Vinayak Damodar Savarkar was the theorizer of Hindutva (1923)—the project to radically reconfigure India as a Hindu majoritarian state. Assessments of Savarkar's earlier The Indian War of Independence (1909), a history of the 1857 Indian “Mutiny,” have generally subsumed this tract into the logic of Hindutva. This article offers a reassessment of The Indian War of Independence and situates it within the political and intellectual context of fin de siècle western India. I suggest that this history of Indian rebellion propagated a novel iteration of Indian popular sovereignty predicated on Hindu–Muslim unity. I read Savarkar as adapting the ideas of Giuseppe Mazzini and Johann Kaspar Bluntschli to challenge what he regarded as the fissiparous logic of late colonial liberalism. Finally, this article argues that Savarkar's account of the mutual constitution of general will and the personalism of sovereignty must be read as a previously unacknowledged instance of Indian populism.

Arab intellectual history has been experiencing a resurgence of late, positioned as it is between the ascendancy of global intellectual history and the continued resilience of area studies. Such a precipitous conjuncture has led to a proliferation of Arab intellectual histories that belie the orientalist fallacy of the region as a “no idea producing area,” as once infelicitously described by Charles F. Gallagher. And yet the task of scholars of the Arab world is surely more complex than merely adding intellectuals and writers who have heretofore been ignored to the catalogue of intellectual history.

This essay makes a decisive turn to the history and historiography of African American intellectual history, a field of study long relegated to the margins of the general field of US intellectual history. Its principal intention is to reflect on the origins, growth, and recent institutionalization of African American intellectual history while showing the relationship between those developments and broader trends within the US and, at times, European historical profession. This framework is meant as a corrective. African American intellectual history is a distinctive field with its own origins, objectives, and methods. Yet it also demands centering within US and global intellectual history. Marginalized for too long, African American intellectual history has long proposed and advanced innovative ways of doing and conceptualizing intellectual history. I suggest that this burgeoning field has important, generalizable lessons about the practice and possibilities of intellectual history writ large.

More than a century ago, the German Catholic historian Sebastian Merkle made the case for a specifically Catholic engagement with the Enlightenment. His audience was largely Protestant academics, who assumed that Protestantism and modernity went hand in hand. But Merkle also refuted wholesale condemnations of the Enlightenment by conservative Catholics, who blamed the movement for the ills that had beset the Church since the French Revolution and which were at the root of the liberal attack on Catholicism up through the Kulturkampf. Merkle insisted that a moderate and constructive Catholic Enlightenment had embraced some aspects of modernity, and that it was important to acknowledge this historical reality in order to fully bring the Church into the modern age.

In Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution, Woody Holton recounts how he introduces his students to the framing of the US Constitution by playing a game. Dividing the blackboard into three sections, he invites his students to shout out their favorite clauses of the Constitution. Holton enters the clauses in the columns and asks his students to label them. Clauses like freedom of religion and speech, freedom from illegal search and seizure, and the right to bear arms end up in the third column, which the students soon recognize as the Bill of Rights. In the first column are clauses taken over from the Articles of Confederation. The second column, which typically ends up with the single entry of “checks and balances,” is the Constitution without amendments. Students struggle to label the first and second columns correctly. When they finally do, they are struck by the fact that the most popular clauses of the Constitution are not in the original document.

The story of American intellectual history has a mythic quality: a slow beginning, a rise to great heights, and a precipitous fall. Early in the twentieth century, the study of American history and literature grew in American colleges and universities, after many years of teaching European ideas in lieu of an American canon. Then, from a literature department arose Vernon Louis Parrington and from an American studies department Perry Miller—their writing compelling, learned, and suggestive. Their books and their students established the new field of American intellectual history, drawing readers far and wide into their interpretations of how not just individuals but entire peoples had “minds” that hovered above society, transmitting ideas from the past and changing with the times. Miller pioneered this approach with The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century, which became required reading for historians for decades—and ever since, for Puritan specialists. Miller used the published sermons of the most prominent theologians—and their European sources—to describe a crisis in Puritan thought over the character of their faith and therefore purpose. The concept of the regional or national mind became so popular that when Parrington's student Henry Steele Commager published The American Mind at mid-century, the book met a hungry public and went into eight printings in seven years.

While some American civil rights activists professed belief in the “philosophy of nonviolence,” others declared nonviolent civil disobedience to be “a tactic rather than a philosophy.” Like many dichotomies, the tactic-versus-philosophy distinction combined as much as it divided. Those who viewed nonviolence as a tactic or method were treated as akin regardless of how much they differed in their tactics or methods. Similarly, those who believed in the philosophy of nonviolence were lumped together with each other and with those who saw nonviolence as a “way of life.” The history of the tactic-versus-philosophy dichotomy provides a unique window on the role of nonviolence within the American civil rights movement.

