In the second half of the nineteenth century, British liberal ideology contained an open-ended vision of international order. The vision usually included a notion of an incipient or immanent international society composed of civilized nations. The fundamental distinction between civilized and barbarian nations meant that while this perceived society was international, in no sense was it global. In this essay we outline some of the broader characteristics of the internationalist outlook that many liberals shared and specifically discuss the claims about international society that they articulated. Liberal internationalism was a broad church and many (but not all) of its fundamental assumptions about the nature and direction of international progress and the importance of civilization were shared by large swathes of the intellectual elite. These assumptions are analysed by exploring the conceptions of international society found in three of the most influential thinkers of the time, T. H. Green, Herbert Spencer and Henry Sidgwick. Finally, the essay turns to the limitations of this vision of international society, especially in the context of the role of empire.

Rousseau's Lettres écrites de la montagne have traditionally been cited as evidence of the influence on his thinking of Genevan traditions of democratic republican political argument, on the grounds that the Lettres were written on behalf of those members of the citizens and bourgeois in the city who were critical of the growing powers of the magistracy, the co-called représentants. This essay proposes a different reading. It argues that the Lettres confirmed long-standing Genevan suspicions about Rousseau's politics and theology which were held both by the représentants and the magistrates. The reason was that Rousseau had composed the Lettres as a critique both of représentant plans for democratic reform and of magisterial usurpation of the sovereign rights of the citizens. The Lettres underscored Rousseau's commitment to the distinction between sovereignty and government outlined in the Contrat social. Rousseau believed that Geneva deserved to be a model for European states because the distinction between sovereignty and government characteristic of its constitution had such clear historical roots. He also recognized that growing uncertainty concerning the relative powers of the General Council, the smaller executive committees of leading magistrates, and the Consistory had created a political impasse. Accordingly the Lettres argued for a new political settlement, that would redefine the constitutional relationship between citizens and magistrates, as well as between church and the state. Rousseau emerges as a dedicated enemy of democratic political innovation in Geneva, and an advocate of renewed Reformation which would make religion the foundation of an anti-commercial morality. Rousseau's singular and heterodox perspective on Geneva and its history is outlined in the essay, which places Rousseau's Lettres in the broader local context of republican and magisterial reform politics.

Focusing on the close connection between Friedrich Nietzsche's historical thought and the discourse of German historicism in the second half of the nineteenth century, this article argues in a thick contextual reading that Nietzsche's second “Untimely Meditation,” Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie für das Leben (1874), needs to be understood as a reflection on the political dimension of historical consciousness, outlining what I shall term a “critical historicism.” In contrast to the standard emphasis on Nietzsche's presumed aestheticism, he is shown to react to rather specific developments within the contemporary intellectual context, such as the establishment of specific historical foundation myths for a new German nation state, exemplified by the public monuments and commemorations of the 1870s, the effect of such foundation myths on the political imagination of historical scholarship, and the intellectual antagonism between Basel's “antimodernism” and the German nation state.

The fundamental importance of theology in the work of Carl Schmitt has been the subject of much recent literature on this controversial figure. However, there has been little consensus on the precise nature of Schmitt's own political theology—that is, on what links there are between his religious or metaphysical concepts and his ideas concerning the nature of political organization and action. This is especially the case with his works of the Nazi era, which are now being studied with the same kind of critical attention given to his more influential Weimar works. In this essay I focus on the important turn Schmitt made in the early years of the Third Reich, from “decisionism” to what he called “institutional thinking,” in order to reveal the theological basis for his understanding of the new regime. I will then argue that Schmitt's institutional approach had in fact always been central to his earlier, better-known writings on law and the state. Schmitt's concept of the institution, which had roots in French legal theory, grounded a political theology that was in the end less a metaphysical approach to the state than one that drew on the concrete example of the legal institutional order of the Catholic Church.

