Hermann Cohen is often described as the last in a line of German idealist, or Jewish rationalist, thinkers. This article, instead, takes Cohen as a point of departure, tracing his distinct form of anti-Spinozism which was transmitted to France by the Russian émigré philosopher of religion Jacob Gordin. It considers the engagements by Cohen, Leo Strauss, and Gordin with Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise, and examines the role an essay by Gordin played in bringing Cohen's view to francophone Jewish audiences and in defending Cohen's reading of Spinoza against Strauss's critique. The article then treats the postwar redeployments of Gordin's essay by Emmanuel Levinas and the historian of anti-Semitism Léon Poliakov against the Zionist and Spinozist views promoted by David Ben-Gurion. Attention to the overlooked centrality of Gordin demonstrates the importance of Russian intelligentsia as carriers of Cohen's legacy, highlights the presence of Cohen's anti-Spinozist views in postwar French and French Jewish thought, and introduces another site within the reception history of Spinoza in the twentieth century.

This article contextualizes Hannah Arendt's complex and sometimes contradictory views on the Prussian statesman and balance-of-power theorist Friedrich von Gentz. A narration of Arendt's encounter with Gentz, to whom she devoted considerable space in her biography of Rahel Varnhagen and about whom she wrote two additional early essays, can illuminate the elusive contours of her international political thought as they developed from her early career to mature works like The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and On Revolution (1963). I argue that a better grasp of Arendt's encounter with Gentz will shed light on the following: Arendt's complex relationship with conservatism, the early influences on her commitment to European unity and federation, and the early development of her conviction that the pathologies of the nation-state system require a revolutionary, cosmopolitan answer. Moreover, understanding this early encounter and its lasting traces will clarify why Gentz, who himself was active at the height of the “Age of Revolution,” once again became an important interlocutor for Arendt as she explored the possibility of a new age of revolutions in On Revolution.

According to a dominant narrative, the concept of popular sovereignty was joined to the notion of public opinion during the French Revolution to form the blueprint of a liberal constitutional state. This article shows how, after the Revolution, Benjamin Constant, who is now recognized as a founding figure of “liberalism,” used public opinion as a substitute for popular sovereignty to theorize political legitimacy and constitution making. I show why and when Constant discussed popular sovereignty, namely to dismiss it as an unhelpful and dangerous fiction in answer to factions invoking the concept to revolutionize the political order, or rulers such as Napoleon using it to claim absolute power. In parallel, I explain how Constant designed his alternative, opinion-based theory of legitimacy in the 1790s, before pragmatically adapting it over the course of his career as political regimes changed in France. Constant's substitution of public opinion for popular sovereignty, I contend, reveals distinct views on what makes a political regime legitimate and the meaning of constitutional changes. I conclude with a discussion of how Constant's views, thus interpreted, throw light on debates about sovereignty and public opinion in modern political thought.

This article reconstructs an overlooked tradition of direct democracy within early twentieth-century Indian political thought. It focuses on four political thinkers—Radhakumud Mookerji (1884–1964), Brajendranath Seal (1864–1938), Radhakamal Mukerjee (1889–1968), and Beni Prasad (1900–1945)—all of whom were central figures in a genre of federalist historiography of premodern Indian politics which emerged in the 1910s. The article interprets these thinkers as critics of the Indian nationalist movement's embrace of electoral government in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through a contextual reading of their major written works in the late 1910s and the 1920s, the article traces the rise of a distinct theory of federalist constitutionalism, modelled on premodern state structures and oriented towards the legislative empowerment of local citizens’ assemblies.

As the “Indo-Pacific” concept gains currency in public discourses on foreign policy, it remains poorly understood as an idea, due to inadequate surveys of its intellectual origins and international visions in global contexts. This article studies Karl Haushofer's theory of the “Indo-Pacific” as an organic and integral space primed for political consciousness. Haushofer not only laid the oceanographic foundation of the “Indo-Pacific” with novel evidence in marine sciences, ethnography, and philology, but also legitimated it as a social and political space. Mindful of Germany's geopolitical predicament in the interwar period and informed by sources in indology and sinology, Haushofer envisaged the political resurrection of South, East, and Southeast Asia against colonial domination, and conceived the “Indo-Pacific” vision for remaking the international order.