In 1858 an aged and weakened James Stephen, the once-formidable “Over-Secretary of the Colonies” whose influence on the course of British imperial administration included such momentous tasks as drafting the bill to end slavery in the colonies and contributing to much of the administrative–constitutional groundwork for colonial self-government, wrote his son James Fitzjames words of encouragement on his rising writing career: “Time was when I enjoyed a repute as a writer of Edinburgh Reviews and from the bottom of my heart I hope as I sincerely believe that you will eclipse me even more than the elder Mill has been eclipsed by the younger.” For all the power he had exercised in the Colonial Office, and for all the worldly success that Fitzjames might enjoy in the legal profession he had been practicing for a half-decade at that point, there was something unique about literary fame that James wished his son to have.

For the five hundred years since Thomas More first depicted the island of Utopia, the portrayal of an ideal social system has intrigued generations of authors. The concept served a double purpose: it applied to an ideal place (eutopia) but also an imaginary, unrealizable one (utopia). Although the search for utopia started from the Classical Age, More invented the genre and hundreds of utopian thinkers followed in his footsteps trying to predict how life would unfold and provide a detailed description of an ideal (or nonideal) future society. From H. G. Wells and Aldous Huxley to Arthur C. Clarke and Ursula Le Guin, successful and popular authors showed a deep concern for future living and working conditions. If the past is another country, the growing literature of utopian thought suggests that the future can be a whole continent. Several undiscovered countries lay in waiting and intellectual historians have often been fascinated by the dense explorations of the utopian writers.

The efforts of liberal thinkers to incorporate mutualistic social principles into Americans’ understanding of liberalism extended through the century, but the strongest and most holistic conceptions of the social sphere took hold during the New Deal era and World War II. Contrary to recent accounts that locate the weakening of that social liberal project in the 1970s and attribute it to underlying economic changes, this article builds on two generations of historiography to argue that the decline began during the long 1950s when totalitarianism changed the political context of social thought. The theory of mass society that developed to explain the rise of totalitarianism replaced the citizens of liberal democratic theory with the anxious, rootless masses of modern society and forecast the collapse of liberal democracy into totalitarianism. Americans cast totalitarianism as the antithesis of America, its Other in the narrative of American identity, a threat both without and within. In that context, mutualistic conceptions of the social sphere were put on the defensive and individual liberty was valorized. Liberal intellectuals, trusting in American capitalism and in the weak social state, focused on the threat of McCarthyite anti-intellectualism and mass irrationality. Their commitment to social democracy weakened and their chief concern shifted to the no-longer-autonomous individuals of modern society.

We live in dark times, as Hannah Arendt might have said. Just open the Jewish or general press on any given day and you will read about swastikas scrawled on buildings. Or hear about the reiteration of anti-Jewish tropes by members of Congress or by the president of the United States or by any number of European prime ministers. You might discover the latest instance of the desecration of Jewish cemeteries or the burning of synagogues. Or perhaps you will linger on the most recent incident of the beating of Jews in New York or Paris or Berlin. Most spectacularly, white Christian nationalists or militant jihadi terrorists have slain Jews en masse in several horrific events, most famously at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and in the linked attacks on Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher in Paris.

Why should intellectual historians care about the history of medicine? As someone who admires and draws frequently on intellectual history but is mostly an outsider to the field, I asked myself this question after accepting the invitation to review two books related to medical history for Modern Intellectual History. To make the question manageable, I decided to investigate how much the history of medicine had cropped up in the pages of MIH since it began publishing in 2004. Three terms fundamental to the history of medicine went into the MIH search engine: “medicine,” “physician,” and “disease.” “Medicine” yielded seven hits, “physician” three, and “disease” one. Curious to see in what context “medicine” appeared, I clicked on the seven hits and discovered three book reviews, two articles that made mention of medicine only incidentally, and two articles that connected medicine to the history of subjectivity. Because seven hits seemed low and the subjectivity result intrigued me, I went back to the search engine with a more specific set of terms. “Psychology” yielded sixteen hits, “psychoanalysis” fourteen, and “psychiatry” one. These results, of course, only tell us about the publishing record of MIH and not necessarily about the research interests that intellectual historians might have in the history of medicine. Still, they do suggest that the piece of medical history most useful to intellectual historians concerns the mind/brain sciences—that is, those sciences most likely to engage minds, selves, identities, the individual, and related constructs of interiority. Apparently less interesting is work from other vibrant research areas in medical history: diseases (e.g. cholera, cancer, plague), hospitals, medical education, medical practice, medical technology, medical sciences (e.g. physiology, nutrition, biochemistry), and the body, to name just a few. Intellectual historians, it seems, hold a strong but quite selective interest in medicine right now.

