In the Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau presents himself as declaiming in “the Lyceum of Athens” but in the presence of Plato and Xenocrates. Why should Rousseau's arguments be heard in such precincts, and why, moreover, is Aristotle missing from them? Rousseau's response to the topic proposed by the Dijon Academy, on which the Discourse was based, may be correspondingly interpreted as a response to Aristotle's philosophy of nature and of the ways in which that philosophy informs the Politics in particular. The critique Rousseau thereby offers of an Aristotelian discourse of nature and society invokes a similar challenge once presented by ancient Epicureanism, and reflects the extraordinary revival of interest in Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things, a poem that became the focus of intense critical scrutiny during the Enlightenment. We may therefore understand why the Discourse on Inequality was read as an “Epicurean” text by certain contemporaries, and recognize particular critical objectives served by Epicurean philosophical resources that were further deployed in works like the Social Contract and Letters Written from the Mountain, reflecting Rousseau's engagement with Genevan reform politics of the 1750s and 1760s.

Since the early twentieth century, historians of political thought have read Immanuel Kant's interventions into debates over the French Revolution—his essay on “Theory and Practice” (1795), and his tract on Perpetual Peace (1793)—against Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Kant is said to have upheld the sovereignty of pure reason for political practice, over and against Burke's stubborn traditionalism. What this dichotomy ignores, however, is that Kant's first public comments on the Revolution were directed not against Burke's Reflections, but against a heavily edited German version of the text published in 1793 by Kant's former student, Friedrich Gentz (1764–1832). The central thrust of Gentz's translation was that while Kant's normative theory of politics was admirable, it needed to be complemented with a prudential grasp of statecraft in order to be made practicable. Without prudence, the rights of man would remain an empty ideal. In responding to Gentz, Kant entered into a debate over whether philosophical reason and political prudence are mutually compatible. His dogmatic refusal to endorse such an alliance, even in the face of the Terror, places his political thought in an unfavourable light.

This essay explores the publication and reception of John Stuart Mill's Principles of Political Economy in late imperial Russia. First published during the era of the Great Reform, Mill's Principles was discussed within the context of the Russian debate on capitalism and land reform. It became popular not only among economists and university students but also the intelligentsia who dominated the debate on capitalism in Russia until the last decade of the century. In reading the Principles, they focused primarily on Mill's discussion of social questions and the ethics of capitalism rather than on the theoretical subjects of economics. In Russia, as in England, the reception of Mill's ideas was not uniform, reflecting the readers’ diverging political views and assumptions. In Russia, however, the tendency towards selective reading was more pronounced and the labels attached to Mill were more extreme.

Prior to World War II, the founder and key theorist of Poland's Christian Democratic movement—the Silesian political revolutionary Wojciech Korfanty—developed a sophisticated “Catholic rights-talk” in conversation with trends in Western European Catholic thought. In the wake of the Holocaust, however, both in ephemeral political opposition on Polish soil and in subsequent exile, Poland's Christian Democrats abandoned their interwar rights discourse. This essay explores that shift, locating its source in interwar Polish Catholic anti-Semitism. Given the Holocaust's perverse fulfillment of Polish Christian Democracy's crucial 1930s advocacy of restricting the political and economic life of Poland to rights-endowed Christians—necessitating the removal of Jewish “non-persons”—the Poles’ transnational postwar advocacy vacillated between Cold War cooperation with American-aligned governments and a desire to participate in the governance of a Poland that, even if Communist, had finally become a “nationally homogeneous state.”

Before his death in 1987, Jacob Taubes played an important role in postwar German academic philosophy and religious thought. Best known for his leftist political theology and scholarship on the history of Western eschatology, Taubes's thought was influential on mid-twentieth-century debates in Germany about secularization and modern political theology. Outside his relationship with Carl Schmitt, however, Taubes has received little attention in histories of postwar European thought, and few attempts have been made to understand his idiosyncratic work on its own terms. This essay presents new contexts for understanding Taubes and his political-theological critique of the ideological dominance of liberalism in postwar Germany. By analyzing Taubes's thought through the lens of his intellectual quarrel with Hans Blumenberg over secularization, it reassesses his contributions to postwar debates about the political temporality appropriate to a secular and non-utopian social theory, and the consequences of these debates for broader critiques of political liberalism.

This article draws on archival sources to offer the first thoroughgoing account of how John Rawls moved from his undergraduate Christian ethics to the mature moral theory that undergirded A Theory of Justice. Identifying the liberal Protestant (rather than neo-orthodox) convictions at the heart of Rawls's senior thesis, it shows how he found an alternative postwar grounding for these views by applying Wittgenstein's later arguments about concepts, criteria, and inductive reasoning to ethics. The article places Rawls in the context of a whole community of mid-century American ethical theorists drawing upon Wittgenstein and trumpeting forms of moral “naturalism,” many of whom shared Rawls's Protestant heritage. It suggests that we can only make sense of the reliance of Rawls's moral theory on personal recognition, emotion, and a universal vision if we sideline the traditional dichotomies of the secularization debate and regard the postwar ethics of Rawls and his cohort as “post-Protestant.”

