Whoever has travelled in the New England States will remember, in some cool village, the large farmhouse, with its clean-swept grassy yard … In the family “keeping-room,” as it is termed, he will remember the staid, respectable old bookcase, with its glass doors, where Rollin's History, Milton's Paradise Lost, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, and Scott's Family Bible, stand side by side in decorous order, with multitudes of other books, equally solemn and respectable.

This paper situates Alfred Russel Wallace's spiritualist writings from his book Miracles and Modern Spiritualism (1875) against the backdrop of Victorian anthropology. It examines how he constructed his argument, and the ways in which he verified the trustworthiness of his evidence using theories and methods drawn from anthropology. Spirit investigations relied on personal testimony. Thus the key question was: who could be trusted as a credible witness? While much has been written on Wallace's inquiries into spirit phenomena, very little scholarship has taken seriously his remark about how his studies of spirits and mediums were a “new branch of anthropology.” Wallace's aim of aligning his spirit investigations to the practices of British anthropology fed into larger disciplinary discussions about the construction of reliable anthropological data. Most notably, like many of his Victorian anthropological counterparts, Wallace grounded his research in a double commitment to firsthand observation and Baconian inductivism.

Between the years 1949 and 1953 the leaders of the Federative People's Republic of Yugoslavia embarked on a series of radical social and economic reforms that restructured state–society relations in line with a decentralized, participatory model of socialism. “Self-management socialism,” as this system became known, served to harmonize local revolutionary ambitions with the embedded liberalism of the postwar international order into which Yugoslavia sought to integrate. During the early reform period Yugoslav intellectuals reorganized socialist ideology around new understandings of autonomy and creativity in ways that resonated with liberal traditions and diverged sharply from the Soviet paradigm. These concepts informed Yugoslav ideas of social self-management and national self-determination and facilitated the country's orientation to the postcolonial world. They also underpinned the new realm of cultural production, where reformers such as Miroslav Krleža and Marko Ristić mobilized this new concern with autonomous creativity to revive previously discarded aesthetic theories of interwar modernism.

“The Brides of Deconstruction and Criticism,” an informal group of feminist literary critics active at Yale University during the 1970s, were inspired by second-wave feminist curriculum, activities, and thought, as well as by the politics of the women's and gay liberation movements, in their effort to intervene into patterns of female effacement and marginalization. By the early 1980s, while helping direct deconstructive reading away from the self-subversiveness of French and English prose and poetry, the Brides made groundbreaking contributions to—and in several cases founded—fields of scholarly inquiry. During the late 1980s, these feminist deconstructionists, having overcome resistance from within Yale's English Department and elsewhere, used their works as social and political acts to help pave the way for the successes of cultural studies in the North American academy. Far from a supplément to what Barbara Johnson boldly called the “Male School,” the Brides of Deconstruction and Criticism arguably were the Yale school. Examining the distinct but interrelated projects of Yale's feminist deconstructive moment and how local and contingent events as well as the national climate, rather than the importation of so-called French theory, informed this moment gives us a clearer rendering of the story of deconstruction.

Two years ago, without any apparent explanation, a little-known Egyptian scholar translated Jean-Paul Sartre's Anti-Semite and Jew (originally published as Réflexions sur la Question Juive, 1946) into Arabic. Widely acknowledged as an experimental and highly influential theory of anti-Semitism in the 1960s, Sartre's text had already had a profound, yet indirect, influence on an entire class of left-wing Arab intellectuals who used it in order to figure out their relationship with the colonizer; that is, with their Otherness. Though these intellectuals read Anti-Semite and Jew in French, it still remained one of Sartre's very few works that had never been translated into Arabic. How so? Addressing this question, this article offers a genealogy of non-translation that revisits the accumulative process by which Sartre's text acquired the status of a haunted and, hence, untranslatable text. Situated at the juncture where anti-Semitism, Zionism, and revolutionary Arab politics intersect, the text became entangled in the ethical politics of the conflict and, after the 1967 war, became associated with the collapse of the Arab revolutionary project and with Sartre's betrayal of the Arab cause. Thereafter, the work of leftist intellectuals who had drawn on Sartre to reject anti-Semitism was forgotten, and an anti-Semitic sentiment that rejects the original message of Anti-Semite and Jew slowly settled in. Beyond dissecting the process by which a text becomes haunted, this article also states the need for an original theorization of anti-Semitism that is culturally specific to the Arab world rather than derivative of European experience.

