This article reexamines the relationship between Jeremy Bentham and Edward Gibbon Wakefield through the lens of one of Bentham’s last projects, “Colonization Company Proposal” (1831), and his support for Wakefield’s scheme of “systematic colonization.” Their intellectual encounter explains how key Benthamite principles were integrated into Wakefield’s influential vision, with lasting effects. While famous for opposing the penal colony in New South Wales, Bentham was persuaded by Wakefield’s principles of commodifying Indigenous land as the basis for restricting landownership in order to compel labor, foster civilization, and fund emigration. Bentham’s distinctive perspective emerges from a comparison of his commentary with the body of work published by the Wakefieldians between mid-1829 and 1831. In turn, after Bentham’s death in June 1832, Wakefield drew heavily from his ideas. Bentham’s and Wakefield’s shared investment in the entwined discourses of penal reform and systematic colonization legitimized Britain’s imperial reorientation toward colonization.

Critiques of religion in Arab political life have long been framed as a project of the left. Since the uprisings of 2011, however, the most forceful critics of theology’s presence in politics have been conservatives. This article reconstructs the intellectual history of the Arab right through the work of philosopher Mohammed Jaber al-Ansari. Revisiting the intellectual and historical context of the 1990s, it advances a new genealogy of conservative Arab political thought, one that saw in all transcendental and religious identifications not only the dangers of revolution but also a forfeiture of politics itself. In decoupling conservatism from Islam, the article advances an understanding of conservatism as both contingent and structural, or permanent in its formal presence but not necessarily in content, to suggest that histories of conservatism not only provide resources for a better understanding of the present, but also can complement the task that radical and ecumenical accounts of the Arab past have long pursued in disputing the religious or cultural nature of conservatism. In that sense, intellectual history of secular conservatism is important not because it is more or less dominant than theologically inflected varieties of it today, but because of how it might help free the historian from the need to restrict her endeavour to the correction of essentialist misrepresentation and to write histories where contingency is assumed rather than histories whose burden it has been to prove it.

William Godwin is predominantly recognized as a theoretical anarchist who envisioned a tranquil anarchy wherein no government was deemed necessary. Equally emphasized in academic literature is Godwin’s unwavering advocacy for gradualism and pacifism as a transition mechanism toward the ideal society—a strategy criticized by some as inadequate or naive in realizing this ideal. Scholars of Godwin have identified a contradiction within his thought on this basis. This article, however, argues that this contradiction dissolves when we shift the focus to what could be termed the “time-regime” of Godwin’s politics: the business of the present differed from the business of the future, even as the present served as road to the future. Viewed through this lens of time-regime, the remarkable significance of democracy in Godwin’s scheme of anarchy becomes evident. Accordingly, this article seeks to analyze his concept of democracy within the backdrop of the French revolutionary decade.

The rise of the movement propagating the abolition of the slave trade in Britain was accompanied by the increasing engagement of women in the antislavery cause. These women claimed a voice on the public stage by pointing to the fact that slavery was a domestic institution. By the early nineteenth century, family separation had become one of the most popular abolitionist tropes and it gave women an important role in the later immediatist movement that emerged in opposition to gradualism. This article deals with the evolution of the abolitionist cognitive tool “mental metempsychosis,” which was made use of to argue against family separations, by looking at religiously inspired ideas notably tied to Christian Kabbalism that challenged the concept of the heritability of slavery. These ideas were initially developed by female Nonconformist ministers to repudiate the biblical story of Eve’s transgression as justification for original sin and for women’s subjugation to men.

This article charts the intellectual development and application of communication theology, centering two church-led communication training programs in Nyegezi (Tanzania) and Nairobi (Kenya), from their founding amid East African decolonization in the 1960s through to the challenges of Africanization in the 1970s–1980s. This has implications for two growing bodies of scholarship. First, speaking to histories of Christian thought—particularly on ecumenism, secularization, and localization in the context of decolonization—I show that these training centers, their African staff, and their students enabled the elaboration of communication theology, and revealed its contradictions. Second, speaking to intellectual histories of attempts to decolonize information and communications, I reinsert theology into an often state-centric narrative, suggesting how these training programs informed debates about relevance and self-reliance in the media. I thus make the case for locating intellectual histories of both communications and Christianity in regions of the decolonizing world.