Walter Kaufmann's monumental study of Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (1950) dramatically transformed Nietzsche interpretations in the postwar United States and rendered Kaufmann himself a dominant figure in transatlantic Nietzsche studies from 1950 until his death in 1980. While the longevity of Kaufmann's hegemony over postwar American Nietzsche interpretations in particular is remarkable, even more so is the fact that he revitalized the career of such a radical thinker in the conservative intellectual climate of the 1950s. Philosophers and historians typically credit Kaufmann with rescuing Nietzsche from the Nazis, but argue that he did so by denaturing Nietzsche's philosophy of power and narrowly transforming him into an existentialist. By contrast, this essay argues that Kaufmann took a much more dramatic step by extending the scope of Nietzsche's philosophy, demonstrating how his ideas resonated with but also transcended the dominant philosophies of the day. Kaufmann presented Nietzsche as a philosopher uniquely poised to bridge the increasing mid-century rift between continental and analytic philosophies, as well as between the increasingly distinct moral worlds of academic philosophers and general readers. At a time when philosophical discourses within the university and beyond were pulling apart, Kaufmann put Nietzsche to work to bring them back together. By emphasizing Nietzsche's harmony with the range of scholarly and popular philosophical concerns of mid-century, he also established, for the first time in the United States, Nietzsche's role as a canonical thinker in the Western tradition.

John Dewey, like many other American intellectuals between the world wars, was fascinated by Soviet events. After visiting Russia in 1928 he wrote excitedly about the “Soviet experiment” and especially about Soviet educational theorists. In his early enthusiasm Dewey hoped that the US and the USSR could learn from each other, especially among the cosmopolitan group of progressive pedagogues he met on his trip. Observing the rise of Stalinism in the 1930s, though, his optimism dissipated; at the same time he came to emphasize historical and cultural differences between the US and the USSR. The result is apparent in Dewey's writings in the late 1930s (especially Freedom and Culture, 1939), as he began to evaluate the Soviet Union in terms that would have been anathema to him a decade earlier. He increasingly blamed Russia's cultural heritage for inhibiting Soviet development along the lines he had envisioned. Dewey's transformation suggests the importance of a cultural reading of American ideas about the USSR. Many American observers joined Dewey in seeing the USSR as the product of Russian culture, with its historical traditions and its own national character—and not just as the instantiation or betrayal of a political doctrine.

People often seem to forget that Rousseau dedicated his Second Discourse to “The Republic of Geneva.” This is a shame because, in doing so, they miss precious clues not only about the meaning of the Discourse itself, but also about its place in Rousseau's political thought as a whole. It is also rather curious, because Rousseau's dedicatory letter to Geneva is actually not so easy to overlook; in the Pléiade edition it takes up more than ten pages of tightly worded text and is thus almost twice as long as Rousseau's more frequently cited “Preface” that follows it. Ignoring the dedication is, of course, part of a larger and more general problem in Rousseau scholarship: the still widespread tendency to read Rousseau out of historical context and with little concern for his intended meaning.

This essay offers a detailed reconstruction of the thought of Inayatullah Khan al-Mashriqi, a camp-follower of fascism in inter-war India who sought to reformulate Islam as a “Religion of Science” according to the precepts of Darwinian evolutionism. Mashriqi has so far been neglected because his political impact was only short-term and did not contribute to the larger story of decolonization in India and Pakistan. But far from being marginal, Mashriqi's philosophical ruminations actually provide a window for a much-needed re-evaluation of the meaning of colonial modernity. While there was much in Mashriqi's writing that conforms to the usual picture of anti-colonial nation-building—his obsession with the truth of science, for instance, and his emphasis on disciplinary political methodologies—the by now standardized critique of such features in the “postcolonial” literature no longer suffices. Behind a façade of continuities with nineteenth-century “Enlightenment” traditions stood a much darker vision of modernity that no longer had any recourse to the certainties of a grand narrative of modernization. Instead, it was a vision that fluctuated between mystical exuberance and deep pessimism. The only sense of certainty was provided by a radical notion of emotional authenticity and a related belief in quasi-religious leadership figures. The larger conclusion to be drawn from the dualistic and contradictory structure of Mashriqi's “fascism” is that the intellectual history of inter-war South Asia needs to be given relative autonomy from the standard nationalism–modernization narrative, for rather than the continuation of an earlier modernity, it should be interpreted as the starting point of a new and much darker formation that arguably continues into the present.

“National identity” is one of those concepts, like “political culture”, which historians have somewhat casually borrowed from the social sciences and then used promiscuously for their own purposes. Over twenty years ago Philip Gleason wrote a wise and prescient (yet sadly underappreciated) essay on the origins of the concept of “identity” in the 1950s, warning historians that already then it had two quite distinct—psychological and sociological—meanings that needed to be distinguished to retain any conceptual clarity. Since then our own use of it has proliferated uncontrollably, and the original confusion identified by Gleason has been compounded by many others. The chain of communication between the concept's progenitors and its present-day users is now so long and so fragmentary that our usage may bear little or no relation to the discourse that Gleason described. There may be nothing wrong with this state of affairs; historians may have found their own value in the term, which need not necessarily be validated by social science. Yet social scientists have continued to work with “identity”, and have puzzled much further over its possible meaning and utility with a degree of conceptual rigour that historians do not usually share. And we continue to validate our own use of the term by reference to an increasingly shadowy and distant social science whence it came. Accordingly it may be useful to look more closely at what social scientists think “national identity” is, and how it operates in human minds and societies. This essay attempts a brief exploration of that kind and then applies its findings to the recent historiography of “national identity” in modern Britain.