In recent years, there has been a deepening convergence between scholarship on global intellectual history and on legal history. To take just one example, a recent book on international law, by Arnulf Becker Lorca (2014), carries “global intellectual history” in its subtitle—a stance related to the author's emphasis on the constitutive role in the field of non-European legal actors. A sustained reflection on the convergence between legal studies and global intellectual history, however, still remains a desideratum, at least in the sense that we do not yet have even a basic platform where scholars with different space/time and (trans-) cultural specialization come together to reflect on how studying legal concepts gains from global intellectual history. This forum, which results from a conference organized at Heidelberg University in 2016, attempts a preliminary intervention here. The introductory remarks are not meant to be conclusive; they invite responses.

This article explores the reception of discourses about land and property in Islamic jurisprudence in colonial Bengal. I argue that Hanafi fiqh provided a sophisticated conceptual repertoire for framing claims to property that agrarian political actors in Muslim Bengal drew upon. Yet the dominant framework for understanding property claims in postclassical jurisprudence was ill-fitted to claims of the kind that agrarian movements in colonial Bengal were articulating. As a result, twentieth-century agrarian movements in the region spoke the language of fiqh, but nonetheless inhabited the ideological landscape of a much broader twentieth-century world of political aspirations and norms.

How may one imagine the global travel of legal concepts, thinking through models of diffusion and translation, as well as through obstruction, negation, and dialectical transfiguration? This article offers some reflections by interrogating discourses (intertextually woven with Sanskritic invocations) produced by three celebrated Bengalis: the nationalist littérateur Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay (1838–94), the Rajavamshi “lower-caste” peasant leader Panchanan Barma (1866–1935), and the international jurist Radhabinod Pal (1886–1967). These actors evidently took part in projects of vernacularizing (and thereby globalizing through linguistic–conceptual translation) legal–political frameworks of state sovereignty. They produced ideas of nexus between sovereignty, law, and “divine” lawgiving activity, which resemble as well as diverge from notions of political theology associated with the German jurist Carl Schmitt. Simultaneously, these actors critiqued coercive impositions of state-backed positive law and sovereign violence, often in the name of globally oriented concepts of “ethical”/natural law, theology, and capacious forms of solidarity, including categories like “all beings,” “self/soul,” “humanity,” and “world.” I argue that “sovereignty,” as a metonym for concrete practices of power as well as a polyvalent conceptual signifier, thus dialectically provoked the globalization of modern legal intellection, including in the extra-European world.

This article addresses the normative framework of the concept of “crimes against humanity” from the perspective of intellectual history, by scrutinizing legal debates of marginalized (and exiled) academic–juridical actors within the United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC). Decisive for its successful implementation were two factors: the growing scale of mass violence against civilians during the Second World War, and the strong support and advocacy of “peripheral actors,” jurists forced into exile in London by the war. These jurists included representatives of smaller Allied countries from around the world, who used the commission's work to push for a codification of international law, which finally materialized during the London Conference of August 1945. This article studies the process of mediation and the emergence of legal concepts. It thereby introduces the concept of “legal flows” to highlight the different strands and older traditions of humanitarian law involved in coining new law. The experience of exile is shown to have had a significant constitutive function in the globalization of a concept (that of “crimes against humanity”).

