Rather than renouncing empire after the fall of Napoleon, this essay argues, French liberal thinkers expressed a sustained preference for a strategy based on transnational connections, or what imperial historians describe as informal imperialism. The eulogy of European Christian civilization exemplified by François Guizot's lecture at the Sorbonne in 1828 served not only to legitimize French global ambitions, but also to facilitate cooperation with other European imperial powers, especially Britain, and indigenous collaborators. Liberal enthusiasm for the spread of Western civilization also inspired the emergence of a French version of free-trade imperialism, of which the economist Michel Chevalier proved a consistent advocate. Only when such aspirations were frustrated did liberals reluctantly endorse colonial conquest, on an exceptional basis in Algeria after 1840 and on a global scale after 1870. The allegedly abrupt liberal conversion to empire in the nineteenth century may instead be construed as a tactical shift from informal to formal dominance.

The four essays in this collection address the history of liberalism outside Europe, at the same time as they reinscribe European liberalism in global contexts. They ask where, beyond Europe and the North Atlantic, has liberal thought flourished as a way to think about problems of state formation, political economy and social order? They take historical scholarship beyond territories that were formally “colonies” of Europe (or of Europeans) to centres of intellectual activity stimulated and challenged by the global circulation of Western liberalism: the Ottoman Empire, the kingdoms of East Asia, the colonial world, the revolutionary world. Their “global” character is less evident in their individual geographical reach, and more apparent in their individual contributions to the sum of what we know about the appearance of liberal ideas beyond their transatlantic intellectual streams. We have brought them together here in order to raise questions about both the limits of liberalism as a concept, and the conceptual frontiers of intellectual history.

This essay argues that today's dominant understanding of secularization—as an epochal transition from a society based on religious belief to one based on autonomous human reason—first appeared in philosophical histories at the beginning of the nineteenth century and was then anachronistically applied to early modern Europe. Apart from the earlier and persisting canon-law use of the term to refer to a species of exclaustration, prior to 1800 the standard lexicographical meaning of “secularization” was determined by its use in public law and diplomacy to name the civil conversion of ecclesiastical property and jurisdiction. Prior to the same point the most important use of the adjective “secular” was in political jurisprudence as a synonym for temporal, civil, and political, to name a religious–political settlement from which rival theologies had been excluded as the condition of its negotiation. But this usage was domain-specific, was quite compatible with religious devotion, and had nothing to do with the putatively secular character of the spheres of philosophy or the natural sciences, thence “society”. Far from seeing a shift from religious belief to autonomous rationality, early modernity in fact witnessed a significant intensification of religious belief and practice under the impact of rival confessional movements. It also emerges that the nineteenth century was characterized not by the supersession of confessional religions—or their conversion into rational religion or moral philosophy—but by their remarkable persistence and adaptation to new circumstances. In light of this, the essay argues that the variant philosophical-historical conceptions of secularization—as the epochal supersession of religious belief by human rationality—should not be understood as theories of a putative process but as “combat concepts”. These were internal to an array of rival cultural-political factions that first emerged in early nineteenth-century Protestant Germany and that continue to do battle today.

This essay explores how particular variants of “Muslim anarchism”, as distinct forms of radical anti-authoritarian religion, subvert conventional approaches to Islamic hermeneutics by drawing on intellectual traditions and discursive strategies external to them. Through recourse to the mutuality between autonomy and automatism, most notably in Western avant-garde and countercultural aesthetics, it elucidates the import of automatic transcendence and retro-futurist imaginaries as novel interpretative techniques for spiritual emancipation in radically libertarian approaches to Islam. My aim is to show how the rich, multivalent concept of automatism, neglected in studies of social and religious phenomena, can be a useful way of elucidating the hermeneutics of specific strands of Muslim anarchism. In doing so, the paper also challenges received understandings of “radical” Islam and the restrictive polarity between militancy and liberalism that has come to frame discussion on global Islam. To this end, I focus on the thought of Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka Hakim Bey), Michael Muhammad Knight and Yakoub Islam.

