This essay reviews the contribution of Stuart Elden to the scholarship relating to the French philosopher Michel Foucault. In particular, the essay considers Elden’s impressive four-volume intellectual history of Foucault’s career: The Early Foucault (2021), The Archaeology of Foucault (2023), The Birth of Power (2017), and Foucault’s Last Decade (2016). While acknowledging the thoroughness of Elden’s research, the essay analyzes Elden’s reluctance to offer a comprehensive interpretation of Foucault’s thought and his failure to say anything about his significance as a thinker. The essay concludes by considering Elden’s work as a symptom of “Foucault scholasticism.”

As the paragon of Chicago school macroeconomics in the late twentieth century, Robert Lucas is closely associated with the collapse of Keynesian hegemony in the 1970s and with neoliberalism more generally. This article explores Lucas’s changing political commitments using previously unexploited archival evidence. It shows that although he often articulated his views in the form of anti-Keynesian polemic, he had a deeply ambiguous relationship with the Keynesian project. Lucas upends interpretations of neoliberalism that emphasize ignorance in the face of the market, as his research program is premised on the hope that states and scholars can make the economy visible, and hence controllable, through stable policy rules. He was impressed by Keynesian successes and the technocratic worldview they made intelligible, but he remained suspicious of economists’ close collaborations with government.

This article clarifies the relationship between Isaiah Berlin’s liberalism, pluralism, humanism, and “aestheticism” by analyzing his unique approach to, and stories about, the history of ideas. I argue that Berlin should be understood as a reformer of liberalism, who understood his intervention in intellectual-historical terms. Reacting against what he saw as threats to human liberty and dignity rooted in the monist rational–scientific aspirations and expectations of Enlightenment-influenced political ideologies, Berlin responded by reinterpreting liberalism’s commitment to negative liberty through an aesthetic conception of the human being and a pluralist way of thinking about politics. In addition to reconstructing how Berlin’s writings on the history of ideas enact this liberal reformation, and clarifying the ways in which his resulting liberalism is and is not aesthetic, I also evaluate the potential implications of Berlin’s work for thinking about liberal politics in the present.

This article traces the emergence of a new type of economist in interwar France—the conjuncturist—through a study focusing on Alfred Sauvy and Robert Marjolin. We argue that these neglected figures helped to shape a new, autonomous, field of expertise that consisted of diagnosing and forecasting the economic situation to guide public decision making. As we show, the history of the conjuncturists is closely linked to that of the Popular Front in general, and to its emblematic law on the forty-hour week in particular. By becoming the most vocal opponents of this law, the conjuncturists fomented an open mutiny against the very government that had given them their first prominent position, in order to obtain the repeal of the forty-hour week, which Sauvy achieved in November 1938. Although the Popular Front was by then a thing of the past, and a future war with Germany had become the most likely outcome, the figure of the conjuncturist had succeeded in firmly occupying the institutional landscape of 1940s France—a form of economic expertise that was henceforth inseparable from political activity itself.

The work of Ronald Dworkin was central to the development of twentieth-century anglophone legal philosophy. This article offers the first discussion of a previously unknown and unpublished book manuscript by Dworkin which shows that he initially grounded his early legal thought in a wide-ranging methodological framework centered on ordinary language philosophy. Amidst heated debates over the draft for the Vietnam War, Dworkin developed a modified version of ordinary language analysis which, he contended, facilitated a critical stance towards what he called “conventional morality.” In this light, the widely acknowledged influence of the legal process school on Dworkin's early work appears as a transition from an earlier engagement with ordinary language philosophy. I conclude by tracing how Dworkin shifted towards the legal process school and how this reshaped the theoretical ambitions of his legal thought.

As a collection of methods oriented toward the artefacts of human expression and the minds that shaped those expressions, intellectual history seems well placed to mobilize the category of the aesthetic, yet the aesthetic is rarely a focus on methodological discussions. The special forum that this article introduces explores what an “aesthetic approach” to intellectual history might look like. It focuses on the work of leading twentieth-century liberal Isaiah Berlin (1909–97), whose amorphous role in the history of intellectual history means that his work offers a parallax view on important questions of method and approach. In introducing this special forum, this article situates Isaiah Berlin’s distinctive approach and varied work as a historian of ideas and defender of liberalism within several larger contexts. One is Berlin’s response to tendencies in post-World War II British philosophy, and his turn to the history of ideas—an understanding of this area of study as requiring essentially aesthetic qualities of judgment, imagination, pattern recognition, and empathetic entry into the perspectives of others. A second is the development of other, more influential approaches to the history of ideas, to which Berlin’s approach is briefly contrasted. A third is the ideological struggles of the Cold War; in this last connection, we explore the affinities between Berlin’s awareness, and affirmation, of the aesthetic and the ethical in his articulation of liberalism.

This article analyzes how direct popular legislation was discussed in France from 1850 to 1852. It is during the Second Republic that the idea of directly involving the people in the law-making process becomes a concrete proposal. It is extensively debated by left republican thinkers such as Ledru-Rollin, Rittinghausen and Considerant to argue, against Proudhon and Blanc, that political representation is, in fact, not democratic. Instead, they claimed that real democracy would require a sharp distinction between legislation and administration and the consequent direct involvement of the people in lawmaking through their participation in local assemblies, tasked with both drafting and approving legislative proposals of general import. These competing understandings of democracy, as theorized through debates about popular legislation in the mid-nineteenth century, foreground some of the fundamental challenges of representative politics and question the role of knowledge and expertise in legitimizing democratic procedures in the age of mass politics.

