Journal of the History of Ideas

@jhideas.bsky.social

9859 Followers 852 Following

Official account of the JHI Blog. Zac Endter, Tomi Onabanjo, and Mrinalini Sisodia Wadhwa. Listen to In Theory: http://soundcloud.com/jhi-blog JHIBlog.org

A quote from the article: "These new discoveries are the earliest evidence of suspicions of a Giusto da Urbino authorship. Remarkably, they arose in 1857-58, just under sixty years before the commonly stated date of 1916 when Conti Rossini first raised his doubts."
A quote from the article: "Settlers' classifications emerging from lived experience forged the plantation system in the English colonies of Barbados and Jamaica by synthesizing British, African, and Indigenous knowledge and fusing it with the materialities of tropical biota."
A poster advertising the JHI Graduate Symposium, 2026: "Prophecy, Prediction, and the Politics of Futurity." Proposals due June 22.
A quote from the article: "Paracelsus's introduction of neologisms and seemingly novel concepts partly created his own epistemological breaks, making ideas that were common in medieval and ancient medicine—like the localization of disease or the specific action of remedies—appear entirely innovative."
A quote from the article: "Early twentieth-century Italian feminist campaigns against the 'white slave trade' and prostitution fused positivist racial science, Jewish philanthropy, and abolitionist feminism, tying protection to surveillance. . . . This Italian experience exemplifies a broader European entanglement between gendered emancipation and the governance of deviance, and . . . recognizing this genealogy enables a more critical engagement with the assumptions that still shape humanitarian interventions, victim-centred reforms, and feminist approaches to social justice today."
A quote from the article: "The (dis)location of elite Indian thought on "race" . . . presents an unstable relationship between questions of universal racial justice and anticolonial struggles in the years prior to India's independence. . . . Kamaladevi's and Naidu's thinking on Afro-Asian solidarities reveals how Indian intellectual thought on race traversed idealized notions of racial solidarities alongside hierarchical and paternalistic attitudes toward Africans under colonial rule."
A quote from the article: "Some of those identifying as belonging to the Celtic race...sought likewise to use race as a constructive idea for promoting their political and cultural goals...Studying the Pan-Celtic movement in light of the better-known Pan-African movement emerging at the time reveals how different peoples interpreted and responded to their place in a racialized world."
A quote from the article: "Only by taking seriously the words of marginalized Black women and other historical actors, even if they are brief or fragmented, and the possibilities of what these might reveal will we begin to witness the ways socially and historically marginalized people attempted to intervene and engage with contemporary intellectual and political debates."
Image announcing that pitches for the JHI Blog's forum on the "Conceptual History of Technology" are due May 7, 2026.
A quote from the article: "In light of the recent rise of right-wing populism, 'fake news,' and anti-intellectualism, as well as a renewed interest in Marcuse and the New Left, this article analyzes the response to Marcuse in Brazil, focusing on the phenomenon of conservative moral panic."
A quote from the article: "Dayal's political experiments with the nation form, unsuccessful and muddled as they are, illustrate this complex and largely unexplored history lurking beneath the nationalism-federalisım binary shaping our understanding of decolonization in South Asia."
A quote from the article: "The seven works explored in this essay mark a distinct turn in the intellectual history of ethnography. These books and essays ask what ethnographic materials are for, and what their future will be. They also indicate a rising tide of feminist interventions in ethnographic studies."
A quote from the article: "While several charitable associations and individuals promoted philanthropy as an activity aimed at validating social hierarchies, there were differently philanthropic societies and militants for whom the highest demonstration of 'love for mankind' involved not the preservation of social order but rather its revolutionary overhaul."
A quote from the article: "The English working schools made those ideas the basis of their pedagogy, with students emulating the moral examples around them and imitating their peers' skills in textile spinning. By learning from one another, these students could contribute to the economic project of England's emulation and competition with rivals in trade."
A quote from the article: "Locke's early political essays address the long-standing political-theological conflict that engulfed early modern England by appealing separately to the two major parties to that conflict: the subjects and the sovereign."
A quote from the article: This essay is about the history of an idea: the idea that the ancient Jews invented drama, and the Greeks thereafter stole it from them. How did the father of the 100 Protestant revolution and a Jewish theatre director, on either side of the Alps, thirty years apart, marshalling different religious and literary traditions toward we may presume) different goals, come to make the same outlandish claim? And why?
