Despite the recent boom in research on the reception and influence of Hume's writings, most scholars have overlooked the fact that his enigmatic essay “Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth,” published in the Political Discourses in 1752, not only attracted the attention of some French intellectuals before and after the Revolution, but was also taken seriously by a significant number of radicals—such as Paine, Price, Godwin, Wollstonecraft—and other reform-minded Whigs—such as James Mackintosh. Although the influence of Hume's plan on The Federalist, No 10, has been much discussed, what is more important is that these British reformers often associated his plan with the National Assembly after the Revolution in France. This essay demonstrates that Hume's plan of a large republic with a bicameral system through a two-tier election was an important intellectual resource for his contemporaries and for later generations.

Jean Barbeyrac was dismayed by the intrusion of theological controversy into the study of modern natural law theory. Yet the longest of the many annotations that he included in his own edition of Grotius was concerned with a theological matter. In this footnote, Barbeyrac attacked Grotius's understanding of Christian ethics as supererogatory; that is, as containing a distinction between the dictates of duty and the counsels of a higher holiness or perfection. The heart of his objection to this view was that it had pernicious psychological effects, that it fostered bigotry and immorality. He reiterated this psychological concern in his later work on the Christian Fathers. This objection to the real-world damages caused by the theory of supererogation was closely linked to his fear of skepticism and his quarrel with Bayle. Barbeyrac's rejection of supererogation also places him within an important strand of early modern thinking about the moral psychology of religion and about the ways in which religious belief could become an obstacle to moral behavior.

This essay analyses Burke's ideas on European history, which lay scattered over his works, and suggests that Burke may have considered Europe, with the notable exception of ancient Rome, as having been in a state of barbarism or confusion from the ancient era until the sixteenth century, despite the gradual development of society. Unlike some of his contemporaries, he did not closely examine the growth of a European state system, nor the rise of the balance of power in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Nor did he specially underline the collapse of feudalism and the process of establishing absolute monarchy. Instead, Burke stressed more fundamental elements. While he often drew attention to the glimmer of hope towards future prosperity amid devastation, which dominated large parts of European history, his ideas on European history reflected his long-held social theory that nations could revive and develop as long as the foundations of society were not damaged.

The hypothesis that the beast of the Gévaudan (an intriguingly mysterious killer that roamed southern France in the 1760s) might be an African hyena was not simply a popular and amusing misconception; it reflected an important dimension of the critical spirit driving eighteenth-century science. By historicizing natural discovery and its motivations, this essay uncovers aspects of Enlightenment natural history—namely an attraction to the unknowable and a desire for uncertainty, both reflected in the fascination with the sublime—that only became more marked as the frontiers of knowledge receded. In doing so, the essay shows the distinctively hybrid character of an Enlightenment mentality that savored both illumination and darkness.

This essay explores the development of Georg Simmel's interpretation of Immanuel Kant's philosophy in the context of neo-Kantianism and its preoccupation with the question of unity in modern diversity. It argues that the neo-Kantian movement can be divided into two periods: in the first, unity was addressed with regard to Kant's epistemology; in the second period, the main issue was the overall coherence of Kantian teaching. Simmel, who belonged to the younger generation of neo-Kantians, absorbed the conclusions of the previous generation that purged Kantian epistemology from its metaphysical foundations related to the noumenal world. Yet he did not share the views of his peers who considered Kant to be the philosopher of cultural plurality. On the contrary, he argued that Kant's system is thoroughly intellectualistic, and that ethics, aesthetics and religion within it are subordinated to logic. At the same time, his own philosophy presupposed cultural plurality akin to that of other neo-Kantians. In other words, Simmel abandoned Kant in order to develop his own version of neo-Kantianism.

