Over the last forty years, analysts at American and British neoliberal think tanks have published a plethora of reports and commentaries celebrating the commercialization of space. This article examines why neoliberal think tanks have developed such a long-term idiosyncratic interest in space policies. I argue that space acts as an affective mobilizer that enables neoliberal ideologues to reactivate their historical ideological struggle against collectivism while simultaneously helping them to rescue the neoliberal project from numerous epistemological threats plaguing it. I first analyze how think tanks’ space activism operates in the context of their concerted struggle since the 1980s against “collectivist” international law. Second, I examine how they use the myth of the space frontier to revive the legitimation of private property as a core pillar of neoliberal thought. The last section analyzes how neoliberal think-tankers have come to offer space as the ideal solution to pressing environmental problems.

Previous scholarship on Caesarism has focused overwhelmingly on continental Europe. Insofar as Britain has been mentioned at all, it has been as a mere foil to the latter: ostensibly, the kind of democratic dictatorship known as “Caesarism” was wholly alien to British traditions of limited, representative, and parliamentary government; as such, the British dismissed it out of hand; the concept never gained any purchase within British thought; indeed, the word itself was not even used in Britain until 1857 (according to the OED, cited by several scholars). By drawing on an array of periodical and newspaper sources, the proposed contribution will challenge this orthodoxy along three principal lines: first, it will demonstrate that Auguste Romieu’s L’ère des Césars (1850) was widely reviewed in Britain, with the result that both the word and the concept of “Caesarism” passed immediately into British usage; second, it will demonstrate that rather than merely dismissing the concept out of hand, mid-century British thinkers engaged seriously with it, formulating an elaborate critique of “Caesarism” as practiced on the Continent; third, it will demonstrate that, as the century wore on, above all due to the democratization of the British constitution that occurred as a result of the 1867 and 1884 Reform Acts, many British thinkers came to believe that Britain was in fact at imminent risk of collapsing into Caesarism, most likely through the emergence of a charismatic parliamentary leader such as Benjamin Disraeli. In this sense, the received belief that Britain was somehow “immune” to Caesarism might hold for the mid-nineteenth century, but it does not hold for the late nineteenth century.

In 1952, Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith published one of his earliest best sellers, American Capitalism. Despite impressive traction among the public, the book sparked controversy among mainstream economists. Not only did Galbraith attack the failure of neoclassical economics to capture reality, but he also offered an alternative: the theory of countervailing power. Galbraith’s vision of an economy of competing aggregates was cast aside, but the political and methodological grounds for this rejection merit a closer look. In this article, I reconstruct the academic debate sparked by the book’s publication to demonstrate how thoroughly Cold War conformist politics influenced American economics in the postwar period. This had consequences both for Galbraith’s theory and for the trajectory of economic methodology thereafter. As this episode suggests, a “neoliberal” economics shorn of ethical and social context congealed in the early 1950s—a historical hinge point with powerful reverberations into our present day.

The introduction to this forum outlines the many ways neoliberal thinkers have apprehended nature over the past century and why this oeuvre has been largely overlooked by historians. The intellectual history of neoliberalism and the study of the environmental crisis have both become sprawling but largely unconnected academic corpuses. This forum has been assembled to act as a conduit and thus help cultivate a new subfield of neoliberal environmental thought. By studying neoliberals as a “thought collective,” an approach pioneered two decades ago by Dieter Plehwe and Bernhard Walpen, it becomes possible to perceive how their environmental frameworks were conceived, debated, and disseminated. The existence of a neoliberal thought collective does not mean that there is a single market-conforming approach to managing environmental problems; rather, there is a wide array of frameworks cohered by a shared canon and worldview. The articles in this forum hint at the creativity and eclecticism of neoliberal bricoleurs, whose arguments range from climate denial, to selfish bees, to privatizing the Moon. As editors, we suggest three reasons for studying neoliberal environmental thought: to better perceive and thwart the thought collective’s objectives, to guard oneself against unconsciously adopting “green” neoliberal frameworks, and to engage fruitfully with the work of a worthy adversary to further the construction of post-neoliberal frameworks and their adjunct intellectual infrastructure.

