This article restores the context of political action to Burke's thinking about politics. It begins with the specific case of his interventions in the parliamentary debate over the Quebec Bill in 1774, and proceeds from this focal point to establish the centrality of the theme of conquest to his political motivation and understanding in general. Burke's preoccupation with conquest drove him to examine eighteenth-century British politics within a set of comparative historical frameworks. These frameworks encompassed the trajectories of both modern European and imperial politics and ancient historical development. The objective of Burke's politics of conquest was to overcome the destructive influence of the spirit of conquest. That objective involved deciding upon and justifying courses of action with reference to these comparative historical frameworks of understanding. Careful investigation shows that while Burke's approach to this task was powerfully influenced by Montesquieu, his arguments invariably entailed serious criticism of Montesquieu's conclusions. Properly understood, these criticisms show that Burke himself did not endorse the political principles that were later taken to constitute “Burkian conservatism”. The article draws the conclusion that a thorough grasp of the politics of conquest in Burke's thinking will force us to reposition him in the history of political theory.

Historical scholarship often relies on intermittent adjustments rather than radical innovation. Through a close reading of three different universal histories published between 1690 and 1760, this essay argues that the secularization of world history in the age of Enlightenment was an incomplete and often unintended process. Nonetheless, one of the most significant changes in this period was the centering of universal history in Europe, a process that accompanied the desacralization of the story of man. Once human progress was embraced as a universal process, the story of the development of the arts and sciences gradually eclipsed the non-European cultures that had formerly played a central role in the Christian narrative of human history.

This issue marks an important stage in the Journal's development. In our original mission statement we recognized that Modern Intellectual History was likely in the first instance to be devoted to publishing work on intellectual history that was essentially Western in orientation and we looked forward to the day in which it would be possible to extend our reach to non-Western as well as Western history.

In a recent appraisal of the nature of the enterprise of intellectual history, it was remarked, not for the first time, that the “the only history of ideas to be written are histories of their uses in argument”. Though perhaps not in such a self-conscious manner, the essays in this issue consider the transformative capacity of ideas. Modern intellectual history in the European and American context grew out of a critique of the dominance of social history; by contrast, it has received little or no attention in the field of colonial and modern South Asia. Despite the vibrancy of the field in general, the two major works in Indian intellectual history were written almost half a century ago. Eric Stokes's English Utilitarians and India and Ranajit Guha's A Rule of Property for Bengal were both concerned with the making of the regime of colonial political economy. These two important books took the major site of the generation of ideas to be the colonial state and the major actors to be its official intellectuals. Interestingly, both these historians later moved away from intellectual history to social history and the experience of the peasantry. It is an ironic tribute to their books that the subsequent focus of much South Asian historical scholarship has been on the nature of the colonial state and its relation to politics, economy and society. However, the emphasis on the power and the work of ideas, in Stokes's and Guha's initial formulations, slowly but surely gave way to “ethnographies of the state”. A related historiographical move emphasized the politics and culture of resistance, as indeed did Stokes and Guha in their later work.

This article seeks to establish a new perspective for understanding Catholic intellectual history in the German territories during the mid-nineteenth century. By analyzing scholars' efforts to revamp “Catholic Wissenschaft” in the context of a broader revival movement, it reveals how both “liberals” and “ultramontanes” engaged in a form of devotional activism which made Catholicism the measure of social action and scholarly practice alike. Important differences notwithstanding, scholars of all stripes saw their task as transforming Catholicism into a relevant tool for meeting the needs of the age. Rooting their efforts in the broader Catholic revival movement in this way, the article proposes “Catholic modernity” as a salient category for interpreting the significance of their work, and for better integrating it into the broader framework of German history.

Considerable attention has been paid to the ideas of critics of the British Empire in the period of its most rapid expansion and rather less to the views of those who supported it strongly. This article investigates the arguments of what are called “ultra-imperialists”, showing how they used the language of character, stiffened by elements from earlier languages of virtue, to justify the possession of empire. They argued that character had been critical in making Britain an imperial power and also claimed that, without the stimulus to action and duty provided by the defence and the governance of empire, character would atrophy, and the nation would suffer catastrophic and irreversible decline. The article ends by comparing the “ultra” position with that of, firstly, the larger body of more pragmatic supporters of empire and, secondly, the small group of radical anti-imperialists who feared that empire was destructive of character.

Historians of political thought tend to emphasize the continuous flow and transmission of concepts from one generation to the next, and from one place to another. Historians of Indian ideas suggest that India was governed with concepts imported from Europe. This article argues instead that the sense of rupture that British officials experienced, from both the intellectual history of Britain and Indian society, played a significant role in forming colonial political culture. It examines the practice of “Hindu” property law in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Bengal. It suggests that the attempt to textualize and codify law in the 1810s and 1820s emerged from British doubts about their ability to construct viable forms of rule on the basis of existing intellectual and institutional traditions. The abstract and seemingly “utilitarian” tone of colonial political discourse was a practical response to British anxieties about their distance from Indian society. It was not a result of the “influence” of a particular school of British thinkers.

