In Enlightenment-era France, theologians, philosophers, and politicians contested the nature and prerogatives of human personhood with particular vehemence. Yet historians have tended to reduce these struggles to a narrative of ascendant individualism. This essay seeks to recover non-individualist formulations of the self in eighteenth-century France, and, in doing so, to offer a more nuanced account of subjectivity during the period. Out of debates over Christian mysticism, radical philosophy, and republican politics emerged two distinct and conflicting modes of formulating the self 's relationship to its ideas and actions. On one side, mainstream philosophes joined Descartes, Locke, and orthodox Catholic theologians in elaborating the individual's capacity to accumulate existential goods in terms of a discourse of self-ownership. Opposition to this view, in contrast, challenged such claims by employing a discourse of dispossession, which stressed the human person's resignation to, and ultimate identification with, a totalizing force outside the self. The essay traces a specific genealogy of this discourse in the writings of Fénelon, Rousseau, and the Illuminist theologian Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, in the context of intellectual polemics ranging from the role of self-love in Christian devotion to the virtues of self-sacrifice in a republican polity. If the Fénelonian doctrine of spiritual abandon called on believers to surrender their particular desires in the love of God, Rousseau likewise demanded that citizens place their property and their persons under the direction of the general will. Saint-Martin, for his part, applied Rousseau's politics of alienation to his vision of a theocratic republic in the wake of the French Revolution, thereby posing the mystic ideal of dispossession as a means of transforming the self and its world along communal, rather than individualist, lines.

Since Dilthey's template study of 1890, the Prussian state's attempt to censor Kant's religious writings has typically been seen as the work of a reactionary politics bent on imposing religious orthodoxy as a bulwark against the spread of Aufklärung. This essay offers a revisionist interpretation, arguing that the attempted censoring was a by-product of a set of a long-standing Religionspolitik designed to achieve religious toleration through a system of regulated public confessions. Reaffirmed in the Religious Edict (1788) and the Censorship Edict (1788), Prussian policy required acceptance of a plurality of public confessions whose stability was preserved through the restriction of public proselytizing and the acceptance of private religious freedom. In breaking with this religious settlement, through their public advocacy of a true “religion of reason”, the Protestant religious rationalists of the theological Aufklärung breached the embargo on public proselytizing, leading eventually to government's attempt to censor Kant's own “pure moral religion”.

“Enthusiasm” has been described as the intellectual opposite of the Enlightenment, its “anti-self”. It stood for a religion of the “heart” rather than the “head”, and was associated with the extreme, millenarian sects on the fringes of established Protestantism. The relationship between religious enthusiasm and enlightened philosophy, however, could be closer than is often thought. Here I focus on the example of the jurist and philosopher Christian Thomasius (1655–1728), who is considered to be one of the first and most influential representatives of the early Enlightenment in Protestant Germany. Usually, Thomasius is described as a sort of classical enlightened thinker who separated the question of religious truth from the pursuit of secular philosophy, and it is implied that the interpretation of Thomasius's religious beliefs contributes little, if anything, to the understanding of his philosophical views. His religious views, however, not only were regarded by contemporaries as an example of religious “enthusiasm”. These “enthusiastic” religious beliefs were also more important to his philosophy than is often argued. They were part of a programme for religious and intellectual renewal and reform which, Thomasius believed, would prepare the reform of Lutheran philosophy from the obsolete, “scholastic” intellectual traditions it had inherited from the papal church. This essay examines the often complex development of Thomasius's religious views in their historical context and their significance for his wider “enlightened” intellectual interests.

