The Enlightenment can usefully be conceived as a confrontation with eroding Christian and classical republican ethics. It was permeated with assumptions about women and the gendered dichotomy between public and private spheres. While William Robertson and Edmund Burke, along with many of their contemporaries, remained committed to Christian- and republican-based conceptions of virtue, they were working within a new Enlightenment paradigm. Its political agenda has to be understood by way of its configurations of beauty, taste, and morality as these relate to the imperatives and needs of modern societies of a high level of sophistication and differentiation. An examination of two themes in the work of Robertson and Burke—the nature of women in “savage” and “civilized” societies, and “beauty in distress”—reveals how long-held convictions about the character of women, especially with regard to their capacity and right to appear in the public domain, were modified and adjusted to the idea of progress, and became central to an enlightened affirmation of modern European civilization. The result had its ironies. On the one hand, a positive public and indeed political role was invented for women that is central to understanding the overall thrust of a political discourse based on politeness, civility, refinement and similar values specifically associated with modern commercial societies. On the other hand, though the complexity of this model of society gave ample scope to informal and spontaneous vehicles of social disciplining, whatever room was left for the more traditional ways of governing polities through the direct exertion of political power remained closed to women: the very features that opened for them the opportunity to play political roles through sociability in the public sphere also circumscribed them.

In recent decades the discipline of history has experienced an unprecedented expansion of its range of subjects. As rich as the new diversity is, it may seem to sacrifice disciplinary coherence to sprawl. More striking, however, is the discipline's capacity to retain its grip on the interpretive and explanatory agenda that continues to make history a distinct way of understanding the human condition. Intellectual history has developed in much the same way. Not so long ago it was regarded by many as an endangered species, its natural habitat having been laid waste by social and cultural historians who rejected its elitism and by historians of ideas who preferred a habitat free of historical clutter. This prognosis notwithstanding, intellectual history has re-emerged as an expanded but still focused disciplinary enterprise, anchored in the belief that texts and the discourses in which they are embedded are multiple points of entry into human creativity in its profuse variety of historical forms, and that their study is essential to understanding the nature of cultural life and the meaning of civilization itself.

Seventeenth-century English virtuoso attitudes to the visual arts have often been contrasted with a putative eighteenth-century culture of connoisseurship, most notably in a still influential 1942 article by Walter Houghton. This essay revisits Houghton's thesis and argues that English virtuoso culture did indeed allow for an incipient notion of artistic connoisseurship but that it did so in a manner different from the French model. The first section details a virtuoso aesthetic in which a modern approach to the cultural heritage of antiquity was central. The instructive ethical and historical attributes of an art work were deemed more important than attribution to a master artist, although one can discern an incipient notion of a virtuoso canon of great artists. The second section examines the social and institutional position of the English virtuosi and argues that the lack of a Royal Academy of Arts in the French manner made virtuoso attitudes to the arts unusually receptive to outside influences such as the Royal Society and other private clubs and academies. It concludes by considering the ways in which some eighteenth-century concepts of taste and connoisseurship defined themselves in contrast to an earlier and wider-ranging virtuosity even if they failed to fully supplant it.

Focusing on the study of the ancient Orient in fin-de-siècle Germany, this essay argues that “orientalism” had a wider range of cultural consequences than the term usually evokes in studies of Western imperialism and its ideologies. The essay describes the development of a generational movement in German scholarship that was characterized by its vigorous championing of the Orient over and against the dominant tendency to isolate and exalt classical civilizations, and especially ancient Greece, and by its role in destabilizing Western presumptions. It demonstrates that the furor orientalis did contribute to the decentering of the Greeks and the ancient Hebrews, bequeathing to the twentieth century both a much deeper and more diverse picture of the ancient Near East and an obsession with origins that could be mobilized by racist propagandists. The essay offers three case studies of groups which exemplified this furor—the Panbabylonists; the Religious-Historical School; and the iconoclastic mythographer Heinrich Zimmer, who represents a strong strain of Schopenhauerian Indology. It concludes by suggesting the more constructive directions taken by orientalists outside Germany in the 1920s–1940s, and poses the question: how long will the peaceful solutions they promoted last?