Arthur C. Danto was one of the most influential and prolific philosophers of art of the second half of the twentieth century. More particularly, his encounter with the art of Andy Warhol in 1964 became a crucial moment that would catapult his lifelong attempt to spell out the theoretical conditions of contemporary art, and the implications those conditions held for art history and criticism. In this article, however, I show that Danto was in fact primed for his encounter with Warhol by the newly emerging identity of Anglo-American analytic philosophy at mid-century. Using unpublished archival material, I show that Danto's fundamental insights in his first two major essays in the philosophy of art, “The Artworld” (1964) and “Artworks and Real Things” (1973), were in place at least two years before his chance meeting with Warhol's artwork. In making this more modest historical claim, however, I argue that Danto was part of a broader generation of philosophers who were attempting to work through some of the fundamental problems raised by the naturalist tradition of American thought since the late nineteenth century, problems that became central to the emerging identity of analytic philosophy in its early stages. Among the most pressing of these problems was how values functioned in a naturalistic universe absent theological or metaphysical grounding. Drawing from this philosophical space, Danto's account of art deeply influenced the direction of Anglo-American philosophy of art during the second half of the twentieth century. In the process, he became one of the most significant theorists of contemporary art in the English-speaking world.

Current discussions of the early Jewish reception of Kantian philosophy are dominated by two major approaches. According to the first, this reception was governed by a universal Enlightenment rationalism that was present in Judaism no less than in Kantian philosophy. According to the second, it was the fact that Kantianism contained a latent Judaic kabbalistic philosophy that made it attractive to Jewish intellectuals. This paper departs from both approaches by showing that when Jewish intellectuals encountered Kantianism they found neither a universal rationality to which Judaism should conform, nor an esoteric Jewish metaphysics to which Kantian philosophy had already conformed, but something else entirely, namely a hostile philosophical religion that sought to reconstruct Judaism in its own image. As a result of the historical context in which this challenge arose, some Jewish intellectuals accepted this reconstruction as a rational reform, while others repudiated it as a Christian-rationalist assault on Jewish law and tradition. Characterized first by the absence of a defensive Jewish Schulmetaphysik that might combat Kantianism on its own grounds, and second by the preparedness of enlightened intellectuals to extort Jewish acceptance of Christian rationalism by withholding citizenship rights, this context made Kantian philosophy into an offer that was difficult for Jewish intellectuals to refuse, or accept.

This article argues that Hayek's thought had a consistent epistemological core that he developed with the aim of undermining prevailing positivism and replacing it with a metaphysical and spiritualistic philosophy of science. This becomes clear when an intellectual-historical method is used to elucidate Hayek's psychological and methodological works. We see that the approaches and arguments he found most convincing were those of nineteenth-century neo-Kantianisms, Gestalt psychology, vitalism, phenomenology, and theological mathematician Georg Cantor. Hayek thought his spiritual science superior because it explained “the place where the human individual stands in the order of things,” thereby clarifying science's epistemic standpoint, but also its meaning. The article will be of interest to scholars of neoliberalism and contemporary politics because its reading of Hayek suggests that the allegiance between, and apparent attractiveness of, Hayekian and religious conservative thought may have something to do with their common claims to marry order, freedom, and purpose.

Harlem loomed large in the imagination of Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington, one of the twentieth century's most significant composers and an important theorist of the condition of being black and American. This article provides insights into Ellington's social thought by foregrounding his evocations of Harlem and his efforts to interpolate that neighborhood into the physical, cultural, and imaginative spaces of US national life. In doing so, it also situates Ellington's ideas in relation to the competing intellectual currents of the Harlem Renaissance movement that had inspired his project of racial vindication. More broadly, the article argues that understanding of the history of African American ideas of race and nation benefits from analysis of discursive place-making and the spatial practices of artistic and intellectual work. Attending to space and place recuperates the complexity and multiplicity of such ideas, which are often concealed by abstracted discussion of concepts such as “integration.”

