The First World War is often seen as marking a transition from a world of empires to that of nation-states. As perhaps the inaugural global event, it is understood as making possible the international order we still inhabit. Yet the war also gave rise to powerful movements that sought to oppose and even dismantle this order. Soviet communism provided one such challenge and pan-Islamism another. While Lenin's desire to convert a war between states into one between classes turned into the dream of an alternative international order, the world's largest pan-Islamist movement in India retained its non-statist imagination. Like Gandhi's Noncooperation Movement, of which they were a part, India's pan-Islamists radicalized the language of empire rather than turning to religion for a new internationalist ideal. And they did so by aiming to escape the war as a global event.

This article explores how rumors of monarchical sodomy at the turn of the eighteenth century became entangled with newly emerging conceptions of the nation and nationalized space. After the 1688 Revolution in England, accusations of the king's sodomy increasingly mobilize territorial rather than theological understandings of sodomy's danger, transforming sodomy's terror from a satanic threat to the Christian kingdom to a national threat to the English nation. While historical studies on the territorialization of sovereignty often focus on structural transformations to the state, these accounts rarely attend to transformations in political feeling. This article shows how a novel discourse of national sodomy helped unsettle long-standing attachments to the king as the embodiment of sovereign power. Moreover, this article methodologically innovates the study of state sovereignty by attending to conceptual problems of political attachment through the study of an affectively loaded concept such as sodomy.

When, why and how did the subjects of individual and national self-determination come to overlap and what were the effects of this overlap when it occurred? Usually in the history of European political thought, the subject of self-determination is associated with the concept of autonomy, while the subject of national self-determination is associated with the concept of the nation-state. The aim of this article is to examine the relationship between these two concepts mainly in the light of an earlier tension between the concepts of the people and of the nation as agents of political authorization and between Roman law and the legacy of Monarchomach thought particularly, but not exclusively, in eighteenth-century France. It is designed to show of how this cluster of tensions was described and discussed first by Rousseau, Kant and Hegel, and then, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, by such figures as Mill, Tocqueville, Bluntschli, Bosanquet, Hauriou, Schmitt and Strauss. The point of the article is to suggest that the modern, two-sided, relationship between parties and states is more of a continuation of the earlier conceptual relationship between nations and peoples than is usually assumed.

This article traces the history of a scholarly vice of little renown: hypercriticism. Focusing on classical philologists and biblical scholars in nineteenth-century Germany, it examines how Hyperkritik developed from a technical philological term into a pejorative label that was widely invoked to discredit the latest trends in classical philology and, especially, biblical scholarship. Methodologically, this broad use of the term challenges historians’ preference for treating scholarly virtues and vices as norms tied to scholars’ research practices. The article therefore develops a rhetorical approach, complementary to the praxeological one, in which scholarly vice terms are interpreted as parts of a repertoire of scholarly “don'ts” on which both specialists and nonspecialists could draw in addressing the perceived ills of scholarly work.

This article argues that Thoreau's concept of “labor” presented as a defense of poiesis—any generative, world-altering activity. Thoreau understood Nature's labor as the ultimate creation for humans to imitate. Human labor best approached this ideal in the absence of market-based divisions of labor, particularly when mental and physical labor were united (even undifferentiated beyond their contemporary, reified distinction, a distinction which deeply troubled Thoreau). Thoreau's epistemology undergirds my discussion of his theory of labor. As I argue, his attempts to transcend divisions between subject and object, between ideal and material—divisions pertinent to his intellectual influences and interlocutors—were isomorphic to his attempts to transcend divisions of mental and physical labor, insofar as sensuous knowing itself was laborious. As Thoreau sought to know Nature and bring human labor closer to it, he expressed a consistent, dialectically complex philosophy, in which political economy and aesthetics, science and poetry, ran in parallel.

This article centers on the early writings of Isaac Breuer (1910–17), arguing that Breuer's radicalization of neo-Kantianism anchors his revolutionary call to politicize Jewish Orthodoxy. Moreover, it contends that neo-Kantianism, which is normally associated with liberal or social-democratic politics, was given a thoroughly antiliberal reading by Breuer that led to an antiliberal Orthodox politics. While the rise of non-Zionist political Orthodoxy is often regarded as an obsolete traditionalism unattuned to the nature of mass politics, Breuer's politicization of Orthodoxy reveals a coherent antiliberal political theory that addresses the aporias of the democratic age. Breuer uses neo-Kantianism to develop an anti-Weberian “science of politics” which attempts to overcome the modern plurality of values by positing Judaism as coercive public morality. Reading Breuer's Jewish writings through the lens of his quarrels with Weber, Stammler, and Cohen, this article explores Breuer's attempt to overcome the association of Kantian morality with liberalism, by legitimizing coercion politically, philosophically, and theologically. This enabled Breuer to criticize apolitical forms of Jewish Orthodoxy, Zionist programs to politicize Judaism, and democratic politics more generally.