This article argues that the muted and often negative responses to the American historian Richard Hildreth’s six-volume History of the United States published between 1849 and 1852 resulted from his embrace of a secular, utilitarian philosophy of history emphasizing individual freedom as the main source of human happiness and social progress. Tracing the origins of these ideas to Hildreth’s early exposure to liberal religion, democratic party politics, and antislavery thought, the article shows that Hildreth’s historiographical approach rejected providentialism in favor of secular causation, rooted in human agency and historical contingency. Hildreth’s liberal utilitarianism is offered as at least a partial solution to what has been called the “problem” of defining his place in American intellectual history.

This article constructs a new genealogy for one of the central rhetorical tropes of conservative politics in the United States in recent decades: “job-killing regulation.” Explaining how Republican politicians since Ronald Reagan have wielded this slogan so potently in their war against environmental regulation requires us to attend both to the social history of American capitalism and to the history of neoliberal intellectual production. Neoliberal intellectuals, clustered around the Mont Pèlerin Society, began warning in the 1940s that leftist elites sought to sacrifice the livelihoods of the working class for the sake of their anti-industrial aesthetic preferences. But this line of argument gained little cultural or political purchase in the US until the crisis of deindustrialization that erupted in the 1970s, when executives began systematically threatening layoffs in response to new environmental regulations. These threats were mainly pretextual but incompetently handled by regulatory policy makers, creating a political opportunity that Reagan exploited skillfully.

Friedrich Hayek regarded Bernard Mandeville as a founding father of the intellectual lineage to which he belonged. This article offers a countergenealogy of his debt to Mandeville. By reading the two philosophers in parallel, it finds continuities beyond those that Hayek himself identifies, notably in their theorizations of evolutionary progress from animals through human savages to bourgeois civilization. Submission to the market, for Hayek, is essential to the civilizing process. The article reconstructs Mandeville’s arguments concerning the similarities between animals and the “lower” classes and races, via the allegory of the beehive. Hayek, likewise, tended to anthropomorphize insects and other animals. In his conception of the evolutionary ladder, robins compare favorably to some human groups. In such ways, the article suggests, ideologies of class and race left an imprint on Mandeville’s and Hayek’s philosophies of nature and human evolution.

This article develops an intellectual history of neoliberal climate change denial, bringing together scholarship on the history of neoliberal ideas with critical research on climate denialism. Focusing on the writings of Deepak Lal (1940–2020), a prominent late neoliberal thinker, the article reconstructs the key arguments Lal developed to throw climate science into question. After situating Lal in relation to neoliberal thought and think tanks, the article explores his views on four key themes: the scientific legitimacy of climatology, the intellectual corruption of climate researchers, the politics of the environmentalist movement, and the concept of imperialism. The article argues that Lal threaded familiar neoliberal concepts and tropes into climate denial, thus articulating a distinctly neoliberal theory of climate change. This theory quickly became influential within the neoliberal movement, segments of which came to echo Lal’s arguments. The article concludes with a broader reflection on neoliberalism’s relation to climate catastrophe.

The Haitian Revolution shaped how planters and pro-slavery intellectuals, abolitionists, and colonial bureaucrats thought about the possibilities, promises, and pitfalls of abolishing enslavement in the nineteenth-century Americas and Caribbean. Uncovering a distinct way of thinking about the Haitian Revolution, this article analyzes how Harriet Martineau’s representation of this revolution placed it under the fold of liberal abolitionism by tracing how liberal political economy grounded her abolitionism. For Martineau, the Haitian Revolution under Toussaint Louverture’s leadership illustrated how a state-managed emancipation process would reproduce and strengthen capitalist plantation production by transforming the enslaved into wage laborers. In this account, Martineau disavowed the conflict between Louverture’s use of state coercion to retain cultivateurs in plantations and cultivateurs’ demands to obtain provision grounds. Engaging Martineau’s representation of the Haitian Revolution, this article expands scholarship that has explored how political thinkers in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world developed conflicting visions of revolutionary Saint Domingue.