This essay examines the rapprochement between science and metaphysics that the French philosopher Alfred Fouillée staged in his writings from 1872 up until his death in 1912. Amidst the influx of new research in scientific psychology inundating France in the late nineteenth century, Fouillée's thought stands out for its creative effort to advance a new spiritualist philosophy on the basis of positive scientific advancements. Fouillée's work is significant for intellectual historians of thought in the fin de siècle because it challenges the common historiographical narrative, initially presented in H. Stuart Hughes's Consciousness and Society, which erroneously frames spiritualist thinkers, Henri Bergson chief among them, as leading a “revolt against positivism.” Fouillée throws into stark relief a new spiritualist current that incorporated research in the natural and human sciences from across Europe in order to craft an updated understanding of consciousness. This essay treats Fouillée's work as a historical window onto a distinctly new spiritualism whose proponents sought to overcome the old spiritualism of Victor Cousin's eclectic school, which shunned any naturalist underpinning of metaphysics. While Fouillée has already been widely historicized as a social and political thinker, this essay introduces original archival materials that help to resituate Fouillée as a leading figure of the new spiritualism animating French philosophy in the final quarter of the nineteenth century.

Although in most accounts of liberalism Africans appear only as passive victims or beneficiaries of European policies, in the early nineteenth century many Africans shared liberal aspirations for the “good society” based on free trade, constitutional government and individual property. However, African liberalism was articulated in the context of an existential crisis provoked by the new European world order. Hassuna D’Ghies, educated in Tripoli and Europe, articulated an overtly “African” liberal response to this crisis of adaptation through his writings and political activity in London in the 1820s. By the end of the decade, D’Ghies had abandoned this project and returned to North Africa to take up a more authoritarian model of reform that ultimately led to the reabsorption of Tripoli and its region into the Ottoman Empire. D’Ghies's turn toward an “imperial liberalism” underwritten by Islamic legitimacy suggests the impossibility of reconciling African autonomy with European liberal claims to universality, and the ways in which African political thought was fragmented by imperial globalization.

Historians of liberalism have tended to ignore or underplay the contribution of southern Europe. However, in the 1820s this part of the world was at the forefront of the struggle for liberal values. This essay explores the relationship between constitutional culture and religion during the liberal revolutionary wave that affected Portugal, Spain, the Italian peninsula and Greece, by examining parliamentary debates, the revolutionary press, literature targeting the masses, religious sermons and exile writings. It argues that rather than rejecting religion, liberals strove to find an accommodation between their values and revealed truth—they were convinced that no society could survive without religious morality. In this way, they developed a variety of religious attitudes that ranged from deism to forms of crypto-Protestantism without abandoning their established religions. At the same time, although they defended individual rights and freedom of expression against the opposition of the churches, and argued for reformed and enlightened forms of religiosity, most of them considered the religious uniformity of their societies advantageous and even opposed religious toleration.

By tracing the career of influential YMCA missionary Sherwood Eddy, this essay brings to light the origins of Christian internationalism in 1920s America. Far more than mere boosterism for Woodrow Wilson's League of Nations, and far more than mere “pacifism” or Social Gospel “idealism”(reductive categories with which activism in the period is often associated), Christian internationalism in the interwar period was a movement defined by three broad and far-reaching impulses. First, it was characterized by the proliferation of new enterprises such as travelling seminars, conferences and publications devoted to reflection on the ethics of international relations. Second, it comprised a holistic, oppositional and radical political orientation that went beyond legalist internationalism and encompassed agitation against imperialism and racism. Third, the movement was premised on a fundamental critique of the idea of America as a “Christian nation”. Eddy's career highlights the unique importance of the missionary enterprise in giving shape to these impulses in the 1920s and beyond.

This essay deals with the intellectual transformation of the late Syrian intellectual Yasin al-Hafiz, and more precisely with his historicist blurring of the distinction between liberalism and socialism in the aftermath of the defeat of 1967. Even though this ideology was not a textbook liberalism, al-Hafiz's later rehabilitation of it is one of the many components of a genealogy of Arab liberalism, one that is marked by the end of the hopes of the postcolonial state. Through this reading of al-Hafiz's intellectual project, the essay addresses the broader question of travelling theories, and, more precisely, the question of how to study the modernist traditions in the non-Western world. In doing so, the goal is to set the basis for a rethinking of contemporary intellectual history in the Arab postcolonial era and to uncover its reflexive streak.

