This article suggests that Henry, third Earl Grey, had a vision of a liberal British world, which he hoped to implement through a political career. It was based on strong executive governance, representative politics, and the abolition of protection and slavery. It relied on the free market and good race relations to bring progress. He rejected the idea that legislation could impose improvement on colonial peoples. His program was quickly derailed, because of turbulent representative politics in Britain and the colonies after 1848. Later political developments made any integrated liberal vision of empire even more impractical. Studying Grey's arguments, and their fate, can help the task of defining British imperial liberalism. It is best understood as an attempt to check (Tory) vested interests, rather than as an ideology of interventionist improvement. Its priorities and tensions make most sense in relation to the concepts, assumptions, and turning points that dominated British politics.

The First World War is often seen as marking a transition from a world of empires to that of nation-states. As perhaps the inaugural global event, it is understood as making possible the international order we still inhabit. Yet the war also gave rise to powerful movements that sought to oppose and even dismantle this order. Soviet communism provided one such challenge and pan-Islamism another. While Lenin's desire to convert a war between states into one between classes turned into the dream of an alternative international order, the world's largest pan-Islamist movement in India retained its non-statist imagination. Like Gandhi's Noncooperation Movement, of which they were a part, India's pan-Islamists radicalized the language of empire rather than turning to religion for a new internationalist ideal. And they did so by aiming to escape the war as a global event.

This article contributes to the historiography of romantic marriage in the eighteenth century by analyzing discourses on marital love and happiness in the moral weeklies of the German writers Georg Friedrich Meier and Samuel Gotthold Lange. Meier and Lange raise overarching questions about why so many marriages are unhappy and argue that long-term marital contentment requires spouses to discover and confirm each other's qualities and abilities on a daily basis. Each must reflect and affirm the other while also practicing a kind of de-escalation in conflict situations, for instance by withdrawing and calming oneself before facing problems anew. I argue that this apparently modern therapeutic approach to marital relationships was part of a civic morality in the making, a morality that pointed forward to the emergence of a modern individual self while also being rooted in a long tradition of spiritual exercises and therapeutic regimens.

Scholarship largely holds that the “Persianate world”—a transregional sphere of cultural exchange mediated by an Indian Ocean lingua franca—was put paid to by a colonizing English East India Company. Against that historiography, this article reveals how colonial and Indo-Persian modern textual trends were coproduced. Reading a first-person account of the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, written in 1815–17 by a prince from a Mughal successor state under Company rule, the article argues that the travelogue's unprecedented form of a diary, and its uncharacteristically affective contents for Indo-Persian prose, drew on emerging genres and Romantic ideologies in British India. But while this resulted in a new kind of Indo-Persian ego-document, this text of Indian Ocean travel remained, however, anchored in Mughal concepts of moods and manners. As such it betrayed transitional tensions that compel a reconsideration of how colonialism led ultimately to the passing of a precolonial Persianate Babel.

This article explores how rumors of monarchical sodomy at the turn of the eighteenth century became entangled with newly emerging conceptions of the nation and nationalized space. After the 1688 Revolution in England, accusations of the king's sodomy increasingly mobilize territorial rather than theological understandings of sodomy's danger, transforming sodomy's terror from a satanic threat to the Christian kingdom to a national threat to the English nation. While historical studies on the territorialization of sovereignty often focus on structural transformations to the state, these accounts rarely attend to transformations in political feeling. This article shows how a novel discourse of national sodomy helped unsettle long-standing attachments to the king as the embodiment of sovereign power. Moreover, this article methodologically innovates the study of state sovereignty by attending to conceptual problems of political attachment through the study of an affectively loaded concept such as sodomy.

Among the most controversial reforms investigated by Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont was the idea of using inheritance as an instrument to diffuse property ownership. This article offers the first comparative account of the development of this concept across each of their major works. By situating their interventions within wider inheritance law debates, it is demonstrated how their evolving visions of democracy forced them to innovatively combine two normative arguments: (i) diffusing property ownership via inheritance was a precondition for placing democracy upon stable political foundations, and (ii) this could counter the rise of pauperism and the extreme wealth inequality of nineteenth-century industrial society. Far from being an anachronistic republican notion, such reforms were long considered too radical to be implemented in England and Ireland.