History as a body of knowledge, a loose bundle of working routines and writing practices, of genres, memories, imaginaries, and institutions, has struggled with its relationship to “religion” for a long time. In the European tradition, but also elsewhere, historical writing often served to fill the gaps in the knowledge about the past that had been, in the main, supplied by scriptural tradition. At the same time, historical writing also became a competitor with this tradition. The resulting relationship was, and continues to be, uneasy. In its familiar present-day form, for example, the quality of being “historical,” i.e. “historicity,” requires the exclusion of divine agency as a permissible explanation of events in the course of worldly affairs. In what François Hartog calls the modern “regime of historicity,” the culture of historical writing after 1750 became dominated by scholarship and aligned with mechanist understandings of the philosophy of nature. Enlightenment-era historical writing increasingly conceived of the world as a nexus of cause–effect relations that afforded space to the divine agency only in the function of “prime mover.” History then appeared to fall in line with the other forces of reason-driven “secularization” that stripped religious knowledge of the privilege of explaining things in the world, ultimately transforming it into “dogma” and “belief,” both only tenuously connected to reality. Knowledge based on the divinely “revealed” texts and the divinely “inspired” thought of traditionally recognized religious authorities lost its previous epistemic standing. Yet this loss occurred, to the extent that it did, in the form of a highly complicated negotiation, with compromises stacked on top of other compromises, generating a continuously confusing and mobile state of affairs.

Scholars have shown that historicizing studies of sight can shed light on everything from art history to statecraft to scientific inquiry. But the disciplined eye of the scholar of language—the philological observer—has received little attention, an omission particularly worthy of notice given recent interest in how the history of humanities might be incorporated into the history of science more broadly. This article contributes to a treatment of philological observation in the nineteenth century. Focusing particularly on the career of the Munich Latinist Eduard Wölfflin (1831–1908), a founding father of the monumental Latin lexicon known as the Thesaurus linguae Latinae, it isolates three distinct modes of philological observation: the constitutive, the collative, and the estimative. In the process, it indicates parallels between the kinds of sight practiced by philologists and those of their contemporaries in other investigative arenas, showing how developments on a Latinist's desk can be tied into much larger networks of cultural and epistemic concerns

The article discusses the central role of the history of religion in the debate on the so-called “crisis of historicism” during the first half of the twentieth century. I argue that the seemingly marginal question of how to write the history of religion informs major debates about the writing of history and history's place in culture. Focusing on Ernst Troeltsch's On Historical and Dogmatical Method in Theology (1900) and Rudolf Bultmann's History and Eschatology (1955), I analyze how theological and historical arguments and concepts interact in their respective histories of religion. According to Troeltsch, the methods of contemporary Religionsgeschichte (history of religion) undermine not only theological dogma but also such common historicist categories as “reason,” “teleology,” or “essence.” Bultmann, using similar methods, develops a similar critique based on the idea of “historicity,” i.e. an anthropological fundament of understanding oneself historically. Here too, the simple and linear understanding of history is called into question by a decidedly religious element, namely eschatology understood as a radically different temporality. Both cases thus show how tightly religious problems, theological arguments, and historical methods are interwoven, and how much our understanding of history, religion, and their mutual relations is informed by this entanglement.

This article argues that the German Revolution of 1918–19 was a formative event in the politicization of Hannah Arendt and Herbert Marcuse, significantly influencing their understanding of revolutionary action and their reflections on the 1960s New Left movement. The German Revolution draws these often polarized thinkers closer together as both characterize the unfulfilled political possibility of the revolution in substantially similar ways. In the work of Arendt, the staunch critic of Marx, this highlights a critical engagement with the socialist tradition; while for Marcuse, the self-proclaimed “orthodox” Marxist, the revolution reveals the importance of a revised idea of revolutionary action. By tracing the influence of the German Revolution on the work of these two theorists, this paper aims to recover the importance of this historical moment in their later political thought, particularly in their readings of the renewed political possibilities of the 1960s.

This article argues that the link Hans Jonas drew between Martin Heidegger's philosophy and Gnosticism cannot be properly understood without taking into consideration his philosophical interpretation of modern science. It claims that Jonas saw Heideggerian existentialism not as a modern instantiation of Gnosticism but as a specific experiential reaction to the new cosmological outlook that emerged from the seventeenth-century scientific revolution, which negated the conceptual world that made Gnosticism possible. Jonas's interpretation is “against the grain”: by claiming that Heidegger's thought is a product of the reduction of nature to measurable, manipulable, and calculable extension governing the modern scientific mind, Jonas attributed to Heidegger the very flaws Heidegger critiqued in others. It is further claimed that Jonas's original contribution to Heidegger's reception history is not in proposing the link to Gnosticism but in reading him as the philosophical outcome of the instrumental reasoning of modern science.