Accounts of liberalism as an ideology of European imperialism have argued that when liberals discovered that colonized people were, in various ways, intractable, they questioned and then abandoned the postulated universal human capacity for improvement; the racial and cultural determinants of native “backwardness” seemed stronger than any universal susceptibility to the civilizing projects of liberal imperialism. While the intellectual trajectory of some canonical liberals illustrates this decline in liberal universalism, some colonized intellectuals—while acknowledging distinctions of race and people-hood—adhered to the universalist optimism of liberalism. In pursuit of a global history of liberalism, this essay examines writings by Peter Jones, Charles Eastman, Zitkala-Sa, Apirana Ngata and William Cooper to illustrate a robust indigenous universalism. Drawing on the intellectual heritage of Christianity and universal (or “stadial”) philosophy of history, these intellectuals affirmed emphatically that their people were demonstrating the capacities to be subjects of liberal civilization.

This essay examines the influence of geopolitical and imperial thought on theories of international relations in the United States. The paper assesses the thought of Owen Lattimore, a leading American sinologist and political adviser to F. D. Roosevelt and Chiang Kai-shek, and Nicholas John Spykman, an influential international-relations scholar at Yale. In the framework of the Second World War and the “air age”, they envisaged a tripolar world order that entailed a new conception of political space and international relations. Lattimore's global geopolitical order sought to replace imperialism with democracy, while Spykman employed geopolitical concepts to envisage a tripolar order of “balanced powers” which built upon—rather than rejected—existing imperial structures. This paper examines their international theories and the policy implications of their thought to claim that 1940s theoretical interdisciplinarity made an important contribution to the development of the discipline of international relations in the United States.

The publication of the Clarendon edition of the Works of Thomas Hobbes recently entered its fourth decade. The monumental project has unfolded against shifting methodologies in the practice of intellectual history, and the edition's own history exemplifies these shifts. Its first general editor was Howard Warrender, who died in 1985 after a distinguished career as a professor of political theory at the University of Sheffield. Warrender was best known for the Political Philosophy of Hobbes: His Theory of Obligation. This influential book offered a deontological interpretation of Hobbes's theory of obligation, according to which the Hobbesian natural laws were to be understood as divine commands. Warrender's book appeared in 1957 and was resolutely textualist in its approach, exploring Hobbes's arguments in isolation and with considerable interpretive charity. His subject was the “theoretical basis” of Hobbes's writing, the importance of which might not be “historically conspicuous.”

In the postwar decade, UNESCO aimed to create an international public sphere to secure peace. The organization made extensive use of photographs to do so, including the photographic archive of works of art and photojournalism from the ruined cities of Europe. However, photography was not simply a transparent medium for communicating internationalist ideals; it was a formative influence in shaping UNESCO's effort to build “peace in the minds of men”. This essay analyses the conception of photography as a universal language articulated in UNESCO-sponsored forums, the use of photography in UNESCO publications concerning human rights and educational reconstruction, and the internationalist ideals of world culture and world citizenship relevant to UNESCO's early work. Analysis reveals that UNESCO's use of photography was less the valuable deployment of a universal language suited to an internationalist agenda than it was the universalizing of certain cultural values in pursuit of the organization's utopian vision.

The period immediately following Independence when Jawaharlal Nehru was prime minister of India (1947–64) has been described conventionally as an era dominated by “socialist” developmentalism. This article contends that an examination of the ideas of Nehru and his closest colleagues reveals a much more complex amalgam of political ideologies and sentiments. Ideas of small-scale development through local bodies and cooperative societies, typical of earlier “communitarian” liberals such as G. K. Gokhale, were blended, and sometimes contended, with visions of rapid industrialization more obviously based on the Soviet model. Nehru himself remained distinctly liberal in his political stance, musing that he could not impose further socialist measures “because most Indians were not socialists.” The article considers the importance of the events of India's partition for this ideological amalgam and the examines the ideas of key figures in Nehru's circle, notably G. B. Pant, D. R. Gadgil, P. C. Mahalanobis and S. Radhakrishnan.

