When you think of 1960s anarchism, community playgrounds and financial planning for tenants’ associations may not spring to mind, yet these, along with similar topics, were Anarchy's (1961–1970) staple fare. The A5 monthly, edited by British journalist Colin Ward (1924–2010), maintained a steady output of ‘anarchist applications’ in the spheres of education, housing, and community development. Although published during the 1960s, the origins and ethos of the journal lay in the previous decade. Responding to this heightened Cold War “moment,” Ward developed an idiosyncratic radical pragmatism prioritizing the practice of popular democracy over the theory of it. In reconstructing Anarchy's intellectual formation, this article contributes to revisionist scholarship acknowledging a more experimental radical culture in 1950s Britain than is usually granted, one that prefigured aspects of the later counterculture but also differed from it in important respects.

This article makes use of primary sources to reconstruct Carl Schmitt's engagement with the work of Hannah Arendt. It focuses on Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963): a book that Schmitt called “exciting” and that made him sick “for a couple of weeks.” The article examines marginalia to explore the reasons behind this ambiguous reaction. It situates Schmitt's reading of Arendt in the aftermath of his 1945 defense writings in which he had come close to legitimizing the international criminal prosecution of Nazi officials: a position he feared could backfire against himself in light of the Eichmann trial. Despite points of agreement in their critiques of depoliticized legality, Schmitt's reading of Arendt remained limited by anti-Semitic hatred and his fear of persecution. Driven by a sense of antagonism rather than dialogue, Schmitt's meticulous Arendt collection reveals above all that he turned to her work in search of theoretical weapons of self-defense.

Recent years have witnessed a marked revival of guaranteed-income proposals. Among these, Milton Friedman's negative income tax is one of the most successful ideas to establish a universal floor of income for every citizen. Elaborated in the early 1940s, it attracted widespread attention among economists and policy makers in the aftermath of Johnson's War on Poverty. This contribution will, however, focus on the intellectual setting under which Friedman envisioned a new way to think about poverty. Tracing back the origin of the proposal in the context of the New Deal, this article shows how Friedman hollowed out redistributive considerations from the hierarchies of needs, notions of duty, or citizenship that were common in the British welfarist conception and preexisting notions of equality where the state played a key role by replacing it with a monetary and market-friendly conception of poverty.

This essay makes a theoretical and methodological intervention into the historical discipline by arguing that there is a serious and necessary role for historians to engage with the realities of our contemporary world. Using the Black Lives Matter movement and the global uprisings of 2020 as a case study, the author rejects long-standing critiques of presentism in the historical discipline. Instead, she argues that the history of transnational black activism and protest engaged by activists in the African diaspora throughout 2020 were indicative of the ways in which the realities of the past continue to materially inform the lives of real people in the present. The author calls the process of excavating these connections between the past and the present “historical sankofa”—a concept borrowed from the Akan tradition of Ghana.

This paper examines the career and thought of French political philosopher Blandine Kriegel (b. 1943) from the standpoint of the most striking paradox they present: though she was a student of Michel Foucault, who was famous for his critique of central role that political thinking has traditionally accorded the state, Kriegel has, since the mid-1970s, been one of the foremost champions of the concept of état de droit—the state as the embodiment of the “rule of law”—in French political debates. At a time when post-1968 critics of Marxism and totalitarianism (notably the so-called nouveaux philosophes) were arguing that states were inherently despotic, Kriegel mounted an original defense of the state, which, she argued, had played a central role in establishing legal rights that freed individuals from the “slavery” of civil society. She was able to do this, in part, by drawing on several suggestive elements found in Foucault's work: his concept of biopolitics, the claim that individuals and subjectivity are constituted through power relations, and the insight that war and sovereignty represent alternative ways of conceptualizing power. In this way, she used aspects of Foucault's political thought to arrive at a decidedly non-Foucauldian appreciation of the modern state.

Histories of the present are premised upon the loss of their subject, which is paradoxically deprived of its integrity by being tied back to the past. Attending to the present has been the prerogative of anticolonial and Cold War writing, for which the disconnection of present from past was crucial. If Gandhi, a critic of historical consciousness as a modality of imperialism, represented the former, Arendt did the latter kind of thinking. Histories of the present disregard these forms of thought, which stress rupture over continuity. This makes them Eurocentric almost by definition, as well as anti-global in their conceptualization. The attack on the US Capitol in January 2021 offers us an example of how an event, understood provincially within a Euro-American history of the present, can be globalised to quite different effect.

The Iranian humanities publication Farhang Emrooz (Today's Culture) published a series of articles on the Cambridge school of intellectual history in May 2016. The journal's colloquium, while hardly the only intervention on the Cambridge school by Iranian scholars, constitutes perhaps the most sophisticated exploration to date of the relationship between the school and Iranian intellectual history. It also excavates what Professor Ḥātam Qāderī defines as conservative currents of historiography in England and Iran. How, this article asks, is Cambridge-style history presented as a conservative approach and what might the school's Iranian reception tell us about the purpose of such a presentation? Furthermore, how do Qāderī and his peers attempt to reform Iranian historiography by diverging from other historiographical currents in Iran?

This article traces the influence of theories of Third World underdevelopment on Stuart Hall's understanding of the nature of historical transitions. I show Hall's notion of “articulation,” central to his social theory, is indebted to ideas about development originating in the global South, rather than to the thinking of “Western Marxists.” By arguing that Antonio Gramsci was a theorist of “articulation,” Hall read Gramsci as a thinker comparable to development theorists he was engaging with in the same period. This had important implications, I suggest, for Hall's “Gramscian” analyses of British politics in the 1980s. Specifically, I show that by describing Thatcherism as a form of “regressive modernization,” Hall adopted the idiom of several theories of economic development to argue that the uneven development of capitalist relations of production is the key to understanding how advanced forms of capitalist accumulation can accommodate seemingly archaic and reactionary social relations and institutions.