Investment law is an oft-overlooked, yet vital, component of the ideological apparatus upholding the fossil-fuel industry. Despite mounting pressure for divestment, large institutional investors continue to fund fossil-fuel firms, in part, by citing the prudent-person principle (PPP), which requires trustees to act as “prudent persons.” To grasp the rationales underpinning contemporary capitalism, it is fruitful to illuminate the PPP’s history. The genealogy of the principle’s emergence in 1830 and subsequent connections to the Chicago school between 1952 and 1994, reveals its tendency to reinforce predominant market actors and expand financial-market logic. Chicago economists and lawyers disseminated the neoliberal financial theories of modern portfolio theory and the efficient-market hypothesis while tying them to the PPP and promoting its US enactment. During the 1990s and 2000s, regulators and pension fund managers adopted these efforts and successfully lobbied to expand the EU’s financial market through a similar PPP regulation, further consolidating the PPP’s influence in the contemporary financial sphere.

The article examines the 1941 Ventotene Manifesto, one of the most celebrated—yet widely misunderstood—documents in the history of federalist Europeanism. Written by Ernesto Rossi and Altiero Spinelli while confined on the island of Ventotene for antifascist activity, the text diagnosed Europe’s collapse as the consequence of sovereign nation-states operating in an anarchic international order and called for the creation of a supranational government imposed by a revolutionary elite. This article situates the manifesto within interwar and wartime socialist, liberal–socialist, and antifascist debates, showing how Rossi and Spinelli elevated federalism as the primary criterion of political progress, displacing class struggle and national liberation. I argue that the manifesto’s revolutionary aims have been obscured by postwar narratives of European integration, which retrospectively recast it as a program for the gradual development of what became the present-day EU. Rather than being a blueprint for incremental unification, the manifesto advocated for a revolutionary federalism that fused socialism with a Jacobin conception of political power. This study challenges teleological readings of Europeanism, offering a historicist account of wartime federalist ideas as shaped by crisis, exile, and revolutionary expectations.

Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West) gave expression to a pervasive feeling of cultural crisis in early twentieth-century European intellectual life. Perhaps unsurprisingly given his reactionary politics and nationalist sympathies, Spengler’s work met with a muted reception in metropolitan France. More open to his message were members of imperial France’s modest colonial intelligentsia; Spengler’s French translator was Mohand Tazerout (1893–1973), an Algerian-born World War I veteran, schoolteacher, and aspiring sociologist. This article tells the story of The Decline of the West’s initial appearance in French before exploring Tazerout’s own intellectual project, which both built on and reached beyond Spengler’s thinking. Contemporary and subsequent North African intellectuals were no less drawn to themes of cultural decline and renewal; however, the unique circumstances that pushed Tazerout to embrace Spengler’s ideas were quickly swept away in a vortex of postcolonial contention.

This article argues that Frederick Douglass’s invocations of Christian spirituality, specifically his belief in divine power and prophecy, constitute a mode of political judgment that (1) grounds his moral convictions, (2) animates his immanent critique of proslavery theology and racial science from their own stated premises, and (3) widens the scope of public reason beyond secular rationalism, scientific empiricism, and inherited religious custom. Against Thomas Jefferson’s “materialist” foreclosure of spiritual discourse, which modern scholarship risks reproducing, Douglass envisions a liberal democratic order in which prophetic spirituality can refine and expand democratic commitments. Methodologically, this article models an approach to intellectual history that treats spirituality as a mode of political reasoning in its own right, rather than as background context or rhetorical convention. Recovering this dimension of Douglass’s thought complicates narratives of secularization and reconceives Enlightenment liberalism as a framework in which faith, reason, and democracy are fundamentally imbricated.

