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European Intellectual History after the Global Turn
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 September 2022
Abstract
The globalization of modern European intellectual history is long overdue. It is also still in its early stages. This essay distinguishes four paths historians have followed so far. First, there has been the attempt to recover the global contexts and sources of the canon of “European thought.” A second approach has been to recapture the global imaginations of modern European thinkers. A third and more difficult possibility has been to track how European concepts and traditions were received and remade as they traveled the globe, and to examine the complex feedback mechanisms that have blurred the line between the European and the extra-European. Finally, a fourth and most controversial mode is to insist that the modern European canon is of prime significance in understanding historical and contemporary global relations—and that part of its value lies in helping undo the exclusions that its own historians have visited on that canon by misrepresenting European thought as a merely European affair.
Résumé
La globalisation de l’histoire intellectuelle de l’Europe moderne et contemporaine est attendue depuis longtemps ; elle en est également encore à ses débuts. Cet essai distingue quatre pistes suivies jusqu’à présent par les historiens. La première correspond à une tentative de retrouver les sources et les contextes mondiaux du canon de la « pensée européenne ». Une deuxième approche consiste à redonner vie aux imaginaires globaux des penseurs européens modernes. Une troisième possibilité, plus difficile à envisager, revient à retracer la circulation des traditions de pensée et des concepts européens à travers la planète en analysant leur réception et leur refaçonnage au cours de ces voyages, tandis que des réseaux de rétroaction complexes brouillaient les démarcations entre l’européen et le non-européen. Une quatrième et dernière voie, plus controversée, insiste sur l’importance capitale du canon de pensée européen dans la compréhension des interactions mondiales passées et présentes, en soulignant qu’une partie de la valeur de ce canon réside dans le fait qu’il peut aider à corriger les points aveugles que ses propres historiens lui ont imposés en représentant, à tort, la pensée européenne comme un isolat coupé du reste du monde.
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References
1 I am grateful to David Armitage and Julian Bourg for their helpful comments. I use “decolonization” even though the term was itself a European creation to make sense of a confusing set of developments that could have been imagined some other way; see Stuart Ward, “The European Provenance of Decolonization,” Past & Present 230 (2016): 227–60.
2 Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1970), 19–21, commenting on Jean-Paul Sartre’s preface to Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth [1961], trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 7–31.
3 On the global Enlightenment, major recent contributions include Alexander Bevilacqua, The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018); and Jürgen Osterhammel, Unfabling the East: The Enlightenment’s Encounter with Asia [1998], trans. Robert Savage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018). On liberalism and empire, the best overview is Jennifer Pitts, “Political Theory of Empire and Imperialism: An Appendix,” in Empire and Modern Political Thought, ed. Sankar Muthu (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 351–87.
4 G. W. F. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History [1822], trans. Leo Rauch (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988), 21–22.
5 Not so long ago, it was a novel move to reconsider the Enlightenment “in national context”; see Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich, eds., The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
6 Arthur O. Lovejoy, “Reflections on the History of Ideas,” Journal of the History of Ideas 1 (1940): 3–23, here p. 4. Cited in David Armitage, “The International Turn in Intellectual History,” in Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History, ed. Darrin M. McMahon and Samuel Moyn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 232–52, here p. 232.
7 J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). The late Émile Perreau-Saussine contended subversively that Skinner’s intra-European framing of the history of ideas was in reaction to the trauma of decolonization: Perreau-Saussine, “Quentin Skinner in Context,” Review of Politics 69, no. 1 (2007): 106–22. Whether or not this is true, there is clearly much more to be said about the colonial origins of the Cambridge school, whose founders were born in South Asia (John Dunn), the son of a colonial administrator in Africa (Skinner), and the descendant of settler colonialism in the Pacific (Pocock). Pocock did write an early comparative essay on Chinese notions of tradition; see Pocock, Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (New York: Athaneum, 1971), chapter 7.
8 H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890–1930 (New York: Knopf, 1958), 12–14.
9 Gay’s work concerned continental Europe, reaching across the Atlantic in The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1966–1969), while Schorske’s was not geographically ambitious, launching in his extraordinary Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (New York: Knopf, 1979) a historiography set at the level of European cities.