Liu Xiaofeng (1956–) is best known today as the founder of the “Chinese Straussian School,” a conservative intellectual movement that advocated a quasi-theological form of political leadership in contemporary China. Little attention has been paid, however, to the intertwined relationship between Liu's political authoritarianism and his meditation on religion. This article traces Liu's lifelong search for a “religious consciousness” from his youthful yearnings for Christian redemption in the 1980s “New Enlightenment,” to the utter profanation of the sacred in his recent espousal of the Mao cult. I suggest that Liu's conservative turn should not obscure the profound and troubling continuity between his earlier search for an “otherworldly” religious ethics and his later obsession with “this-worldly” political theology. By exploring the entanglement between revolution and religion throughout Liu's zigzagging journey, this article considers Liu's transition as part and parcel of a generational endeavor to come to terms with the “politico-theological” legacies of Mao's revolution.

This essay traces how China's changing presents have been represented in Anglo-American discourse and in China studies from the Cold War to today. It shows how, in popular opinion but also in academia, that discourse has displayed a stubborn tendency to explain—or rather explain away—China's presents, configuring them strictly in relation to pasts that can never be overcome and futures that are either never realized or always dangerously looming. This ideological framing has its roots in Cold War anticommunism, which was foundational to China studies in the US, but lingers on to this day, as China's coevalness is continuously denied.

Three generations ago, intellectual historians wrote books in which central texts and intellectual figures were held to be the sources of entire bodies of thought. The metaphors of “influence” and “origins” were common; particular arguments associated with those texts and thinkers were imagined as shaping and creating traditions of thought. Adjectives like “Lockean,” “Jeffersonian,” “Nietzschean,” and “Kantian” attached themselves to whole strains and schools of philosophical, political, and social thought. Two generations ago, a wholesale shift in intellectual historiography, best represented by the Cambridge school historians Quentin Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock, but evident well beyond them, pushed historians away from the centrality of major figures and texts understood as shaping long traditions, and toward “languages” and “discourses” that were historically localized and bounded. Individual texts were to be understood not as the source of a stream of ideas, but as creatures of very specific discursive and ideological environments; understanding their history meant understanding authorial “intention” contextually, rather than “influence” and long-term consequence. Along with this turn was a commitment to historical discontinuity and an understanding of the alterity and “otherness” of past ways of thinking. Whatever our vision of Kant might be today, said this school of thought, it is not the Kant of the eighteenth-century world in which he thought, and we should be wary of projecting our contemporary understandings into that foreign world.

Political economy, as a field of study, now generally refers to work on the interplay of state actors and the macroeconomy. As practiced by economists, political scientists, and legal scholars, political economy concerns the behavior of central bankers, the impacts of changes in the tax code, world trade negotiations. It has to do with policy. But to historians of economics, the term “political economy” is more likely to call to mind thinkers who engaged in economic reasoning a century or more ago: Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, Karl Marx. For many historians of economics, “political economy” functions as a shorthand: “economics” avant la lettre. Evoking a time before the formal disciplinization of “economics,” “political economy” suggests a more humanistic perspective, “economics” a more scientistic one. Whereas the term “economics” has been used to refer to an academic discipline, practiced by disinterested intellectuals, the term “political economy,” in both its usages, highlights the close connection between economic ideas and political action.

The mythmaking began in 1808. Soon after the Parliament of the United Kingdom passed an Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, the English abolitionist Thomas Clarkson published the first history of the movement that had led to the ban on the trafficking of enslaved Africans within the British Empire. It was a testament to British benevolence. A tribute to Christian virtue. “The abolition of the Slave-trade took its rise, not from persons, who set up a cry for liberty when they were oppressors themselves, nor from persons who were led to it by ambition or a love of reputation among men, but where it was most desirable, namely, from the teachers of Christianity in those times,” Clarkson proclaimed. In his telling, the inspiration for abolitionism had risen naturally from the same people who had dominated the transatlantic slave trade during the preceding century and would maintain colonial slavery for another three decades.

For many intellectual historians, presentism is viewed as a cardinal sin—linked to unreflective anachronism and the inappropriate projection of present-day values onto a very different past context. However, by embracing the ways in which the present inevitably shapes our modes of inquiry, our historical interests, and even the moral underpinnings of our analysis, we can find in the present tools that can make our history better, and help make sense of historical debates and controversies. This essay gives an account of Japanese historiography organized around four versions of presentism. The first is political presentism, an analytic lens that emerged in the “objectivity debate” over what constituted politicized scholarship and reflected the political antagonisms of the Cold War in Asia. Consciously or unconsciously, political convictions shape our scholarship. The second version is the presentism of social context. Each decade that followed the Asia–Pacific War possessed its particular zeitgeist, and histories written during those moments were products of their time. The third form of presentism is the connection between past and present via analogy or likeness: using a past event or person to understand the present and vice versa. To analogize past and present means finding a correspondence that makes the past feel familiar and less “other.” The fourth version of presentism is the project of contemporary history: the past in the present, the past leading to the present, the present as the starting point for historical inquiry.

This contribution reflects on the theme of intellectual history and the present from the perspective of recent intellectual histories of mid-twentieth-century Africa. I focus on two aspects of the intellectual historian's work which relate to the importance of putting the past into dialogue with the present. First, using new histories of the historical event of mid-twentieth-century decolonization as a case study, I consider the potential offered by investigating ideas which have been eclipsed or forgotten and trying to understand when and why possibilities closed down. Second, I consider the role of the intellectual historian in deessentializing concepts that underpin contemporary public discussion, focusing in particular on the concept of “democracy.”