Theodore Ziolkowski, Clio the Romantic Muse: Historicizing the Faculties in Germany (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004)

Thomas Albert Howard, Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern German University (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)

William Clark, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006)

In the same symbolic way that the modern political world can be traced to revolutionary Paris, and the modern economic world to industrial Manchester, so modern academia and modern scholarship trace their origins to Germany at the turn of the nineteenth century. There and then the study of history, philosophy, philology, linguistics, and, somewhat later, the natural sciences was transformed in content and methodology onto the lines that would characterize them until deep into the twentieth century. Some argue that the period from 1770 to 1830 launched a still more fundamental transformation in the very structure of academic knowledge: the creation of modern “disciplines” as the new social and intellectual forms through which knowledge would be classified, produced, and communicated.

The history of the book is everywhere, so widely diffused that it merits comparison with the famously elusive Scarlet Pimpernel, whose pursuers sought him without success. Like that figure, book history passes among us in disguise, reluctant to reveal its presence even as it gains ever-greater recognition. In some quarters, it lurks within the domain of bibliography, a field of scholarship dedicated to describing the histories of printed texts and, in the service of this enterprise, concerned with the details of book-making. Elsewhere, book history installs itself within descriptions of libraries and education, sharing, with the first of these, a concern for how old books were accumulated and classified and, with the second, for the many ramifications of literacy and the fashioning of schoolbooks. Together with the history of journalism it studies how news was disseminated and ponders the significance of periodicals, be these newspapers or magazines. Political history has been another convenient site of disguise in the wake of efforts to connect the public sphere and concepts of nation with the emergence of print culture. And, of course, book history has enjoyed a long and fruitful kinship with literary history, a relationship freshly energized in recent decades as literary historians turned to describing the rise and remaking of a canon and to emphasizing the mediations that all texts undergo—the “sociology of texts,” to borrow a phrase made famous by D. F. McKenzie. To this list we can add the version of intellectual history that reconstructs the reading of a person or group and employs this data to generalize about the coming of the Enlightenment and similar formations.

Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work (New York: Knopf, 2005)

Robert Milder, Exiled Royalties: Melville and the Life We Imagine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)

Edgar A. Dryden, Monumental Melville: The Formation of a Literary Career (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004)

Reading Melville in relation to intellectual history is both necessary and hard. His writings explore (among other things) political and legal theory, theology, aesthetics, natural philosophy, and what he once called “ontological heroics.” Yet if Melville engages ideas as intensely as any United States literary figure, his work remains difficult to locate within intellectual traditions. Largely an autodidact, Melville read eclectically; and unlike Emerson, Thoreau, and Fuller—all of whom have occasioned intellectual biographies—he left no extensive journals or letters from which to reconstruct his education and mind. We have the checkmarks, scores, and occasional comments of his partially recovered marginalia, important evidence that can raise as many questions as answers regarding influence and intention. Melville's novels, short fiction, and poetry thus bear the heaviest burden of proof as to his thinking, though these texts are also tricky, not only because of their famously complex structures and ambiguities, but also because they tend to subvert the intellectual systems they inhabit. Melville's tendency to push ideas to their limits is part of his achievement and appeal, and befitting his image as a roughhewn sailor there is a kind of skeptical restlessness to his thought. To appreciate Melville's relation to ideas is to pursue a commensurately unbounded mode of inquiry that includes (among other things) literary criticism, cultural history, and biography.

This article probes the link between anti-colonial nationalist thought and a theory of jihad in early twentieth-century India. An emotive affinity to the ummah was never a barrier to Muslims identifying with patriotic sentiments in their own homelands. It was in the context of the aggressive expansion of European power and the ensuing erosion of Muslim sovereignty that the classical doctrine of jihad was refashioned to legitimize modern anti-colonial struggles. The focus of this essay is on the thought and politics of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. A major theoretician of Islamic law and ethics, Azad was the most prominent Muslim leader of the Indian National Congress in pre-independence India. He is best remembered in retrospectively constructed statist narratives as a “secular nationalist”, who served as education minister in Jawaharlal Nehru's post-independence cabinet. Yet during the decade of the First World War he was perhaps the most celebrated theorist of a trans-national jihad.

