observation and Baconian inductivism.

This article widens the scope of the history of Hegel's reception in turn-of-the-century French philosophy by thematizing an often neglected moment, namely the years 1897 to 1927. Before the so-called “Hegel renaissance,” in fact, the Hegelian dialectics was generally understood as a “panlogist” doctrine aimed at dissolving the concrete individual in the abstract dimension of the concept or in the all-encompassing realm of Absolute Spirit. However, even at the beginning of the century, attempts were made to provide a more positive assessment of Hegelian philosophy. The author reconstructs this panlogist controversy by analyzing the points of view of some prominent philosophers of the time, namely Charles Renouvier, René Berthelot, Émile Boutroux, Émile Meyerson and Léon Brunschvicg. The aim of the article is to provide a deeper understanding of the historical continuities and discontinuities characterizing Hegel's reception in France.

Between the years 1949 and 1953 the leaders of the Federative People's Republic of Yugoslavia embarked on a series of radical social and economic reforms that restructured state–society relations in line with a decentralized, participatory model of socialism. “Self-management socialism,” as this system became known, served to harmonize local revolutionary ambitions with the embedded liberalism of the postwar international order into which Yugoslavia sought to integrate. During the early reform period Yugoslav intellectuals reorganized socialist ideology around new understandings of autonomy and creativity in ways that resonated with liberal traditions and diverged sharply from the Soviet paradigm. These concepts informed Yugoslav ideas of social self-management and national self-determination and facilitated the country's orientation to the postcolonial world. They also underpinned the new realm of cultural production, where reformers such as Miroslav Krleža and Marko Ristić mobilized this new concern with autonomous creativity to revive previously discarded aesthetic theories of interwar modernism.

This article makes the case that the early modern debate over political representation was deeply intertwined with a theological debate over the Fall. The “resemblance” theory of representation adopted by English Parliamentarians was first formulated by Calvinists to make the case that Adam represented humanity, despite the fact that humanity had never authorized him to act in their name. The Royalist rejoinder, which treated authorization as a necessary and sufficient condition of representation, began life instead as a Pelagian response to Calvinist orthodoxy. This theological dispute provides a crucial context for the interventions of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke.

As part of Benjamin Constant's academic “revival,” scholars have revisited the political and religious elements of his thought, but conclude that he remained uninterested in the nineteenth century's major social and economic questions. This article examines Constant's response to what would later become known as “the social question” in his Commentary on Filangieri's Work, and argues that his claims about poverty and its alleviation highlight central elements of his political liberalism, especially on the practice of citizenship in the modern age. By interpreting social issues through his original political lens of “usurpation,” Constant encouraged skepticism of social legislation and identified the political implications of a “disinherited” poor class. The lens of usurpation ultimately limited the scope of Constant's solutions to poverty. But his attention to social and economic issues prompts us to reexamine the category of “the social” and its uses in the history of liberal thought, particularly the place of class concerns in the French liberal tradition.

Scholars of political thought, sociology, and the arts have yet to fully explore the impact of positivism on modernist design theory and practice. This paper offers an intellectual history of the works of three generations of positivist sociologists who built on each other's works. They are Auguste Comte and Richard Congreve, Frederic Harrison and Charles Booth, and Patrick Geddes and Victor Branford. These actors developed different types of sociological survey, established a network of urban interventions, and proposed a series of planning programs and manifestos. It will be argued that their intention was to systematically reconcile international and domestic issues to realize a modern eutopia. Following this analysis, it will be shown that a similar language and practice appeared in the work of a diverse range of such modernist designers as Patrick Abercrombie, Sybella Gurney Branford, Louis Sullivan, H. P. Berlage, and Le Corbusier, among others.

This article reconsiders the Catholic reaction to the French Revolution, focusing on Nicola Spedalieri's On the Rights of Man (1791) and on the debate that its publication sparked in Italy and beyond. The outbreak of the Revolution and the polarization of public opinion between the supporters of the new regime and its relentless opponents convinced Spedalieri, a well-reputed Catholic theologian, of the need to find a via media between these two extremes. Assuming the re-Christianization of the postrevolutionary world as his goal, Spedalieri argued that some aspects of revolutionary political culture were acceptable from a Catholic standpoint as long as the revolutionaries, in turn, agreed to abandon secularization and to uphold the traditional confessional organization of the state. It was not modernity itself, he claimed, that should be rejected, but secularization, for a different modernity from that conceived by the revolutionaries—a confessional modernity, combining revolutionary politics and confessional states—was possible. Far from gaining immediate acceptance, Spedalieri's ideas were harshly criticized during the 1790s and then set aside by the triumph of reactionary Catholicism during the Restoration. However, they resurfaced later in the nineteenth century and ultimately played a decisive role in the development of the church's attitudes toward modern culture, for they carved a path for Catholics to fight secularization from within and to reshape modernity accordingly.

