This article argues for a reassessment of James Mill's anticlerical, and possibly atheistic, brand of secularism. Mill's well-known religious skepticism and criticism of the Church of England, it is suggested, have tended to obscure his otherwise dispassionate assessment of religion as a social phenomenon. The article traces Mill's lifelong belief that religious improvement was a necessary precondition to societal progress, from his first major publication in 1805 to his late advocacy of a tolerant state religion in 1835. In this, Mill differed starkly from Jeremy Bentham, who considered all religious beliefs harmful and whose utopian utilitarian society was secular rather than tolerant. The article contends that eighteenth-century Scottish enquiries into human manners and religious progress directly inspired Mill's lifelong ambition to use religion as a tool to reform manners and create the educated public opinion he believed was indispensable to the enactment of his democratic and utilitarian programme.

This article shows how two concepts for which Blaise Pascal's Pensées (1670) are best known—divertissement and ennui (often mistranslated as “boredom”)—inherited and transformed medical conceptions of melancholy along with one of melancholy's signature therapeutic protocols: diversion. Instead of limiting the genealogy of Pascal's concepts to more obvious textual sources (St Augustine, Montaigne, etc.), here they are read against the background of an epistemological paradigm dominant in his time: Galenic medicine. Drawing on a large corpus of early modern French medical texts, this article discloses how melancholy, stripped of its overt medical status, remerges in Pascal's analysis of subjectivity, which valorized melancholic ennui against the values of a nascent civil society subservient to the monarchic order. Once used to describe outlying temperaments and exceptional pathologies, the discourse on melancholy becomes fundamental to the human being per se in Pascal's theological and anthropological perspective. Thus transformed, the older forms of melancholy and its remedies ensured the possibility of their survival—disguised and unrecognized—in modern theories of subjectivity and psychology. Understanding melancholy's latent presence in the Pensées, in other words, sheds new light on the affective aspects of Pascal's social critique and invites us to investigate the modern afterlife of early modern melancholy.

Adam Ferguson has usually been portrayed as an advocate of conflict, political parties, and factional strife. This article demonstrates that this is a rather unbalanced reading. A careful investigation of Ferguson's works and correspondence in context reveals a man deeply troubled by both turbulence and party politics. He consistently expressed fears of what he saw as the tumultuous populace, and the willingness of party leaders to rise on the shoulders of the mob. This could ultimately lead to military despotism, something he dreaded. While Ferguson's theory of antagonistic sociability was original, this article shows that we should not take for granted that it implied an approval of party conflict in a broad sense. Indeed, he was highly critical of opposition parties seeking to replace the government. He did tolerate a regulated form of contest between different orders in the state under a mixed constitution, but it is here argued that he is much better understood as a Christian Stoic promoting stability and order than a supporter of party struggle.

This article considers the philosophical foundations of the French Enlightenment through a close study of the Stoic influences on the Marquis de Condorcet's education philosophy. The article argues that although Condorcet did not acknowledge any direct Stoic influence, his philosophy of education nevertheless should be understood in the eclectic idiom of eighteenth-century Stoic discourse. Furthermore, Condorcet's Stoicism was entirely compatible with Rousseau's Stoicism to the degree that one could call Condorcet a Rousseauean at least in matters of education theory—even though Condorcet, a protégé of Voltaire, is usually presented as a critic of Rousseau. Finally, the article suggests that the notion of liberty that Condorcet seeks to make flourish through his national education plan is in line with the Stoic ideal of rational autonomy, despite Condorcet's insistence that the modern idea of liberty (that is, his own idea) is fundamentally different from the ancient idea.

English common law reports are dense with ideas. Yet they remain mostly untapped by intellectual historians. This article reveals how intellectual history can engage with law and jurisprudence by following the notion that “infidels” (specifically non-Christian individuals) deserved to receive exceptional treatment within England and across the globe. The starting point is Sir Edward Coke: he suggested that infidels could be conquered and constitutionally nullified, that they could be traded with only at the discretion of the monarch, and he confirmed their incapacity to enjoy full access to the common law. This article uncovers how each of these assertions influenced the development of the imperial constitution in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when it came to war, trade and slavery. Identifying each of the major moves away from Coke's prejudices, this article argues that sometimes common lawyers responded to political change, but at other times anticipated it.