This article scrutinizes Rawson W. Rawson over seven years, from 1837 to 1844, during which he served as founding editor of the Journal of the Statistical Society of London and then as civil secretary to successive Canadian governors-general. Rawson studied poverty in London, amplified criticisms of Malthusian Poor Law disciplines in Scotland, and applied that logic to Indigenous poverty on the colonial frontier. The statisticians sought generic definitions of property and agency that sometimes challenged a more binary logic of civilization. But in Canada, Rawson's very critique of dispossession became an instrument of that dispossession.

When, why and how did the subjects of individual and national self-determination come to overlap and what were the effects of this overlap when it occurred? Usually in the history of European political thought, the subject of self-determination is associated with the concept of autonomy, while the subject of national self-determination is associated with the concept of the nation-state. The aim of this article is to examine the relationship between these two concepts mainly in the light of an earlier tension between the concepts of the people and of the nation as agents of political authorization and between Roman law and the legacy of Monarchomach thought particularly, but not exclusively, in eighteenth-century France. It is designed to show of how this cluster of tensions was described and discussed first by Rousseau, Kant and Hegel, and then, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, by such figures as Mill, Tocqueville, Bluntschli, Bosanquet, Hauriou, Schmitt and Strauss. The point of the article is to suggest that the modern, two-sided, relationship between parties and states is more of a continuation of the earlier conceptual relationship between nations and peoples than is usually assumed.

Recent scholarship has examined Alexis de Tocqueville's underexplored assertion that American racial stratification functioned as an extension of European feudalism. However, Tocqueville was not alone in his insights. At least a half-dozen nineteenth-century African American writers and thinkers, including Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Maria Stewart, Harriet Jacobs, Sojourner Truth, and especially Hosea Easton, have also described America's racial hierarchy as a continuation of antecedent European feudal social structures. Not only do their perspectives on what I call racial feudalism in America lend credence to Tocqueville's hypothesis that the afterlife of medieval social frameworks continued to persist in the post-Enlightenment United States, but also black Americans establish a distinctive body of knowledge that must be read alongside Tocqueville to render a more complete understanding of antebellum US social hierarchy.

This article traces the history of a scholarly vice of little renown: hypercriticism. Focusing on classical philologists and biblical scholars in nineteenth-century Germany, it examines how Hyperkritik developed from a technical philological term into a pejorative label that was widely invoked to discredit the latest trends in classical philology and, especially, biblical scholarship. Methodologically, this broad use of the term challenges historians’ preference for treating scholarly virtues and vices as norms tied to scholars’ research practices. The article therefore develops a rhetorical approach, complementary to the praxeological one, in which scholarly vice terms are interpreted as parts of a repertoire of scholarly “don'ts” on which both specialists and nonspecialists could draw in addressing the perceived ills of scholarly work.

Istanbul's intellectual life saw an evolutionist paradigm shift during the Hamidian period (1876–1908). Two generations of intellectuals used their privileged education and the burgeoning printing press to popularize evolutionism to advance global and local claims. On the one hand, selective readings of evolutionism allowed them to claim Ottoman adherence to a superior Caucasian race and to claim belonging to the circle of “civilized nations.” On the other hand, by hailing themselves champions of a new positivist age, oppositional evolutionists sought to challenge the Hamidian establishment and the kind of Islam it represented. Because examinations of Ottoman evolutionism in the Hamidian period reveal the interconnections between new globalized ways of ordering the world, the rise of new Ottoman elites, and conflicting strategies to guarantee imperial survival in the asymmetrical age of empire, they allow transcending narratives centered on the (ir)reconcilability of Islam and evolutionary theories.

