📣 Announcing The 2026 Modern Intellectual History Lecture! We're thrilled to welcome Prof. Marlene L. Daut (Yale) for her talk: “The King of Haiti and Black Statecraft in the Nineteenth Century.” 📅 March 19, 2026 ⏰ 2:15–3:45 PM CST 📍 Black Cultural Center Auditorium, Vanderbilt University

📣 Announcing The 2026 Modern Intellectual History Lecture! We're thrilled to welcome Prof. Marlene L. Daut (Yale) for her talk: “The King of Haiti and Black Statecraft in the Nineteenth Century.” 📅 March 19, 2026 ⏰ 2:15–3:45 PM CST 📍 Black Cultural Center Auditorium, Vanderbilt University

Now on FirstView: Ismay Milford examines communication theology, the decolonization of information, and the Africanization of journalism, 1960–1990

Now on FirstView: Camilla Boisen reflects on the stories we tell ourselves about peace and genocide in her review essay of A. Dirk Moses' @dirkmoses.bsky.social The Problems of Genocide and Lauren Benton's They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence

Now on FirstView: Abolition on the eve of revolution? Jennifer Pitts and Michael F. Suarez, S.J., examine Condorcet’s French translation of Quobna Ottobah Cugoano’s influential antislavery treatise and analyze its reception in France

Now on FirstView: Against the Caesarist crowd? Peter Giraudo analyzes Georges Sorel's early democratic socialism during the Dreyfus affair and his ideas on workers' dissociation from Parisian crowds as a necessary condition for socialist progress

Now on FirstView: Abolition on the eve of revolution? Jennifer Pitts and Michael F. Suarez, S.J., examine Condorcet’s French translation of Quobna Ottobah Cugoano’s influential antislavery treatise and analyze its reception in France

Now on FirstView: Camilla Boisen reflects on the stories we tell ourselves about peace and genocide in her review essay of A. Dirk Moses' @dirkmoses.bsky.social The Problems of Genocide and Lauren Benton's They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence

Now on FirstView: Against the Caesarist crowd? Peter Giraudo analyzes Georges Sorel's early democratic socialism during the Dreyfus affair and his ideas on workers' dissociation from Parisian crowds as a necessary condition for socialist progress

Now on FirstView: Civil society divided against itself? Pamela C. Nogales analyzes labor reformers' fights for shorter hours in antebellum U.S. and the transatlantic debates over a global "social republic"

Now on FirstView: What happened to New England theology? Sam Gee analyzes the contemporary decline of scholarship on New England Theology and proposes a way forward for its study by going beyond evangelical readings of the sources

Now on FirstView: Bringing intellectual history into dry dock? Nayeli L. Riano reflects on methods and intellectual history in her review essay of Javier Fernández-Sebastián’s Key Metaphors for History and Elías Palti’s Intellectual History and the Problem of Conceptual Change bit.ly/4q1wSas

Now on FirstView: Jane Lydon @janelydon.bsky.social reexamines the relationship between Jeremy Bentham and Edward Gibbon Wakefield through the lens of one of Bentham’s last projects: “Colonization Company Proposal” (1831)

Now on FirstView: The bear in the room and the civilizing process? Ferenc Laczo @ferenclaczo.bsky.social discusses the historical narratives of “the West” and “Europe” in his review essay of Georgios Varouxakis’s The West: The History of an Idea and Anthony Pagden’s The Pursuit of Europe: A History

Now on FirstView: Timothy Scott Johnson interrogates the relationship between empire, decolonization, and sociology in France in his review essay of George Steinmetz’s The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought and Amín Pérez’s Bourdieu and Sayad against Empire

Now on FirstView: Conservative Arab thought after Islam? Ahmed Dailami reconstructs the intellectual history of the Arab right through the work of philosopher Mohammed Jaber al-Ansari in the late 20th century

Now on FirstView: The “Woman’s Seed”? Ariane Viktoria Fichtl @threadofariane.bsky.social analyzes the abolitionist cognitive tool “mental metempsychosis” that challenged the concept of the heritability of slavery and was at the heart of immediate abolitionism in Britain

Now on FirstView: William Godwin as a democrat? Minchul Kim analyzes Godwin’s ideas of democracy and the time-regime of European political thought in the Age of Revolutions

From MIH Archives: Where is British America in the Republic of Letters? Caroline Winterer explores the prospects and limits of digitally mapping the republic of letters and reframing our textual archive in spatial dimensions

Now on FirstView: Governing the Miracle? Julia Nordblad @julianordblad.bsky.social discusses the consequences of planetary perspective for political thought in her review essay of Blake and Gilman’s Children of a Modest Star and Alyssa Battistoni’s Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature

Now on FirstView: Ismay Milford examines communication theology, the decolonization of information, and the Africanization of journalism, 1960–1990

Now on FirstView: The Crown's prerogative? Duncan Wallace examines British legal opinion about immigration and sovereignty, 1833–1906

Now on FirstView: Losing Control of Tocqueville? Peter Madill and Richard Whatmore examine Jacob Peter Mayer and the genesis of Gallimard’s Oeuvres complètes d’Alexis de Tocqueville

Now on FirstView: An intellectual history of homeownership? Samuel Zipp analyzes “social property,” managed hierarchy, and the challenge of social selfhood in the early 20th-century U.S.