The paper is concerned with disputes over sovereignty and global commerce in the 1760s and 1770s. The eighteenth-century revolution in economic science has been identified with agricultural reforms, and with the definition of national economies. The economists of the time, including Turgot, Mirabeau, Dupont de Nemours, Baudeau and Adam Smith, were also intensely interested in the merchant sovereigns of the French, English and Dutch East India companies, and in the new colonial ventures of the post-Seven Years War period. Their writings on global commerce were sometimes extraordinarily detailed (about herrings, for example, or bye-laws) and often untheoretical. Turgot was for a brief period minister of the navy and of the colonies. The older Mirabeau described the “Spaniard” as “the true Mogul of America,” and the cod of the North Atlantic as “the inexhaustible Peru of the Dutch.” But the economists’ writings on global connections were the occasion for some of their most profound reflections on the political consequences of laissez-faire, on theories of sovereignty, on the difficulties of transporting information or instructions over very large distances, and on the changing relationships between power, law and commerce. The disputes over long-distance commerce provide an interesting insight, the paper suggests, into ways of thinking which were at the same time scientific and administrative, global and provincial.

This article explores the cultural controversy about the relationship between painting and poetry sparked by Wilhelm von Schadow's 1828 rendering of Mignon, a famous literary heroine in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. Following closely a position introduced by Lessing and endorsed by Goethe, and using it to advance his general thesis about the end of art, Hegel argued that Schadow's image transgressed the proper borders of its medium by attempting to translate the poetic into the visual. Schadow, by contrast, insisted on the crucial regenerative role of art in society and art's religious mission, thereby giving an emphatically Christian tenor to the Romantic injunction to strive after the infinite. Animated by these convictions, Schadow turned Goethe's heroine into an allegory of Romantic art, thus “Christianizing” Goethe's neoclassical sensibility. The controversy provoked by Schadow's Mignon provides an opportunity to explore late Romantic aesthetics and the cultural and political meaning of art within the context of the Prussian Restoration, as well as to reconsider the relationship between this putatively conservative sensibility and “modernism.”

The separation of church and state disguised the coordination of two very different conceptions of liberty at work in Revolutionary America, one with a religious basis in radical Protestant thought and the other with a legal basis in the secular Enlightenment. The essay combines the disciplines of law, literature, and intellectual history to investigate these contrasting formulations and their changing relationship. Cross-cultural analysis of the language of protest in both England and America gives the investigation a crucial focus. It also explains a larger movement from direct influence to refraction in Anglo-American relations.

The interdisciplinary approach is critical to understanding how the same language came to mean different things. Exegesis of the common law tradition in England and close rhetorical analysis of pulpit oratory and legal pamphleteering in Revolutionary America reveal a striking shift in the meaning of liberty as legal explanation trumped religious protest in the process of national formations. Properly understood, the paradoxical role of the American lawyer was to cap revolutionary impulses through the manipulation of the language of a bible culture. Legal positivism replaced natural law as a ruling impulse in the definition of rights, and a republic based on the right of revolution became a nation state where the test of membership would be loyalty. The long-term result has been that the citizen faces a permanent and often puzzling dichotomy best understood in dialectical terms. National identity, while secular, responds to providential invocation in the American republic of laws, and protest finds its most potent voice in religious expression.

The 1929 ‘Davos encounter’ between Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer has long been viewed by intellectual historians as a paradigmatic event not only for its philosophical meaning but also for its apparently cultural-political ramifications. But such interpretations easily lend legitimacy to a broader and recently ascendant intellectual-historical trend that would reduce philosophy to an allegorical expression of ostensibly more ‘real’ or instrumentalist meanings. However, as this essay tries to show, the core of the dispute between Cassirer and Heidegger is irreducibly philosophical: the Davos debate brought into focus the emergent themes of the so-called “Kant-crisis” of the 1920s, and cast new light upon neo-Kantian doctrines as to the status of objectivity and the possibility for intersubjective consensus in both knowledge and ethics. The Davos encounter cannot be retroactively decided on political or cultural grounds, since it concerns just that unresolved tension between transcendentalism and hermeneutics that is itself constitutive of intellectual history as a discipline.

