This article explores why, in references in Polish political discourse to the revolutionary triad "liberty, equality, fraternity," the concept of fraternity was often supplanted by other categories. To address this question, the authors examine the shifting interpretations and reformulations of fraternity found within nineteenth-century Polish discourse, focusing specifically on three leftist frameworks that articulated communist, nationalist, and associationist variants of fraternity. Their analysis reveals that fraternity acquired a distinctive significance in the Polish context, evolving into a higher-order concept. Its meaning was shaped by the unique circumstances of a nation deprived of statehood.
Wolff's doctrine of miracles has been interpreted either as a rationalistic attempt to minimize (or even deny) supernatural events or as a defense of their possibility. This article argues that both interpretations are one-sided, because Wolff's position evolved over time. After reconstructing the doctrine of miracles expounded in German Metaphysics, I consider Wolff's (and Hollmann's) response to the Pietist attack. I argue that his later definition of the supernatural, while prima facie equivalent to the earlier, actually has a different meaning and less alarming implications. I conclude that Wolff gradually moved away from his initial, Leibniz-inspired concept of miracle.
Ali Bulaç, prominent Turkish Islamist intellectual, proposed in the 1990s to revive the Constitution of Medina (622 CE) as a global social contract for post-modern, post-national societies. Focusing on this non-Western rejoinder to the Western conversation on multiculturalism, we analyze the possibility of a liberal interpretation of Islam. Can a faith-based document lend itself to liberal interpretations, leading to a Nozickean night-watchman state? How did this debate attract a broad array of liberals, New Leftists, and Islamists? We attempt to show how the CoM debate in Turkey provides us with a snapshot of pollination between Western and Islamic political thought.
The Holy Roman Empire is not usually considered a place of democratic innovation, but this article demonstrates that numerous seventeenth-century academic authors in the Empire explored democracy within the newly established university discipline of political science. They published extensive textbooks and dissertations and examined democracy in unprecedented detail, arriving at a novel understanding of its character. They distinguished between two different kinds of democracy, often called "free democracy" and "restricted democracy," and argued that the latter was a viable constitutional form, even the best form of the state.
This article examines the feminist search for a comprehensive theory of women's oppression in the 1970s, told through the work of British feminist Juliet Mitchell. It reconstructs the development of Mitchell's thought from her work on New Left Review in the late 1960s to her landmark Psychoanalysis and Feminism in 1974. In doing so, it offers a new interpretation of the "turn" from "women" to "gender," with consequences for the history of Marxism and feminism, feminism and race, and the subject in French post-structural theory in Britain and the US.
Abstract: This article uses new archival evidence to reframe the controversy over the authorship of the Ḥatäta Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob (also known as the Wärqe ), a philosophical autobiography set in seventeenth-century Ethiopia. We demonstrate that, already in the context of the Catholic mission to evangelize the Oromo people of southern Ethiopia, accusations were made against a Capuchin missionary, Fr. Giusto da Urbino (1814–56), to the effect that he had endorsed, edited, or even forged this work. Catholic authorities promptly attempted to suppress the Ḥatäta Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob , identified in an 1857 report as a “true Lucretius of Ethiopian literature.”
Locke's famous account of labor-mixing in acquiring property is often treated as a metaphor: labor cannot be literally mixed with objects. This article situates Locke's vocabulary and argument of "mixing," "joining," and "annexing" in a long legal tradition of writing about mixed, joined, and fused substances in property acquisition. It suggests that Locke's account can be textually and contextually interpreted as an example of accession and specification-civil and common legal modes of original acquisition through mixing properties-and that this account solves many of the famous criticisms of Locke's theory of property.
This article analyzes the politics of nineteenth-century German cultural history, or what the historian and statistician Georg Friedrich Kolb called the "cultural history of mankind." It shows that nineteenth-century cultural history became a key battleground in a wider dispute about democracy and Caesarism. It argues that questions about the proper scope and method of cultural history, which revolved around claims about human agency, progress and destiny, and the meaning of "true culture," were deeply implicated in the political debate about the viability of modern democracy and its relationship to Caesarism.
guided by their sensory and embodied knowledge of plants' applications in daily life. This style of knowledge formation, which I call "lived botany," was key to establishing colonies. Settlers' schemes of plant classification were influenced by the practices of enslaved Lokono and African people who demonstrated essential applications of tropical vegetation. Although settlers' lived botany was an important source of information for natural historians, colonists approached colonial ecologies differently. Lived botany reveals how multiple forms of botanical knowledge production fueled the growth of the early English empire.
How elite Indian intellectuals conceptualized "race" in late British India remains undertheorized. In this essay, I demonstrate how Indian intellectuals invoked racial solidarities in strategically ambiguous and hierarchical ways, either in a comparative mode with caste, imperialism, and shared oppression or as difference to be transcended by a humanist cosmopolitanism. Empirically, I argue through a close reading of anti-imperialist Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay's political essays "The People of Africa" and "The Awakening of Asia" that ideas of civilizational hierarchies, imperial notions of time and progress, and notions of "geopolitical tutelage" toward Africa underpin assumed progressive Afro-Asian solidarities in the pre-Bandung era.