In giving a historically specific account of the self in early twentieth-century India, this article poses questions about the historiography of nationalist thought within which the concept of the self has generally been embedded. It focuses on the ethical questions that moored nationalist thought and practice, and were premised on particular understandings of the self. The reappraisal of religion and the self in relation to contemporary evolutionary sociology is examined through the writings of a diverse set of radical nationalist intellectuals, notably Shyamji Krishnavarma, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Har Dayal, and this discussion contextualizes Mohandas Gandhi. Over three related sites of public propaganda, philosophical reinterpretation and individual self-reinvention, the essay charts a concern with the ethical as a form of critique of liberalism and liberal nationalism. While evolutionism and liberalism often had a mutually reinforcing relationship, the Indian critique of liberalism was concerned with the formation of a new moral language for a politics of the self.

Karl Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte can be read as a guidebook, but it is also a site of pilgrimage for those seeking to come to terms with the Marxist legacy, from within and from without. This essay examines the reading and citing of The Eighteenth Brumaire by Marxist and non-Marxist political analysts, historians of the Second Republic, and cultural theorists. Invoking this text and claiming to rescue it from the distorted glosses others have given it, readers both confront and evade their own political and intellectual anxieties.

Anita Burdman Feferman and Solomon Feferman, Alfred Tarski: Life and Logic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)

Murray G. Murphey, C. I. Lewis: The Last Great Pragmatist (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005)

The lives of analytic philosophers and logicians do not prima facie appear to be the stuff of popular intellectual biographies. Who but former students or specialists would want to know the details of lives devoted to academic pursuits that, so it would seem, all but exclude personal expression? Demonstrative cultural documents such as Also sprach Zarathustra lay claim to our attention in part because they are the product of minds in dynamic tension with the culture that surrounded them, but Gödel's undecidability proof, for example, owes nothing of its importance to its author's social or psychological life at the time he wrote it. The life of the analyst or logician would, in short, appear to be beside the point—window dressing at best, obfuscating at worst.

Although history is the pre-eminent part of the gallant sciences, philosophers advise against it from fear that it might completely destroy the kingdom of darkness—that is, scholastic philosophy—which previously has been wrongly held to be a necessary instrument of theology.

This article elucidates the meaning of Indian nationalism and its connection to religious universalism as a problem of ethics. It engages in that exercise of elucidation by interpreting a few of the key texts by Aurobindo Ghose on the relationship between ethics and politics in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Both secularist and subalternist histories have contributed to misunderstandings of Aurobindo's political thought and shown an inability to comprehend its ethical moorings. The specific failures in fathoming the depths of Aurobindo's thought are related to more general infirmities afflicting the history of political and economic ideas in colonial India. In exploring how best to achieve Indian unity, Aurobindo had shown that Indian nationalism was not condemned to pirating from the gallery of models of states crafted by the West. By reconceptualizing the link between religion and politics, this essay suggests a new way forward in Indian intellectual history.

Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)

Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)

“A public can only attain enlightenment slowly,” Kant famously observed. His use of the term “public” (Publikum), of course, is notoriously slippery, and even now, after decades of academic discussion of Öffenlichkeit and l'opinion publique, it regularly trips up the unsuspecting undergraduate intent on answering Kant's central question: What is enlightenment? And yet it is clear that whatever else he meant, Kant envisioned a central role for the scholar (Gelehrter) in constituting the public, and furthering enlightenment. And so we might say, in a Kantian gloss, that scholars attain enlightenment, and knowledge of the Enlightenment, only slowly.

This essay focuses on the oppositional politics expressed in the historical geography of the Persian and Urdu poetry of Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938), showing how it emerges from, and breaks with, Urdu and Persian travelogues and poetry of the nineteenth century. It explores the complex relationships between the politics of Muslim separatism in South Asia and European imperialist discourses. There are two defining tensions within this politics. The first is between territorial nationalism and the global imaginings of religious identity, and the second is between the homogenizing imperatives of nationalism and the subjectivity of individual selfhood. These tensions are reflected in the composite geography of Iqbal's work, which contains three elements: a sacred space, a political territoriality and the interiority of subjectivity. But these elements are in conflict with each other; in particular, the space of interiority in his poetry conflicts with the realm of politics in the external world.