This article explores the political thought of C. F. G. Masterman (1873–1927), a leading figure in the movement of New Liberalism in Britain at the beginning of the twentieth century. The article emphasizes the distinctive color his Christian beliefs and Anglican loyalties lent to his progressive Liberal ideals; this adds a new dimension to the existing historiography of the New Liberalism, which, until recently, has neglected the religious influences on its development. The article further underlines Masterman's concern to harness the cause of religious freedom and the disestablishment of the Church of England to social reform; he did so through reviving the older Gladstonian alliance between Liberalism and Nonconformity. It argues that his religiosity—focused on the Church of England—was central to his thought, and was frequently expressed in the language of prophecy he imbibed from Thomas Carlyle and other nineteenth-century seers.

“The Brides of Deconstruction and Criticism,” an informal group of feminist literary critics active at Yale University during the 1970s, were inspired by second-wave feminist curriculum, activities, and thought, as well as by the politics of the women's and gay liberation movements, in their effort to intervene into patterns of female effacement and marginalization. By the early 1980s, while helping direct deconstructive reading away from the self-subversiveness of French and English prose and poetry, the Brides made groundbreaking contributions to—and in several cases founded—fields of scholarly inquiry. During the late 1980s, these feminist deconstructionists, having overcome resistance from within Yale's English Department and elsewhere, used their works as social and political acts to help pave the way for the successes of cultural studies in the North American academy. Far from a supplément to what Barbara Johnson boldly called the “Male School,” the Brides of Deconstruction and Criticism arguably were the Yale school. Examining the distinct but interrelated projects of Yale's feminist deconstructive moment and how local and contingent events as well as the national climate, rather than the importation of so-called French theory, informed this moment gives us a clearer rendering of the story of deconstruction.

This essay investigates the intellectual history of one of the purportedly most “revolutionary” concepts of post-1945 international thought—the concept of supranationality. While the literature has generally analyzed the concept as a direct continuation of progressive cosmopolitan ideas, or, to the contrary, as a political watchword formulated after 1945 to promote the European project, this essay highlights other, more ambiguous origins for the concept. It retraces the early uses of the concept in French debates. It argues that the irruption of supranationality in the political and legal vocabulary was far from revolutionary, as is typically claimed—without referring directly to the writings of the great classical philosophers. Rather, the concept drew on earlier discourses whose emergence can be identified in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates, ranging from Catholic thought to international law. To retrace the genealogy of supranationality in the decades preceding the supranational vogue of the 1950s contributes to illuminating the complex intellectual origins of the European Union and of international thought more generally.

This article traces the origins and evolution of a popular interpretation of Adam Smith as a “Chicago-style” economist, and it challenges the idea that the “Chicago Smith” is simply a misinterpretation of Smith's ideas. To that end, it reexamines the role that the Chicago school of economics played in developing and propounding a distinct vision of Adam Smith, not only within the profession of economics, but also for the broader American public in the twentieth century. I argue that the readings, teachings, and interpretations of Smith from Chicago economists across different generations are more than just superficial symbolism, claims of intellectual authority, or rhetorical window dressing. Chicago’s engagement with Smith’s ideas constitute important interpretive and substantive arguments about the essence of Smith’s contribution to economics and the role that Smith’s ideas could play in shaping public policy.

Antonio Gramsci's notion of “passive revolution” has often been understood as a distinctive historical narrative, political concept, or theory of state formation. This article proposes to consider it instead as a “heuristic formula” within the “lexical architecture” of the Prison Notebooks. Based upon a diachronic and contextualist analysis of the usage of the formula, I argue that Gramsci's research on passive revolution emerged as a critical element within the development of his own distinctive conception of the “sublation” and “actualization” of the slogan of “the revolution in permanence.” Attending to this dialectical relationship allows the political and strategic dimensions of passive revolution to be highlighted, and suggests new paths of research for the debate about its analytic fertility and contemporary relevance.

Two years ago, without any apparent explanation, a little-known Egyptian scholar translated Jean-Paul Sartre's Anti-Semite and Jew (originally published as Réflexions sur la Question Juive, 1946) into Arabic. Widely acknowledged as an experimental and highly influential theory of anti-Semitism in the 1960s, Sartre's text had already had a profound, yet indirect, influence on an entire class of left-wing Arab intellectuals who used it in order to figure out their relationship with the colonizer; that is, with their Otherness. Though these intellectuals read Anti-Semite and Jew in French, it still remained one of Sartre's very few works that had never been translated into Arabic. How so? Addressing this question, this article offers a genealogy of non-translation that revisits the accumulative process by which Sartre's text acquired the status of a haunted and, hence, untranslatable text. Situated at the juncture where anti-Semitism, Zionism, and revolutionary Arab politics intersect, the text became entangled in the ethical politics of the conflict and, after the 1967 war, became associated with the collapse of the Arab revolutionary project and with Sartre's betrayal of the Arab cause. Thereafter, the work of leftist intellectuals who had drawn on Sartre to reject anti-Semitism was forgotten, and an anti-Semitic sentiment that rejects the original message of Anti-Semite and Jew slowly settled in. Beyond dissecting the process by which a text becomes haunted, this article also states the need for an original theorization of anti-Semitism that is culturally specific to the Arab world rather than derivative of European experience.