Modern Intellectual History 

About: Modern Intellectual History is an academic journal published by Cambridge University Press. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Politics & Intellectual history. It has an ISSN identifier of 1479-2443. Over the lifetime, 738 publications have been published receiving 4377 citations. The journal is also known as: MIH.

Historiography and enlightenment: a view of their history

Abstract: This essay is written on the following premises and argues for them. “Enlightenment” is a word or signifier, and not a single or unifiable phenomenon which it consistently signifies. There is no single or unifiable phenomenon describable as “the Enlightenment,” but it is the definite article rather than the noun which is to be avoided. In studying the intellectual history of the late seventeenth century and the eighteenth, we encounter a variety of statements made, and assumptions proposed, to which the term “Enlightenment” may usefully be applied, but the meanings of the term shift as we apply it. The things are connected, but not continuous; they cannot be reduced to a single narrative; and we find ourselves using the word “Enlightenment” in a family of ways and talking about a family of phenomena, resembling and related to one another in a variety of ways that permit of various generalizations about them. We are not, however, committed to a single root meaning of the word “Enlightenment,” and we do not need to reduce the phenomena of which we treat to a single process or entity to be termed “the” Enlightenment. It is a reification that we wish to avoid, but the structure of our language is such that this is difficult, and we will find ourselves talking of “the French” or “the Scottish,” “the Newtonian” or the “the Arminian” Enlightenments, and hoping that by employing qualifying adjectives we may constantly remind ourselves that the keyword “Enlightenment” is ours to use and should not master us.

"What is the History of Books?" Revisited

Abstract: Having accepted the invitation to revisit my essay of 1982, “What Is the History of Books?”, I find that I can do it only in the first person singular and therefore must ask to be excused for indulging in some autobiographical detail. I would also like to make a disclaimer: in proposing a model for studying the history of books twenty-four years ago, I did not mean to tell book historians how they ought to do their jobs. I hoped that the model might be useful in a heuristic way and never thought of it as comparable to the models favored by economists, the kind in which you insert data, work it over, and arrive at a bottom line. (I do not believe that bottom lines exist in history.) It seemed to me in 1982 that the history of books was suffering from fissiparousness: experts were pursuing such specialized studies that they were losing contact with one another. The esoteric elements of book history needed to be integrated into an overview that would show how the parts could connect to form a whole—or what I characterized as a communications circuit. The tendency toward fragmentation and specialization still exists.

Rammohan roy and the advent of constitutional liberalism in india, 1800–30

Abstract: This paper concerns the reformulation by British expatriates and the first generation of English-speaking Indian intellectuals of the key ideas of European constitutional liberalism between 1810 and 1835. The central figure is Rammohan Roy, usually seen as a “reformer” of Hinduism. Here Rammohan's thought is set in the context of the Iberian and Latin American constitutional revolutions and the movement for free trade and parliamentary reform in Britain. Rammohan and his coevals created a constitutional history for India that centred on the institution of the panchayat, a local judicial body. While some expatriates and Indian radicals discussed “independence” or “separation” for the country as early as the 1830s, Rammohan himself argued for constitutional limitations on the Company's power and Indian representation in Parliament. Under liberal British government, he believed, an Indian public would emerge, empowered by service on juries and the operations of a free press.

Liberalism without humanism: michel foucault and the free-market creed, 1976–1979*

Abstract: This article challenges conventional readings of Michel Foucault by examining his fascination with neoliberalism in the late 1970s. Foucault did not critique neoliberalism during this period; rather, he strategically endorsed it. The necessary cause for this approval lies in the broader rehabilitation of economic liberalism in France during the 1970s. The sufficient cause lies in Foucault's own intellectual development: drawing on his long-standing critique of the state as a model for conceptualizing power, Foucault concluded, during the 1970s, that economic liberalism, rather than “discipline,” was modernity's paradigmatic power form. Moreover, this article seeks to clarify the relationship between Foucault's philosophical antihumanism and his assessment of liberalism. Rather than arguing (as others have) that Foucault's antihumanism precluded a positive appraisal of liberalism, or that the apparent reorientation of his politics in a more liberal direction in the late 1970s entailed a partial retreat from antihumanism, this article contends that Foucault's brief, strategic, and contingent endorsement of liberalism was possible precisely because he saw no incompatibility between antihumanism and liberalism—but only liberalism of the economic variety. Economic liberalism alone, and not its political iteration, was compatible with the philosophical antihumanism that is the hallmark of Foucault's thought.

What is “national identity”? definitions and applications in modern british historiography

Abstract: “National identity” is one of those concepts, like “political culture”, which historians have somewhat casually borrowed from the social sciences and then used promiscuously for their own purposes. Over twenty years ago Philip Gleason wrote a wise and prescient (yet sadly underappreciated) essay on the origins of the concept of “identity” in the 1950s, warning historians that already then it had two quite distinct—psychological and sociological—meanings that needed to be distinguished to retain any conceptual clarity. Since then our own use of it has proliferated uncontrollably, and the original confusion identified by Gleason has been compounded by many others. The chain of communication between the concept's progenitors and its present-day users is now so long and so fragmentary that our usage may bear little or no relation to the discourse that Gleason described. There may be nothing wrong with this state of affairs; historians may have found their own value in the term, which need not necessarily be validated by social science. Yet social scientists have continued to work with “identity”, and have puzzled much further over its possible meaning and utility with a degree of conceptual rigour that historians do not usually share. And we continue to validate our own use of the term by reference to an increasingly shadowy and distant social science whence it came. Accordingly it may be useful to look more closely at what social scientists think “national identity” is, and how it operates in human minds and societies. This essay attempts a brief exploration of that kind and then applies its findings to the recent historiography of “national identity” in modern Britain.