Since the 1830s thinkers in both the United States and India have sought to establish analogies between their respective countries. Although many have felt the US black experience to have obvious parallels in India, there has been a fundamental disagreement about whether being black is comparable to being colonized or to being untouchable. By examining these two competing visions, this essay introduces new topics to the study of black internationalism, including the caste school of race relations, B. R. Ambedkar's anti-caste movement, and the changing significance of India for Martin Luther King, Jr.

Hannah Arendt's well-known examinations of the problem of evil are not contradictory and they are central to her corpus. Evil can be banal in some cases (Adolf Eichmann) and radical (the phenomenon of totalitarianism) in others. But behind all expressions of evil, in Arendt's formulations, is the imperative that it be confronted by thinking subjects and thoroughly historicized. This led her away from a view of evil as radical to one of evil as banal. Arendt's ruminations on evil are illuminated, in part, by concerns that she shared with her fellow New York intellectuals about the withering effects of mass culture upon individual volition and understanding. In confronting the challenges of evil, Arendt functioned as a “moral historian,” suggesting profitable ways that historians might look at history from a moral perspective. Indeed, her work may be viewed as anticipating a “moral turn” currently afoot in the historical profession.

“‘Histoire du livre’”, remarked Robert Darnton in a much celebrated essay from 1982, “‘Geschichte des Buchwesens’…‘history of books’ or ‘of the book’ in English-speaking countries—its name varies from place to place, but everywhere it is being recognized as an important new discipline”. In the twenty-five years since Darnton's original observation book history has if anything continued to flourish. With a number of multi-volume national histories of the book now at various stages of completion, an international infrastructure of research centres, teaching programmes and publishers’ lists, quite clearly something has been happening.

This paper concerns the reformulation by British expatriates and the first generation of English-speaking Indian intellectuals of the key ideas of European constitutional liberalism between 1810 and 1835. The central figure is Rammohan Roy, usually seen as a “reformer” of Hinduism. Here Rammohan's thought is set in the context of the Iberian and Latin American constitutional revolutions and the movement for free trade and parliamentary reform in Britain. Rammohan and his coevals created a constitutional history for India that centred on the institution of the panchayat, a local judicial body. While some expatriates and Indian radicals discussed “independence” or “separation” for the country as early as the 1830s, Rammohan himself argued for constitutional limitations on the Company's power and Indian representation in Parliament. Under liberal British government, he believed, an Indian public would emerge, empowered by service on juries and the operations of a free press.

This essay examines Isaiah Berlin's ambivalent relationship with the ideas and practices of Jewish nationalism and the ways in which this ambivalence shaped some of the key premises of his political thought. Drawing upon extensive archival research in his unpublished letters from the mid-1930s to the late 1950s, this essay reconstructs Berlin's attempt to reconcile himself with the national idea. This attempt forced him to enrich his liberalism, and pushed him to develop “Diaspora Zionism” and adopt the Jewish normalization discourse. In the course of those intra-Jewish debates Berlin also began to conceptualize freedom as an opportunity concept, an idea that would later become central both in Berlin's famous negative concept of freedom and in his pluralism. Adopting a dual perspective, which considers Berlin as both a British liberal and a Russian-Jewish émigré intellectual, I therefore offer to see the Jewish Zionist writings as complementary rather than secondary to Berlin's “liberal” enterprise.

This essay examines the contested grounds of authorization for one important orientalist project in India during the nineteenth century – the translation of the ancient Sanskrit Ṛg Veda, with a view to highlighting the ultimately ambiguous nature of the orientalist enterprise. It is argued that Europeans initially sought to validate their translations by adhering to Indian scholarly practices and, in later decades, to a more “scientific” orientalist–philological practice. Indian Sanskrit scholars, however, rather than accepting such translations of the Veda, and the cultural characterizations they contained, instead engaged critically with them, reproducing a distinctive vision of Indian civilization through their own translations into English. Moreover, by examining the diverse ways in which key concepts, such as the “fidelity” of a translation, were negotiated by Europeans and Indians, this essay also suggests that intellectual histories of the colonial encounter in South Asia should move beyond debates about colonial knowledge to more explicitly examine the contexts of knowledgeable practices.