The Norwegian Constitution of 1814 was the last in a series of European constitutions inspired by the American and French examples between 1776 and 1814 of which today the American and the Norwegian examples are the only two left. This paper revisits the debates preceding the Norwegian 17 May 1814 Constitution and argues that republican ideas of liberty as independence from arbitrary power formed the intellectual background and context of the debates. This breaks with standard narratives in Norwegian history where the constitution is described as an early example of liberalism. The republican influence forces us to revise the conventional reading of the Norwegian Constitution, and may further provide us with new keys to interpret the intellectual roots of the “Nordic model.” The author suggests that the present high levels of economic equality, egalitarianism and trust in the Scandinavian countries may have their intellectual origins in a particular “Scandinavian republicanism,” inspired by the example of the American republicans in the late eighteenth century.

Josiah Tucker, who was the Anglican dean of Gloucester from 1758 until his death in 1799, is best known today as a controversialist, a political economist and a lesser contemporary of Adam Smith. Little attention has been paid, however, to the important relationship between his religious writings and his wider economic thought. This article addresses this lack of attention in two ways: first by demonstrating the link between Tucker's conception of civil and religious liberty and his “science” of political economy, and second by drawing sustained attention to his economic adaptation and reformulation of the moral philosophy of Bishop Joseph Butler, Tucker's ecclesiastical mentor from 1739 to 1752. Emphasizing Butler and Tucker's views on the traditional Christian virtue of charity, and the moral duty of the rich towards the poor, the article suggests that both clergymen were proponents of a sociability-based, neo-Stoic conception of human nature, which was not only compatible with, but also dependent upon, the established Anglican Church and state and the predominantly Whig commercial order. In consequence, Tucker's political economy was premised on the unavoidability of social subordination and economic inequality as necessary hallmarks of modern commercial society. Accordingly, the article closes with a brief discussion of Tucker's “Butlerian” assessment and rejection of the “anti-social” doctrine of individual natural rights, associated with the popular radicalism of the American and French Revolutions in the latter half of the eighteenth century.

Samuel Laing was a key figure in propagating both an academically respectable defense of peasant proprietors and a critique of bureaucratic central government in Victorian Britain, his writings cited and argued with by John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, Walter Bagehot, and John Austin (among others). This article corrects misapprehensions that Laing was a libertarian apologist for unfettered commercialism and complacent patriotism. It situates Laing in his argumentative contexts to show him as a critic of conventional political economy who called for a “natural” society of self-governing freeholders like that he observed in Norway, but who gradually became ambivalently caught between a British commercial and aristocratic order and a Continental model of greater property diffusion and strong central government. Laing's story sheds new light on the complex afterlives of republican and civic themes in nineteenth-century Britain, and their interaction with emergent concerns over the dangers to active citizenship of both wage labor in international markets and centralizing bureaucracies.

Recent theories concerning the origins of the idea of “the West” have missed the most important link in the story, the writings and tireless propagandizing efforts of Auguste Comte. It was Comte who first developed an explicit and elaborate idea of “the West” as a sociopolitical concept, basing it on a historical analysis of the development of the “vanguard” of humanity and proposing a detailed plan for the reorganization of that portion of the world, before it could serve the rest of humanity to achieve the same “positive” state of development. Previous authors who had used “the West” did not go beyond employing it casually and interchangeably with “Europe.” Thus the modern political idea of “the West” was anything but an imperialistic project in its inception, despite widespread arguments in the literature that attribute its emergence to the needs of high imperialism. Comte's West was meant to abolish empires of conquest and establish world peace.

This article discusses Nahda intellectual Buṭrus al-Bustānī’s public and pedagogic writings. It focuses on the nationalist pamphlets, the Nafīr Sūrriya, written in the wake of the first sectarian–civil war, and his translation of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, both published in Beirut in 1860. I analyze Bustānī’s politico-theological and economic thought by looking at the nexus of debt, guilt, love, and mercy that he draws out in the Nafīr. The article argues that Bustānī’s nation is inaugurated into a “guilt-history” and eternally faced with the task of confronting the mercy of debt and the un-requitable debt of mercy. Nationality in this specific sociohistorical context became a form of artifice that in a postlapsarian age requires religion, labor, and exchange to survive as a social contract. The “civil war” exemplified a return to a state of nature that could only be amended by a return to the laws of nature and the seeking of refuge under the name of one God and one religion, diyāna. The social contract, articulated in these terms, could only be sealed through the recognition of natural laws as the foundation provided by God himself, while politics remained concealed under the folds of political theology.