This article, through a close engagement with John Updike's work, explores the manner in which the postwar liberal temper shaped American fiction. By contextualizing the novelist's early writings within the changing intellectual climate of the period, it demonstrates how his liberal sensibilities deeply informed his literary imagination. The essay employs new archival material about Updike's Harvard education and sketches his political biography—the first of its kind—to offer a fresh and more nuanced understanding of Updike as not only a gifted writer but also a political thinker. Although he chose the less traveled road of fiction to do so, Updike expressed a particular temperament pervasive among many liberal intellectuals at the time. By challenging the widely held view of him as an apolitical writer, the article also enriches our understanding of the meanings and complexities of postwar liberalism while illuminating the often overlooked link between literature and politics.

Talk of modernity is plagued with paradox. A relativist stance towards modernity—the claim, for example, that modernity is just one cultural configuration among others—seems to contradict itself. The concept of “cultural configuration,” and similar notions (such as “language game,” “discourse,” “community,” or “myth”), are themselves the products of modern intellectual research and debate. If the relativist claim is true, it appears to undermine the validity of those very conditions of modern intellectual debate that make the claim thinkable. But to argue for modernity's superiority over other cultural configurations seems equally problematic. If the criteria of superiority are themselves modern, then the argument appears question-begging. But if the criteria are not modern, then these non-modern criteria (by which the superiority of the modern can be discerned) would appear themselves to be superior to modern criteria.

In the past ten years, contextual approaches to intellectual history have been dislodged from their dominant position in the discipline. In the 2013 volume Rethinking European Intellectual History, edited by Samuel Moyn and Darrin McMahon, a number of the contributors challenged the previous generation's emphasis on context, whether social, political, or linguistic, arguing that it constrained the scope of intellectual history and unnecessarily foreclosed the possibility of critical engagement: if we could only understand ideas by embedding them in foreign contexts, how could they be meaningful today? Instead, many historians have come to embrace what had earlier been derided as a form of “idealism”: an emphasis on the autonomy of ideas and their internal structure. Paying attention to this structure has allowed historians to treat ideas less as historical artifacts and thus offer them as living resources for thinking through problems in the present.

Why should intellectual historians care about children? Until recently, the answer was that adults’ ideas about children matter, particularly for the history of education and the history of conceptions of the family, but children's ideas are of little significance. Beginning with Philippe Ariès in the 1960s, historians took to exploring how and why adults’ ideas about children changed over time. In these early histories of childhood, young people figured as consumers of culture and objects of socialization, but not as producers or even conduits of ideas.

Intellectual historians have long appreciated the central role of religious ideas in the movements for social transformation that shaped the early United States. The American Revolution, the nation's original radical event, has for generations sparked investigations into the relationship between evangelical theology and political consciousness. The antebellum period has probably inspired more scholarship on the social significance of religion than any other era, most notably in sensitive and detailed accounts of the antislavery movement, but also in studies of prison reform, public schools, the treatment of people with disabilities, and much else.

Readers dismayed by the appearance of a review essay on hipsters, hippies, and rock music in the pages of Modern Intellectual History should take a deep breath (you may inhale) and consider the following passage from John Dewey's 1934 Art as Experience:

It's impossible to know what Dewey would have thought had he lived beyond his ninety-two years and confronted the rock music and counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s. Would he have found “intelligence” at work in “acid rock” or hippie culture? Or would he have reacted as rock critic Greil Marcus did in the famous opening line of his review of Bob Dylan's 1970 Self Portrait album: “What is this shit?” I’d like to think he’d have given the music a listen, if not at the Fillmore then perhaps on his home stereo. After all, Dewey had this to say about music: “Music, having sound as its medium, thus necessarily expresses in a concentrated way the shocks and instabilities, the conflicts and resolutions, that are the dramatic changes enacted upon the more enduring background of nature and human life.” If any music expressed the shocks, instabilities, and conflicts of its day—and did so “in a concentrated way”—it was rock ’n’ roll. In fact, sonic culture had a privileged place in Dewey's aesthetics as an expression of the emotional life of individuals and communities. “Generically speaking, what is seen stirs emotion indirectly, through interpretation and allied idea. Sound agitates directly, as a commotion of the organism itself.” A philosopher who refused to sever sensory experience from cognition might well have considered whether somewhere in the commotion of rock culture there was also thinking. The question for historians committed to that proposition today is how and where to locate thinking in all the feedback.

In the above-mentioned article the dates in line 3 of the abstract should read as follows:

“Theory and Practice” (1793) and his tract on Perpetual Peace (1795).