This article develops an intellectual history of neoliberal climate change denial, bringing together scholarship on the history of neoliberal ideas with critical research on climate denialism. Focusing on the writings of Deepak Lal (1940-2020), a prominent late neoliberal thinker, the article reconstructs the key arguments Lal developed to throw climate science into question. After situating Lal in relation to neoliberal thought and think tanks, the article explores his views on four key themes: the scientific legitimacy of climatology, the intellectual corruption of climate researchers, the politics of the environmentalist movement, and the concept of imperialism. The article argues that Lal threaded familiar neoliberal concepts and tropes into climate denial, thus articulating a distinctly neoliberal theory of climate change. This theory quickly became influential within the neoliberal movement, segments of which came to echo Lal's arguments. The article concludes with a broader reflection on neoliberalism's relation to climate catastrophe.
This article constructs a new genealogy for one of the central rhetorical tropes of conservative politics in the United States in recent decades: "job-killing regulation." Explaining how Republican politicians since Ronald Reagan have wielded this slogan so potently in their war against environmental regulation requires us to attend both to the social history of American capitalism and to the history of neoliberal intellectual production. Neoliberal intellectuals, clustered around the Mont P & egrave;lerin Society, began warning in the 1940s that leftist elites sought to sacrifice the livelihoods of the working class for the sake of their anti-industrial aesthetic preferences. But this line of argument gained little cultural or political purchase in the US until the crisis of deindustrialization that erupted in the 1970s, when executives began systematically threatening layoffs in response to new environmental regulations. These threats were mainly pretextual but incompetently handled by regulatory policy makers, creating a political opportunity that Reagan exploited skillfully.
Marco Filoni, The Life and Thought of Alexandre Kojève, trans. David Broder (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2025) Boris Groys, Alexandre Kojève: An Intellectual Biography (London: Verso, 2025)
Friedrich Hayek regarded Bernard Mandeville as a founding father of the intellectual lineage to which he belonged. This article offers a countergenealogy of his debt to Mandeville. By reading the two philosophers in parallel, it finds continuities beyond those that Hayek himself identifies, notably in their theorizations of evolutionary progress from animals through human savages to bourgeois civilization. Submission to the market, for Hayek, is essential to the civilizing process. The article reconstructs Mandeville’s arguments concerning the similarities between animals and the “lower” classes and races, via the allegory of the beehive. Hayek, likewise, tended to anthropomorphize insects and other animals. In his conception of the evolutionary ladder, robins compare favorably to some human groups. In such ways, the article suggests, ideologies of class and race left an imprint on Mandeville’s and Hayek’s philosophies of nature and human evolution.
In 1952, Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith published one of his earliest best sellers, American Capitalism . Despite impressive traction among the public, the book sparked controversy among mainstream economists. Not only did Galbraith attack the failure of neoclassical economics to capture reality, but he also offered an alternative: the theory of countervailing power. Galbraith’s vision of an economy of competing aggregates was cast aside, but the political and methodological grounds for this rejection merit a closer look. In this article, I reconstruct the academic debate sparked by the book’s publication to demonstrate how thoroughly Cold War conformist politics influenced American economics in the postwar period. This had consequences both for Galbraith’s theory and for the trajectory of economic methodology thereafter. As this episode suggests, a “neoliberal” economics shorn of ethical and social context congealed in the early 1950s—a historical hinge point with powerful reverberations into our present day.
The article examines the 1941 Ventotene Manifesto, one of the most celebrated-yet widely misunderstood-documents in the history of federalist Europeanism. Written by Ernesto Rossi and Altiero Spinelli while confined on the island of Ventotene for antifascist activity, the text diagnosed Europe's collapse as the consequence of sovereign nation-states operating in an anarchic international order and called for the creation of a supranational government imposed by a revolutionary elite. This article situates the manifesto within interwar and wartime socialist, liberal-socialist, and antifascist debates, showing how Rossi and Spinelli elevated federalism as the primary criterion of political progress, displacing class struggle and national liberation. I argue that the manifesto's revolutionary aims have been obscured by postwar narratives of European integration, which retrospectively recast it as a program for the gradual development of what became the present-day EU. Rather than being a blueprint for incremental unification, the manifesto advocated for a revolutionary federalism that fused socialism with a Jacobin conception of political power. This study challenges teleological readings of Europeanism, offering a historicist account of wartime federalist ideas as shaped by crisis, exile, and revolutionary expectations.
