This essay demonstrates how the early Enlightenment salonnière madame de Lambert advanced a novel feminist intellectual synthesis favoring women's taste and cognition, which hybridized Cartesian (specifically Malebranchian) and honnête thought. Disputing recent interpretations of Enlightenment salonnières that emphasize the constraints of honnêteté on their thought, and those that see Lambert's feminism as misguided in emphasizing gendered sensibility, I analyze Lambert's approach as best serving her needs as an aristocratic woman within elite salon society, and show through contextualized analysis how she deployed honnêteté towards feminist ends. Additionally, the analysis of Malebranche's, Poulain de la Barre's, and Lambert's arguments about the female mind's gendered embodiment illustrates that misrepresenting Cartesianism as necessarily liberatory for women, by reducing it to a rigid substance dualism, erases from view its more complex implications for gender politics in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, especially in the honnête environment of the salons.

This essay offers a reassessment of William Paley's Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785). It focuses on his defence of religious ethics from challenges laid down in David Hume's Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751). By restoring the context of theological/philosophical debate to Paley's thinking about ethics, the essay attempts to establish his genuine commitment to a worldly theology and to a programme of human advancement. This description of orthodox thought takes us beyond the bipolar debate about whether intellectual culture in the period was religious or secular: it was clearly religious; the question is: what kind of religion? It also makes questionable the view that England was somehow isolated from so-called Enlightenment currents of thought that were thriving elsewhere on the Continent. The “science of man”, far from being the sole preserve of Scottish and continental thinkers, also provided the basis for moral thought in eighteenth-century England.

Conceptions of Geist (mind/spirit) associated with German Romanticism shaped ideologies of national folk, not only in Europe but elsewhere in the world. In Meiji Japan (1868–1912) psychologists drew upon Volkerpsychologie (folk psychology) and Geist to create a narrative of Japanese folk mind/spirit. Here, spirit functioned as a “hidden essence” which substantiated the integrity of the folk, positioned the folk hierarchically in opposition to other societies, and explained (and presented correctives to) the fragmentation of Japanese society. Japanese psychologists, I argue, appropriated the narrative form of Geist discourse, retaining its ideological power even as they altered its substance by divesting German psychology of its orientalist and Christian content. Attention to Japan's engagement with nineteenth-century German psychology will contribute to a more thorough account of the production of “spirit” in Meiji Japan and to a critique of present-day exclusionary ideologies of Japanese spirit and identity.

This article argues that positive perceptions of American westward expansion played a major (and so far overlooked) role both for the domestic German debate about the necessity of overseas expansion and for concrete German colonial policies during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During and after the uprising against colonial rule (1904–7) of the two main indigenous peoples, the Herero and the Nama, of German South-West Africa (Germany's only settler colony), colonial administrators actively researched the history of the American frontier and American Indian policies in order to learn how best to “handle” the colony's peoples. There exists a substantial literature on the allegedly exceptional enchantment of Germans with American Indians. Yet this article shows that negative views of Amerindians also influenced and shaped the opinions and actions of German colonizers. Because of its focus on the importance of the United States for German discussions about colonial expansion, this article also explores the role German liberals played in the German colonial project. Ultimately, the United States as a “model empire” was especially attractive for Germans with liberal and progressive political convictions. The westward advancement of the American frontier went hand in hand with a variety of policies towards Native Americans, including measures of expulsion and extinction. German liberals accepted American expansionism as normative and were therefore willing to advocate, or at least tolerate, similar policies in the German colonies.

Russian public opinion in the first half of the nineteenth century was buffeted by a complex of cultural, psychological, and historiosophical dilemmas that destabilized many conventions about Russia's place in universal history. This article examines one response to these dilemmas: the Slavophile reconfiguration of Eastern Christianity as a modern religion of theocentric freedom and moral progress. Drawing upon methods of contextual analysis, the article challenges the usual scholarly treatment of Slavophile religious thought as a vehicle to address extrahistorical concerns by placing the writings of A. S. Khomiakov and I. V. Kireevskii in the discursive and ideological framework in which they originated and operated. As such, the article considers the atheistic revolution in consciousness advocated by Russian Hegelians, the Schellingian proposition that human freedom and moral advancement were dependent upon the living God, P. Ia. Chaadaev's contention that a people's religious orientation determined its historical potential, and the Slavophile appropriation of Russia's dominant confession to resolve the problem of having attained historical consciousness in an age of historical stasis.

The work of Arthur de Gobineau has presented scholars with a number of interpretive problems concerning his status as a race theorist, his place in the history of racial thought, and the influence of his work on subsequent thinkers. This essay addresses the particularly vexing issue of the origins of Gobineau's racism from the perspective of his affiliation with French royalists in the 1840s and challenges the existing scholarship on the derivation of L'Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines by placing the Essai in the context of his international experience as a member of the French diplomatic corps. Although disillusioned with legitimist politics during the July Monarchy, Gobineau never abandoned his youthful ideological priorities. From the perspective of his royalist past, the Essai appears as part of an extended rumination on the decadence of the French aristocracy and its failure to stem the tide of revolution and bureaucratic centralization. As such, Gobineau's racism can best be understood as a royalist heresy rather than a continuation of his aristocratic elitism or a clean break with his earlier preoccupations.