10 For the profound risks inherent in talk of “turns,” see Judith Surkis, “When Was the Linguistic Turn? A Genealogy,” American Historical Review 117, no. 3 (2012): 700–22.
11 Bevilacqua, The Republic of Arabic Letters, offers a striking account of these exchanges.
12 Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009).
13 Harry Liebersohn, The Return of the Gift: European History of a Global Idea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Gili Kliger, “Humanism and the Ends of Empire, 1945–1960,” Modern Intellectual History 15, no. 3 (2018): 773–80.
14 David Armitage, Foundations of Modern International Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), chapter 10; Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), chapter 1; Sankar Muthu, Global Connections in Enlightenment Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, forthcoming).
15 Maya Jasanoff, The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World (New York: Penguin, 2017).
16 Duncan Bell, “Making and Taking Worlds,” in Global Intellectual History, ed. Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 254–81, here p. 272.
17 Sheldon Pollock, “Cosmopolitanism and Vernacular in History,” in Cosmopolitanism, ed. Carol A. Breckinridge et al. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 15–53. See also Myles Lavan, Richard E. Payne, and John Weisweiler, eds., Cosmopolitanism and Empire: Universal Rulers, Local Elites, and Cultural Integration in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
18 Bell, “Making and Taking Worlds,” 261.
19 Benjamin Lazier, “Earthrise, or the Globalization of the World Picture,” American Historical Review 116, no. 3 (2011): 602–30. See also Michael Lang, “Mapping Globalization or Globalizing the Map? Heidegger and Planetary Discourse,” Genre 36, no. 3/4 (2003): 239–50.
20 Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965), 176. See also Harry Liebersohn, The Travelers’ World: Europe to the Pacific (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006); and Charles Roberts Anderson, Melville in the South Seas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939).
21 Jack Goody, Renaissances: One or Many? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
22 Jonathan I. Israel, Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights, 1750–1790 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), especially part 3; Israel, The Expanding Blaze: How the American Revolution Ignited the World, 1775–1848 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). Even more boldly, see Sebastian Conrad, “The Enlightenment in Global History: A Historiographical Critique,” American Historical Review 117, no. 4 (2012): 999–1027.
23 C. A. Bayly, Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire; The Wiles Lectures Given at the Queen’s University of Belfast, 2007 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
24 Alison Bashford and Joyce E. Chaplin, The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016); Yoav Di-Capua, No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Decolonization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018); Marwa Elshakry, Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Omnia El Shakry, The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017); Kris Manjapra, Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals across Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014).
25 Cemil Aydin, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asianist Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Aydin, The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017); Janaki Bakhle, “Putting Global Intellectual History in Its Place,” in Moyn and Sartori, Global Intellectual History, 228–53; Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012).
26 Isaiah Lorado Wilner, “Transformation Masks: Recollecting the Indigenous Origins of Global Consciousness,” in Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas, ed. Ned Blackhawk and Isaiah Lorado Wilner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 3–41. See also Gili Kliger, “Colonial Reformation: Religion, Empire and the Origins of Modern Social Thought” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2022).
27 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Global Intellectual History beyond Hegel and Marx,” History & Theory 54, no. 1 (2015): 126–37.
28 Andrew Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History: Culturalism in the Age of Capital (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Sartori, Liberalism in Empire: An Alternative History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014).
29 Richard Drayton and David Motadel, “The Futures of Global History,” Journal of Global History 13, no. 1 (2018): 1–21.
30 For my own such attempts, see Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), chapter 4; Moyn, “On the Non-Globalization of Ideas,” in Moyn and Sartori, Global Intellectual History, 187–204; and Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018), chapters 4 and 6.
31 David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Damrosch, ed., World Literature in Theory (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014); Martin Puchner, The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, Civilization (New York: Random House, 2017); Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (New York: Verso, 2013). See also the brilliant sociological account in Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).
32 There are, however, essay collections for scholars: Moyn and Sartori, Global Intellectual History; Margrit Pernau and Dominic Sachsenmaier, eds., Global Conceptual History: A Reader (London: Bloomsbury, 2016).
33 Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, 58.