A striking aspect of the initial reception of John Rawls is that he was embraced by leading market-liberal theorists such as Friedrich Hayek and James Buchanan. This article investigates the reasons for the free-market right's sympathetic interest in the early Rawls by providing a historical account of the dialogue between Rawls and his key neoliberal interlocutor, James Buchanan. We set out the common intellectual context, notably the influence of Frank Knight, that framed the initial work of both Buchanan and Rawls and brought them together as seeming allies during the early 1960s. We then analyze a significant theoretical divergence between the two in the 1970s related to their contrasting responses to the politics of those years and to differences over the importance of ideal theory in political thought. The exchanges between Buchanan and Rawls demonstrate that Rawlsian liberalism and neoliberalism initially emerged as entwined critiques of mid-twentieth-century political economy but could not sustain that alliance when faced by the new claims for civil and social rights that became a marked feature of politics after the 1960s.

This article situates Carl Schmitt's The Tyranny of Values (1960/1967/1979) within the context of Schmitt's 1940s and 1950s op-ed campaign for full amnesty for Nazi war criminals as well as the context of the Veit Harlan trials and the 1958 Lüth judgment of the German Constitutional Court. The article further examines the revisions to Schmitt's 1967 version of the text in the light of Karl Löwith's criticisms of Schmitt in an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung from 1964. The article argues that The Tyranny of Values is a work of post-Second World War Nazi apologetics, in which Nazi racial theory can be seen being put to polemical ends in the 1960s and 1970s. The article concludes with broader reflections on the relation of Schmitt's The Tyranny of Values to Nazi discourse in the aftermath of the Second World War and the history of Nazism post-1945.

This article reveals how Japanese anti-regime rebels in the mid-1870s deployed news of the Ottoman Empire and the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 in a burgeoning national public sphere to justify and encourage violent revolution against the Meiji government. It focuses especially on commentary in Hyōron shinbun and its successor publications Chūgai hyōron and Bunmei shinshi, short-lived radical newspapers linked to what became the Kagoshima and Kumamoto rebel factions in the Japanese civil war of 1877. Anti-government agitators drew from French and American theory and history and constructed Turkey as a hidebound violator of freedom and civil rights, casting the Turkish case as a parable for what would befall the Meiji government, supposedly a similar wielder of despotism. They inveighed at the same time against European powers for seizing on “Asian” weakness to expand their empires in Asia. Newspapers thus produced a sense of global simultaneity, intimating to readers that they lived in the same empirical moment as people across the world, but as they constructed this empirical simultaneity, they produced also a sense of theoretical nonsynchronicity, in which the histories of some nations acted as the futures of others. Violent revolution, the journalists suggested, provided the best means of reconciling these dual temporalities of global time.

This article examines the “new professions” as alternative settings where women thought and wrote about the international. Presenting the case studies of Fannie Fern Andrews, Mary Parker Follett and Florence Wilson, it shows that, in emerging professional and disciplinary contexts that have hitherto lain beyond the purview of historians of international thought, these women developed their thinking about the international. The insights they derived from their practical work in schools, immigrant communities and libraries led them to emphasize the mechanics of participation in international affairs and caused them to think across the scales of the individual, the local group and relations between nations. By moving beyond the history of organizations and networks and instead looking for the professional settings and audiences which enabled women to theorize, this article shifts both established understandings of what counts as international thought and traditional conceptions of who counts as an international thinker.

This article focuses on the life and ideas of Kuwabara Takeo, a cultural critic and scholar of French literature who became renowned for his 1946 critique of haiku as a “secondary art” in comparison with the novel. By reconstructing Kuwabara's intellectual trajectory from the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s, I show how this famous essay was in part an effort to respond to Karl Löwith's famous critique of Japanese intellectuals. Löwith argued that Japanese intellectuals were insufficiently critical towards their own culture, due to the way that they compartmentalized practices and ideas associated with either Japanese culture or Western civilization. Kuwabara resisted such tendencies through the practice of cross-cultural comparison. His work gained encouragement from and responded to Löwith's critique in a way that illuminates the role that comparisons played in the intellectual culture of mid-twentieth-century Japan.