What did early national Americans mean when they articulated fears of “luxury and effeminacy,” those twin sins of a republic that idolized the classical virtues of manly self-restraint? This essay argues that the fear of luxury and effeminacy circulated not just as airy metaphor but as palpable reality, specifically in the figure of the female recumbent on the sofa. The article traces separately the careers of Enlightenment Venus, who especially in her recumbent form embodied fears of passion in a republic built on reasoned consent, and the sofa, a piece of neoclassical furniture that rose to great popularity at this time and was envisioned as both effeminate and luxurious in fictional and nonfiction writing. The essay then joins the two figures of recumbent Venus and the sofa, showing how they were mutually enabling, and how they entered into early national conversations about labor and race. It concludes by examining how two educated American women, the self-described Roman matrons Mercy Otis Warren and Martha Bayard Smith, incorporated the image of the supine woman and her implied sofa into fictional writings about classical polities in danger. By knitting political ideologies, imaginative worlds, and neoclassical objects, the essay suggests a way for historians to flesh out the intellectual history of early national women, showing how they could participate in a conversation about modern politics and classical antiquity from which we have assumed they were largely disbarred.

The founder of Russian socialism, Alexander Herzen, was also an original moral and social philosopher, anticipating much twentieth-century thought in his attack on “grand narratives” that endow history with a rational direction and a final goal. The critique of radical utopianism which he based on his observations of the French revolution of 1848 did not (contrary to the common view) deprive him of any further role as a revolutionary intellectual. Rather, it forced him to redefine this role. The key influences on him in this respect were the thought and the activity of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. He saw Proudhon's attack on the anthropotheism of Feuerbach's “religion of humanity” as completing the demystification of the world begun by the Left Hegelians' critique of religious alienation, and interpreted Proudhon's unpopularity with the French Left as confirmation of his role as a forerunner who had articulated a vision of freedom from transcendent authorities and systems much in advance of his time. During his subsequent involvement in the Russian political scene Herzen modelled himself to a significant degree on Proudhon, attacking systematizers on all sides, urging a pragmatic approach to the problem of political reform, and accepting his loss of influence among Russian radicals as the price for unmasking the authoritarianism hidden in the ideologies of the Left: a notable instance of cross-cultural influences at work in the history of nineteenth-century revolutionary thought.

While popular nationalism flourished in the United States from the time of the Revolution onward, reflective treatments of what it meant to be, specifically, a “nation” were rarely produced until the Civil War era. Historians have generally treated northern Civil War theorists of the nation as importers of European ideas of organic nationhood to serve conservative and statist purposes. The most notable mid-century theorists—Francis Lieber, Elisha Mulford, Orestes Brownson, John William Draper, Frederick Douglass, and Charles Sumner—were a more diverse set, however. They brought to the subject different theoretical and political assumptions and produced different models of the American nation, and they accommodated their borrowed conceptions to native materials. If their initial aim was to strengthen the authority and unity of the wartime nation, they soon struggled with the multiracial nation that was emerging from the war. The unity they posited in the nation contended with invidious racial, ethnic, and religious distinctions. In the end, Lieber, Brownson, Mulford, and Draper found diversity difficult or impossible to reconcile with their visions of national unity. Only Sumner and Douglass managed to construct models of the nation that were both heterogeneous and united: their postwar views serve as counterpoint to the tortured efforts of the other writers. In the language of current theory, these writers divided over whether the United States was a civic or an ethnic nation, although not all their exclusions and inequalities emanated from an ethnic model of the nation, nor all their inclusions and liberties from a civic one.

Acknowledgments are now a constitutive and almost compulsory part of academic productions. This essay, based on some 1,000 books in the humanities and social sciences, traces the sociogenesis of this academic genre. Focusing on the paratextual nature of acknowledgments, it examines the following questions: What do the lists of names in them mean? What effects are expected from these carefully written, or at least calculated, pieces? Acknowledgments reveal authorial strategies, the staging of a public persona, the pursuit or display of symbolic capital in a highly competitive world. But they can disclose more than that. They may also show a private person, depict an imagined Eden, recall a generosity. Acknowledgments involve a complex discourse. What they tell us is that the intellectual field is also a community, that in the “battleground” of learning there is a place for the gift, indeed that the giving of gifts still remains one of the means—perhaps even the principal one—of the advancement of learning.