Although the establishment of history as a discipline has been examined extensively for European, North American, and, partly, Asian contexts, the Ottoman case still constitutes a neglected issue in the study of the global history of historiography and, in broader terms, of modern intellectual history. The present article focuses on the late Ottoman intellectual world and explores the making of the historical discipline in the Ottoman Empire. It argues that this transformation was the consequence of a number of interrelated factors, such as the turbulent developments in late Ottoman politics, Ottoman(ist) efforts to forge a “national” historical master narrative after the 1908 Constitutional Revolution, and Ottoman historians’ engagement with European historical thought and writing. Besides examining these factors and the ways in which they interacted, the article deals in detail with the works of late Ottoman historians to probe the Ottoman case of the professionalization of history.

This article argues that Thoreau's concept of “labor” presented as a defense of poiesis—any generative, world-altering activity. Thoreau understood Nature's labor as the ultimate creation for humans to imitate. Human labor best approached this ideal in the absence of market-based divisions of labor, particularly when mental and physical labor were united (even undifferentiated beyond their contemporary, reified distinction, a distinction which deeply troubled Thoreau). Thoreau's epistemology undergirds my discussion of his theory of labor. As I argue, his attempts to transcend divisions between subject and object, between ideal and material—divisions pertinent to his intellectual influences and interlocutors—were isomorphic to his attempts to transcend divisions of mental and physical labor, insofar as sensuous knowing itself was laborious. As Thoreau sought to know Nature and bring human labor closer to it, he expressed a consistent, dialectically complex philosophy, in which political economy and aesthetics, science and poetry, ran in parallel.

This article analyzes Dolf Sternberger's post-World War II argumentation against proportional representation. Sternberger is central in the intellectual history of German democratization. However, he expressed his misgivings about parties and proportionality in a perplexingly antidemocratic register. Proportionality was anonymous, mechanical, dead, and purely mathematical, relying on “mere numbers” and “summing up” as opposed to living, dynamic, and organic political relations—ultimately not a form of political electing at all. Sternberger intentionally mobilized age-old topoi and metaphors which interwar antidemocratic authors had used against parliamentary democracy in its entirety, now skillfully redirecting their force against proportional representation more specifically. Sternberger's intricate metaphorical system linked his anti-proportional views to his theory of active civic engagement and ultimately served pro-democratic aspirations in the altered historical situation. His case exemplifies broader continuities between interwar and postwar discourses and highlights the need to read metaphorical argumentation in historical contexts and pragmatically rather than merely semantically.

The article examines T. E. Hulme's reading of Georges Sorel as a politically transversal thinker of moral renewal. It argues that, by distancing Sorel from syndicalism and by reading him as a thinker of moral absolutes, this interpretation constituted an act of resignification. This is shown by contrasting Hulme's reading with the dominant patterns of the British reception of Sorel. What emerges is the striking, and self-aware, originality of Hulme's positions. This originality, we argue, was made possible by the European scope of Hulme's intellectual horizon, which gave him the resources to read Sorel differently. Finally, we ask why Hulme read Sorel in this way. We suggest that Hulme was working through a contradiction between his relativistic philosophical education and an increasing need for political commitment. Sorel's ethics of commitment grounded in myth were a way to move from Bergsonian openness to a metaphysics capable of conceptualizing moral and political absolutes.

This article examines the reconfigurations of British anarchist politics and culture, focusing on the reception of William Godwin by three influential anarchist writers and activists: George Woodcock, Colin Ward, and Albert Meltzer. It argues that mobilizing Godwin was an important part of their efforts to define, and then defend, a particular version of anarchist intellectual culture in Britain, each with its own unique history and strategic perspectives regarding social and political change. These competing conceptualizations of Godwin's legacy and significance therefore reflected both their independent political and intellectual concerns and developing rifts in the broader anarchist movement, especially between proponents of gradualism and those of more militant forms of anarchism. Ultimately, for all three, Godwin became a cipher for internal ideological struggles in anarchist politics, as his pliable ideas were mobilized in the battle for the meaning of British anarchism.