This article attends to a formative moment in the history of Japanese historiography around 1900, when many Japanese historians began to identify with the eminent German historian Leopold von Ranke—curiously, however, without a substantial preceding engagement with his work. The article employs the concept of the “scholarly persona” to explore the views of influential Japanese historians on the significance of Leopold von Ranke as an embodiment of scholarly virtues. Contrasting Ranke's image in Japan with that prevalent among German and European practitioners, the article argues that Ranke did not function as a marker of a “Western” or “modern” way of doing history, as most previous accounts of his impact in Japan have asserted, but as a universally appropriable icon of a globalizing discipline.

Sylvia M. Payne was one of the first women to practice psychoanalysis in Britain. Though she became president of the British Psychoanalytical Society, not a single scholarly work is dedicated to Payne's intellectual ideas—a substantial historical lacuna, especially when compared with the research on Ernest Jones, one of Sigmund Freud's early disciples and the president who preceded her. This essay presents the first exploration of her early work. It focuses on her belonging to a group of British analysts who challenged Sigmund Freud's thinking on sexual difference. The full scope of this challenge, I argue, as it emerged in interwar Britain, has remained unexamined until today. Adding to the scholarship on the prominent and lesser-known roles of women in psychoanalysis, the article shows that Payne made significant contributions to the field; she also developed the work of Melanie Klein, on whom we also need more research. The study describes the life and work of a woman who has been neglected in the historiography of twentieth-century intellectual history. It engages with broader methodological questions of how to define the political, historical role of female psychoanalysts of her generation.

This article investigates Norman Mailer's appropriation and Americanization of the concept of totalitarianism as an internal critique of US society and culture in the 1960s. Dominant understandings of totalitarianism from the 1930s to the 1950s focused on external threats and were wedded to notions of pervasive state control of all aspects of life. Mailer's crucial intervention offered an alternative theory which viewed totalitarianism as an internal threat to the United States and de-emphasized the centrality of the state. His theory of cultural totalitarianism focused on internal psychological manipulation rather than external political coercion. Mailer's focus on the United States was symptomatic of a broader intellectual trend towards the study of non-statist forms of totalitarianism which has yet to receive adequate scholarly attention. This article thus illuminates new dimensions of the totalitarianism debate in American political thought and provides a fuller picture of Mailer's significance as a social critic.

Much recent scholarship has shown just how indebted the secular sciences of religion were to the Protestant world from which they grew. Yet this “Protestant world” is typically described schematically, as if Protestantism offered a coherent worldview or even a consistent set of doctrines. A different picture emerges if we deepen our historical horizon, and explore the reflexes, aspirations, and norms that have found a home in the Christian (in this case, Protestant) theological imagination. This “Christian archive” was a heterogeneous place, with room for many things that we would now call secular or even profane. Protestant reform in fact began by condemning this heterogeneity, insisting that much of what the church had come to see was sacred was, at best, only and all too human. Yet centuries of conflict in Europe over the truth of Christianity only pluralized this archive further. The nineteenth-century history of religion grew less out of “Protestantism,” in other words, than out of the sedimented mixture of theological, historical, philological, and anthropological materials inherited from these earlier moments. It was, moreover, also an intellectual project that discovered new uses for these materials and thereby opened new horizons of humanistic inquiry. This article makes this argument with reference to sacrifice—a theological challenge for Christian thinkers from the outset of the tradition, but especially for Protestants; a magnet for diverse historical, anthropological, and theological reflections; and a productive zone of inquiry for the nineteenth-century German philosophers, philologians, and “higher critics” of the Hebrew Bible who together helped create the modern history of religion.

This article analyses the early international thought of Trinidad-born Marxist journalist Claudia Jones. We focus on a neglected aspect of Jones's intellectual production in the United States: her interrogation of geopolitics in her Weekly Review articles in the early 1940s. We situate Jones in relation to the contemporary popularization of geopolitical thought in this period, reading her alongside another neglected figure in histories of international thought, the African American geopolitical scholar and diplomatic historian Merze Tate. Jones read together the geopolitical, class, racialized, and anticolonial implications of the expanding Nazi empire, positioning her at the forefront of Marxist theoretical innovation in this period. Moving beyond studies of canonical texts and white male thinkers in international intellectual history, we build on black women's intellectual history to center a black working-class woman's popular theorizing of international relations.