This issue has been concerned with two problems. First, all the contributors have considered how ideas travelled to, from and within nineteenth- and twentieth-century India. It examines how these ideas were received and reinterpreted by India's English-influenced intelligentsia in the light of its own intellectual histories. Second, the volume is intended as a contribution to an emerging global and trans-national history of ideas that attempts to set the sophisticated traditions of European, Atlantic, Islamic and Asian intellectual history in a world context.

Susan Layton, Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, paperback version 2005; first edition 1994)

Harsha Ram, The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003)

In the last decades of the Russian Empire, Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire made for favorite reading among the intelligentsia. Today imperial themes have become increasingly important in American academia; historians and literary scholars who study Russia are no exception. The two studies under review explore the spirit and the letter of the Russian Empire in the moment of boom and glory preceding its collapse. Published in 1994, Susan Layton's Russian Literature and Empire was the pioneering study of the subject. Published in 2003, Harsha Ram's The Imperial Sublime is so different from Layton's book that the differences, rooted in the American rather than the Russian imperial experience, deserve reflection in their own right. While Layton looked at the world through the emancipatory optic of postcolonialist and feminist movements, Ram manifests a different kind of sensibility, one which is alert to the scale and beauty of the victorious power. In a sad but understandable way, Susan Layton's ethical concerns give way to Harsha Ram's aesthetic ones.

Eric Sundquist, Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005)

As measured by that deadly but inescapable phrase “quantity and quality,” Eric Sundquist is perhaps the most productive American literature scholar of his generation. Since 1979, when he was still in his twenties, he has authored half a dozen books while editing another half-dozen. All have made an impact and many of these have been highly influential—his first book, Home as Found: Authority and Genealogy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, was among the very first to read canonical American works through the lens of contemporary literary and psychoanalytic theory; his edited collection American Realism: New Essays (1982) proved pivotal in reviving the critical energy in a major but long-dormant literary and historical period. To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (1993) was by implicit design and to powerful effect nothing less than a rewriting of the foundational work of American literary history and criticism—F. O. Matthiessen's monumental American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941). I will spend some time describing To Wake the Nations not only because of the book's exceptional importance but because its eloquent introduction provides the closest thing to a critical credo that Sundquist has written. His description there of his critical ideals—particularly of “justice,” boundary-crossing and “verification”—will help orient our approach to Strangers in the Land, which remains loyal to these ideals as it extends his interest in race and ethnicity, black and white, to the tormented subject of blacks and Jews, united by a “bond of alienation.” (52).

Catherine Kerrison, Claiming the Pen: Women and Intellectual Life in the Early American South (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005)

Susan Stabile, Memory's Daughters: The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004)

Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America's Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2006)

Consider Abigail Adams. Known to us mostly through over one thousand letters that she exchanged with her husband, John Adams, she was a woman of redoubtable intelligence and energy. Wife of the second president of the United States, she was mother to its sixth. She traveled to France and England, rubbing elbows with dukes and diplomats; she read deeply in history and literature; she supported the literacy of black children; she was a conduit for the American reception of Catharine Macaulay's republican-friendly History of England from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line (1763–8). The letters between John and Abigail fly so fast and furious, are so full of learned banter and palpable yearning, that their marriage appears strikingly modern, a union of equals. Let us not be deceived. Abigail Adams, like other women of her generation even in the social stratosphere, had no formal schooling, and her erudition was dwarfed by the massive learning bestowed upon John. He had a Harvard BA and read law for three years. He took for granted a vast public arena in which to unleash his colossal, if tortured, political ambitions. Abigail never published a word.

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders' Worldview New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005)

Ethan Kleinberg, Generation Existential: Heidegger's Philosophy in France, 1927–1961 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005)

Samuel Moyn, Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas between Revelation and Ethics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005)