This article argues that, despite his reputation for intellectual heterodoxy, the Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–1930) actually set a high value on the political discipline of theoretical activity, and that some of his most creative thought was on that theme. In doing so, the article questions the prevailing assumption about the heterodoxy of Mariátegui’s Marxism. By reading Mariátegui in terms of discipline as much as heterodoxy, the article also unsettles historiographical conventions about Mariátegui’s attitude to various political practices and ideas, including cosmopolitanism and the politics of exile. The article proceeds by first contextualizing Mariátegui’s adoption of Marxism as a means of greater discipline in Peruvian intellectual life. It then traces the main lines of Mariátegui’s critique of politically ill-disciplined intellectualism during the interwar period, before reconstructing his positive models of a balance between intellectual discipline and innovation, understood as a necessary condition of genuine revolutionary thinking.

This article examines the trajectory of two Native American songs transcribed by French Jesuits in the seventeenth century, their subsequent inclusion in printed books in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and their use by historians and entertainers in the twentieth century. The study focuses on how these songs, initially part of Native American oral and aural tradition, were transformed into primary-source evidence for historical research and racialized entertainment. This is an intellectual and cultural history that uses history-of-the-book and bibliographical methodologies to understand the discipline of history’s formation in the academy. The article argues that converting these songs into written musical notation inherently altered their meaning and context. It highlights how transcribing music by ear involves subjective interpretation and the loss of crucial performative elements. Furthermore, reproducing these songs in printed form further distanced them from their original cultural context, making them susceptible to misinterpretation and appropriation. The fact that these changes occurred as history was founded as a discipline is crucial to understanding the argument. The study employs a multidisciplinary approach, drawing on historical documents, musical scores, and popular-culture materials. It examines the role of women scholars, such as Emma Helen Blair and Edna Kenton, in making these sources accessible to a broader audience through their work on primary-source anthologies. However, it also points out the unintended consequences of this accessibility, as the songs were increasingly decontextualized and used to perpetuate romanticized and inaccurate portrayals of Native American culture. The work of Blair and Kenton is central to the formation of history as a discipline in the academy, especially as they worked with and for men like Reuben Gold Thwaites and Frederick Jackson Turner. The research concludes that the transformation of these songs into historical sources and entertainment props reflects the complex relationship between scholarship, popular culture, and the representation of Native American culture in the twentieth century. It raises critical questions about authenticity, ownership, and access to Indigenous cultural expressions. Finally, this study emphasizes the importance of considering notated music as a historical primary source, acknowledging its limitations and potential for misinterpretation.

Kōsaka Masataka (1934–96) was a prominent and self-described realist IR theorist in Japan whose thought shared several key tenets with contemporary liberal internationalism. This article argues that a significant strand of IR theory—one that ultimately supported the US-led international order—originated from an anti-Anglo-Saxon vision articulated by four Kyoto school scholars, including Kōsaka’s father, during wartime debates. These thinkers proposed a new world order grounded in the concepts of a “pluralistic world” and moralische Energie. Kōsaka transformed these ideas into a framework of plural civilizations, each driven by its own underlying “energy.” In postwar Japan, he pursued what William James termed “the moral equivalent of war,” envisioning a “pluralistic world” sustained by liberal internationalism and led by the US, which he interpreted as inherently pluralistic. By examining the ambivalent relationship between the Kyoto school and Kōsaka Masataka, this article challenges the simplistic Western–non-Western binary in contemporary IR theory.

This article seeks to enrich discussion of Catholicism and liberalism by recovering the intellectual trajectory of Charles Forbes René, Comte de Montalembert (1810–70) and his work in the drafting of the Falloux Law of 1850. The article shows how Montalembert served as a key bridge figure in the translation of liberal Catholic political discourse into legislative reality, emphasizing a liberalism of jurisdiction and constitutionalism that he wielded against both French anticlericals and reactionary Catholics. Although often seen more as a Catholic figure than as a liberal tout court, Montalembert’s thought as evinced in his political interventions on education placed him comfortably in the core of nineteenth-century liberalism, perhaps more than he himself would have cared to realize. As the article shows, Montalembert bridged political theory and practice, and his relatively unappreciated legacy ramified far beyond his own career.

Marco Filoni, The Life and Thought of Alexandre Kojève, trans. David Broder (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2025)

Boris Groys, Alexandre Kojève: An Intellectual Biography (London: Verso, 2025)