The publication of the collection of essays Women, Gender and Enlightenment (ed. Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor, Houndsmills: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005) affords an unusual opportunity to confront a myriad of interrelated issues, at once definitional and ideological, that face intellectual historians of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe and America. The 768-page work came out of a highly unusual collaborative research project conducted from 1998 to 2001, “Feminism and Enlightenment, 1650–1850: A Comparative History,” a series of colloquia, conferences, and Internet exchanges enlisting the participation of over a hundred historians in Europe, North America, and Australia. The product of this extensive interaction showcases the contributions of thirty-eight authors, not only covering a broad array of topics but, still more remarkable, displaying a large degree of consensus about issues of interpretative concern. While dozens of books and articles have anticipated pieces of the arguments made in this volume, never has so extensive an attempt been made to pull them together into a cohesive whole.

The following comments and response were presented at a symposium on Jerrold Seigel's The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), held at the Center for European Studies, Harvard University, on 14 October 2005. The symposium was organized by David Armitage, Peter Gordon and Judith Surkis and was sponsored by the CES's Colloquia in Intellectual and Cultural History.

In the Confessions Rousseau provides a very helpful account of the composition of the Discourse on Inequality (as he calls the Second Discourse). This account contains two elements that prefigure the work's reputation among scholars today. First, Rousseau says that, while in his earlier works he had only partially revealed the basis of his thought, the question posed by the Academy of Dijon offered him the occasion to develop his principles, “completely in a work of the greatest importance.” A few pages later he confirms the importance of the Discourse by saying, “Everything that is bold in the Social Contract was previously in the Discourse on Inequality.” A consensus of scholars would, I think, agree that the Discourse is, indeed, a particularly bold work and the first place to look for a rigorous exposition of Rousseau's principles.

In December of 1850, exhausted by his role in French politics and recuperating from tuberculosis, Alexis de Tocqueville retreated to the Amalfi coast to think, write, and recover. To his best friend Louis de Kergolay, Tocqueville wrote about completing his memoir on the 1848 revolution and his plans to undertake a comprehensive account of French history that would explain the turmoil of the past century. The appeal was powerful, he explained to Kergolay, but “the difficulties are immense. The one that most troubles my mind comes from the mixture of history properly so called with historical philosophy. I still do not see how to mix these two things,” he conceded, “and yet, they must be mixed, for one could say that the first is the canvas and the second the color, and that it is necessary to have both at the same time in order to do the picture.” Tocqueville feared “that the one is harmful to the other, and that I lack the infinite art that would be necessary in order to choose properly the facts that must, so to speak, support the ideas.

In the Troisième Dialogue Rousseau suggests that all his writings pursued a single theme—to the effect, as he puts it, that “Nature made mankind happy and good but…. society depraves and renders it miserable.” Emile, in particular, he adds, “is nothing but a treatise on the original goodness of mankind.” He no doubt conceived Emile in that vein, since the opening line of its first book heralds precisely the claim that in the Dialogues he would declare to be his works' chief contention: “Everything is good when it springs from the hands of our Creator; everything degenerates when shaped by the hands of man.” Yet if on his own testimony we accept that this was the guiding thread of his philosophy as a whole, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the text which most fully elaborates Rousseau's central principle, and which on account of the attention he there devotes to it lies at the nexus of his whole career, is the Discours sur l'inégalité.

It is somehow fitting that Jerrold Seigel's The Idea of the Self, a triumph of rigorous and erudite intellectual labor, has me thinking about labor. And so I will come at the book through the meanings given to labor from the mid-seventeenth century to the early nineteenth. My skepticism is meant to serve a larger purpose: to begin mapping the research territories opened or resituated by Seigel's achievement.

Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, 6 vols. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005)

Until recently, serious students of music did not read sweeping histories of music. In a time of increasing specialization, we do not expect to find new ideas in such work. This has changed with the publication of Richard Taruskin's History of Western Music. Monumental in its scope and original in its approach but informal in its prose and always engagingly direct, it offers a provocative perspective on the whole of music's history and sets fresh agendas for anyone interested in music and its relation to the history of ideas, politics and culture. Taruskin's History differs from all previous projects of its kind in that it does not principally survey famous works by famous composers. Focusing instead on particular issues within a chronological framework (his chapter titles refer, amongst other things, to feudalism, humanism, enlightenment, virtuosos, transcendentalism and totalitarianism), and selecting composers whose music contributes to the consideration of those issues (sometimes omitting well-known figures or placing familiar works in radically new contexts), he sets out quite simply to explain why music has been composed as it has, and to show how its existence has relied not on composers in isolation but on a whole musical culture of composers, patrons, performers, critics and many others. Rather than relegating historical events and ideas to the status of context or calling them extra-musical, he places them at the centre of his narrative and in intricate dialogue with music; so while his close analyses of music will mean most to those with musical training, they are part of an argument about history that will be suggestive and illuminating to any reader.

The Idea of the Self is a book which really made me think. Within the history of selfhood that it sets forth (and within which it is inscribed), this is precisely what a book about the self should do. For, as Seigel explains, reflectivity—our ability as selves to think critically about our own positions—is a constitutive, and pre-eminent, aspect or dimension of our selfhood. His work raises important questions about the normative implications of the ways in which we think about selfhood and how we attempt to write its history. As someone whose work has both addressed and been influenced by thinkers (such as Emile Durkheim, Georges Bataille, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida) that Seigel argues have an unsatisfying and overly abstract account of selfhood, these are provocative questions indeed. The Idea of the Self has, as a result, forced me to interrogate the normative assumptions that underlie my own research and writing.

The action of the soul on the body is the abyss of philosophy in the constitution of man, just as the action of the general will on the public force is the abyss of politics in the constitution of the State.

Kevin Repp, Reformers, Critics, and the Paths of German Modernity: Anti-politics and the Search for Alternatives, 1890–1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000)

Suzanne Marchand and David Lindenfeld, eds., Germany at the Fin de Siecle: Culture, Politics, and Ideas (Baton Rouge: Lousiana State University Press, 2004)

As in the colorization of old black-and-white films, large swaths of modern German history have been undergoing a major makeover through full-spectrum, high-definition re-colorization. Stark black and white—and in between steely gray-on-gray—hardly suffice any longer for representing the full spectrum of the German past in its manifold formations and transformations. As compellingly set forth in the two works reviewed here, this changing retrospective view of change itself is revamping the history of the Wilhelmine Reich of 1890–1914. And just as in the colorization of old films, this shift has the uncanny parallax effect of making a bygone period-piece seem somehow closer to our sensibly “more modern” present-day world—even while the earlier period is also plainly lodged in a distant timeframe. The new history has some very interesting and unsettling special effects and nowhere do they come into play more palpably than in treating the special “German question” in relation to the larger question of Western mainstream modernity.

Is there any work by a modern author that inspires the range of comparisons that Rousseau's Second Discourse does? Looking backward, the quartet of scholars writing above—leading figures of anglophone scholarship on Rousseau—finds echoes of the book of Genesis, the Histories of Tacitus, Ovid's Metamorphoses, and Pelagius. Others have been reminded of Lucretius and more than one of Plato's dialogues. Looking forward, the names of Hegel, Marx, and Heidegger are cited here; comparisons with The Genealogy of Morals and Civilization and Its Discontents spring as easily to mind. If the Second Discourse thus serves as a kind of intense philosophical echo-chamber, this no doubt has something to do with its author's singular position in modern intellectual history, standing not just at the crossroads of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, but at that of antiquity and modernity themselves. It also owes much to the sheer internal complication of the text, whose relatively few pages feature a bewildering variety of moving parts: the extended Dedication to Rousseau's native city of Geneva; the Preface, with its preliminary presentation of Rousseau's philosophical anthropology; the prize question that inspired the Second Discourse: “What is the origin of inequality among men, and whether it is authorized by natural law”; the Exordium, announcing Rousseau's scandalous intention to “set aside the facts”; the analysis of the “state of nature” in Part One, with its excoriating attack on previous natural-law thinkers; the account, in Part Two, of the various “revolutions” that gradually established and deepened social inequality, before sealing it with political tyranny; and last, but certainly not least, Rousseau's trenchant endnotes, conjuring up a fabulous range of philosophical, cultural, and scientific reference, as essential to the Second Discourse as Gibbon's footnotes are to his History.