A quote from the article: "The critical force of much of interwar ethnography has dulled with the passage of time, but Séjourné and Carrington's engagement with Indigenous Mexico, past and present, continues to shine brightly."
A quote from the article: "Schmitt's essays . . . in which he presents a vision of the Third Reich as a post-state political organism . . . were for him an attempt to adapt Hegel's ethical state to the conditions of the 1930s and to identify the Third Reich as the political community that most fully realized the march of the spirit."
A quote from the article: "In sum, démocratie libérale was not merely a theoretical project but a practical compromise—a balancing act between the demands of popular sovereignty and the fear of democratic excess. It reveals the ambivalence of both liberals and Bonapartists toward democracy, foreshadowing the uneasy cohabitation of democratic and authoritarian tendencies that continues to shape political systems today."
A quote from the article: "Openness toward Averroes signaled a turn away from the anti-Arabic polemics that roiled medical humanism in the first decades of the sixteenth century and reveal a lack of concern about philosophical controversies surrounding his views about the human soul and the eternity of the world."
A quote from the article: "We do not have an appropriate word for bad democracy in our constitutional discourse; and that is because we never had one."
A quote from the article: "After the disciplinary differentiation of the individual sciences, which has replaced philosophy as a universal discourse from the nineteenth century onward, and with the emergence of plural public spheres based on new media, knowledge has become splintered and fragmented, so that the forms and contexts of the production of meaning can only be explored in an interdisciplinary and historical-epistemologicai perspective."
What Should We Call a Bad Democracy? DANIEL SUTTON Averroes Among the Paduan Physicians, 1540 to 1600 CRAIG MARTIN The Pueblo and the Politics of History and Historiography in the Writings NAYELI L. RIANO “True Liberal Democracy . . . Belongs to Napoléon III”: The Rise and Fall of Démocratie Libérale in the French Second Empire HUGO BONIN Schmitt’s Reinterpretation of Hegel During His Nazi Period WOJCIECH ENGELKING Laurette Séjourné and Leonora Carrington, Ethnography and Surrealism in Mexico IAN MERKEL The Twentieth Century in Basic Concepts: A Dictionary of Historical Semantics in Germany ERNST MÜLLER, BARBARA PICHT, AND FALKO SCHMIEDER
A quote from the article: "While Soviet atheists were too distant, too politically weak, and too institutionally disorganized to justify the fears of religious conservatives, the anxieties of liberal freethinkers, or the hopes of radical secularists, Soviet atheism nevertheless cast a long shadow and left a lasting legacy."
A quote from the article: "The music-critical discourse of the early nineteenth century sought to become, in effect, a market-making system, with the aesthetic stakes of music hanging in the balance. It also sought thereby to shape, through the market, the musical public in such a way that the public’s own cultural aspirations could be redeemed in aesthetic terms."
A quote from the article: "We may never truly be alone in Kantianism, but we are also never really together—perhaps to our ultimate advantage."
A quote from the article: "Jesuit discussions on the avoidance of public antagonism in the spirit of decorum or accommodation could be seen, at least in part, as a reaction to the ambivalent powers of rhetoric to address the senses and emotions of the people. They wanted to incorporate the powers of eloquence but preferably within genres that did not nurture open confrontation."
A quote from the article: "In the domain of public law, the last will and testament laces the holders of power into what may, by analogy, be called an undying office or perhaps an abstraction—the office of the scholarch or, indeed, the abstract king."
A quote from the article: "To Cole, democracy was an ongoing social inquiry made on ever-shifting grounds. This inquiry required many forms of knowledge as well as complete emotional and intellectual agility from its participants, a comprehensiveness that no single curriculum, learning theory, or pedagogical method alone could capture, let alone ensure."
A quote from the article: "This is a story about how easily erudition could upset the more fragile areas of the post- Reformation theological consensus, and yet it is also a story about how rapidly erudition could become as inflated and speculative as the most cynical early modern caricature of medieval scholasticism."
A quote from the article: "The biology of the state might be the most radical theoretical example of what we would like to call here a 'biopolitical tendency to naturalize the social.'"
A quote from the article: "Felix Adler had defined the program of his New York Society for Ethical Culture as that of a 'practical religion,' and even if [Hermann] Cohen did agree with Adler’s fight against particularism, a fight he himself defined as a fight for 'all' human beings, he believed that such a fight cannot be led by means of a religion, whichever it is. It should be furthered politically."
