JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS最新文献

This essay examines how the transnational interactions of two secularist organizations, the International of Proletarian Freethinkers (IPF) and the Soviet League of Militant Godless (League), and their social contexts, shaped the meaning, direction, and fate, of secularism in interwar Europe. It shows that while Soviet atheism played a central role in European secularism, its actual reach and influence abroad was indirect and, ultimately, limited. It also argues that Soviet atheism's most significant impact was the consolidation of an anti-secularist alliance against "Godless Communism" that cast a shadow long after the decline of atheism in the Soviet Union itself.

G. D. H. Cole is best known as a disillusioned theorist of guild socialism, but this article argues his work here must be read in tandem with his ideas of workers' education. It focuses on his construction of the WEA tutor who, as a pedagogical and political persona, embodied and transmitted the qualities needed to sustain a socialist democracy. In this way, Cole reconciled commitments to pluralism and individuality with a practical political program. Although dismissed as naive in the 1930s, this persona proved influential for early New Left thinkers seeking alternatives to the pessimism of the Cold War liberal critique.

In contrast to the prevalent interpretation that understands Renaissance rhetoric as an inherently ethical practice, this article presents three case studies-Erasmian rhetoric, Jesuit rhetoric, and French discussions during the Wars of Religion-in which rhetoric was interpreted as an ambivalent power. In the aftermath of the Reformation, all these traditions not only emphasized rhetoric as an ambivalent force with potential to create both discord and concord, but adjusted their understanding of the specificities of rhetoric-its scope and relationship to other arts-accordingly. The article also suggests that seventeenth-century anti-rhetorical discourse draws on this tradition.

A memoir of J. G. A. Pocock derived from his correspondence with Quentin Skinner between 1965 and 2020. The letters follow the development of Pocock's career from his early years in New Zealand to his move to the United States in 1966 and his long period of teaching at Johns Hopkins University. Among the topics covered are the gestation and publication of Pocock's most famous book, The Machiavellian Moment, and the evolution of his six-volume study of Gibbon's history, Barbarism and Religion. Much new light is also cast on Pocock's personality, family life, relations with colleagues, and political beliefs.

This article analyzes the published testimonies of French shipwreck survivors to trace the emergence of a settler colonial ideal in nineteenth-century France. Emerging from the encounters of French survivors with the men of the Anglo-World, this ideal encouraged compassionate, paternalist authority as a solution to the ongoing conflict of paternal despotism and disorderly fraternal freedom in France. The community of sentiment imagined in shipwreck testimonies was gendered and racialized, cultivating white compassion across colonial empires. These transimperial affective ties allowed the settler colonial ideal to persist in the early twentieth century, despite the abandonment of further projects for French settlement.

The introduction to a cluster of articles: "Context and Paratext: New Insights into the Early Modern Reception of the Greek Fathers."

The early twentieth-century American neo-realists' approach to consciousness is historically reconstructed and critically discussed. With reference to the relevant works of Ralph Barton Perry, William Pepperrell Montague, and Edwin B. Holt, it is argued that Montague and Holt, in particular, struggled with the problem of error and disagreed strongly on their solutions to it. Finally, a line is drawn to related discussions in contemporary philosophy of mind.

This article contributes to the genealogy of the concept of academic freedom with a focus on the English universities in the middle of the seventeenth century. It argues that libertas scholastica (the corporate freedom of the universities) and libertas philosophandi (liberty of philosophizing, within and without the universities) were distinctive guiding concepts, sometimes in opposition but occasionally complementary, in debates over the universities in this period. If these two notions together constitute the antecedents of the modern concept of academic freedom, their conjunction must be recognized as a much more contingent and irregular phenomenon than has been previously understood.

This article reframes the interpretation of Kant as a social thinker. Reflecting on the politicization of Kant's theory of judgment, it instead suggests a return to Kant's "sociability" on his own terms: to the intrinsic monologism of his model of intellectual community. This historical intervention serves to elucidate the interrelation of egoism and sociability in his ideas about judgment, critical thinking, and knowledge production. Situating these within the intellectual context of late eighteenth-century Prussia, it offers a reading of Kant as a "communitarian logician," someone committed to an abstract, non-empirical sense of community fostered in the introspective mind.