The Haitian Revolution shaped how planters and pro-slavery intellectuals, abolitionists, and colonial bureaucrats thought about the possibilities, promises, and pitfalls of abolishing enslavement in the nineteenth-century Americas and Caribbean. Uncovering a distinct way of thinking about the Haitian Revolution, this article analyzes how Harriet Martineau’s representation of this revolution placed it under the fold of liberal abolitionism by tracing how liberal political economy grounded her abolitionism. For Martineau, the Haitian Revolution under Toussaint Louverture’s leadership illustrated how a state-managed emancipation process would reproduce and strengthen capitalist plantation production by transforming the enslaved into wage laborers. In this account, Martineau disavowed the conflict between Louverture’s use of state coercion to retain cultivateurs in plantations and cultivateurs ’ demands to obtain provision grounds. Engaging Martineau’s representation of the Haitian Revolution, this article expands scholarship that has explored how political thinkers in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world developed conflicting visions of revolutionary Saint Domingue.
Oswald Spengler's Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West) gave expression to a pervasive feeling of cultural crisis in early twentieth-century European intellectual life. Perhaps unsurprisingly given his reactionary politics and nationalist sympathies, Spengler's work met with a muted reception in metropolitan France. More open to his message were members of imperial France's modest colonial intelligentsia; Spengler's French translator was Mohand Tazerout (1893-1973), an Algerian-born World War I veteran, schoolteacher, and aspiring sociologist. This article tells the story of The Decline of the West's initial appearance in French before exploring Tazerout's own intellectual project, which both built on and reached beyond Spengler's thinking. Contemporary and subsequent North African intellectuals were no less drawn to themes of cultural decline and renewal; however, the unique circumstances that pushed Tazerout to embrace Spengler's ideas were quickly swept away in a vortex of postcolonial contention.
Investment law is an oft-overlooked, yet vital, component of the ideological apparatus upholding the fossil-fuel industry. Despite mounting pressure for divestment, large institutional investors continue to fund fossil-fuel firms, in part, by citing the prudent-person principle (PPP), which requires trustees to act as “prudent persons.” To grasp the rationales underpinning contemporary capitalism, it is fruitful to illuminate the PPP’s history. The genealogy of the principle’s emergence in 1830 and subsequent connections to the Chicago school between 1952 and 1994, reveals its tendency to reinforce predominant market actors and expand financial-market logic. Chicago economists and lawyers disseminated the neoliberal financial theories of modern portfolio theory and the efficient-market hypothesis while tying them to the PPP and promoting its US enactment. During the 1990s and 2000s, regulators and pension fund managers adopted these efforts and successfully lobbied to expand the EU’s financial market through a similar PPP regulation, further consolidating the PPP’s influence in the contemporary financial sphere.
This article argues that Frederick Douglass's invocations of Christian spirituality, specifically his belief in divine power and prophecy, constitute a mode of political judgment that (1) grounds his moral convictions, (2) animates his immanent critique of proslavery theology and racial science from their own stated premises, and (3) widens the scope of public reason beyond secular rationalism, scientific empiricism, and inherited religious custom. Against Thomas Jefferson's "materialist" foreclosure of spiritual discourse, which modern scholarship risks reproducing, Douglass envisions a liberal democratic order in which prophetic spirituality can refine and expand democratic commitments. Methodologically, this article models an approach to intellectual history that treats spirituality as a mode of political reasoning in its own right, rather than as background context or rhetorical convention. Recovering this dimension of Douglass's thought complicates narratives of secularization and reconceives Enlightenment liberalism as a framework in which faith, reason, and democracy are fundamentally imbricated.
This article traces the creation of Eurocapitalism as a response distinct from neoliberalism to the challenges of the 1970s. By reconsidering the historical relationship between the European project's competition law regime and its environmental policies, it suggests that the European Community has, since the late 1960s, constituted a unique form of Eurocapitalist development project, one that, in several fundamental respects, differed markedly from the neoliberal developments that characterized the American Leviathan. The article thereby also unearths the global origins of a Eurocapitalist ecology, demonstrating the long lineage of industrial programs like the EU's Green Deal as tools to tackle climate change.