A quote from the article: "The loss of these translations paints another picture of censorship in early modern Italy to be hung beside those of earlier studies. Here we find not eagle-eyed censors imperiously rooting out any trace of heresy, nor men of letters happily collaborating on the dismemberment and reassembly of their works. We instead find overworked scholars leaving their manuscripts on the desks of equally overworked censors, until these manuscripts were forgotten or rendered obsolete by rival publications."
A quote from the article: "Obscure and challenging authors, such as Clement of Alexandria, were rescued from library shelves and thrust into the intellectual fray, gaining newfound but ambiguous fame."
A quote from the article: "In Melanchthon’s view, the study of Nazianzus and the other eloquent Greek Fathers he had been promoting in Wittenberg through his courses and editions was instrumental for forming the future generation of Reformed leaders and scholars and ensuring they would not suffer defeats such as the one experienced in Leipzig by Karlsdatdt and, less manifestly, by Luther."
A quote from the article: "Against the recent Platonizing interpretations of ps.-Dionysius, Lefèvre introduced his edition as an antidote brewed from the scholarly and religious resources of Paris."
A quote from the article: "While Ficino primarily viewed the Fathers through the lens of their alignment with the Platonic tradition and Poliziano approached their works as a repository of classical references and eloquence, Pico pursued a more comprehensive engagement with the Greek Fathers, valuing their philosophical insights beyond the confines of Platonism and integrating their perspectives into his broader intellectual endeavors."
A quote from the article: "While a more systematic translation program for patristics would have fit well in Nicholas’s patronage, in practice, it appears that his support for patristic translations was mostly incidental."
A quote from the article: "What can we learn about early modern patristic reception by conceiving of publishers, editors, translators, patrons, correctors, censors, and compositors as creators of patristic books? Looking at editions in their making, rather than just the final product, reveals failures, compromises, and second thoughts that are crucial to a complete understanding of the works and their reception."
A quotation from the article: "Complicity will be understood here as a concept that characterizes 'soft' forms of intention that are easy to deny in court, or temporary positions that may change with the circumstances. Focusing on complicity bypasses the perpetrator-victim dichotomy in favor of a discursive and historical analysis of the entanglement between individuals and institutions."
Weber’s theoretical and historical exploration of charisma in Confucianism and Taoism served as the foundation for his attempt to re-enchant charisma as an applicable idea in German politics in Politics as a Vocation. The connection between these two texts not only offers a new and important pathway to understand and interpret Weber’s notion of charisma but also breaks through the boundary between Western and East Asian intellectual traditions and makes global entanglements visible.
A quotation from the article.
A quote from the article: "Reading a periodical was an active rather than a passive pursuit: humanistically trained scholars read journals with pen in hand, making extensive annotations that were often shared with friends and colleagues and conceived for public rather than simply for private use."
An list of articles featured in the January 2025 issue of the JHI.
A quote from the article.
A list of some of hte JHI's most-read articles from 2024 which are freely available for several weeks: Women and Intellectual History in the Twentieth Century, Part One: Rethinking the “Origins” of US Intellectual History by Sophie Smith Women and Intellectual History in the Twentieth Century, Part Two: Activists, Academics, and the Future by Sophie Smith Alternate Edens: History, Evolution, and Origins in UNESCO's Cultural and Scientific History of Mankind by Emily M. Kern Sophie de Grouchy’s Political Thought in the "Letters on Sympathy" (1798) by Minchul Kim “Facts” and “Ideas”: Richard Jones, William Whewell, and the Entangled Histories of Science and Political Economy in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain by Upal Chakrabarti Prisoner, Sailor, Soldier, Spy: Hobbes on Coercion and Consent by Daniel Luban Legal Analogies in Cicero's Political Thought by Maarten Klink Historicizing a Dream of Complete Science by Nasser Zakariya Foucault and Dumézil on Antiquity by Stuart Elden "Building the Earth": Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Science, and the Spirituality of the United Nations by Sarah Shortall The Influence of the Principle "Necessitas Non Habet Legem" on Nordic Medieval Laws on Theft by Mia Korpiola and Jørn Øyrehagen Sunde
A quote from the article.
A quote from the article: "Professional intellectual history as a subfield has been unfriendly to women. But this hostility was never sufficient to arrest investigations into women's 'intellectual history,' both named as such and not. It is time for these works to find their place in our histories of the field."