Basic questions about Kant's international theory remain unresolved, in part because the ambiguous language and sketchy blueprints given in Perpetual Peace lend themselves to a wide variety of interpretations. This essay proposes a novel solution for this difficulty: a careful reconsideration of the political concepts embedded in Kant's first philosophy. In the First Critique, the “Conflict of the Faculties,” and in particular his neglected essay “Perpetual Peace in Philosophy,” Kant repeatedly draws on the language of sovereignty, war, and international law, in order to describe how the critical philosophy will bring peace to what he terms the “battlefield of metaphysics.” The most striking feature of this program for “perpetual peace in philosophy” is that it does not end disagreement over ideas, but rather prevents it from becoming pathological by subjecting it to the “discipline” of critical reason. And I argue that Kant's proposal for global peace is precisely parallel: a sovereign world court that arbitrates decisively between states, while otherwise leaving them free to clash, compete, and disagree.

This essay analyses Alfred Zimmern's scheme for a global British Commonwealth. A prominent British liberal internationalist and leading early scholar of International Relations, Zimmern developed an anti-racial account of empire and international order. In conceptualizing a British Commonwealth, he sought to replace “race” with “nation” as the basic ontological category of world ordering. The idea of cultural Zionism, formulated by Ahad Ha’am, played a key role in Zimmern's attempt. Ahad Ha’am's account of non-statist Jewish nationalism served as a useful ideological device for Zimmern to theorize a multinational Commonwealth without acknowledging colonial demands for self-determination. The essay also shows that Horace Kallen's notion of American cultural pluralism helped Zimmern to consolidate his project for the post-racial empire.

The British–Irish Union of 1801 remains a significant and controversial moment in the histories of both countries, but understandings of its genesis are restricted inscope. This article seeks to place the Union in a new historical context: the crisis of the European states system that accompanied the French Revolution. It considers the position held by the Union in the critique of Kant's famous essay on “Perpetual Peace” (1795) advanced by one of his most influential students, the publicist and state official Friedrich Gentz (1764–1832). Gentz argued that the consolidation of the British state offered a model for the regeneration of European society. Only unitary forms of sovereign authority could exercise the responsible political agency required for the restoration of peace in the wake of the Revolution. The decline of small states and composite polities supported the durable civil liberty and commercial development necessary to mankind's moral development in history.

This essay addresses the emergence of theories of “identity” in twentieth-century politics, aesthetics, and philosophy by considering Theodor Adorno's understanding of “negative identity” as a form of coercive categorization that nevertheless contains social knowledge. A historical account of the Frankfurt school's relation to questions of race, anti-Semitism, and the idea of culture, the essay analyzes Adorno's infamous jazz articles in light of the transatlantic history of Marxian political theory and its understanding of racism, subject–object relations, and models of cultural production. The result is an investigation of the history of the concept of identity, its emergence alongside the rise of cultural studies, and its relation to international cultural–aesthetic formations such as jazz. The article concludes with an examination of Adorno's critique of idealism, cultural identity, and nationalism in light of the “wounded” political subjectivity of the modern era.

This essay considers how American Enlightenment moralists and Evangelical religious revivalists responded to “Jacobinism” at the College of New Jersey, which later became Princeton University, from 1800 through 1817. At this time, disruptive student activities exemplified alleged American “Jacobin” conspiracies against civil society. The American response to “Jacobins” brought out tensions between two different competing intellectual currents at the College of New Jersey: a revival of Christian religious principles led by Princeton trustee Reverend Ashbel Green and, in contrast, the expansion of Samuel Stanhope Smith's system of moral education during his tenure as college president from 1795 through 1812. As a moralist, Smith appealed to Scottish Common Sense philosophy in teaching the instinctive “rules of duty” as a way to correct unrestrained “passions” and moderate “Jacobin” radicalism. In doing so, Smith developed a moral quasi-relativism as an original feature of his moral philosophy and contribution to American Enlightenment intellectual culture. Green and like-minded religious revivalists saw Princeton student uprisings as Smith's failure to properly address irreligion. This essay shows the ways in which “Jacobinism” and then the emerging age of religious revivalism, known as the Second Great Awakening, arrived at the cost of Smith's “Didactic Enlightenment” at Princeton.

