The German ethnologist Gustav Klemm (1802–67) occupies a rather problematic position in the history of ideas, alternately hailed as a seminal figure in the development of concepts of race and culture, or belittled as a rather derivative marginal thinker. This article seeks to clarify Klemm's significance by rooting his theories in their contemporary intellectual and social context. It argues that his system, a linear model of human development driven by the interworkings of race and culture, grew from an attempt to synthesize Enlightenment notions of universal progress with major shifts of the mid-nineteenth century, including experiences of dramatic social, political and technological change, commitments to constitutional liberalism, and changes in contemporary ethnology and museology. His works therefore illustrate the complex manners in which ideas of heredity, environment, civilization, development and gender could be blended in this often neglected period, and how their meanings and implications altered as syntheses were built.

Some of Herder's most striking ideas stemmed from his early evaluation of German literary publicity, which to his mind stood in stark contrast to conditions in the sociable world. Such a predicament bespeaks the importance of considering the relationship between printed text and lived sociability in the Enlightenment. By charting the heady twists and turns in his intellectual development from 1765 to 1769, this essay treats the young Herder in what for him became an aesthetically charged field between the two. The “phantom” public which he came to envision would be manifest to the senses, at least to the extent that it might be “felt” by the reader of print, but it also amounted to a surrogate for the more tangibly sensual experience of face-to-face community.

This article analyses how Rousseau's First Discourse and the questions it posed about human progress and the reform of society were debated in the institutional context of the Berlin Academy by Formey and Herder. Despite some important disagreements, Formey and Herder fundamentally shared Rousseau's assumption that erudition could be detrimental both to society and to the individual. In order to limit the socially corrosive effects of the arts and the sciences, and in an attempt to realize their full beneficent potential, they called for their reform through institutional regulation and management by a meritocracy of scholarly experts. Drawing on Hume, Herder in particular developed a positive role for the modern state as an active agent of enlightenment, provided it not only promoted the arts and sciences but also guaranteed freedom and the rule of law to ensure their flourishing.

Gandhi's critique of the modern state was central to his political thinking. It served as a pivotal hinge between Gandhi's anticolonialism and his theory of politics and was given striking institutional form in his vision of decentralized peasant democracy. This essay explores the origins and implications of Gandhian antistatism by situating it within a genealogy of early twentieth-century political pluralism, specifically British and Indian pluralist criticism of state sovereignty and centralization. This essay traces that critique from the imperial sociology of Henry Sumner Maine, through the political theory of Harold Laski and G. D. H. Cole, to Radhakamal Mukerjee's reworking of these strands into a normative–universal model of Eastern pluralism. The essay concludes with a consideration of Gandhi's ideal of a stateless, nonviolent polity as a culmination and overturning of the pluralist tradition and as integral to his distinctive understanding of political freedom, rule, and action.

As the foundational contributions of the fin de siècle sexual science movement to research on sexuality continue to be fleshed out, new avenues of understanding this important movement will continue to emerge. This essay uncovers the explosive intersection of early sexual science and strains of first-wave feminism in Vienna and charts the emergence of anti-essentialist feminism from this intersection. The first section offers an interpretation of how the discipline of sexual science emerged from medical criminology and how these origins contributed to the misogynist inflection of early sexology. The essay then chronicles the intersection of first-wave feminism and this misogynist sexual science. The central argument is that feminists’ encounters with sexual science dialectically produced an anti-essentialist variant of feminism. This microscopic interpretation of historical context, it will be argued, provides a new vista from which to view the larger tableau of modern European, especially Austrian, intellectual history.

Adam Smith's lectures present a bleak theory of history in which the innate human “love of domination” results in the perpetuation of increasingly repressive slave societies. This theory challenges common conceptions about the philosophical and historical foundations of Smith's thought, and accounting for it requires moving beyond traditional dichotomies between an “economic” sphere grounded on asocial wants and a “political” sphere grounded on sociability. For Smith, under the influence of earlier thinkers like La Rochefoucauld, Mandeville, and Rousseau, all human behavior is rooted in our esteem-seeking social nature, and the dominant form of esteem-seeking is a “corrupt” one based on external superiority. Understanding these foundations explains why Smith views both European commercial society and its central motive of economic self-interest as historically contingent, the product of a long series of unintended historical consequences.

Antiquity is back. In some respects, it is surprising it ever went away: for the last forty years, Peter Gay's magisterial survey, which connected the “little flock” of philosophes with “pagan” authors, has loomed large over the field of Enlightenment studies. But shortly after its publication, a methodological sea change pulled the field in an opposite direction. Robert Darnton hailed this rising tide of social and cultural history in a 1971 largely critical review of Gay's two volumes. The hyper-longue durée of Gay's historical panorama, which extended from the age of Virgil to that of Voltaire, was soon to be displaced by more focused inquiries into the history of the book, forms of enlightened sociability, and national difference. Intellectual history, particularly of Gay's epic brand, soon became scarce, despite the lasting presence of Gay's two volumes on bibliographies and course syllabi.