Dwight Macdonald's 1958 attack on James Gould Cozzens's novel By Love Possessed posited that the book's popularity was an “episode” in “The Middlebrow Counter-Revolution” then under way among American critics. That conclusion neglected the strategies of publishing, advertising, and authorial stance that Cozzens and his wife, the agent Sylvia Baumgarten, wielded to create a best seller. Macdonald also did not see how he and Cozzens shared a high-culture aesthetic and competed for power over readers threatening to make criticism irrelevant. Each tried to consolidate that power by depicting his adversary as socially inferior: as Jew, queer, or feminized “middlebrow.” Although Macdonald's appropriation of Cozzens's own values succeeded in damaging Cozzens's reputation, the authority that Macdonald hoped to preserve was likewise about to collapse under pressure from mass culture and postmodern relativism. The Macdonald–Cozzens imbroglio thus provides a useful example of the provisional nature of cultural hierarchy at any given historical moment.

In a recent essay the agent provocateur and philosopher Slavoj Žižek remarked that the Bhagavad Gita represented the perfect philosophy for post-capitalist society. By no means the first reaction to this text, this is only the most recent and arguably most controversial understanding of the philosophical content of the Gita, whose previous commentators have ranged from Nietzsche to Hitler. Less controversially, the modern composer Phillip Glass opened his opera Satyagraha with a dramatization of the discourse between Krishna and Arjuna that forms the Gita's content as a plea for a humanist politics. Though the text does not offer limitless possibilities for interpretation, what is certain is that the Gita has acquired an iconic status in modern times as a set of reflections on ethics, war, justice, freedom and action.

This essay outlines the unique interpretation of the avant-garde formulated in the early 1920s by the Czech novelist, playwright, and cultural critic Karel Čapek (1890–1938). Whereas in Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974) Peter Bürger argued that the central problem of the avant-garde was its failure to effect a genuine reconciliation of art and life, Čapek, in contrast, worried about the prospect of success. Closely observing the practices of the Czech avant-garde group Devětsil, Čapek interpreted its attempt to fuse art and life in terms derived largely from the French vitalist philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941) as an effort to free life from all constraints and bonds. Drawing on the work of Georg Simmel (1858–1918), he argued that the goal of living life “in itself,” without any constraints, was impossible. All life, he said, must necessarily be embodied in form and so less than completely free. Life conceived as a state of pure freedom, unbounded by any material or physical limits, amounted to the devaluation of individual life. The problem with the project of the avant-garde was that it was unethical.

This article reconsiders Sartre's seminal 1945 talk, “Existentialism is a Humanism,” and the stakes of the humanism debate in France by looking at the immediate political context that has been overlooked in previous discussions of the text. It analyses the political discussion of the term “humanism” during the French national elections of 1945 and the rumbling debate over Sartre's philosophy that culminated in his presentation to the Club Maintenant, just one week after France went to the polls. A consideration of this context helps explain both the rise, and later the decline, of existentialism in France, when, in the changing political climate, humanism lost its centrality, setting the stage for new antihumanist criticisms of Sartre's work.

This essay examines Albert Camus's considerable debt to Antonin Artaud. Camus was not only a dramatist, but he also employed dramaturgical techniques in his more famous fiction and essays. In this regard, Artaud's ideas on social reconstitution through aesthetic terror were crucial to the development of many of Camus's most famous works, written both in Algeria and in France before and after World War II. This article considers the ways in which aesthetic–political techniques adapted from Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty were employed to challenge fascism in Algeria and France, by simultaneously summoning Algerian settler myths of exile, destitution and regeneration. Camus's considerable sophistication in the use of these techniques, and the colonial context in which they were initially applied, have often been missed by scholars and critics who have sought to unproblematically situate his works within debates about the Cold War and more recently the “War against Terror”.

This essay considers the relationship between the Bhagavad Gita as a transnational text and its changing role in Indian political thought. Indian liberals used it to mark out the boundaries between the public sphere they desired and a reformed Hinduism. Indian intellectuals also used the image of Krishna to construct an all-wise founder figure for the new India. Meanwhile, in the transnational sphere of debate, the Gita came to represent India itself in the works of theosophists, spiritual relativists and a variety of intellectual radicals, who approved of the text's ambivalent view of the relationship between political action and the World Spirit. After the First World War, Indian liberals, notably Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, philosopher and later India's second president, used Krishna's words to urge a new and humane international politics infused with the ideal of “detached action”.

Criticized as a nostalgic anachronism by those who oppose her version of political theory and lauded as symbol of direct democratic participation by those who favor it, the Athenian polis features prominently in Hannah Arendt's account of politics. This essay traces the origin and development of Arendt's conception of the polis as a space of appearance from the early 1950s onward. It makes particular use of the Denktagebuch, Arendt's intellectual diary, in order to shed new light on the historicity of one of her central concepts. The article contends that both critics and partisans of Arendt's use of the polis have made the same mistake: they have presumed that the polis represents a space of face-to-face immediacy. In fact, Arendt compared the polis to a series of analogues, many of which are not centered on direct exchanges between political actors and spectators. As a result, Arendt's early work on the polis turns out to anticipate many of the concerns of her later work on judgment, and her theory of the polis becomes a theory of topics.

