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.

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)

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.

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.

Cedric Robinson is often invoked for his account of racial capitalism forwarded in his 1983 book Black Marxism. Yet much of what Robinson meant by the term has been lost in its posthumous revival in the wake of Black Lives Matter. What accounts for this belated reception, and what has that delay obscured? Like many thinkers associated with the cultural turn, Robinson theorized racial capitalism to critique economic reductionist accounts of race and culture. Unlike his contemporaries, however, Robinson understood culture as the expression of world-historical peoplehood. Rather than an account of historical difference or the contingency of meaning, Robinson theorized culture as emergent from civilizational struggle. This article argues that Robinson’s distinctive account of culture explains both the lack of attention he generated in his own moment and its sudden canonization today.

This article surveys the history of relativism in the years from 1640 to 1710, connecting it to the revival of Epicurean thought in France and Britain. During these decades, a Christianized Epicureanism, elaborated by Pierre Gassendi and divulged by French and British sympathizers, coexisted with a libertine Epicureanism carrying Cyrenaic and naturalist overtones. Both fostered the development of relativist theses. Philosophers and imaginative authors responsible for the Epicurean revival—from Gassendi and the Earl of Rochester to Madame Deshoulières and Margaret Cavendish—derived relativistic conclusions from the Epicurean theory of justice to Epicurus’ hedonism, atomic theory, and sensationalist epistemology. They often brought relativism under control by recommending conformity to local norms, but some took Epicurean relativism in a reformist direction, making cases against homophobia, anthropocentrism, social inequality, and religious persecution. This phase in the history of relativism accordingly anticipates the popularization and politicization of heterodox ideas usually associated with the Enlightenment.

The Haitian Declaration of Independence famously refers to the revolutionary army as the Armée indigène. What did “indigenous” mean on the eve of the Haitian revolution? How and when was it adopted there? And how did its adoption there transform its meaning? This article answers these questions with an eye toward the politics of the term today. In early modern Europe, the indigenous named the relationship between land and nationhood. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the term especially came to connote ideas about Africa and the Americas. The Haitian revolutionaries domesticated and redirected these ideas toward anticolonial ends. Subsequent users in postcolonial Haiti struggled to sustain the meaning the revolutionaries intended, however. The itinerary of “indigenous” before, during, and in the wake of the Haitian Revolution reveals that it has connoted for a long time a critique of European imperialism, but has also enabled imperial government and ethnonationalist violence.

This article traces the creation of Eurocapitalism as a response distinct from neoliberalism to the challenges of the 1970s. By reconsidering the historical relationship between the European project’s competition law regime and its environmental policies, it suggests that the European Community has, since the late 1960s, constituted a unique form of Eurocapitalist development project, one that, in several fundamental respects, differed markedly from the neoliberal developments that characterized the American Leviathan. The article thereby also unearths the global origins of a Eurocapitalist ecology, demonstrating the long lineage of industrial programs like the EU’s Green Deal as tools to tackle climate change.

Could the common people, including illiterate laborers, be enlightened? How should cultural elites and political leaders embark on the task? Frederick II, king of Prussia, discussed these issues in an extensive correspondence with Voltaire and d’Alembert in the 1760s and 1770s, exchanges that led to an infamous prize contest on the potentially useful deception of the people (Berlin, 1780). Analyzing this discussion in detail for the first time, the article situates it within contemporary and longer-term contexts. The result is a reassessment of the views of mainstream Enlightenment authors on the intellectual capacities of the populace, the function of religion in ethics and politics, and the positive role of prejudice (as distinct from superstition) in eighteenth-century discourse. This should nuance Hans-Georg Gadamer’s famous claim that the Enlightenment harboured a “prejudice against all prejudices.”

This interdisciplinary study discusses the political implications of three interrelated cyclical theories articulated in twentieth-century America: Walter B. Cannon’s notion of homeostasis in the human body, John K. Fairbank’s analysis of the dynastic cycle in Chinese history, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr’s view of cycles in American politics. By intertwining the theories with the trajectories of early-century progressivism, Cold War liberalism, and the postwar New Deal order, this article argues that these three liberal intellectuals expressed in common a faith in the vitality of American democracy during its successive crises. Their hopeful worldview rested on their understanding of democracy. Cannon, Fairbank, and Schlesinger upheld democracy not as a specific political system built in their country but rather as an endless and open-ended project by which individual women and men would reshape their common destiny.

“The body” became wildly popular in the social sciences and humanities at the end of the twentieth century. The concept anchored hundreds of scholarly articles and books, across a range of disciplines. The present article offers a new answer as to how and why “the body” experienced this meteoric late-century rise. Scholars set out to address a long-running problem in European and American thought: the mind–body problem. To a person, researchers suddenly rejected any sharp delineation between these realms. While warnings against dualism motivated many projects on the body, it only explains the initial rush to this idea. To understand the corporeal turn of the late twentieth century we must attend to the soaring ambition of the body scholars to bridge all of the divisions of modern thought—subject/object, nature/culture, spirit/flesh—at the point of the body. This article analyzes key body books from the fields of theology, political philosophy, sociology, history, black studies, analytical philosophy, anthropology, and feminist philosophy. In the end, it sounds a note of criticism that the corporeal turn rested on a fantasy of control and controllability of flesh.

As interest in the thought of Giambattista Vico increases worldwide, the completion of the critical edition of his Scienza Nuova, in its successive versions of 1725, 1730, and 1744, provides an opportunity to reassess the compositional, textual, and editorial history of the work, and to ask further questions about the work’s evolution. This article first outlines the course of the work’s composition, highlighting the complex history of the 1725 version, and the rapidity and extent of the rewriting which resulted in the version of 1730. It reviews the earlier editions of the Scienza Nuova by Ferrari and Nicolini, both of whom subordinated the 1730 version to that of 1744. The critical edition, by contrast, affirms the independence of all three versions: the article outlines the problems involved in editing each of them. It ends by opening up the question: what was Vico doing when he rewrote the work in 1730?