While the word “liberalism” only appeared in Britain from the 1820s, this article argues that its prehistory must pay attention to the language of “liberality.” It suggests that until the 1760s, to be “liberal,” and to demonstrate “liberality,” were primarily associated with the exercise of charity, but that thereafter they increasingly came to refer to having an open mind: there were frequent appeals to the “liberal” and “enlightened” spirit of the times. Those latitudinarians and Dissenters pushing for more toleration in the 1770s were particularly attracted to “liberal” language, and pioneered the idea that “liberality of sentiment” was a necessary accompaniment to the pluralism thrown up by the right of private judgment. Only from the mid-1790s did anti-Jacobins start to fixate on this terminology, arguing that liberality was insidious because under the cover of a virtue it nurtured the indifference which enabled the enemies of religion to triumph. These arguments did not appeal beyond orthodox circles, but they indicate how established the language of “liberality” had become—it provides a framework for understanding the reception of “liberalism” after 1815.

Over the past two decades, long-running debates about the purposes and practices of humanistic inquiry have been refocused as a debate about the uncertain fate of the humanities in a digital age. Now, with the advent of digital and computational humanities, scholars are discussing with a new urgency what the humanities are for and what it means to practice them. And many suggest that the surfeit of digital data is unprecedented and are calling for new methods, practices, and epistemologies. This article considers these claims in light of a longer history of what Lorraine Daston has called “practices of compendia”––practices of collecting, collating, and interpreting massive amounts of data. It focuses, in particular, on the late nineteenth-century German historian Theodor Mommsen and the range of projects he initiated and led as secretary of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. Mommsen invented the “big humanities” and what his contemporaries termed the “industrial” model of scholarship, a model that helped create a new, modern scholarly persona and a distinctly modern ethics of knowledge.

This article looks at Sigmund Freud's attempt to rethink psychoanalytic therapy at the close of the Great War. By profoundly undermining a liberal world order and dramatically eroding the material security and social prestige of the educated middle class (Bildungsbürgertum) to which Freud belonged, the war unsettled the social politics of classical analytic therapy. Simultaneously, the treatment of the war neuroses by psychoanalysts appeared to invert the liberal principles around which the procedure of psychoanalysis was developed by placing the analyst in a fundamentally disciplinary relationship vis-à-vis the patient. In response to these threats to the identity of psychoanalysis, Freud undertook a far-reaching renegotiation of the politics of analytic therapy in his address, titled “The Paths of Psychoanalytic Therapy,” to the Fifth International Psychoanalytic Congress in the last months of the war. His attempt to mediate the contradictions exposed by the war gave rise to a vision of a postclassical psychoanalysis for a mass democratic age.

This article considers the intellectual development of the historian and jurist F. W. Maitland (1850–1906). Its focus is the development of his ideas about the importance of intermediate groups between the individual and the state. Maitland expounded these ideas in a dazzling series of late essays which became the wellspring of the tradition known as “political pluralism.” Yet, as this article shows, the same ideas also played a crucial role in Maitland's great works of legal and historical scholarship, including The History of English Law. If this is appreciated, then the liberal, Germanist and constitutionalist basis of Maitland's thought becomes clear. So too does Maitland's position as a “new” liberal thinker, committed to freedom and constitutionalism, but critical of individualism and parliamentary sovereignty. In short, it is only if Maitland's political essays are read alongside his works of history and law that either can really be understood.

Through an analysis and historical contextualization of Gujarati writer Karsandas Mulji's Travels in England (1866), this article makes two interrelated arguments. First, Indian liberals' efforts to translate notions of liberty exposed the gap between liberalism's subtractive and additive projects, its abolition of customary constraints on the subject and its imposition of new constraints. Second, Mulji's travelogue suggests the complexity of anthropology in post-1850s India, when an amateur form of social science persisted alongside the emergence of the ethnographic state. As an amateur ethnologist, Mulji drew freely on source material from Henry Mayhew to Samuel Smiles to present England as a moral template for India. His turn to self-help or self-improvement literature, moreover, suggests the global scope of a mid-Victorian ethical culture that set the stage for the ethical concerns of anticolonial thinkers like M. K. Gandhi.