Of the various topics that have occupied readers of Isaiah Berlin—liberty, pluralism, nationalism, Marxism, romanticism, to name just a few—very few have focused on the role of judgment in his philosophy.1 One possible reason for this is that the concept of judgment, unlike other concepts in the political-theory lexicon, seems too indistinct to permit careful analysis.2 Judgment often seems too circumstantial, too contextual, to have a theory of. What is good judgment in one situation will not be so in another. It consists, to a large degree, in our capacity to read the times, and I do not mean the New York Times. The concept of judgment is invariably connected to character, but good character seems as elusive as good judgment. Do certain kinds of people simply have good judgment and, if so, what are the characteristics that produce it? We seem to be caught in a vicious—or, should I say, virtuous—circle.

In 1917, the US Department of Labor launched a new section: the Division of Negro Economics (DNE). Established to study black labor in the context of the Great Migration and staffed completely by black social scientists and social workers, the division offers a window onto the origins and meaning of black economics in the United States. During an age of pervasive scientific racism, the division’s leaders leveraged the language and tools of academic economics to assert black Americans' fundamental humanity, particularly by rendering black migrants as economic agents. The history of the division reveals how black economic thinkers made the economic study of the Great Migration into an egalitarian intellectual project, even if they could not escape institutional bias and prejudice. It stands as a lesson on the potential of economics, both as a tool of oppression and as one of political claims-making.

For two weeks in July 1967, several thousand people attended the International Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation in London, a sprawling event that is now largely remembered as a point of convergence for an unlikely roster of prominent radical intellectuals—Stokely Carmichael, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Goodman, and Herbert Marcuse among them. This article uses a broad array of sources to present the congress as a mass counterinstitution in which a variety of social actors—including not only the invited speakers, but also conference organizers and audience members—struggled to establish nonauthoritarian forms of knowledge production. The record of these efforts, and in particular the audience's demand to participate directly in the production and exchange of ideas, illuminates the ways in which radical intellectuals' challenge to dominant institutions in the global North during the late 1960s threatened to undermine their own discursive authority.

At what point can a social democrat be described as neoliberal? In 1982, Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck (1930–2020) left the Social Democratic Party, although he claimed to remain a social democrat by principle. Lindbeck was a central representative of the neo-Keynesian turn in economics after 1970. At the same time, he was a principled believer in the welfare state. This essay places Lindbeck, somewhat asymmetrically, in the context of two other Swedish economists: social democrat, eventually libertarian, Ingemar Ståhl, and trade union economist Gösta Rehn. My purpose in comparing these three economists is to examine the boundaries between an evolving social-democrat project and emergent neoliberal ideas. There were important connections of conversation, collaboration and friendship between these three actors. Yet they took different paths. The article proposes that understanding the relationship between social democracy and neoliberalism can be productively done through an emphasis on three things: the relationship between egalitarian objectives and economic instrumentalities in the social-democrat project, specific meeting points between social-democrat and neoliberal repertoires of ideas as proposed in the problem of the mixed economy, and the interplay of personal biographies and economic expertise.

This article aims to contribute to recent discussions about the status of the “aesthetic” in the history of liberalism, by considering the ways in which ideas about music—specifically a “love of music [that is] both aesthetic and ethical”—has shaped liberal thought. Focusing on the work of the prominent twentieth-century liberal Isaiah Berlin (1909–97), and drawing from unpublished correspondence and neglected published writings, it introduces music as a form through which Berlin approached thinking about the tension between sensation and idea, or feeling and thinking, thereby shaping his approach to intellectual history.

This article offers a reading of the intersections of ancient and modern imperialism in Alfred Zimmern's 1911 monograph The Greek Commonwealth: Politics and Economics in Fifth-Century Athens. The first section looks at Zimmern's use of ancient and modern comparisons and shows that, far from modernizing the ancient Greeks, as scholars have argued, he in fact insistently drew attention to the differences between the ancient and modern worlds. The second section examines the complexities of Zimmern's narrative of the Athenian empire, in particular the tension between politics and economics intimated by the book's subtitle and foregrounded by its structure. The article as a whole sets Zimmern's account in the context of Edwardian reflections on ancient and modern imperialism and shows, with the help of his own reflections, that his use of historical parallels was designed to encourage thought about modern political and economic problems as well as action to remedy them.

This article examines the topic of postcolonial subject formation in the work of Moroccan historian and theorist Abdallah Laroui (1933–) by analyzing his evaluation of the notion of authenticity. I trace understandings of self-identity for Moroccans and other Arab populations that Laroui articulates in his work from the 1960s through the 2000s, and situate his interventions in relation both to relevant political developments and to contributions of other Arab intellectuals on this question, across this time period. Rather than interpret Laroui as a proponent of undifferentiated universalism in his reading of modern history, as many of his critics and commentators do, I demonstrate how he departs from such an approach by calling attention to the notion of particularism, which he defends as a counterpoint to authenticity. The article concludes with a discussion of Laroui's abandonment of a positive, alternative conception of cultural and political subjectivity by the late twentieth century, and considers what the implications of this shift in his thought are.

Statistics, ableism and domestic colonialism were inextricably intertwined in Britain over the long nineteenth century, based on both engineering people deemed to be “backward” and improving “waste” land, which together were used to justify farm colonies for the disabled, bookended by two key moments. The first is Sir John Sinclair's introduction of descriptive statistics into the English language in order to provide a foundation for domestic colonization which, as the founding president of the British Board of Agriculture and Internal Improvement, he promoted. He also enlisted Jeremy Bentham, who published his own domestic colonization plan (massive pauper panopticons on waste land) rooted in the statistics of his pauper population table. The second key moment occurs at the beginning of the twentieth century, when Sir Francis Galton develops key statistical arithmetic methods as the foundation for eugenics and his defense of compulsory segregation of the mentally disabled into domestic farm colonies.