This article tells the archival story of how Rawls invented a hypothetical Muslim state that he called “Kazanistan.” It examines drafts of The Law of Peoples from 1992 to 1998, Rawls's notes, his personal correspondence, and the sources preserved in his archives. I track Rawls's gradual interest in Islam, which resulted in his invention of Kazanistan during the final revisions, in March 1998. Contrary to the aesthetics of rigor and simplicity in ideal theory's methods, Rawls's actual method in his incursion into “comparative philosophy” and Islam was circuitous and contingent. And contrary to ideal theory's self-presentation as emerging from an ahistorical conceptual realm, the idealized abstraction of Islam emerges from Rawls's own history, or from an ideologically limited set of texts, conversations, and political debates about Islam. The genealogy of Kazanistan illustrates how liberal philosophy extracts data from other disciplines to construct other peoples, without regard for the surrounding disciplinary politics.

This article provides a new look at Weimar Germany's Conservative Revolution by exploring its suspicion of conceptual and discursive language. It argues that Conservative Revolutionaries not only disdained intellectualism and public discourse; they also extolled their presumed opposites—instinct, intuition, self-evidence—as crucial ingredients in an “ineffable nationalism” which held that a true nation is based on unexpressed or difficult-to-articulate feelings and values. The origins of this ideology are found in a modernist crisis of representation and in sociological accounts of traditional “organic” communities. These themes were politicized by World War I, whose seeming incommunicability magnified the problem of representation and made the unspoken harmony of wartime comradeship an attractive model for a revitalized national community. The article's final section examines the early writings of Ernst Jünger in order to show in detail how these issues came together to create the Conservative Revolutionary mind.

The Unemployed of Marienthal (1933) has long been esteemed as a classic of twentieth-century social science; its portrait of the effects of joblessness on individual minds and social institutions has inspired generations of researchers. But this reception has largely overlooked the political origins and implications of the study. This essay resituates Marienthal in the context of its creation and dissemination: the distinctive Marxism of interwar Austria. Specifically, it demonstrates that Marienthal introduced social-psychological methods and findings into Marxist debates about the present state and future prospects of the working class. Led by Paul F. Lazarsfeld, the Marienthal researchers adopted the Austro-Marxist goal of creating a model proletariat through a program of “anticipatory socialism.” But by finding that unemployment confounded efforts to reform the working class, Marienthal undermined the very program it aimed to support. In fact, the essay shows, Marienthal authorized arguments that the unemployed were unreliable political actors—“declassed” workers as likely to become reactionaries as revolutionaries. The essay concludes by considering whether Marienthal embodied a distinctively Austro-Marxist “style” of thinking and research.

Solar crosses were symbolic markers that once punctuated the rolling pathways at the foot of the French Pyrenees. For Henri Lefebvre, these “crucified suns” came to symbolize a number of time-tested traditions that could revitalize everyday life in the modern world. His efforts to resurrect the archaic confronted two contemporary contexts: the hypermodernization promoted throughout France's long Reconstruction and the degradation of provincial communities that attended it. A heretical Marxist, Lefebvre's social thought included a Romantic sensibility that was organically connected to southwestern France and Friedrich Nietzsche. Dialectical in nature, Lefebvre's revolutionary Romanticism repurposed age-old styles of symbolic expression and cyclical recurrence in order to transform everyday life and keep the deracinating forces of modernization at bay. The French sociologist's enduring interest in archaic traces, and his belief that they might one day be revived, reorients how we approach his landmark studies on space and time in the modern city.

Among the most important ideas in Cold War nuclear strategy and arms control was that of “stability”—the notion that by protecting weapons for use in retaliation, the superpowers would be less likely to fight a thermonuclear war. Conventional wisdom among strategists and historians of strategy has long held that stability was inherent to the logic of rational nuclear deterrence. This essay shows the conventional wisdom to be mistaken. It examines the technical practice of Thomas Schelling, who introduced the stability idea in a classic 1958 paper. Celebrated as a game theorist, Schelling was actually trained as a Keynesian macroeconomic modeler during the second half of the 1940s. In 1958, he used Keynesian techniques to frame deterrence as a stable system of dynamic adjustment, akin to the stable macroeconomic system he had modeled as a young economist. Among Schelling's fellow strategists, stability quickly became popular as a rationalization for their preferred nuclear deployment policies.