This essay examines the relationship between the novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged) and the broader conservative movement in the twentieth-century United States. Although Rand was often dismissed as a lightweight popularizer, her works of radical individualism advanced bold arguments about the moral status of capitalism, and thus touched upon a core issue of conservative identity. Because Rand represented such a forthright pro-capitalist position, her career highlights the shifting fortunes of capitalism on the right. In the 1940s, she was an inspiration to those who struggled against the New Deal and hoped to bring about a new, market-friendly political order. As a second generation of conservatives built upon these sentiments and attempted to tie them to a defense of Christian tradition, Rand's status began to erode. Yet by the late 1960s, Rand's once-revolutionary defense of capitalism had become routine, although she herself remained a controversial figure. The essay traces the ways in which Rand's ideas were assimilated and modified by key intellectuals on the right, including William F. Buckley, Jr, Whittaker Chambers, and Gary Wills. It identifies the relationship between capitalism and Christianity as a fundamental dilemma for conservative and right-wing thinkers. By treating Rand as an intellectual and cultural leader of significant import, the essay broadens our understanding of the American right beyond the confines of “mainstream” conservatism, and re-establishes the primacy of the 1930s, and 1940s, to its ideological formation. Responding to a paucity of scholarship on Rand, the essay offers an analysis and summary of Rand's ideas, and argues that despite her outsider status, Rand's work both embodied and shaped fundamental themes of right-wing thought throughout the century.

George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003)

Robert E. Brown, Jonathan Edwards and the Bible (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002)

Avihu Zakai, Jonathan Edwards's Philosophy of History: The Re-enchantment of the World in the Age of Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003)

Amy Plantinga Pauw, “The Supreme Harmony of All”: The Trinitarian Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002)

We play tricks on the past, but the past also plays tricks on us. We try to fool the past by reconstructing it in our own image, imposing order and significance on the untidy sources we depend upon. The trick the past plays on us is to remain defiantly strange, ever able to expose what it is that our gestures of sympathetic reconstruction have altered, ignored, or suppressed.

This essay examines the thought of the French anthropologist Pierre Clastres (1938–1977). It situates his once-famous depiction of savage politics as a premonitory rejection of the state at the crossroads of several traditions, long- and short-term. First, Clastres's thought resonates with the primitivistic appeal by French “moralists” since the early modern period to the lifestyle of prehistoric societies; second, it casts light on the history of French anthropology in the crisis years of structuralism; and third, it reflects the revival of Friedrich Nietzsche in French thought of the era. Above all, however, the essay explains Clastres's thought as an attempt to resist and to overcome the well-known communist allegiances of postwar French intellectuals. Early in rejecting communism, Clastres owed his prominence to the 1970s popularization of the critique of “totalitarianism.” The so-called “passing of an illusion” of communism, one version of which Clastres pioneered, is often interpreted as the replacement of confusion with truth. It is more interesting, the essay suggests, to situate it in its time, as a complex achievement as defective as it was creative, if Clastres's thought is taken as an example. In closing, the essay suggests some legacies, often unintentional, Clastres left behind in French political thought of the years since his death.

Michael Warner, a literary critic with a keen sense of history, wrote in 1987 that “New Historicism is a label that historians don't like very much because they understand something different by historicism. But nobody's asking historians….” This essay is an answer to questions nobody asked me, questions about interdisciplinarity and the differences between literary critical and historical practices. A return to historically informed literary criticism, which many critics still consider a dominant trend in the profession, emerged in the early 1980s following the publication of Stephen Greenblatt's acclaimed Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980). Reacting as it did against the decontextualized abstractions of New Criticism and Deconstruction, the movement soon labeled New Historicism sought to breathe new life into canonical texts by relating them to non-literary texts and social practices of their day. This historicist inclination should have formed the basis for a coming together of the movement's practitioners with historians interested in literary representations. But no such merger has occurred: New Historicists evince little interest in the systematic, archivally based study of history, and historians have at best shown indifference to the work of Greenblatt and his followers.