W. V. Quine is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential philosophers of the twentieth century. Quine wrote and lectured on logic, philosophy of language, and epistemology throughout his long career, and was one of the American figures who did most to establish the analytic tradition of philosophy in the United States. Until recently, the historical development of both Quine's philosophy and the analytic tradition of which it is a part remained unexamined by historians and philosophers alike. In the last decade or so, however, analytic philosophers have begun to assess the history of their enterprise, and Quine's place within it. Building on this welcome development with the tools of intellectual history, this essay examines Quine's philosophical apprenticeship in the late 1920s and 1930s.

The basic tenets of Quine's mature thought set in early in his studies. Most notably, he displayed in his student writings a commitment to science as the primary theory of the world within which philosophical inquiry should take place. Yet he found the uncertain direction of interwar American philosophy uncongenial to his views. During a year of postdoctoral research in Europe, Quine encountered the work of analytic philosophers and logicians such as Rudolf Carnap and Alfred Tarski. Their scientific program for philosophy captivated Quine, who returned to Harvard a champion of their work. For the rest of the 1930s, Quine was an indefatigable advocate of the analytic tradition; he brought news of European logic and scientific philosophy to American universities. His purpose in doing so was to move American philosophy towards science and away from what he saw as its metaphysical entanglements. The reception and transformation of analytic philosophy in the United States is shown to have involved a complex dynamic between foreign and domestic conceptions of philosophy.

Pierre Leroux founded the liberal journal Le Globe in the 1820s, moved briefly into the Saint-Simonian camp, and then emerged as one of the most important, independent and philosophically ambitious Romantic socialists of the period before 1848. This essay examines the conflict that erupted between Leroux and German Left Hegelians when Leroux chose to endorse the Berlin lectures of F. W. J. Schelling in 1841. Whereas German radicals like Marx believed Leroux simply did not understand Schelling, the article argues that Leroux's support of Schelling was consistent with the political project that he had pursued since his break with the Saint-Simonians. Leroux's attempt to create a third-way politics between the “socialisme absolu” of the Saint-Simonians and the “individualité absolu” of liberalism was strongly influenced by his long-standing engagement with Romantic poetics, most importantly with what he called Romanticism's “style symbolique.” The Romantic notion that the symbol is a visible representation of the invisible and fundamentally unrepresentable connected Leroux's aesthetics and his politics, for the symbolic mode suggested a way to think of social relationships without reifying them; the gap between representation and objects such as “individual”, “society”, “humanity”, and “God” seemed to open up a space for artistic and political creativity. This commitment to a politics based on the role of the symbolic created an affinity with Schelling that was not acknowledged in the polemics that followed from Leroux's defense of the Left Hegelians' arch-enemy. Recovering the terms of that affinity casts a new and different light on the intersection of aesthetics and politics in Romanticism, and it illuminates paths in the early history of socialism that later developments closed down.

The historiographical trend that goes under the name of the “linguistic turn,” or, more capaciously, the “new cultural history,” has stressed the enormous plasticity and contingency of the human world. Its proponents have maintained that, instead of being determined by laws analogous to those that govern the physical world, human reality is to a large degree—just how large a degree is, of course, a hotly contested issue—autonomously constructed by the human manipulation of language. Language is, in this view, not confined to passively mirroring a prior social reality; rather, linguistically constituted entities can powerfully influence social life even in the absence of “real,” objective referents. As Sarah Maza notes in the introduction to The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie: An Essay on the Social Imaginary, 1750–1850, cultural historians have, since the 1970s, enthusiastically embraced such an approach with respect to newer topics of investigation like gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. Yet its application to the venerable historical category of class, while not altogether lacking, has lagged noticeably behind.