The history of French liberalism is undergoing a renaissance. For much of the twentieth century, it was viewed with disdain, as insufficiently “engaged,” as too tentative in its demands for social reform, as overly optimistic concerning the progress of reason and science. Scholarship during the past three decades has challenged these views, though it is notable that there is still, to my knowledge, no general history of French liberalism that goes past the consolidation of the Third Republic in the late 1870s. Part of the ongoing reassessment has been the consequence of the decline of revolutionary illusions and of marxisant frameworks of analysis following 1968, reinforced by the more general decline of the left following the end of the Cold War in 1989 and the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991. Another element contributing to this reassessment has been the emergence of more nuanced definitions of “liberalism,” ones that are not limited to legal (civil liberties), political (constitutionalism), and/or economic (free trade) dimensions. Equally important, scholars are insisting, are conceptions of science, of religion, of the role of the state, of solidarity, of sociability, of moeurs, of identity, of gender, of the self.

In the years following Bacon's Rebellion of 1676, the rich planters of colonial Virginia hit upon a New World expedient that would be fateful for the entire history of race in America. Edmund Morgan tells the story memorably in American Slavery, American Freedom. Having narrowly evaded death and devastation at the hands of the former indentured servants who comprised the region's lower classes, and still faced with a chronic shortage of labor, the planters began to import African slaves to work the tobacco crops on which their wealth depended. They weren't the first in the New World to try this approach. West Indian sugar planters had already successfully organized the labor on their large plantations along these “racial” lines, and there was sufficient precedent in Western culture at large for associating “blackness” with evil to defuse moral alarm at the practice.

In 1995, the Presses universitaires de France re-published (for the very first time in French) Elie Halévy's classic book La formation du radicalisme philosophique (first edition 1901–4). Startlingly, in the afterword of volume 1, Jean-Pierre Dupuy explained that even if this book on Bentham and his school of thought has been considered a classic and one of the first serious historical studies in any language, Halévy had been a “bad interpreter” of utilitarianism.

From the 1680s to the 1720s German Lutheran pastors’ use of private confession and suspension from Communion as a means of disciplining wayward parishioners generated seminal theological and intellectual debates. They were driven by Pietists and secular natural law jurists and concerned ultimately the purported corruption in the early Christian church that led to the abusive, unwarranted, and centuries-long intrusion of clerical power into secular affairs. By investigating these debates, this essay reveals in new ways the constructive collision of two different intellectual predispositions—one clerical, the other legal—that propelled the early Enlightenment in Germany. Letters from the 1680s and other writings of Philipp Jakob Spener, the father of German Pietism, show how he and fellow clergymen wrestled with specific pastoral challenges regarding the disciplining of allegedly unrepentant and incorrigible sinners. Christian Thomasius, a central figure in the early Enlightenment, and other secular natural law jurists vigorously rebutted the Pietists’ claims by critically examining the practice of confession in the primitive church, thereby exposing the historical origins of priestcraft. In doing so, Thomasius highlighted affinities between his work and that of the radical Pietist Gottfried Arnold, who had indicted the clergies of Christian churches for their unjust and inveterate persecution of religious dissidents. But Thomasius also faulted Arnold for weaknesses in his biblical scholarship. Thomasius's criticism points to the special form of biblical scholarship that secular natural law jurists had helped to develop and that predisposed them to embrace radical interpretations of Scripture, a potent stimulant of early Enlightenment thought.

It is easy, especially for a generation of students who entered kindergarten in the age of Google, to think that machines, before the advent of electronic computers (and smart phones and iPads), were heavy, clunky, stupid things—big, industrial, hissing with steam and clanking their gears. Or if they weren't heavy and hissing, at least they were rigid and rote: a clock inexorably ticking its way around the dial, an automaton executing brittle motions in stiff sequence.

Walt Rostow wanted his landmark contribution to modernization theory, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-communist Manifesto (1960), to offer an alternative to Marxist analysis, and in service of that effort he sought to replace class with nation as the agent of history. Britain figured prominently in the resulting account, functioning as everything from a trailblazing pioneer to an idiosyncratic anomaly to a cautionary tale for weak-kneed Americans, but it never explicitly offered the model for other nations to follow that historians today associate with the text. In explaining how that misreading came to dominate discussions of Stages, this essay rethinks a US historiography that collapses modernization theory with American exceptionalism, and a UK historiography premised on the claim that Britain made the modern world. Attending to the function of Britain in Stages reinserts British history into postwar conceptions of world history—not as a paradigmatic case, but nevertheless as a significant one.