In the early nineteenth century, parliamentarians in Britain debated whether the Crown’s prerogative could be used to exclude and deport aliens. These arguments were later expanded in litigation about the immigration practices of the British colonies. On behalf of the colonies, some lawyers proposed that the executive powers of colonial officials were informed by the writings of Samuel Pufendorf and Emer de Vattel, who had claimed that the state could forbid the entry of foreigners. But across three disputes, from Mauritius (1830s), Australia (1880s), and Canada (1900s), lawyers in the colonies and in London revealed several doubts about this line of thought. In doing so, they expressed a more general skepticism about the relevance of sovereignty to immigration control.

In June 2021, the last of the eighteen tomes of Tocqueville’s Oeuvres complètes was published by Gallimard. This project had been instigated more than seventy years earlier by Jacob Peter Mayer, a German Jewish writer who had fled to England in 1936. Mayer believed that Tocqueville’s insights into democracy, fanaticism, and revolution were more relevant to the nation-states of the postwar era than those of any other writer, and so he embarked upon a mission to publish Tocqueville’s complete works to underscore their contemporary relevance. Utilizing many unpublished documents, this article tells the story of how Mayer came to direct the publishing venture, how he battled with the national commission that was set up by the French government to oversee it, and how he eventually lost control of the project after thirty years as editor in chief. His experience confirmed in his eyes that free states lacked democratic cultures sufficient to sustain them.

This article investigates the intellectual and cultural history of homeownership in the United States. Focused on the work of the economist Richard T. Ely, it argues that this history should move beyond Ely’s intellectual influence on the real-estate industry in the 1910s and 1920s to incorporate his critique of laissez-faire economics, his ideas about “social property,” and his visions of managed hierarchy, all of which originated in the late nineteenth century. The essay tracks Ely’s connections to Progressives like John Dewey—with their visions of a coming social self to displace possessive individualism—and his influence on Herbert Hoover’s 1931 National Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership—which prefigured the New Deal’s housing policy. Following Ely’s work reveals how homeownership institutionalized what Dewey called “social values,” but did so by naturalizing a persistent rhetoric of autonomy and individualism that relied on divisions of race, class, and gender for its power.

This article situates the work of famous “skeptical environmentalist” Bjørn Lomborg in current environmental debates, arguing that he represents a shift from a “market” to a “planning” orientation within promethean environmental discourse taking place since the early 2000s. Instead of seeing self-correcting markets as a panacea for all societal ills, “planning” prometheanism aims to address environmental problems such as climate change through public policy, state investment, and technology development. We investigate the genesis of Lomborg’s “planning” prometheanism and locate its key sources of inspiration in the works of American economists Julian Simon, William Nordhaus, and Thomas Schelling. Moreover, we argue that Lomborg’s approach is characterized by a technocratic skepticism toward democracy which derives from his reliance on rational-choice theory. Finally, highlighting the adaptability of promethean discourse, we suggest that Lomborg’s “planning” prometheanism represents a renaissance of 1950s promethean thought at a time when a post-neoliberal world is taking shape.

This article examines the egalitarian ideas and practices of Gamal al-Banna (1920–2013) during Egypt’s transition from postcolonial socialism to neoliberal Islamic revival. It highlights al-Banna’s efforts to recast egalitarian ideals within both Arab socialist and Islamic frameworks. I argue that during the height of Arab socialism, al-Banna Islamized the egalitarian principles of labor to conform with and popularize salient socialist objectives. As the socialist lexicon ceded to a global trend of neoliberalism, Islam became increasingly intertwined with the formation of an identity-centric Muslim world. Within this transformed sociocultural landscape, al-Banna developed an alternative vision that integrated egalitarian ideals into a liberal Islamic discourse. Through a critical reexamination of al-Banna’s writings and activism, this article uncovers a leftist, egalitarian origin within the broader spectrum of contemporary Islamic revival. I demonstrate that the contracted global perspective—from postcolonial to Muslim worlds—led al-Banna to reconceptualize the nation’s postcoloniality and social progress through a renewed framework of liberal Islam.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the concept of “direct action” emerged as a major presence in radical politics. In the years following World War I, opponents of war and militarism reshaped that concept. They insisted upon its nonviolent character, they specified how direct action might be used to oppose war, they distinguished direct action from Bolshevism and social democracy, they imagined direct action as a key contributor to a future nonviolent revolution, and they drew upon contemporary struggles from the Ruhr, to Samoa, to India to justify their political claims. The radicals who shared these debates were linked by an energetic transnational network, spanning the War Resisters’ International and the International Antimilitarist Bureau. This article recovers this network, traces the key intellectual contributions, and argues for their significance. It aims to contribute to the intellectual histories of direct action and of nonviolence and to draw attention to previously submerged debates of the radical interwar left.