Once again, the United States is at war. Just as in the 1960s and 1970s, the battlefield is halfway around the globe in a third world country. The deployment of military force is again justified partly in terms of national interest, but also in terms of bringing modernity, freedom and prosperity to a people whose society can be described in terms such as “traditional,” “despotic,” “backward,” “undemocratic,” and/or “underdeveloped.” The exact meaning of the polar opposition signaled by the words “modern” and “traditional” is, like all politically charged terms, subject to debate and far from stable, but the polarity has figured importantly in international affairs ever since the end of World War II, and its salience was sharply heightened by the suicidal attack on New York's World Trade Center in September, 2001. That tragedy, together with the erratic bellicosity of the American response—directed not solely at the perpetrator, Al Quaeda, but also at Saddam Hussein's cruel dictatorship in Iraq—put modernization back in the headlines for the first time since 1975, when the United States pulled out of Vietnam in defeat. With the return of modernization comes the vexing problem of what to make of differences between “us” and “them.” What ethical obligations do scholars have in a world increasingly crowded with people who are eager to sacrifice lives—their own or others'—for the sake either of preserving tradition, or of hastening the triumph of modernity? Most pressing of all, given the potentially civilizational scale of the conflict, is another integrally related question: what does the future hold for ethnocentrism?

In recent decades, questions surrounding the concept of the “self,” whether by that name or such cognate terms as “subjectivity” or “identity,” have come to occupy a prominent place in historical scholarship, literary and gender studies, social theory and philosophy. Most recently, Jerrold Seigel's The Idea of the Self has provided not only a vast new historical map of this conceptual terrain but a challenging new way of exploring it. My purpose here is to examine both, and the thematic and methodological questions they raise for this major contemporary field of inquiry.

Steven Conn, History's Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004)

Maureen Konkle, Writing Indian Nations: Native Intellectuals and the Politics of Historiography, 1827–1863 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004)

New histories of indigenous and colonized peoples have revitalized some ancient questions. When and where does a properly historical discourse begin and why? The profession has traditionally given two different answers to the “when” and “where” queries. One venerable account holds that history proper begins with the Greeks and takes Herodotus (or Thucydides, depending on the political climate) for its founding patriarch. The second answer holds that historical consciousness only begins with modernity, and that real historical discourse—including the beginnings of professional, disciplined historiography—starts in Europe.

Arguably, with respect to religious practice, the United States Constitution sought to metamorphose what had been restricted practices of religious toleration into what we more commonly and with more generous spirit call religious tolerance. The provisions of toleration laws, making legal concessions under the aegis of an official religion, were better than burning heretics at the stake, a practice that after the bloody Thirty Years War in Europe (1618–48) usually caused more trouble than it was worth. Still they extended only a grudging permission to “dissenters.” The category “dissenter” did not include all religious minorities, and it placed the tolerated minorities at a disadvantage in almost all civil capacities. Religious toleration before the end of the eighteenth century gave some religious believers license to be wrong, but it carried no pledge of respect.

Mi Gyung Kim, Affinity, That Elusive Dream: A Genealogy of the Chemical Revolution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003)

Guiliano Pancaldi, Volta: Science and Culture in the Age of Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003)

To challenge the presumed isolation of the scientific method from social concerns and forces, to question the inevitability of progress, to explore the ideological and polemical aspects of science—all these are by now goals commonly stated in historical studies of science. In the quest for these desiderata over the past twenty years or so, historians of science have in many cases distanced themselves from intellectual history in its idealist, disembodied form. However, in spite of salutary moves to analyze instruments, laboratory practices, visual representations, instituions and politics, a great deal of the raw material for the history of science remains textual, very often in the form of print. And, as the existence of this journal attests, intellectual history has retooled to take seriously the contexts for ideas and intellectual movements. At the present moment, when intellectual historians and historians of science are allied in the game of contextualizing our subjects, it is worth considering how current scholarship is working to define multi-layered contexts for scientific ideas and the texts in which they appear.

In reality, no one single-handedly creates a new field of historical inquiry. As soon as you open your mouth to pronounce George Grote the modern father of ancient Greek history, you remember that August Boeckh, Karl Otfried Müller, and Connop Thirlwall laid Grote's groundwork. But it almost seems as if Michael O'Brien has pulled off such a feat. Taking the scattered bricks of the intellectual history of the antebellum American South, he has, over long years of labor, built from them a coherent structure where none existed before, a many-roomed mansion of the mind. The two volumes and 1,200 pages of Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860 culminate a quarter-century of rare scholarly achievement.