This article examines a previously unexplored chapter in the history of atheism: its close links with nineteenth-century racial anthropology. These links are apparent especially in many atheists’ interest in polygenesis, the theory that human races had separate origins, in contrast to the orthodox Christian doctrine of monogenesis that said all races descended from Adam and Eve. The article's focus is Charles Bradlaugh (1833–91), arguably the most important British atheist of the era, representing the radical working-class, secularist movement that emerged in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. The article charts the ways Bradlaugh and other atheists used the research on polygenesis from leading scientific racists in both Britain and the United States to critique Christianity. It also explores some of the contradictions of this use, namely the ways polygenesis clashed with Darwinism and a longer chronology of the age of the Earth. Finally, the article explores how polygenist ideas informed Bradlaugh's imperial worldview and notes that, despite his acceptance of polygenesis, Bradlaugh was a supporter of the rights of nonwhites in the British Empire, particularly in India.

This essay examines one of the least-studied works in the philosophical corpus of Theodor Adorno, The Concept of the Unconscious in the Transcendental Theory of Mind. A retracted habilitation thesis composed in 1926–7, the text is often regarded as an exposition of the philosophical system of Adorno's teacher, Hans Cornelius, that bears little significance for Adorno's mature works. I argue that Concept of the Unconscious sheds significant light on both the historical origins and the conceptual underpinnings of the relationship between society and the psyche that Adorno would theorize over the course of his intellectual career. In this early text, Adorno articulated a dual critique of dominant neo-Kantian and vitalist understandings of the unconscious, turning to Freud for a more adequate account of the unconscious as a product of intertwining psychological and social processes. Adorno developed this dialectical understanding of the psycho-social relationship in numerous postwar writings on psychoanalysis.

This article demonstrates how T. H. Marshall's conceptualization of sociology—its subject, key questions and methodology—was embedded within broader moments in twentieth-century political history, including two world wars, the economic crisis of the interwar era, the onset of the Cold War and the rise of decolonization. In doing so, it brings intellectual history and the history of academic disciplines (particularly sociology) together with more recent trends in the historiography of twentieth-century Europe, including research on postwar democratization, reconstruction and the global spread of human rights discourses. Marshall was a sociological thinker in what Eric Hobsbawm has called the “age of extremes,” whose understanding of social citizenship not only played a role in theorizing the welfare state in postwar Britain, but also helped shape reconstruction within Europe and international development efforts following decolonization. In this respect, Marshall was part of a transnational and global movement to recast key concepts such as democracy, human rights and citizenship after the Second World War. This broader perspective illuminates how his work straddles traditions of pluralism and idealism, liberalism and social democracy, rather than being simply representative of any one of these schools of thought.

This article argues for an appreciation of the permeability of the Western socialist and black radical traditions and a recognition of their codevelopment. This relationship is illustrated through an analysis of George Padmore's intellectual history, particularly focusing on How Russia Transformed Her Colonial Empire (1946), in which Padmore applied Marxist ideas to his project of colonial liberation. The book functions as Padmore's manifesto for the transformation of the British Empire into a socialist federation following the model of the Soviet Union. Through comparisons with the manifestos of British socialist F. A. Ridley and American pan-Africanist W. E. B. Du Bois, this article contextualizes this manifesto within a moment of postwar internationalist optimism. This approach also facilitates a discussion of the meaning of “pan-Africanism” to Padmore, concluding that pan-Africanism was, for him, a methodology through which colonial liberation, and eventually world socialism, could be achieved.

H. G. Wells was one of the most celebrated writers in the world during the first half of the twentieth century. Famed for his innovative fiction, he was also an influential advocate of socialism and the world-state. What is much less well known is that he was a significant contributor to debates about the nature of social science. This article argues that Wells's account of social science in general, and sociology in particular, was shaped by an idiosyncratic philosophical pragmatism. In order to demonstrate how his philosophical arguments inflected his social thought, it explores his attack on prevailing theories of race, while also highlighting the limits of his analysis. The article concludes by tracing the reception of Wells's ideas among social scientists and political thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic. Although his program for utopian sociology attracted few disciples, his arguments about the dynamics of modern societies found a large audience.