The most senior Australian in the League of Nations secretariat, H. Duncan Hall became an established advocate of institutional internationalism as a mitigator of conflict. From 1933, however, the advent of totalitarian movements and his exposure to Freudianism through his association with Dr Robert Waelder led him to the conviction that psychoanalysis provided the key to the irrationality of the times. He endeavoured to use his League position, including his influence in Australia, to convince opinion leaders of the profound dangers of national mass psychosis to the survival of the international order. Frustrated in the League, he then sought to convey the same message in the United States. Although largely unsuccessful in his efforts, and unable to establish an academic vehicle for the study of the issue in America, he was able to help bring to Australia the first practitioners of Freudian psychoanalysis trained in Europe.

In the wake of the Second World War, Germany saw an intensive debate about the idea of the university and its future role in society. All were agreed that the country's universities had to be revitalized after the ravages of Nazism, but the question was what weight should be given to the classical German heritage, and the Humboldtian tradition in particular. The mandarins, the older humanist scholars, dominated the public debate about the fundamental principles of research and higher education, and this essay focuses on the contribution made by three of them—Karl Jaspers, Gerhard Ritter, and Werner Richter. In making their points, they all revealed a strong historical orientation, but equally very different views on the Humboldtian legacy. This essay argues that their ideas about the German university must be seen against the background of the specific experiences of their generation. In the event, the immediate post-war period was the last time their academic ideals were to gain much of a hearing. The university debate proved to be the swansong for Germany's intellectual elite.

Two legal publications that Carl Schmitt produced during the First World War contain the first expressions of his maximally authoritarian interpretation of the state of emergency. Yet, when read in conjunction with his wartime journals, we find that his production of these texts is contextualized by a profound, private struggle over whether to accept or reject the political values they articulate. What is most surprising about Schmitt's self-presentation in these journals is the degree to which, during the early war period, he expresses a visceral anti-authoritarianism and concern for decidedly liberal ideals such as the rights of the individual and the separation of powers. But it is also in these journals that we observe the process—culminating in a moment of existential decision during the winter of 1915–16—through which he came to see such liberal commitments as untenable on both personal and political-theoretical levels simultaneously.

Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism is a distinctively international history. It traces Nazism to a “collapse of the nation-state” across Europe, brought on by European anti-Semitism and European imperialism, rather than to specifically German developments. This essay recovers the political meaning of that methodological choice on Arendt's part, by documenting the surprising intersection between Arendt's involvement in political debates over postwar European reconstruction, where she made an intellectual alliance with Resistance groups across Europe and strongly argued for European federation, and her involvement in historiographical debates over the sources of Nazism. I show the explicit connection that Arendt drew between an internationalist historiography of Nazism and the need for an internationalist European politics, in a series of essays she wrote in the mid-1940s. I then argue that this connection continues to play a prominent role in Origins itself, sharply differentiating Arendt from other prominent theorists of Nazism.

In the disciplines of political science and international relations, Machiavelli is unanimously considered to be “the first modern realist.” This essay argues that the idea of a realist tradition going from the Renaissance to postwar realism founders when one considers the disrepute of Machiavelli among early international relations theorists. It suggests that the transformation of Machiavelli into a realist thinker took place subsequently, when new historical scholarship, informed by strategic and political considerations related to the transformation of the US into a global power, generated a new picture of the Renaissance. Focusing on the work of Felix Gilbert, and in particular his Machiavelli and Guicciardini, the essay shows how this new interpretation of Machiavelli was shaped by the crisis of the 1930s, the emergence of security studies, and the philanthropic sponsorship of international relations theory.