This article explores Rawls's evolving orientation to “the tradition of political philosophy” over the course of his academic career, culminating in Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2001). Drawing on archival material, it argues that Rawls's fascination with tradition arose out of his own pedagogical engagement with the debate around the “death of political philosophy” in the 1950s. Throughout, I highlight the significance of Rawls's teaching—beginning with his earliest lectures on social and political philosophy at Cornell, to his shifting views on “the tradition” in his published works, culminating in the increasingly contextually minded and irenic approach on display in Political Liberalism (1993) and Justice as Fairness. This neglected aspect of the “historical Rawls” offers insight into how Rawls himself might have read “John Rawls” as a figure in the history of political thought—and reveals that he spent a lot more time contemplating that question than one might think.

Historical scholarship on “great spaces,” a central concept in the political thought of Nazi Germany, has previously focused on legal debates while neglecting important economic contexts. The journalist Ferdinand Fried deserves to be considered one of the major economic theorists of “great spaces” in the Weimar, Nazi, and early postwar eras. Fried argued that the world economy was inexorably passing from globalization through economic nationalism to a reconstituted “world economy of great spaces.” Deglobalization, as he depicted it, was a global experience that produced similar economic and political outcomes around the world. His writings anticipated and inspired Nazi propaganda aimed at legitimizing German hegemony in Europe. His ideas, and their reception, illustrate how dialectical and global visions of history have resonated with conservative intellectuals during crises of the world economy.

In September 1955, John Kenneth Galbraith encountered British Labour Party MP Richard Crossman at a conference hall in Milan, Italy. They went there with a clear mission: to defend their parties’ achievements from expected attacks by Friedrich Hayek and other “reactionaries” at the conference. In public, they confidently boasted about the records of the Democratic and Labour governments in prosperity, full employment, and social and welfare programs during the past decades. In private talks, however, they were less confident—and more candid. “Both the American liberal and the British socialist in the 1930s,” said Galbraith to Crossman, “assumed that capitalism was not only immoral but unworkable; it was a system which must destroy itself because of its own inherent weaknesses.” But if this assumption were not true, he asked, “would that not mean the snapping of the mainspring of the Labour Party?” Crossman instantly got the point. The clothes of American liberals were “stolen by the Eisenhower Republicans, just as ours [were] by the Butlerites,” confessed the Labour MP. The task of reforming capitalism, which had been the raison d’être of the “party of reform” of both countries, lost its urgency. An era of reform had been replaced by an era of moderation. And in this new era, their parties were clearly on the losing side—and would continue to lose until they could find a new cause to fight.

The anthropologist Margaret Mead is widely known for stating that human nature is “almost unbelievably malleable,” meaning that individual identity—including gender—is shaped more by culture than by biology. Many feminists, notably Betty Friedan, seized on this idea as a tool for dismantling sexist biases but were dismayed when Mead's later work seemed to relegate women to a biologically determined, maternal role. Mead, however, argued strenuously in print and correspondence that she never intended to set nature against nurture, for she believed that identity grew from the interplay of the two. The historical context for Mead's thinking changed, as the menace of eugenic politics in the 1930s yielded to the existential threat of nuclear annihilation after 1945, but Mead never fundamentally changed her mind about the production of gender.

This article traces the invention of pluralist political language in France to a very specific ideological source: Jacques Maritain, Emmanuel Mounier, and the progressive Catholic circles that gathered around the journal Esprit in the 1930s. It shows that the dialogue with the émigré Russian Jewish sociologist Georges Gurvitch was an important influence on the Esprit circle, but also that it was Maritain rather than Gurvitch who did most to disseminate the language of pluralism. The paper thus builds on recent work according Maritain and Christian democracy a central place in the intellectual history of twentieth-century politics. It also contests the Anglo-American bias that has dominated histories of pluralism, and instead places France at the centre.

