This article examines the role of legal argument in late eighteenth-century antislavery thought by subjecting Granville Sharp’s legal writing to detailed scrutiny. Much scholarship on law and antislavery in the British context justifiably focuses on the meaning of Lord Mansfield’s 1772 ruling in Somerset’s Case. Adopting a different approach, this article reads Sharp’s antislavery jurisprudence expansively, as an effort to fashion legal and political ideals. In so doing, it shows that Sharp’s legal writing was part of a broader project aimed at associating antislavery with a particular conception of national identity. Examining Sharp’s wide-ranging analysis of statute and common law, the article further argues that Sharp developed a form of natural-rights constitutionalism, melding the radical cause of abolition with the notion of tradition. Finally, the article explains how Sharp’s jurisprudence promoted an ideologically important vision of abolitionism as a distinctively modern form of progress. In short, the article argues that Sharp’s legal writing should be read not only in relation to Somerset but also as a means of understanding the character of antislavery thought and its relation to wider currents in eighteenth-century radicalism.

Civil religion has been imagined as a bloodless rationalism or a baptized patriotism, but rarely as a fully fledged religion. This article argues that a strain of civil religion emerged out of deism in the 1770s and 1780s that aspired to be an authentic religion complete with public prayer. This “practical civil religion” looked to spirituality and social ritual as a means of taming the passions and achieving national regeneration. One of the first to imagine such a religion was the journalist and novelist Louis-Sébastien Mercier. The dissenting minister David Williams went beyond Mercier’s dream, in 1776 opening the world’s first deist chapel at Margaret Street in London. Maximilien Robespierre’s short-lived cult of the Supreme Being in revolutionary France represented the apogee of the tradition of practical civil religion. Robespierre proposed the cult as a means of effecting national regeneration and completing the Revolution.

The fiduciary conception of political power that the republican tradition adopted in its struggle against absolutism was dissolving during the late eighteenth century and the nineteenth. However, in the mid-nineteenth century, some attempts appeared that represent a reemergence of the fiduciary democratic (or proto-democratic) scheme. One of them was the case of Spanish federalism and its greatest exponent, Francisco Pi y Margall. This article shows that the core of Pimargalian federal republican thought is based on a fiduciary conception of sovereignty, which is grounded in a recovery of the language of revolutionary natural law. By arguing that the fiduciary principle applied not only to his concept of public authority, but also to his comprehensive proposal for the federal reorganization of the state, this article contributes to a better understanding of the specific contribution of Pi’s work and to contemporary discussions on the foundations and scope of republicanism, federalism, and fiduciary relationships.

The literature on the introduction of modern Western philosophy in the late Ottoman Empire is predominantly ethnocentric. This is because it reduces the Ottoman version of modern Western philosophy to the philosophical discourses of Muslim/Turkish intellectuals at the expense of non-Muslim Ottomans’ philosophical activities in languages other than Turkish. This article challenges such ethnocentrism and offers an alternative narrative from the perspective of Ottoman Armenian thinkers in the late nineteenth century. With this aim, it analyzes the philosophical thoughts of Madatia Karakashian, Nahabed Rusinian, Kalusd Gosdantian, and Yeghia Demirjibashian.

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 traces the emergence of a new type of economist in interwar France—the conjuncturist—through a study focusing on Alfred Sauvy and Robert Marjolin. We argue that these neglected figures helped to shape a new, autonomous, field of expertise that consisted of diagnosing and forecasting the economic situation to guide public decision making. As we show, the history of the conjuncturists is closely linked to that of the Popular Front in general, and to its emblematic law on the forty-hour week in particular. By becoming the most vocal opponents of this law, the conjuncturists fomented an open mutiny against the very government that had given them their first prominent position, in order to obtain the repeal of the forty-hour week, which Sauvy achieved in November 1938. Although the Popular Front was by then a thing of the past, and a future war with Germany had become the most likely outcome, the figure of the conjuncturist had succeeded in firmly occupying the institutional landscape of 1940s France—a form of economic expertise that was henceforth inseparable from political activity itself.

In 1917, the US Department of Labor launched a new section: the Division of Negro Economics (DNE). Established to study black labor in the context of the Great Migration and staffed completely by black social scientists and social workers, the division offers a window onto the origins and meaning of black economics in the United States. During an age of pervasive scientific racism, the division’s leaders leveraged the language and tools of academic economics to assert black Americans' fundamental humanity, particularly by rendering black migrants as economic agents. The history of the division reveals how black economic thinkers made the economic study of the Great Migration into an egalitarian intellectual project, even if they could not escape institutional bias and prejudice. It stands as a lesson on the potential of economics, both as a tool of oppression and as one of political claims-making.

This article examines the influence of Spinozism on Leszek Kołakowski’s humanist Marxism between 1953 and 1968. After historically exploring Kołakowski’s early Stalinism and his later belief that Hegel’s historical theodicy, in eradicating the contradiction between totality and particularity, abolished individual moral responsibility, it examines Kołakowski’s interpretation of Spinoza’s alternatively ahistorical and ambiguous relationship between substance and its modes, which Kołakowski admired despite finding it metaphysically contradictory. It shows that this interpretation contributed to Kołakowski’s Marxism, which focused on the moral freedom of the individual by accepting the permanence of contradiction between subjectivity and totality. His interest in Spinoza also changed Kołakowski’s understanding of modernity, which he increasingly identified with the seventeenth century, especially those forms of thinking that contradictorily blended elements of religious and rationalist thought. While Kołakowski abandoned Marxism, this interest in the relationship between religion and secularism defined much of his thought after 1968.

In the early 1970s, Christopher Stone and Peter Singer influentially rejected the anthropocentrism of liberalism, contending that animals and nature deserved moral and legal consideration independent of humans. This article historicizes the emergence of nonhuman personhood by showing how they and other writers attempted to dismantle liberalism’s anthropocentrism at a dynamic time in humanist politics. Writers asserted nonhuman personhood as a continuation of 1960s liberation movements, employing the narrative of a “natural” extension of rights and equality from marginalized humans to nonhumans. This determinism, however, obscured nonhumans’ specific inability to make political claims. Drawing on the incipient 1970s human rights movement, writers circumvented this problem of political agency by emphasizing nonhumans’ capacity to suffer. Suffering allowed humans to see themselves in nonhumans and thus recognize their personhood. This turn to empathetic identification as the driver of historical change inaugurated an anti-anthropocentric humanism that extended personhood beyond humanity but reinscribed a more fundamental distinction between those able and those unable to make political claims. Drawing on both 1960s challenges to humanism and 1970s humanist preoccupation with suffering, anti-anthropocentric humanism preserved the very limitations of liberal politics into a new definition of personhood that effaced political agency from both personhood and history.

This article analyzes the relationship between living systems theory (LST) and the army's military doctrine in the 1980s. General Donn Starry, Colonel Mike Malone, and Major James Cary worked with James G. Miller, the founder of LST, to make the army more efficient at fighting a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. LST conceptualized that living organisms organized matter and energy and that its components could function because they worked as a part of the whole to adapt to their environment. The article reveals how these officers employed LST as a framework to model a reciprocal relationship between individual agency and collective unity in the army's hierarchical organization. Situating this doctrinal reform in the years after the end of the draft and the mainstreaming of neoclassical economics in the 1980s, it finds that the army officers were using LST to replace Robert McNamara's mechanical strategic paradigm used in the Vietnam War.