How and why are universalist modes of political thought transformed into culturally essentialist and exclusionary practices of governance and law? This article considers this question by analyzing the interaction between Confucianism and liberalism in East Asia. It argues that liberalism, particularly as it was used in attacking Confucianism, was instrumental in embedding ideas of cultural particularism and cultural essentialism in the emergence of modern political thought and law in both China and Japan. Both Confucianism and liberalism are self-imagined as universalist traditions, theoretically applicable to all global societies. Yet in practice both have regularly been defined in culturally determined, culturally exclusivist terms: Confucianism as “Chinese,” liberalism as “British” or “Western.” The meeting of Confucian and liberal visions of universalism and globalism in nineteenth-century East Asia provides an intriguing case study for considering the interaction between universalism and cultural exclusivism. This article focuses on the role of nineteenth-century global liberalism in attacks upon the previous Confucian order in East Asia, demonstrating the complicity of liberalism in new, culturally essentialist and particularist constructions of governance and law in both China and Japan.

This article brings the case of imperial transformation of the Russian Empire/Soviet Union into global discussions about empire, nationalism, and postimperial governance, and highlights the political and legal imaginaries that shaped this transformation, including their global and entangled character. This article argues that the legal and political discourses of decentralization, autonomism, and federalism that circulated at the time of the imperial crisis between the Revolution of 1905 and the adoption of the Soviet Constitution in 1924 contributed to the formation of an ethno-national federation in place of the Russian Empire, despite both the efforts of the Bolsheviks to create a unitary state, and the expectations of a different future among contemporary observers. At the same time, the postimperial institutional framework became a product of political conjunctures rather than the legal discourse. Its weakness before the consolidating party dictatorship made the Soviet Union a showcase of sham federalism and autonomism.

During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Rabbi Joseph Karo composed two major Jewish codes of law: the Beit Yosef, and its abridged version, Sulchan ‘Aruch. Though several centuries of legal discussion and scholarship have passed since their publication, these double codes of law were never superseded. This codification project defined the axial place of law in Jewish tradition. I argue that it responded to changes in legal processes and the enforcement of law that simultaneously transformed early modern Europe and the Ottoman world. Transcontinentally connected changes in political institutions—the formation of a centralized Islamic empire in the Ottoman case, and the formation of centralized states in Europe—dramatically redefined the role of law and legal codification in the forging of state power and community identities. The resultant belief among Sephardi rabbis, including Karo, that changes in Jewish legal tradition were now needed, prompted a redefinition of Jewish legal culture, whereby law (a gradually centralized conception of it) began to be seen as the foundation of Jewish religious heritage and ethnic identity. Despite the absence of state backing, early modern transformations in Jewish law were thus part of comparable changes taking place in the European and Islamic legal worlds.

Few fields are as riddled with terminological indecision as “German Jewish thought.” One cannot invoke this sphere without immediately bumping up against essential questions of definition. Should membership within its bounds be reserved for those who wrote, primarily, as Jews for Jews, even if in a non-Jewish language? Or should its borders be expanded substantially to include Jewish contributions to secular German thought—or, perhaps more aptly put, secular thought in German, in order not to exclude the vast number of Central European Jewish innovators who wrote in the language? If one takes the latter route, the problems only proliferate, for the question then ensues, what makes any of these supposed Jewish contributions Jewish? How is the Jewishness of a particular work, school of thought, or sensibility to be gauged and assessed? How does one avoid the risk of reading too much in—or too little? How does one steer clear of reducing Jewishness to some stable core or essence, without relying on a notion so broad and diffuse as to be effectively meaningless? And always lurking is the question whether, in imputing Jewishness to a cultural product or outlook, one has betrayed its creator, who would have recoiled at being labeled a “Jewish” author or artist. These problems are not peculiar to German Jewish intellectual history. They arise wherever and whenever Jews have been disproportionately prominent in the shaping of secular culture—for instance, in the writing of the “New York intellectuals” in the postwar United States. But the role of authors and artists of German Jewish background proved especially pronounced even after many, like Hannah Arendt or Leo Strauss, emigrated to escape the Nazis. In their new environments, they remained active participants in intellectual life, and the question remains whether they were carrying on the tradition of German Jewish thought.