This essay focuses upon a single speech by the Ottoman man of religion Shaykh Ahmad Tabbarah. Though short, it allows us to reconsider the ways in which we have framed intellectual production beyond Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For even as scholars have queried the diffusionist sweep of earlier narratives, asserting the intellectual agency of non-Western thinkers, they have continued to lay the emphasis on the ways the latter customized European thought to local exigencies. Tabbarah, however, engaged in two-way translations and transgressions. Arraying French sources into a Khaldunian narrative even as he slotted statistics into conventional rhetorical forms, he imbued the secular with the religious, and the religious with the secular. Resolutely refusing to choose between these various elements, he laced them together into a compound creation, which drew its strength from the confluence of two seemingly incommensurable bodies of thought.

This essay explores the journeys of Andean pre-Columbian antiquities across the Americas and the Atlantic during the late nineteenth century along the veins of intellectual networks, between Andean communities and European, North American and Creole collectors and museums. Centred on the studies and collection of José Lucas Caparó Muñíz, the essay focuses on the Creole and European practice of lifting pre-Columbian objects preserved or “still” in use in Andean communities out of their context and taking them to European and Creole private and public collections. Intellectual history has long paid scant attention to the many voices that its authors silenced, disfigured and suppressed. By looking at the journeys of Andean artefacts—at their owners, their brokers and their losers—this erssay traces the systemic hierarchies and the chasms of an expanding modern intellectual culture.

Sometime in the 1760s, a Constantinople-born, French-educated Muslim arrived at the port of Balassor in north-east India. Known variously as Mustapha or Monsieur Raymond, he had, he later wrote, “with a mediocre dictionary and a bad grammar”, and by conversing with the ship's captain en route from Bombay, “learned enough of English . . . as I might delight in Bolingbroke's Philosophical works”. This student of contemporary intellectual history soon put his knowledge to work, securing a position translating for Robert Clive, the conquering hero of the English East India Company's new imperial administration in India. Subsequently falling from favour, Mustapha crossed over to seek employment with the English company's French rivals, earning himself a spell in prison as a spy. He also travelled to Mecca, where he gained the honorific “Haji” but lost his fortune, his cabinet of curiosities and his collection of books and manuscripts. He then became the keeper of a zenana (to the Europeans, a harem or seraglio), and he entered the world of publishing. In 1789, in Calcutta, Mustapha had printed for himself a pamphlet-length diatribe on the iniquitous administration of the law in British Bengal entitled Some Idea of the Civil and Criminal Courts of Justice at Moorshoodabad. In the same year he was also involved, as the pseudonymous editor “Nota Manus”, in the publication of a three-volume English translation of a Persian work of Indian history—Ghulam Hussain Khan Tabatabai's Seir Mutaqherin, or View of Modern Times (written in 1781–2)—which dealt with the British conquest and administration of Bengal, and offered a stern critique of the new rulers who seemed to have “an aversion to the Society of Indians, and a disdain against conversing with them”. Finally, Mustapha (who called himself a “Semi-Englishman” who had the interests of his “adopted countrymen” at heart) claimed to have published in London a work of futurology entitled State of Europe in 1800. In his encounters with Europeans, his travels within and beyond India (although he never made it to England as he had planned), and his involvement in the production of historical and geographical knowledge, Mustapha was deeply interested in that which shaped his own fortunes: the relationships of knowledge and power between Europe and other parts of the world.

Puritans had big stories to tell, and they cast themselves big parts to play in those stories. The fervent English Protestants who believed that the Elizabethan Church urgently needed further reformation, and the self-selecting band among them who went on to colonize New England, were sure that they could re-create the churches of the apostolic age, and eliminate centuries’ worth of Romish accretions. By instituting scriptural forms of worship, these purified churches might have a beneficial influence on the state as well, and bring about the rule of the godly. If a purified English church and state could inaugurate reformation across all of Christendom, spread the gospel to infidels around the globe, and usher in the millennium, then all the better. In 1641, an anonymous tract called A Glimpse of Sions Glory announced that the new puritan-controlled Parliament would bring on “Babylon's destruction . . . The work of the day [is] to give God no rest till he sets up Jerusalem in the praise of the whole world.” The leading minister of colonial Boston at the time, John Cotton, predicted that as soon as 1655, as Michael Winship summarizes Cotton:

We have all heard the admonition to “take religion seriously.” It is a perplexing command, since AHA statistics indicate that graduate students have been flocking to religious topics for years. Library shelves groan under the weight of recent works that take religion seriously. What, then, might it mean to take religion more seriously, as it has been such a booming academic field for decades now? As Elizabeth Pritchard has pointed out, the imperative is not a methodological recommendation at all, but an ethical–political one. To take religion “seriously” is to grant it its rightful place as an independent variable amidst others, without reducing it to the old categories of politics or class or gender. It is implicitly frivolous to see religion as a superstructural manifestation of a deeper social or economic reality, as have many functionalist theories from Marx onwards. These accounts are routinely pilloried as condescending towards the past, and as failing to take historical actors at their word when they claim to act for religious reasons. There is much to this; nonetheless, the currently reigning assumption of religious autonomy, like that of other cultural artifacts, has been perilously undertheorized. In this joint review, I would like to show how this understanding of religion impedes historical understanding. It might be the case that, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, religion is too important to take seriously.

The classics appear conspicuously in the pamphlet wars of the American Revolution, though in the opinion of Bernard Bailyn (written many years ago), their presence is “window-dressing” and their influence “superficial.” They are “everywhere illustrative, not determinative, of thought” (my italics). Up the scale in influence comes Enlightenment rationalism, also “superficial” but only “at times”—that removes the foreigners, ancient and modern. Then, further up the scale are English common-law writers, “powerfully influential” though still insufficiently “determinative”; above them, a “major source,” New England Puritan thought and culture; and finally, at the top, seventeenth-century British “heroes of liberty” and the “early eighteenth-century transmitters of this tradition,” e.g. Commonwealth men, Bishop Hoadly. Who would have thought that the bishop of Winchester weighed in the balance more heavily than Plato and Aristotle? Only once in passing does Bailyn even mention Machiavelli, to whom J. G. A. Pocock, Quentin Skinner, and Harvey C. Mansfield would grant large prominence in the development of Revolutionary thought.

In the age of decolonization, Indian psychology engaged with and nationalized itself within global networks of ideas. While psychology was eventually applied by public intellectuals in explicitly political arenas, this essay focuses on the initial mobilization of the discipline's early Indian experts, led by the founder of the Indian Psychological Association, Narendranath Sengupta. Although modern critics have harshly judged early Indian psychologists for blind appropriation of European concepts, an analysis of the networks through which the science of psychology was developed challenges this oversimplification. Early Indian psychologists developed their discipline within a simultaneously transnational and nationalistic context, in which European ideas overlapped with ancient texts, creating a deliberately “Indian” brand of psychology. As the discipline of psychology exploded across the world, Indian psychologists developed a science of swaraj, enabling synergies between modern psychological doctrine, philosophy and ancient texts. This paper explores the networks of ideas within which modern Indian psychology was developed, the institutional and civil environment in which it matured, and the framework through which it engaged with and attempted to claim credence within transnational scientific networks.

This deeply researched and beautifully crafted study takes as its subject a generation of women who came to maturity in America's Gilded Age. They were scientists and social workers, physicians and educators, and, perhaps most notably, Progressive reformers engaged in the pursuit of social justice. Claiming the newly available opportunities for higher education and professional employment, these women successfully pursued lives in uncharted territory. Barbara Sicherman introduces us to a less visible but equally salient factor in their journey to public identities marked by achievement and acclaim—their sustained and sustaining engagement with reading.

In Reforming Hollywood, William D. Romanowski defends mainline Protestants from the charge that they acted like bluenose censors during the movie controversies of the twentieth century. In fact, he claims, they consistently supported free expression even as they fought to make Hollywood acknowledge and give scope to moral values beyond the profit motive. Unlike these mainline Protestant “structuralists,” who sought to morally elevate the broader society, both Catholics in the earlier part of the century and evangelicals in the latter took a “pietistic” approach that emphasized individual morality and sought to censor obscenity, blasphemy, and ideological unorthodoxy in film. While structuralists (whom the author often simply identifies as liberals) wanted to cooperate with Hollywood in campaigns of “movie betterment,” pietists (conservatives) wanted to rein in the moviemakers and cleanse the screen of “unwholesome” content.