Challenging the common image of Hume as a thoroughly secular philosopher, I argue that Hume occasionally relied on the design argument to defend the objectivity of values. Hume acknowledged that rejecting design might open the door to aesthetic, ethical, and epistemic relativism. To avoid this prospect, he allowed himself to repurpose the language of providential naturalists like Hutcheson and claim that “nature,” rather than God, has attuned our faculties to objective standards of morals, beauty, and truth. Historians of philosophy have treated such passages as merely figurative, as they conflict with fundamental principles in Hume's philosophy. I argue instead, from an intellectual historical perspective, that Hume nonetheless expects the passages to be read literally, since only the literal reading helps his case against relativism. Rather than recasting Hume as a defender of design, however, I argue that his appeals to design were less an integral part of his philosophy than a provisional compromise, a response to intractable tensions in the history of secularism.

This article explores the influence of East Asia's economic growth on the evolution of American neoconservative thought in the 1970s and 1980s. It traces how prominent neoconservative thinkers—Nathan Glazer, Peter L. Berger, Herman Kahn, Michael Novak, and Lawrence E. Harrison—developed the claim that the region's prosperity stemmed from its alleged Confucian tradition. Drawing in part from East Asian leaders and scholars, they argued that the region's growth demonstrated that tradition had facilitated, rather than hampered, the development of a distinct East Asian capitalist modernity. The article argues that this Confucian thesis helped American neoconservatives articulate their conviction that “natural” social hierarchies, religious commitment, and traditional families were necessary for healthy and free capitalist societies. It then charts how neoconservatives mobilized this interpretation of Confucian East Asia against postcolonial critiques of capitalism, especially dependency theory. East Asia, they claimed, demonstrated that poverty and wealth were determined not by patterns of welfare, structural exploitation, or foreign assistance, but values and culture. The concept of Confucian capitalism, the article shows, was central to neoconservatives’ broad ideological agenda of protecting political, economic, and racial inequality under the guise of values, culture, and tradition.

This article discusses the historical context of the famed dissident intellectual Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s (1923–69) travelogue documenting his visit to Israel in early 1963, posthumously titled Safar beh velayat-e ʿezraʾil (Journey to the Province of the Angel of Death), focusing on (1) the political and intellectual context and reception of his controversial essay, in particular the brief infatuation of Iranian anti-Soviet socialists in the League of Iranian Socialists with socialist Zionism; (2) Al-e Ahmad’s discussion of political sovereignty and theo-politics in modern Israel and the important insights and observations provided therein; and (3), finally, the shifting sands of Al-e Ahmad’s engagement with Israel and Zionism and their relation to how he understood the politics of anticolonialism in the context of modern Iran following the 1953 coup d’état, which overthrew the nationalist government of Mohammad Mosaddeq, the Shah’s “White Revolution” and the Arab–Israeli War of 1967. The development of his views from ones of curiosity, fascination and ambivalence to condemnation echo less a simplistic and psychologized “return to religion” or “quest for authenticity” than an integration of the category of coloniality in relation to a wider field of struggles then unfolding across the global South during the 1960s, and provided the basis for a critique of not only Iranian social democrats, but several leading lights of the French left.

There is a long history of scholars finding in architecture tools for thinking, whether this is the relationship between nature and culture in Simmel's ruins, industrial capitalism in Benjamin's Parisian arcades, or the rhythms of the primordial in Heidegger's Black Forest farmhouse. But what does it mean to take seriously the concepts and dispositions articulated by architects themselves? How might processes of designing and making constitute particular forms of thinking? This article considers the words and buildings of Lahore-based architect Kamil Khan Mumtaz (b. 1939) as an entry point into such questions. It outlines how professional architecture in Pakistan has grappled with the unsettled status of the past in a country forged out of two partitions (1947 and 1971). Mumtaz's work and thought—engaging questions of tradition, authority, craft and the sacred—demonstrates how these predicaments have been productive for conceptualizing time, labor and the nature of dwelling in a postcolonial world.