This article centers on the early writings of Isaac Breuer (1910–17), arguing that Breuer's radicalization of neo-Kantianism anchors his revolutionary call to politicize Jewish Orthodoxy. Moreover, it contends that neo-Kantianism, which is normally associated with liberal or social-democratic politics, was given a thoroughly antiliberal reading by Breuer that led to an antiliberal Orthodox politics. While the rise of non-Zionist political Orthodoxy is often regarded as an obsolete traditionalism unattuned to the nature of mass politics, Breuer's politicization of Orthodoxy reveals a coherent antiliberal political theory that addresses the aporias of the democratic age. Breuer uses neo-Kantianism to develop an anti-Weberian “science of politics” which attempts to overcome the modern plurality of values by positing Judaism as coercive public morality. Reading Breuer's Jewish writings through the lens of his quarrels with Weber, Stammler, and Cohen, this article explores Breuer's attempt to overcome the association of Kantian morality with liberalism, by legitimizing coercion politically, philosophically, and theologically. This enabled Breuer to criticize apolitical forms of Jewish Orthodoxy, Zionist programs to politicize Judaism, and democratic politics more generally.

This article argues for the importance of worker education for understanding the intellectual history of Marxism. It examines the work of the early Western Marxist Karl Korsch, who was deeply engaged in that project, showing that his most famous text, 1923's Marxism and Philosophy, can be read as a reflection on its problems and goals, especially the demand that the theory taught to the workers should “express” their life experience and struggle. The article ends with a discussion of the way in which the project of worker education can help us think through the geographical specificities of Marxism. In adjusting the pedagogical project to “express” new populations, especially in countries without a large industrial working class, intellectuals and party leaders entertained broad revisions to Marxist theory.

This article offers a new account of the rise of judicial power in modern Germany. Strong judicial control of the government is often associated with the constitutional ethos that emerged in postwar West Germany as a reaction to Nazi rule. This article locates the origins of German judicialization in the political struggles of the Weimar era. It shows how the assumption of a power to judicial review by Germany's highest court, the Reichsgericht, was the product of the successful cooperation of the judiciary with conservative political parties on the issue of property rights in the young republic. These were at the centre of two controversies examined in the article: the expropriation of princes of former ruling houses and the consequences of the hyperinflation of 1923. In both cases the Reichsgericht used an understanding of property as an inalienable right to radically reinterpret Germany's first democratic constitution, which had in fact granted the legislature extensive power to modify property relations. This suited the judiciary's own objective of assuming stronger controls over legislative action and bolstered the political position of conservative forces in Weimar politics. What emerged was a supra-positive constitutionalism that sought to supersede the written constitution. These political realities were an essential context for theoretical debates on the extent and limits of judicial power between theorists such as Carl Schmitt, Hans Kelsen, Hermann Heller, Franz Neumann, and Ernst Fraenkel. An examination of the complex interaction of parliamentary, judicial, and popular politics concerning the issue of property reveals that German judicial empowerment amounted to an attempt to rewrite the Weimar Constitution and limit the scope of Germany's democratic revolution.

This article reintroduces Italian antifascist intellectual Nicola Chiaromonte to anglophone twentieth-century intellectual history by foregrounding Chiaromonte's transatlantic exchange with the New York intellectuals. Drawing from Chiaromonte's unpublished notes and correspondence, as well as his published writing in English and Italian, it elaborates how what I call Chiaromonte's “negative utopianism” migrated concepts and concerns from the political-philosophical context of 1930s Paris to 1940s New York. Though descriptions of Chiaromonte in New York accentuate his rejection of Marxism within sectarian radical circles, I resituate this tension vis-à-vis the philosophical clash between Chiaromonte's speculative, phenomenological conceptual framework and his US milieu's scientific rationalism and naturalistic pragmatism. Thanks to his influence on Dwight Macdonald's politics magazine, Chiaromonte became a contact point with the ideals animating the antifascist resistance and the theoretical transformations inaugurated by the decentered subject—one whose promotion of relationality and limit as grounds for recentering the transatlantic left had longer echoes.