Over the last decade or so, intellectual historians in and beyond the US field have deepened their engagement with the historical profession's “transnational turn.” This welcome development should hardly be a surprise; after all the turn, which began for Americanists in the late 1990s, owed a good part of its erudition and its energy to some of the most distinguished intellectual historians of that time. Thomas Bender convened four conferences at NYU's La Pietra villa—itself part of some intellectual-history footnotes in the early twentieth century—and also made major scholarly and organizational contributions to the field. Two of the most frequently cited works that made the case for the “internationalization of US history”—avant la lettre—were by similarly preeminent intellectual historians Daniel Rodgers and James Kloppenberg. Other scholars, like David Hollinger, encouraged such work in their students before undertaking a more robustly transnational approach themselves. A wealth of scholarship in recent years has not just continued this tradition but expanded it, with intellectual historians individually and collectively pursuing their subjects across geographic borders as well as methodological boundaries. Two recent edited collections showcase work by scholars (mostly mid-career or younger) and contemplate the possibilities and the limits of different scales and methods of investigating the past in its broadest contexts.

Like Karl Marx, Edmund Burke has remained a partisan figure, even though the specific partisan context in which he wrote is long gone. To a greater degree than Marx, however, Burke's partisan identity is itself frequently contested. Burke was a hero to the conservative writer Russell Kirk, who devoted his life to undoing the triumphs of twentieth-century American progressivism. But Burke was also a hero to Woodrow Wilson—whose presidency enacted and inspired so many of the progressive reforms that Kirk wanted to overturn—and to a number of the Victorian liberals who did so much to form Wilson's political mind-set.

At a 2004 conference at Princeton University, the leading practitioners of two influential approaches to studying the history of texts—the “history of the book” and “intellectual” history—compared the underpinnings of their respective methods. Robert Darnton contended that while seemingly “made for each other,” book history and intellectual history had proceeded along parallel paths over the late twentieth century, with the latter focused on the analysis of discourse, while historians of the book concerned themselves with the diffusion of texts. Quentin Skinner responded to Darnton by elaborating on these “contrasts.” He characterized the history of the book as “a specialized form of inquiry into the production, diffusion and enjoyment of printed and scribally published material,” while describing intellectual historians as primarily concerned with the meanings that actors in the past have ascribed to concepts as they expressed them in language. Intellectual historians, Skinner suggested, had paid relatively little attention to the social histories of how texts were produced and received, including questions of their physical attributes.

At its birth, American environmental history had strong connections with intellectual history. Books such as Roderick Nash's Wilderness and the American Mind and Donald Worster's Nature's Economy made the rise of preservationist and ecological thinking central to the field's early identity. But during the last several decades, as intellectual historians have engaged in their own soul-searching, American environmental historians retreated from engagement with intellectual history in favor of a “cultural turn.” In some ways, this retreat was surprising, because environmental historians became more circumspect about the very approaches that intellectual historians were questioning in their own scholarly practices: whether we could generalize from elite sources, disengage ideas from their social or cultural contexts, separate out a distinct intellectual realm and its exemplary intellects from histories of popular knowledge, or locate such a thing as an “American mind.” The second generation of American environmental historians continued to study environmental ideas, of course, but with less willingness to venerate canonical environmental thinkers and more interest in how American ideas of nature were socially and culturally constructed. As environmental historians became more critical of environmentalist ideas—finding in them signs of class position, racial formation, consumer status, and uncritical borrowings from science—we tended to become suspicious of the realm of ideas in general. Despite these parallels within our fields, the moment compelled environmental historians to turn away from intellectual history. One sad result is that environmental historians do not seem to have stayed abreast of intellectual historiography. Another, if my cursory review of this journal's recent tables of contents is any indication, is that environmental topics seem peripheral to the field of intellectual history. For the sake of both fields, it's time to restore the fragmented habitats that have isolated our subdisciplines.

In September 1829, David Walker published the first edition of his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, a pamphlet that became a stirring call to arms for both slaves and free blacks alike. Walker's audience was blacks in the United States and his aim was to foster black unity and education, combat racial stereotypes, and make the case for the abolition of slavery. Like most abolitionists, black and white, Walker hoped that the end of slavery could come about through peaceful means. Unlike most other abolitionists, however, Walker openly called for slaves to violently resist their bondage, stating, “it is no more harm for you to kill a man, who is trying to kill you, than it is for you to take a drink of water when thirsty.” While advocates of pacifism and nonviolence often based their positions on their Christian faith, it was Walker's Christianity which lent support to his calls for revolutionary violence. “Does the Lord condescend to hear their cries and see their tears in consequence of oppression?” he asked. “Will he let the oppressors rest comfortably and happy always? Will he not cause the very children of the oppressors to rise up against them, and oftimes to put them to death?” Walker firmly believed that God would have his vengeance on blacks’ oppressors and that the vehicles for that vengeance might very well be the slaves themselves.