The cultural world of French elites was profoundly shaken by the long sequence of events we now refer to as the French Revolution. The legal, political, and social world in which elites moved was transformed by successive revolutionary regimes and, more generally, by what Benjamin Constant called “the torrent” of change that began with the Revolution in 1789. Individuals experienced excitement, hope, and enthusiasm, but also suffered trauma, insecurity, and loss. The effects of these experiences on elite sociability and culture are difficult to characterize precisely. Michelle Perrot and Anne Martin-Fugier have written that there was a tendency on the part of French elites during the nineteenth century to retreat increasingly into the sanctuary of their homes, where they practiced more exclusionary forms of sociability, and simultaneously adopted more defensive forms of politics. Alain Corbin reminds us that the vulnerability that accompanied the progress of individuation in nineteenth-century France frequently manifested itself as an obsession with self-scrutiny, as represented by the enriched forms of interior monologue found in diaries and in Romantic poetry and literature. This retreat and concomitant self-scrutiny can be seen as a further refinement of the delicacy and sense of shame—of what we call modesty—that Norbert Elias suggested over sixty years ago was a central characteristic of the advance of European manners.

Having accepted the invitation to revisit my essay of 1982, “What Is the History of Books?”, I find that I can do it only in the first person singular and therefore must ask to be excused for indulging in some autobiographical detail. I would also like to make a disclaimer: in proposing a model for studying the history of books twenty-four years ago, I did not mean to tell book historians how they ought to do their jobs. I hoped that the model might be useful in a heuristic way and never thought of it as comparable to the models favored by economists, the kind in which you insert data, work it over, and arrive at a bottom line. (I do not believe that bottom lines exist in history.) It seemed to me in 1982 that the history of books was suffering from fissiparousness: experts were pursuing such specialized studies that they were losing contact with one another. The esoteric elements of book history needed to be integrated into an overview that would show how the parts could connect to form a whole—or what I characterized as a communications circuit. The tendency toward fragmentation and specialization still exists.

The Order of Books was published in France in 1992 and translated into English in 1994. I have to confess that I had not reread it since, and perhaps I would have never read it again had I not been invited to do so for this exercise. The central aim of that book was to try to understand something of how in the period between the fourteenth and the eighteenth century the written word was classified, organized, and perceived by all the actors involved within the trajectory of the text, from authors to publishers and printers, from the printing shop to the library. I will begin by recounting some of the factors in my own intellectual life that I believe led up to that book, and go on to reflect on the arguments that I posited in 1992, in the hope of giving some account of the ways in which that earlier work might today be supplemented.

Tom Stoppard, The Coast of Utopia (London: Faber and Faber, 2002)

Part I: Voyage

Part II: Shipwreck

Part III: Salvage

In a recent article in the London Review of Books, Perry Anderson sang a dirge over the decaying corpse of the Russian liberal intelligentsia. A “spirit of opposition…had defined the Russian intelligentsia since the 19th century—and for long periods [had] been its virtual raison d'être…whatever its internal disputes, [it] had always taken its role as Kulturträger for granted” (8). But then in the early 1990s it helped to saw off the branch it was sitting on, and plunged itself, unwittingly, into an economic and cultural abyss. It had used its cultural clout to support and legitimate Yeltsin's market reforms. The result was the decimation of all the institutions, from universities to film studios and the press, which had guaranteed the intelligentsia's existence and enabled it—not just despite, but because of the censorship—to maintain its role as the late Soviet system's permanent and often salaried opposition.

What is the conceptual status of modernity in the Muslim world? Scholars describe Muslim attempts at appropriating this European idea as being either derivative or incomplete, with a few calling for multiple modernities to allow modern Islam some autonomy. Such approaches are critical of the apologetic way in which Muslims have grappled with the idea of modernity, the purity and autonomy of the concept of which is apparently compromised by its derivative and incomplete appropriation. None have attended to the conceptual status of this apologetic itself, though it is certainly the most important element in Muslim debates on the modern. This essay considers the adoption of modernity as an idea among Muslim intellectuals in nineteenth-century India, a place in which some of the earliest and most influential debates on Islam's modernity occurred. It argues that Muslim apologetics created a modernity whose rejection of purity and autonomy permitted it a distinctive conceptual form.

This essay will explore the presence of Germany as a key trope of Bengali nationalist discourse in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth. It will problematize the exhaustiveness of a conventional spectrum of interpretation in the analysis of colonial intellectual history that has been defined at one extreme by the cultural violence of colonial interpellation and at the other by a hermeneutic conception of authentic intercultural encounter across the limits of great traditions. When Bengalis actually began to interact directly with Germans and German thought, it was an encounter whose parameters had already been deeply determined in the course of the preceding forty or fifty years. But I shall also argue that this appeal to the trope of Germany emerged from within a more complex, multilateral configuration in which “Germany” was itself a key figure of Victorian discourses in Britain itself.

In contributing to this symposium on book history, I was asked to reflect on my A Social History of Knowledge (hereafter SHK), which was published in 2000, describing how I came to write it and what has happened to the field since, and considering the question of whether I might write my essay differently if I were beginning it today. Following this, I shall devote the remainder of the article to a sketch for a future project on the history of knowledge.