The history of the rise and fall of “modernization theory” after World War II has been told as a story of Talcott Parsons, Walt Rostow, and other US social scientists who built a general theory in US universities and sought to influence US foreign policy. However, in the 1950s anthropologist Robert Redfield and his Comparative Civilizations project at the University of Chicago produced an alternative vision of modernization—one that emphasized intellectual conversation across borders, the interrelation of theory and fieldwork, and dialectical relations of tradition and modernity. In tracing the Redfield project and its legacies, this essay aims to broaden intellectual historians’ sense of the complexity, variation, and transnational currents within postwar American discourse about modernity and tradition.

This article examines Charles Villers's Essay on the Spirit and Influence of Luther's Reformation (1804) in its intellectual and historical context. Exiled from France after 1792, Villers intervened in important French and German debates about the relationship of religion, history, and philosophy. The article shows how he took up a German Protestant discussion on the meaning of the Reformation that had been underway from the 1770s through the end of the century, including efforts by Kantians to seize the mantle of Protestantism for themselves. Villers's essay capitalized on a broad interest in the question of Protestantism and its meaning for modern freedom around 1800. Revisiting the formation of the narrative of Protestantism and progress reveals that it was not a logical progression from Protestant theology or religion but rather part of a specific ideological and social struggle in the wake of the French Revolution and the collapse of the Old Regime.

Where is America in the republic of letters? This question has formed in my mind over the last four years as I have collaborated on a new project based at Stanford University called Mapping the Republic of Letters. The project aims to enrich our understanding of the intellectual networks of major and minor figures in the republic of letters, the international world of learning that spanned the centuries roughly from 1400 to 1800. By creating visual images based on large digitized data sets, we hope to reveal the hidden structures and conditions that nourished the growth of the republic of letters in the early modern era and the causes of its transformation in the nineteenth century. This task has only recently become feasible with the digitization of the correspondences of major intellectuals such as Benjamin Franklin, John Locke, Athanasius Kircher, and Voltaire, and of libraries, cabinets of artifacts, and Grand Tour itineraries.

Anyone who works at the interstices of intellectual history and philosophy and the history and philosophy of science will be quick to rank Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions amongst the most influential works of the last half-century. But its influence extends well beyond these disciplines as well. First published in 1962 as a contribution to the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, over the last fifty years it has enjoyed a rich afterlife, leaving in its wake an immense if contested inventory of ideas whose significance has transcended the well-policed boundaries that often separate the natural sciences from the social sciences and the humanities. Even more surprising for a book of its academic character, it has enjoyed a reception in popular discourse that exceeds its disciplinary bailiwick. Its trademark terms—not only the celebrated ideas of a paradigm and a paradigm shift but also more technical themes such as normal science, incommensurability, and anomaly—have been naturalized into mundane English with a degree of success that puts to shame just about any other work of recent scholarship. Paraphrasing one of its characteristic claims, one may be temped to observe that, since the publication of Kuhn's Structure, we all live in a different world.

This article reappraises the political ideas of William Manning, and through him the trajectory of early modern republicanism. Manning, an early American farmer writing in the 1780s and 1790s, developed the republican distinction between “the idle Few” and “the laboring Many” into a novel “political theory of the dependent classes.” On this theory, it is the dependent, laboring classes who share an interest in social equality. Because of this interest, they are the only ones who can achieve and maintain republican liberty. With this identification of the interests of the dependent classes with the common good, Manning inverted inherited republican ideas, and transformed the language of liberty and virtue into one of the first potent, republican critiques of exploitation. As such, he stands as a key figure for understanding the shift in early modern republicanism from a concern with constitutionalism and the rule of law to the social question.

This essay examines the efforts by Austro-Marxists to identify, define, and incorporate “intellectual workers” (geistige Arbeiter) into their movement. In this struggle, socialists faced a hegemonic conservative establishment that controlled the largest scholarly societies and intellectual publications and held most positions in the universities and educational bureaucracy. Despite notable successes in “Red Vienna,” a closer examination of the discourse on intellectuals reveals that conservative ideas remained entrenched in interwar Austria. Austro-Marxists could not overcome the class biases and status anxieties of the educated middle class (Bildungsbürgertum), a problem that became more pronounced as the 1920s unfolded. The analysis of this lost debate reveals that the historiography of interwar Vienna requires revision to account for the relative weakness of progressive and radical ideologies and the persistence of antidemocratic, anti-Semitic, and authoritarian beliefs within Viennese intellectual culture. The participants in this “Black Viennese” cultural field have largely escaped critical scrutiny despite, and likely because of, their pervasiveness during the First Republic and after World War II. In looking at Austrian and European debates on the role of intellectuals in modern society, this article places conservatives back at the center of interwar Austrian intellectual and cultural history, while contending that they must bear greater responsibility for the authoritarian and fascist turns of Austria during the 1930s.