This article argues that, despite his reputation for intellectual heterodoxy, the Peruvian Marxist Jos & eacute; Carlos Mari & aacute;tegui (1894-1930) actually set a high value on the political discipline of theoretical activity, and that some of his most creative thought was on that theme. In doing so, the article questions the prevailing assumption about the heterodoxy of Mari & aacute;tegui's Marxism. By reading Mari & aacute;tegui in terms of discipline as much as heterodoxy, the article also unsettles historiographical conventions about Mari & aacute;tegui's attitude to various political practices and ideas, including cosmopolitanism and the politics of exile. The article proceeds by first contextualizing Mari & aacute;tegui's adoption of Marxism as a means of greater discipline in Peruvian intellectual life. It then traces the main lines of Mari & aacute;tegui's critique of politically ill-disciplined intellectualism during the interwar period, before reconstructing his positive models of a balance between intellectual discipline and innovation, understood as a necessary condition of genuine revolutionary thinking.
This article surveys the history of relativism in the years from 1640 to 1710, connecting it to the revival of Epicurean thought in France and Britain. During these decades, a Christianized Epicureanism, elaborated by Pierre Gassendi and divulged by French and British sympathizers, coexisted with a libertine Epicureanism carrying Cyrenaic and naturalist overtones. Both fostered the development of relativist theses. Philosophers and imaginative authors responsible for the Epicurean revival-from Gassendi and the Earl of Rochester to Madame Deshouli & egrave;res and Margaret Cavendish-derived relativistic conclusions from the Epicurean theory of justice to Epicurus' hedonism, atomic theory, and sensationalist epistemology. They often brought relativism under control by recommending conformity to local norms, but some took Epicurean relativism in a reformist direction, making cases against homophobia, anthropocentrism, social inequality, and religious persecution. This phase in the history of relativism accordingly anticipates the popularization and politicization of heterodox ideas usually associated with the Enlightenment.
This interdisciplinary study discusses the political implications of three interrelated cyclical theories articulated in twentieth-century America: Walter B. Cannon's notion of homeostasis in the human body, John K. Fairbank's analysis of the dynastic cycle in Chinese history, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr's view of cycles in American politics. By intertwining the theories with the trajectories of early-century progressivism, Cold War liberalism, and the postwar New Deal order, this article argues that these three liberal intellectuals expressed in common a faith in the vitality of American democracy during its successive crises. Their hopeful worldview rested on their understanding of democracy. Cannon, Fairbank, and Schlesinger upheld democracy not as a specific political system built in their country but rather as an endless and open-ended project by which individual women and men would reshape their common destiny.
Could the common people, including illiterate laborers, be enlightened? How should cultural elites and political leaders embark on the task? Frederick II, king of Prussia, discussed these issues in an extensive correspondence with Voltaire and d'Alembert in the 1760s and 1770s, exchanges that led to an infamous prize contest on the potentially useful deception of the people (Berlin, 1780). Analyzing this discussion in detail for the first time, the article situates it within contemporary and longer-term contexts. The result is a reassessment of the views of mainstream Enlightenment authors on the intellectual capacities of the populace, the function of religion in ethics and politics, and the positive role of prejudice (as distinct from superstition) in eighteenth-century discourse. This should nuance Hans-Georg Gadamer's famous claim that the Enlightenment harboured a "prejudice against all prejudices."
The Haitian Declaration of Independence famously refers to the revolutionary army as the Arm & eacute;e indig & egrave;ne. What did "indigenous" mean on the eve of the Haitian revolution? How and when was it adopted there? And how did its adoption there transform its meaning? This article answers these questions with an eye toward the politics of the term today. In early modern Europe, the indigenous named the relationship between land and nationhood. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the term especially came to connote ideas about Africa and the Americas. The Haitian revolutionaries domesticated and redirected these ideas toward anticolonial ends. Subsequent users in postcolonial Haiti struggled to sustain the meaning the revolutionaries intended, however. The itinerary of "indigenous" before, during, and in the wake of the Haitian Revolution reveals that it has connoted for a long time a critique of European imperialism, but has also enabled imperial government and ethnonationalist violence.
Cedric Robinson is often invoked for his account of racial capitalism forwarded in his 1983 book Black Marxism. Yet much of what Robinson meant by the term has been lost in its posthumous revival in the wake of Black Lives Matter. What accounts for this belated reception, and what has that delay obscured? Like many thinkers associated with the cultural turn, Robinson theorized racial capitalism to critique economic reductionist accounts of race and culture. Unlike his contemporaries, however, Robinson understood culture as the expression of world-historical peoplehood. Rather than an account of historical difference or the contingency of meaning, Robinson theorized culture as emergent from civilizational struggle. This article argues that Robinson's distinctive account of culture explains both the lack of attention he generated in his own moment and its sudden canonization today.