This article uses new archival evidence to reframe the controversy over the authorship of the Ḥatäta Zär'a Ya'ǝqob (also known as the Wärqe), a philosophical autobiography set in seventeenth-century Ethiopia. We demonstrate that, already in the context of the Catholic mission to evangelize the Oromo people of southern Ethiopia, accusations were made against a Capuchin missionary, Fr. Giusto da Urbino (1814-56), to the effect that he had endorsed, edited, or even forged this work. Catholic authorities promptly attempted to suppress the Ḥatäta Zär'a Ya'ǝqob, identified in an 1857 report as a "true Lucretius of Ethiopian literature."
Celtic movement. Showing first how Pan-Celticism emerged within the same context as the better known Pan-German and Pan-Slavic movements, the essay then examines the way that the idea of "race" formed a binding agent for the different Celtic nations, who were divided linguistically, geographically, and politically. It uncovers their assumptions and goals, and what prominent contemporaries made of them. Finally, the essay considers similarities and differences with the contemporary Pan-Africanist movement, and the light these can shed on the uses of racial ideas at the time.
Born enslaved in Jamaica, Amelia Newsham had albinism, a condition not fully understood in the eighteenth century that contributed to nascent understandings and debates regarding racial difference. Known as the "white negro," Amelia was examined and exhibited across England by "men of the Enlightenment" who sought scientific explanations for her white skin. Their ideas were published or traceable in their correspondence. But what of Amelia? This paper places a brief archive from 1791 within the context of the ongoing "race debates" of the eighteenth century to consider how she understood her own difference and the question of human variety.
This article examines Paracelsus's doctrine of signatures as a crucial component of his challenge to humoral medicine, integral to his localist understanding of diseases and drugs action. It addresses the boundaries that lead scholars to regard these aspects of Paracelsus's thought as "scientific," while the doctrine of signatures is associated with "religion" or "magic." By considering overlooked theological tracts, it demonstrates the interconnectedness of the three aspects of his thought, tracing Paracelsus's reinterpretation of the signatures as invisible signs back to his belief that all Gewächse (i.e., animals, plants, stones, and metals) grow from an invisible tree sprouted from God.
This paper considers a series of medical congresses, abolitionist networks, and eugenic debates, and the intertwining of scientific and feminist knowledge in tackling prostitution and trafficking from 1899-1921. It argues that western male civilizational and racialized assumptions profoundly influenced the ideas of gender and international relations in international law-making at the beginning of the 20th century. The article retraces genealogies of feminist approaches to international law based on criminalized and sanitized understandings of gender violence, sexual rights, and justice for women.
Abstract: By focusing mainly on Spencean radicalism and touching upon the trade unionist and revolutionary abolitionist traditions, this article sheds light on the existence of a short-lived current of “philanthropism from below” that emerged in Britain at the turn of the nineteenth century. At a time when the notion of “philanthropy” had yet to permanently acquire its middle class and paternalist overtones and its current meaning as an act of giving by the rich to the poor, some British ultra-radicals voiced a powerful alternative by presenting as “philanthropic” the overhaul of the social order and its proprietary and racial hierarchies.
Scholars and Indigenous communities alike have long interrogated Native peoples' interventions into ethnography. Earlier treatments investigated how ethnographers ally with colonial states and how Indigenous people resist their objectification. The works that this essay explores mark a new turn. They ask what ethnography is for, and what its future will be. These scholars evaluate how Indigenous interventions into ethnography plant seeds for revitalized ceremony, kinship ties, and gender complementarities. Charting a broad expanse of time and place-from Central Australia to Din & eacute;tah to the Canadian Northwest Coast to Mesoamerica-these works assemble a toolkit for reimagining the function of ethnography.
Abstract: This article presents how the right-wing received Herbert Marcuse’s philosophy during the Brazilian dictatorship. I argue that General Moacir Araújo Lopes, an intellectual leader of Brazilian War College, was Marcuse’s most powerful interlocutor in Brazil. I construct a genealogy of the reception of Marcuse, highlighting a rare manifesto he wrote against the Brazilian dictatorship published in the New York Times in 1964. Then, I demonstrate through documents from the dictatorship’s security agencies how Marcuse’s readers were targeted for retaliation.
Abstract: This article traces the intellectual journey of twentieth-century nationalist, Har Dayal, into an ardent champion of the world-state, as a way of exploring whose interests were served by federations, world governments, and other alternatives to the nation-state in a decolonizing British Empire. Dayal, the article illustrates, was a minor political thinker whose ideas were not up to scratch who proffered bizarre solutions to challenging political issues. Consequently, he is an easily dismissible figure in the modern intellectual landscape. The article asks how disorderly and undisciplined thinkers like him can serve as serious subjects for global intellectual history.
Abstract: Locke scholars generally agree that the Essay Concerning Toleration (1667) represents a recantation of his “intolerant” Tracts (1660–62). However, this conversion narrative is based on comparisons between the Tracts and Essay that fail to distinguish the different audiences and aims of these works. The Tracts and Essay are two separate appeals to the two parties of the political-theological conflict of Restoration England. The Tracts appeal to subjects in an attempt to persuade them to obey the sovereign in indifferent matters. The Essay appeals to the sovereign, advising him to widely tolerate religious worship in order to reduce political conflict.