Initially trained as a physicist, Kuhn became a leading and extraordinarily influential figure in the history of science. He saw his work in the history of science as contributing to a novel philosophical conception of the nature of science. At the outset of Structure, for example, Kuhn announces his intention to replace the “development-by-accumulation” model he associates with the philosophical tradition before him—including, in particular, what he calls “early logical positivism”—with a new model of radical conceptual discontinuity or incommensurability. Structure was written during Kuhn's tenure teaching philosophy and history of science at Berkeley, and, shortly after its publication, he took up a new post as professor of philosophy and history of science at Princeton. From 1983 until his death in 1996 Kuhn was professor of philosophy at MIT, where he attempted further to articulate his conception of incommensurability, taking account of developments in linguistics and philosophy of language.

What can one say about the state of the art in the Federal Republic? A number of aspects are discernible, not only in the practices and various traditions of intellectual history there, but also in its politics: the stark dichotomy between Marxists and anti-Marxists; the ever-present metahistorical question of which (sub)discipline, field, or method would set the political agenda; and the position of Jewish émigrés. These issues raise still more basic ones: how to understand the Nazi experience, which remained living memory for most West Germans; how to confront the gradually congealing image of the Holocaust in private and public life; and the related matters of German intellectual traditions and the new order's foundations. Had the Nazi experience discredited those traditions and had the personal and institutional continuities from the Nazi to Federal Republican polities delegitimated the latter? These were questions with which intellectuals wrestled while they wrangled about historical method. In this introduction, I give a brief overview of these and other innovations in the field, before highlighting some of its characteristics today.

This essay explores how the experience of National Socialism provoked German intellectuals to rethink elitist conventions in politics. It focuses on three figures in the town of Heidelberg—Alexander Mitscherlich, Dolf Sternberger, and Alfred Weber—as well as on a journal (Die Wandlung) and a discussion forum (the Aktionsgruppe Heidelberg) that they established after 1945. Breaking with both mandarin and vanguardist traditions, they conceived a politics that neither transpired over the masses’ heads nor sought to organize them from above but rested on the people's participation from below. Moreover, a correspondence existed between their thinking on democracy and the grassroots, extra-institutional activities they pursued in an attempt to realize what they called “publicness” (Öffentlichkeit). Finally, the essay relates such immediate postwar ideas and practices to these intellectuals’ stances toward West Germany after 1949 as well as to the discussion on “publicness” that unfolded there, as exemplified in Jürgen Habermas's early work.

Among the topics discussed in Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, those of education, training, and pedagogy are apt to seem the least compelling. Certainly, the earliest debates about Structure focused on other, more controversial, matters: incommensurability, meaning change, the rationality of theory choice, normal science—the list goes on. Over the past two decades, however, a growing concern among historians and sociologists of science with the nature of scientific apprenticeship has stimulated greater appreciation of the importance of questions of teaching and learning to the philosophical position sketched in Structure. This paper seeks to develop further our understanding of these issues as they bear on Kuhn's theory of science.

Bilingualism was Kuhn's solution to the problem of relativism, the problem raised by his own theory of incommensurability. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he argued that scientific theories are separated by gulfs of mutual incomprehension. There is no neutral ground from which to judge one theory fitter than another. Each is formulated in its own language and cannot be translated into the idiom of another. Yet, like many Americans, Kuhn never had the experience of moving comfortably between languages. “I've never been any good really at foreign languages,” he admitted in an interview soon before his death. “I can read French, I can read German, if I'm dropped into one of those countries I can stammer along for a while, but my command of foreign languages is not good, and never has been, which makes it somewhat ironic that much of my thought these days goes to language.” Kuhn may have been confessing to more than a personal weakness. His linguistic ineptitude seems to be a clue to his overweening emphasis on the difficulty of “transworld travel.” Multilingualism remained for him an abstraction. In this respect, I will argue, Kuhn engendered a peculiarly American turn in the history of science. Kuhn's argument for the dependence of science on the norms of particular communities has been central to the development of studies of science in and as culture since the 1980s. Recent work on the mutual construction of science and nationalism, for instance, is undeniably in Kuhn's debt. Nonetheless, the Kuhnian revolution cut off other avenues of research. In this essay, I draw on the counterexample of the physician–historian Ludwik Fleck, as well as on critiques by Steve Fuller and Ted Porter, to suggest one way to situate Kuhn within the broader history of the history of science. To echo Kuhn's own visual metaphors, one of the profound effects of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions on the field of history of science was to render certain modes of knowledge production virtually invisible.