Now on FirstView: From markets to planning in promethean discourse? Niklas Olsen and Rasmus Skov Andersen situate the work of famous “skeptical environmentalist” Bjørn Lomborg in current climate and environmental debates bit.ly/486IPqq

From Postcolonial to Muslim Worlds? Xiaoyue Yasin Li examines the egalitarian ideas and practices of Gamal al-Banna (1920–2013) during Egypt’s transition from postcolonial socialism to neoliberal Islamic revival

Now on FirstView: Does economic nationalism have a philosophy? Stefan Link engages with this question in his review essay of Suesse Marvin’s The Nationalist Dilemma: A Global History of Economic Nationalism and Helleiner Eric’s The Neomercantilists: A Global Intellectual History

Now on FirstView: Direct action as radical politics? Sean Scalmer analyzes the transnational histories of direct action and of nonviolence drawing attention to previously submerged debates of the radical interwar left

Now on FirstView: Republican revivals? Anton Jäger reflects on the history of republicanism in his review essay of Quentin Skinner’s Liberty as Independence and Bruno Leipold’s @brunoleipold.com Citizen Marx

From MIH Archives: Emma Planinc examines the foundations of Rousseau’s political languages: figurative, imagistic, and modeled on ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs

Now on FirstView: Vicarious Sovereignty? Taimur Reza analyzes the place of extraterritorial Turkey in the vision of Bengali Muslims at the turn of the twentieth century (1890–1917)

Now on FirstView: More Marx, Less Marxism? Ulrich Plass reviews the new Princeton edition of Marx’s Capital (Vol. 1) recently translated by Paul Reitte

Now on FirstView: DuBois’s Eugenic Democracy? Inder S. Marwah examines how Darwinism, eugenics, and fin de siècle race sciences shaped W. E. B. Du Bois’s early political ideas on race and racial uplift

Now on FirstView: How can a regime be constituted to provide security and liberty without becoming despotic? Luke Foster analyzes Montesquieu’s case for honor in Publius and Adams during the early U.S. republic

From MIH Archives: Confucian capitalism? Jennifer M. Miller explores the influence of East Asia's economic growth on the evolution of American neoconservative thought and its celebration of traditional values in the 1970s and 1980s

From MIH Archives: The politics of time? Mira L. Siegelberg analyzes J.G.A. Pocock’s debt to Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy in The Machiavellian Moment and examines their disparate responses to the discourse of political crisis during the Cold War

From MIH Archives: Self, Spencer, and Swaraj? Shruti Kapila @shrutikapila.bsky.social examines how the Indian critique of liberalism was concerned with the formation of a new moral language for a politics of the self in the historiography of nationalist thought (1890–1920) bit.ly/4fKSKn5

New MIH Issue: Aestheticizing heroism for an aesthetic liberalism? Joshua Cherniss @jcherniss.bsky.social analyzes Isaiah Berlin on heroes and hero worship

New MIH Issue: Thinking metaphorically? Jason Ferrell analyzes metaphor as method in the writings of Isaiah Berlin’s to demonstrate the moral agency associated with value pluralism

New MIH Issue: How has music shaped liberal thought? Sarah Collins analyzes naivety, liberalism, and Isaiah Berlin’s musical thinking

New MIH Issue: Reading the history of money? Carl Wennerlind analyzes the political and ideological theorization of money in his review essay of Stefan Eich’s The Currency of Politics and George Caffentzis’ Civilizing Money

New MIH Issue: Andrew Hartman @andrewhartman.bsky.social analyzes the history of liberalism in the twentieth century in his review essay of Samuel Moyn’s, Liberalism against Itself @samuelmoyn.bsky.social and Joshua Cherniss’ Liberalism in Dark Times @jcherniss.bsky.social

New MIH Issue: Isaiah Berlin as an internal reformer of liberalism? Alicia Steinmetz illuminates the relationship between Berlin’s liberalism, pluralism, humanism, and “aestheticism” by analyzing his unique approach to the history of ideas

New MIH Issue: Can judgment be taught? Steven Smith examines the role of judgment in the philosophy of Isaiah Berlin

“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.” The great J.G.A Pocock on historiography and Enlightenment for Modern Intellectual History. Check out his essay here:

New MIH Issue: “A Setting Where Things Can Happen”: Benjamin Serby analyzes the International Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation in London and the politics of knowledge production in the 1960s

New MIH Issue: Gianna Englert reflects on freedom and regeneration in revolutionary France in her review essay of Geneviève Rousselière’s Sharing Freedom and Emma Planinc’s Regenerative Politics

New MIH Issue: An aesthetic approach to intellectual history? Introduction to MIH Forum “Isaiah Berlin and the Aesthetics of Liberalism” by Joshua L. Cherniss @jcherniss.bsky.social and Sarah Collins

New MIH Issue: Spontaneity and Control? Max Hancock reframes a key moment in the history of neoliberalism by delving into Friedrich Hayek’s and Stafford Beer’s ideas on “self-organization” applied to the design of economic institutions

From MIH Archives: Of savagery and civil society? Samuel Moyn @samuelmoyn.bsky.social ‪examines the thought of French anthropologist Pierre Clastres and situates his once-famous depiction of savage politics as a premonitory rejection of the state at the crossroads of several traditions