Mid-twentieth century American intellectual history is in the midst of a boom; a younger generation of historians, now half a century distant from the era, and less inclined than their immediate forerunners to be committed to a vision of the 1960s as a critical turning point in modern culture, is reshaping what has been an underdeveloped field. Recent studies of thinkers such as C. Wright Mills, Ayn Rand, Lionel Trilling, and Whitaker Chambers, and subjects such as postcapitalist social thought and pollsters in mass society, to name a few, have regenerated interest in an arena that had once been dominated by studies of the New York Intellectuals and Richard Pells's useful summaries and evaluations of prominent intellectuals of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. The newer intellectual history of this period appears to be premised on several ideas: that the so-called “liberal consensus” of the era was an ideological product of liberalism itself, rather than an adequate description of the contours of thought; that thinking in terms of clear and sharp distinctions between right and left doesn't help us understand the ways in which ideas, sensibilities, and intellectual commitments were configured at mid-century; that there is a great deal more continuity in social, political, and cultural thought than an image of the 1960s as cultural watershed would allow; and that the mid-century decades are, in the most profound sense, the first years of our own time, with all the characteristic epistemic, moral, and critical problems that have characterized thought and culture in the world in which contemporary Americans live. What the Progressive Era was for mid-century historians and intellectuals such as Richard Hofstadter and Henry May, the mid-century, and particularly the early Cold War era of the late 1940s and 1950s, is, for the historian of today, the root of the destabilizing conundrums of modernity, particularly the puzzle of the role of critical intellect in a mass-mediated environment of socialized knowledge, feeling, and being.

The emergence of the German Jewish philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) as the object of scholarly attention has been both surprising and rapid. In the decades since his early death while in exile in the United States, Cassirer never fell into complete oblivion. His works remained known to specialists in German intellectual history; his participation in a famous 1929 debate with Martin Heidegger in Davos, Switzerland, one of the most iconic moments in modern Continental thought, made his name familiar to most students of modern philosophy. Yet Cassirer lacked the widespread recognition given to contemporaries such as Heidegger or Walter Benjamin, and his work never became the center of historical or philosophical study. This neglect stemmed, in part, from dismissal by his peers; as Edward Skidelsky explains in his new study, Rudolf Carnap found him “rather pastoral,” Isaiah Berlin dismissed him as “serenely innocent,” and Theodor Adorno thought he was “totally gaga” (125). The last few years, however, have seen the rise of a remarkable new interest in Cassirer in both Germany and the English-speaking world. Among this recent literature, Edward Skidelsky's and Peter Gordon's works lead the small “Cassirer renaissance” and offer the best English-language introduction to his thought. Both Gordon and Skidelsky ambitiously seek to relocate Cassirer at the forefront of modern German and European thought. Gordon goes as far as to call him “one of the greatest philosophers and intellectual historians to emerge from the cultural ferment of modern Germany” and one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century (11). In making such bold statements, Gordon and Skidelsky clearly set their sights beyond the person himself; they aspire to highlight a central strand of thought that enjoyed a powerful presence in early twentieth-century Germany but fell into neglect in the postwar era. In doing so, they seek to reevaluate the nature and legacy of Weimar thought, its complex relationship with the period's unstable politics, and its relevance today.

Academics are falsely rumored to have a low regard for religion. Although Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, authors of The God Delusion and God Is Not Great, respectively, made atheism a best-selling subject in the United States, it is not coincidental that Hitchens and Dawkins are English. They were educated in a country where a strident antipathy toward religion is not unpatriotic. American atheists with as much brass are rare. Kicking religion around cannot be an American sport because, from colonial to contemporary times, religion has been a central component of American culture. To be sure, a lot of scholarly criticism has been directed at right-wing Christian and Islamic movements. But scholars whose personal views on faith incline them to echo Hitchens's mordant formula that “religion poisons everything” should probably look for a country other than the United States to study. The recent books of historians and sociologists of American religion have taken a tone toward the subject that has ranged from gentle to friendly.

The term “intellectual” is a French coinage that dates to the years preceding the Dreyfus affair. Nevertheless, the concept has a distinguished pedigree that can be traced back to Voltaire's heroic interventions under the ancien régime—most notably, the Calas affair—as well as Victor Hugo's vehement protests against Louis Bonaparte's petty caesarism. The first intellectuals were, as a rule, littérateurs. They were interlopers who relied on the renown they had accrued in their field of expertise to hazard moral pronouncements about actualités or current events. By virtue of their literary or scientific prestige—or, to use a contemporary locution, their “cultural capital”—they hoped to shame the political authorities into rectifying a gross miscarriage of justice. As Jean-Paul Sartre once put it, intellectuals are “those who involve themselves in matters that are none of their business.”