Admired throughout the twentieth century by literary and sociological theorists but long neglected by philosophers, readers have overlooked Kenneth Burke's theoretical dependence on American philosophic realism, thus missing consistent patterns of his insight. By tracing Burke's own realism back to his year at Columbia University and his time at The Dial magazine, we see how Burke's earliest aesthetic theories conformed to aspects of the new realist movement. During the Depression, in his book Permanence and Change, he followed earlier new realists in arguing for a reconstructed modern teleology of “purpose” and incorporated realism within his pleas for a suppler Communist Party rhetoric than that sanctioned by the party leadership. Burke's apparently inconsistent positions can be understood as a continuous philosophical argument for realism within changing intellectual contexts, explaining his long-lived cross-disciplinary appeal and influence. Burke maintained central realistic tenets: (1) the independent existence and intelligibility of an external world and (2) the substantive meaning of universals, particularly a common human nature. Examining these connections informs our readings of Burke while illuminating one reverberation of the philosophical “new realists” in American intellectual culture. Burke expressed realist principles in his presentation of symbolic action and dramatism in The Philosophy of Literary Form and A Grammar of Motives, both published in the 1940s. His sophisticated aesthetic–linguistic realism appeared in his arguments against logical empiricists and New Critics, which displayed an arc of transformation in the philosophical and critical culture before World War II from a still-contested mixture to an emphatically nominalistic, antirealist one. It was from this philosophical position that Burke offered his lively, penetrating analyses of and challenges to many of the major movements in twentieth-century philosophy: realism, pragmatism, positivism, and post-structuralism.

This essay argues that Jean-Paul Sartre's notion of “dialectical reason”, as elaborated in his Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), had a decisive impact on the composition of Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1961). The relationship between the two works has not before received a thorough textual exposition. Such an exposition, it is suggested, also entails revising the view of the nature of Fanon's work that has become entrenched in anglophone scholarship. Instead of a self-grounding theorist who more resembles the postcolonialists who would succeed him, this essay presents a view of Fanon as a situated theorist, drawing on those resources that could best help him to articulate the task at hand. The notion of “dialectical reason” allowed him to break from his previous understanding of decolonization as the attainment of reason through struggle, and see the “praxis” of revolution as, itself, self-realizing reason. To perceive this allows us better to seize on the thinking that guides his discussions of objectification under colonialism, anticolonial violence, and the role of the national bourgeoisie, and, thus, to clear up a number of controversies.

The story of French liberalism is, we are often told, one of exceptions, eccentricities, and enigmas. Compared to their British counterparts, French liberals seem more reluctant to embrace individualism. Whereas liberals in the English-speaking world typically espouse what Isaiah Berlin called “negative liberty”—a sphere of private autonomy from which the state is legally excluded—French liberals have often proved highly accommodating towards “positive liberty”—that is, liberty insofar as it is tethered to collectively defined ends. Most crucially, rather than seeking to shield individuals and civil society from an intrusive state, French liberals—consistent with a broader trend in French political culture—are inclined to see the state as an essential and even emancipatory political tool. In this vein, Jean-Fabien Spitz writes in a recent collection entitled French Liberalism from Montesquieu to the Present Day,

Despite intense scholarly interest in the “Anglo-Marxism” that rose to prominence in Britain from the mid-1950s, its intellectual lineaments and lineages have yet to be fully accounted for. This is particularly the case with the concept of “experience,” which was a central category in the work of two of the most influential figures of the early “New Left” in Britain: Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson. This essay traces a conceptual history of “experience” from its emergence in Cambridge literary criticism during the 1920s and 1930s, and in the quasi-Marxist literary culture of the 1930s, to the confluence of these two currents in the work of Williams and Thompson. Reassessing the nature of each thinker's engagement with Leavisite literary and cultural criticism, and of Thompson's attempted reformulation of Marxism, it argues that recovering their widely differing usages of “experience” illuminates their distinctive conceptions of “culture” as a site of political action.

In 1921, John A. Ryan, a priest and professor at Catholic University in Washington, DC, and one of his students, the Reverend Raymond McGowan, published A Catechism of the Social Question. The first question in it reads, “What do we mean by the social question?” Answer: “A question denotes a problem or a difficulty which demands solution. A social question is one that concerns society, or a social group. The social question means certain evils and grievances affecting the wage-earning classes, and calling for removal or remedy.”