Whilst Edward Gibbon's Memoirs of My Life comprise a notoriously complex document of autobiographical artifice, there is no reason to question the honesty of its revelation of his attitudes to geography and its relationship to the historian's craft. Writing of his boyhood before going up to Oxford, Gibbon commented that his

This essay lays out a history of the translation, interpretation, transmission and reception of the Bhagavad Gita as a cultural, religious and philosophical text in the West from 1785 to 1945; in doing so it focuses primarily on Britain, although it also refers to other contexts of reception where they are connected to the British context, or to present revealing or helpful comparisons. The object of the essay is to investigate relationships between the Gita's interpretive history and assumptions about the Gita, both as a transcultural philosophical source and as an essentially Hindu religious text, which have been in place since the twentieth century. Although there have been other transnational surveys and histories of the Gita's translation, this essay differs from them in positing a specific period of interpretation between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, during which time, it argues, the Gita as a received and translated text was significantly altered in certain specific ways which continue to influence its present understanding both in the West and in India.

Aurobindo Ghose was a major nationalist intellectual of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who rose to prominence as one of the most radical leaders of the Swadeshi movement before retreating to the French colony of Pondicherry to dedicate his life to spiritual exercises and experiments. Aurobindo, like so many others of the nationalist period, produced a major commentary on the Bhagavad Gita. I will argue that his appeal to the Gita in the late 1910s represented, however, not a continuation of his nationalist project, but rather a radical reformulation of it in the wake of the defeat of the Swadeshi mobilization of 1905–8.

At the end of Matters of Exchange, Harold Cook's major revisionist account of the early modern scientific revolution, he locates the political and economic writings of Bernard Mandeville within the practices and values of contemporaneous Dutch observational medicine. Like Mandeville, Cook describes the potency of early modern capitalism and its attendant value system in generating industry and knowledge; like Mandeville, Cook finds coercive systems of moral regulation to be mistaken in their estimation of human capacities; and like Mandeville, Cook does not shy away from the violence that often made the worldwide commerce in matters of fact possible. “Every Part was full of Vice,” famously rhymed Mandeville, “Yet the whole Mass a Paradise.” The practices and values of science, this book suggests, stemmed from the vices of the merchant and the consumer, not the sprezzatura of the baroque courtier, the asceticism of the Christian gentleman, the speculation of the university philosopher, or the dour appraisal of the theologian. Interest, not claims to disinterest, made modern science and its attendant values possible. Scrupulous attention to goods from around the world and right at home created the conditions for natural knowledge.

This essay reconstructs the intellectual development of the philosopher of history Louis O. Mink Jr, in order to illuminate the philosophical background to “postmodernism” in American historical epistemology. From around 1970, Mink was a prominent and influential defender of the view that historical narratives were imaginative constructions rather than representations of past actuality. This has since been understood as a characteristically postmodern view. Mink's wider sensibility, however, is better described as modernist than postmodernist. The crucial context for his philosophy was a hostility to “positivism” going back to his graduate years at Yale, and his epistemological views were of a piece with a defence of historical understanding as both distinctive and valuable. In both respects Mink was influenced by the philosophy of R. G. Collingwood, while he was himself an important influence on Hayden White. Mink's case therefore helps bridge the gap between interwar and later twentieth-century versions of Anglophone historical contructivism, while drawing attention to some cultural contexts in which the development of both modernist and postmodernist views of historiography must be understood.

M. K. Gandhi's “Discourses on the Gita,” a series of talks delivered to ashramites at Sabarmati during 1926 and 1927, provides a singular instance in Indian intellectual thought in which the Bhagavad Gita's message of action is transformed into a theory of non-violent resistance. This essay argues that Gandhi's reading of the Gita has to be placed within an identifiable general understanding of the political that emerged among the so-called “extremists’ in the Congress towards the beginning of the twentieth century. Gandhi, we argue, wrested from the “Extremists” their vocabulary and their pre-eminent political text, the Gita, and put them to use in the cause of non-violent politics. But, more importantly, his discourses on the Gita after 1920 suggest an acceptance, on his part, of politics as it actually was. This is where he departed from the projects of Tilak or Aurobindo. The Gita, in Gandhi's hand, became a talismanic device that allowed the satyagrahi his or her involvement in political action while providing protection from the necessary and unavoidable venality of politics and its propensity to violence.

Ann Thomson's Bodies of Thought is simultaneously an outgrowth of her prior work and a new direction in her scholarship. She has done rigorous and original study of the mid-eighteenth-century French materialist Julien Offray de La Mettrie, offering important critical editions and major articles. She also has done fruitful studies of broader issues of eighteenth-century medicine, vitalism, Epicureanism, and clandestine literature. These endeavors immersed her in precisely the consequences—both intended and unintended, in France, above all—of the sorts of debates that she examines here. She knows well the early modern issues and implications of debates about mind and body, and she can explain them with precision and fluency.