Jeffrey Sklansky, The Soul's Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820–1920 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002)

Jackson Lears, Something for Nothing: Luck in America (New York: Viking, 2003)

Jerry Z. Muller, The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002)

Allan Megill, Karl Marx: The Burden of Reason (Why Marx Rejected Politics and the Market) (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2002)

Donald R. Kelley, The Descent of Ideas: The History of Intellectual History (Aldershot, England/Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002)

Mark Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge, England/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999)

Mark Noll, America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002)

Brooks Holifield, American Theology: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003)

Intellectual history, after a generation of neglect, is suddenly getting attention again in the United States. Giving impetus to this renewal of energy are two major works on American religious thought before the Civil War: Mark Noll's America's God and Brooks Holifield's American Theology. Both are big books, over 600 pages each, and they address a big topic stretching across time and space: the grand tradition of American theology, now a lost art. They treat a time when Christian theology as an intellectual activity enjoyed considerably more prestige and cultural influence than it does today, and surely it has seldom been so innovative and diverse as in the period they treat. Both books have been written by highly respected scholars, deeply learned in the relevant primary and secondary sources. The danger in reviewing such large undertakings is that reviewers will not treat them as a whole but simply grumble that their own specialty doesn't get enough attention: the historian of gender wants more about women, the historian of science more about his subject, etc. These books deserve to be evaluated in toto. Having been conceived and written independently, even though more or less simultaneously, they demonstrate contrasting visions of how to deal with their subject. The two books typify the “external” and “internal” approaches to intellectual history respectively, illustrating for the reader strengths and limitations of the two approaches as well as their complementarity.

Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)

Ruth H. Bloch, Gender and Morality in Anglo-American Culture, 1650–1800 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003)

Barbara Taylor entitles her new book Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination. The imagination in question is Wollstonecraft's, but, like Wollstonecraft, Taylor is interested in the imagination more generally, both the problems that the imagination gets women into and the ways in which the feminist imagination can get women out of those problems and help them imagine a more just and equitable future. Ruth H. Bloch's aim in Gender and Morality in Anglo-American Culture, 1650–1800, the newly published collection of her essays, is somewhat more modest. Although her chief objective is to analyze the transformation in American views about women, gender, the family, and religion in the era of the American Revolution, she also offers case studies in the use of a culturalist approach to feminist history. Although there are important differences in approach and subject matter between these two books, their similarities and areas of overlap—not the least of which is that their authors are two of the best feminist intellectual historians at work today—make it instructive to review them together.

Georg Cavallar, The Rights of Strangers: Theories of International Hospitality, the Global Community, and Political Justice since Vitoria (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002)

Jonathan Haslam, No Virtue Like Necessity: Realist Thought in International Relations since Machiavelli (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002)

Edward Keene, Beyond the Anarchical Society: Grotius, Colonialism and Order in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)

George Cotkin, Existential America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003)

Ann Fulton, Apostles of Sartre: Existentialism in America, 1945–1963 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999)

Jean-Philippe Mathy, Extrême-Occident: French Intellectuals and America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993)

Jean-Philippe Mathy, French Resistance: The French–American Culture Wars (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000)

Malachi Haim Hacohen, Karl Popper – The Formative Years, 1902–1945: Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)

John Kadvany, Imre Lakatos and the Guises of Reason (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001)

Steve Fuller, Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for our Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000)

Frederick Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism, 1781–1801 (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 2002)

Robert Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2002)

All art should become science and all science art; poetry and philosophy should be made one.

Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Fragmente

When two major studies on the same thematic appear roughly simultaneously, integrating not only their authors' respective careers but the revisions of a whole generation of scholarship, the moment cries out for stock-taking, both substantively and methodologically. At a minimum, we need to recognize the key theses of our two protagonists and the frameworks they erect to uphold them. But we need even more to step back from that endeavor to wider considerations. I advance two claims in that light. First, something has been unearthed in these studies which speaks to urgent philosophical concerns of our day, namely the rise of naturalized epistemology and the need for a more encompassing naturalism. Indeed, I suspect this current interest may have incited (if only subliminally) discernment of just those aspects of the earlier age. That signals something essential about the point and practice of intellectual history, namely (my second claim) the mutuality, not opposition, of historicism and presentism.