This article offers a new account of the rise of judicial power in modern Germany. Strong judicial control of the government is often associated with the constitutional ethos that emerged in postwar West Germany as a reaction to Nazi rule. This article locates the origins of German judicialization in the political struggles of the Weimar era. It shows how the assumption of a power to judicial review by Germany's highest court, the Reichsgericht, was the product of the successful cooperation of the judiciary with conservative political parties on the issue of property rights in the young republic. These were at the centre of two controversies examined in the article: the expropriation of princes of former ruling houses and the consequences of the hyperinflation of 1923. In both cases the Reichsgericht used an understanding of property as an inalienable right to radically reinterpret Germany's first democratic constitution, which had in fact granted the legislature extensive power to modify property relations. This suited the judiciary's own objective of assuming stronger controls over legislative action and bolstered the political position of conservative forces in Weimar politics. What emerged was a supra-positive constitutionalism that sought to supersede the written constitution. These political realities were an essential context for theoretical debates on the extent and limits of judicial power between theorists such as Carl Schmitt, Hans Kelsen, Hermann Heller, Franz Neumann, and Ernst Fraenkel. An examination of the complex interaction of parliamentary, judicial, and popular politics concerning the issue of property reveals that German judicial empowerment amounted to an attempt to rewrite the Weimar Constitution and limit the scope of Germany's democratic revolution.

Scholars of modern South Asia have remained divided on the role of religion in the creation of Pakistan. Many have argued that Pakistan's “founder,” Muhammad Ali Jinnah, was a secularist, his argument for Pakistan resting on an abstract notion of Islam within an Enlightenment framework of conceiving minority, nation, and state. Why, then, did madrasa-trained Muslim scholars, the ulama, support his demand for Pakistan? This article explores the political thought of the most influential Muslim scholar immediately before partition, Shabbir Ahmad Usmani (d. 1949). I argue that Usmani viewed Pakistan as a particular kind of Islamic democracy. While he drew on medieval Muslim juridical and political discourses, Usmani's readings reveal his debt to Western political categories. By paying attention to the tensions and opportunities offered by this encounter of modern political conditions with Islamic intellectual thought, this article outlines an Islamic vision of the political that resonates beyond the politics of colonial India.

Today, it seems impossible to discuss historians’ encounter with post-structuralist theory, the ensuing triumphant surge of the cultural turn, and the establishment of what scholars have recently called the postcultural historiography without the help of such paramount concepts of post-structuralist analysis as contingency, variability, instability, open-endedness, and so on. Having defined the last forty years of theoretical and methodological developments in history, these nowadays conventional tools of critique and interpretation have grown to become synonymous with the post-structuralist conceptual promise and outcome. This article questions this standard and exceptionally generous account. What if, the article asks, we start our account not with the resolute assertion of the radical contingency and variability of the post-structuralist view of history, but with something more fundamental to it—its own fixed and totalizing presuppositions? To show how an intellectual agenda opposed to fixed and totalizing reasoning can end up operating with fixed and totalizing logics of its own, the essay turns to Michel Foucault and his momentous career, to be traced from the 1960s to the 1980s.

Beginning with its emergence in the 1870s and carrying through to the wars of the 1990s, Yugoslav socialism was animated by various visions of supranational affiliation: from Balkan federalism to communist Slavism to the nonaligned movement and European unification. These projects were examples of what this article terms mediating spaces: strategies of spatial consolidation designed to mediate their constituent nations’ integration into global capitalist modernity. Throughout the long twentieth century intellectuals on the world periphery set out to secure political sovereignty and economic development at a scale between the national and the global. These spatial projects were particularly pronounced in Yugoslavia, where the fragmentation of multiethnic empires made questions of supranational unity especially urgent. Developing the concept of mediating spaces, this article proposes a mode of intellectual history that approaches the global not as the scope of intellectual mobility or the horizon of historical inquiry, but rather as a generative scale of human experience that conditioned the formation of modern radical thought.