Marc Fumaroli, Chateaubriand: Poésie et terreur (Paris: Fallois, 2003)

Has the time come to revive François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848), author of Atala and René, the novels that defined romanticism in France and, above all, of the immense Mémoires d'outre-tombe (“Memoirs from beyond the grave”), perhaps the most ambitious of all French autobiographical projects? What does an eighteenth-century provincial nobleman's son, author of fanciful tales of encounters with North American “noble savages,” apologist for medieval Christianity, and unsuccessful proponent of a Bourbon restoration after 1815, have to say to twenty-first-century readers? The first important study of Chateaubriand's career, the nineteenth-century literary critic Sainte-Beuve's Chateaubriand et son groupe littéraire sous l'Empire, written in 1849, firmly assigned the great romantic author to an earlier phase of French letters. Commenting on the just-published posthumous Mémoires, Sainte-Beuve admitted that the work revealed Chateaubriand's “immense talent as a writer,” but damned the work by saying that “he reveals himself in all his egotistical nakedness.” The distinguished French literary scholar Marc Fumaroli has now set out to reverse these verdicts on the man and the Mémoires.

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, centenary edition, foreword Micky James, intro. Eugene Taylor and Jeremy Carrette (Routledge, 2002)

Charles Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited (Harvard University Press, 2002)

William James and a Science of Religions, ed. Wayne Proudfoot (Columbia University Press, 2004)

William James has a secure reputation as a pioneer psychologist and as a founding father of the philosophy of pragmatism. In his own time, however, he was best known and most popular among the laity for “The Will to Believe” (1895) and for The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902), which were defenses erected on behalf of religion in an increasingly secular world. Religious liberals treated the Bible as one human document among others and Christian faith as one tradition among many, but they “sought to salvage what they could of traditional belief, piety, and ethic.” James was part of this movement that took science, empiricism, and modern philosophy as a point of departure, but his contribution to it was distinctive, original, and (in his own idiom) unusually “tough-minded.”

Mark Lilla, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics (New York: New York Review of Books, 2001)

Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life (New York: Pantheon, 2002)

“Great writers are either husbands or lovers,” Susan Sontag explained in a 1963 essay on Camus. “Some writers supply the solid virtues of a husband: reliability, intelligibility, generosity, decency. There are other writers in whom one prizes the gifts of a lover, gifts of temperament rather than of moral goodness. Notoriously, women tolerate qualities in a lover—moodiness, selfishness, unreliability, brutality—that they never countenance in a husband, in return for excitement, an infusion of intense feeling. In the same way, readers put up with unintelligibility, obsessiveness, painful truths, lies, bad grammar—if, in compensation, the writer allows them to savor rare emotions, and dangerous sensations.” Camus was “the ideal husband of contemporary letters,” she opined, but “as in life, so in art both are necessary, husband and lovers. It's a great pity when one is forced to choose between them.”

John Skrentny, The Minority Rights Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002)

Richard King, Race, Culture and the Intellectuals, 1940–1970 (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Press, 2004)

Since June 1964, all three branches of the federal government have supported the goal of racial justice in the United States. John Skrentny, in The Minority Rights Revolution, explains how that goal and related ones have been implemented over the last sixty years. He argues that key policy developments since that time were driven less by mass movements and much more by elite “meaning entrepreneurs.” Well before the 1964 Civil Rights Act was made law, in the immediate post-World War II years, a bevy of transatlantic intellectuals responded to Nazi race policy by seeking a universalist vision that would unite humanity. Richard King, in Race, Culture and the Intellectuals, explores how intellectuals pursued that anti-racist universalist vision and then how African and African-American intellectuals in the 1960s, in particular, rejected universalism and began, instead, to pursue racial justice through cultural particularism. King's traditional intellectual history, when combined with Skrentny's sociological analysis of how elites managed ideas to pursue specific policies, reveals how American society, in pursuit of racial justice, moved from the simple stated ideals of the 1964 Civil Rights Act—equal opportunity and access—to the complexities of affirmative action and an embrace of “diversity” in American life.