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This book aims to show that Adam Smith (1723–90), the author of Inquiry into…the Wealth of Nations, was not the promoter of ruthless laissez-faire capitalism that is still frequently depicted. His ‘right-wing’ reputation was sealed after his death, when it was not safe to claim that an author may have influenced the French revolutionaries. But as the author also of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which he probably regarded as his more important book, Smith sought a non-religious grounding for morals, and found it in the principle of sympathy, which should lead an impartial spectator to understand others' problems. The book locates Smith in the Scottish Enlightenment; shows how the two books are perfectly consistent with one another; traces Smith's influence in France and the United States; and draws out the lessons that Smith can teach policy makers in the twenty-first century. Although Smith was not a religious man, he was a very acute sociologist of religion. The book accordingly explains the Scottish religious context of Smith's time, which was, as it remains, very different to the English religious context. The whole book is shot through with an affection for Edinburgh, and for the Scottish Enlightenment. It begins and ends with poems by Smith's great admirer, Robert Burns.

Africa throughout its postcolonial history has been plagued by human rights abuses ranging from intolerance of political dissent to heinous crimes such as genocide. Some observers consequently have gone so far as to suggest that human rights are a concept alien to African cultures. The International Criminal Court (ICC)’s focus on Africa in recent years has reinforced the region’s reputation as a hotspot for human rights violations. But despite Africa’s notoriety concerning human rights, Africa and the Shaping of International Human Rights argues that the continent has been pivotal for helping shape contemporary human rights norms and practices. Challenging prevailing Eurocentric interpretations of human rights’ origins and evolution, it demonstrates that from the colonial era to the present Africa’s peoples have drawn attention to and prompted novel ways of thinking about human rights through their encounters with the world at large. Beginning with the depredations of King Leopold II in the Congo Free State in the 1880s and ending with the ICC’s current activities in Africa, it reveals how African events, personalities, groups, and nations have influenced the trajectory of human rights history in intriguing and critical ways, in the end enlarging and universalizing a major discourse of our time.

From August 29 to September 21, 1909, Sigmund Freud visited the United States, where he gave five lectures at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. This book brings together historians of psychoanalysis and of American culture to consider the broad history of psychoanalysis in America and to reflect on what has happened to Freud's legacy in the United States in the century since his visit. There has been a flood of recent scholarship on Freud's life and on the European and world history of psychoanalysis, but historians have produced relatively little on the proliferation of psychoanalytic thinking in the United States, where Freud's work had significant intellectual and social impact. The book provides readers with insights and perspectives to help them understand the uniqueness of Americans' psychoanalytic thinking, as well as the forms in which the legacy of Freud remains active in the United States in the twenty-first century.

Ruskin often disparaged attempts to alleviate conditions in the cities, yet he financed the pioneering early housing experiments of Octavia Hill in London, and established a museum for working men in Sheffield. At the same time, he strove to promote the rural ideal and inspired the revival of some rural handicrafts. Both a self-proclaimed ‘violent Tory of the old school’ and a ‘communist’, the paradoxical John Ruskin, the leading Victorian art and social critic, inspired a younger generation with his political ideas and social experiments. A wide range of individuals, consciously indebted to him, engaged in social action designed to ameliorate the worst excesses of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century British industrial capitalism. Progressive political thinkers and social activists answered Ruskin's challenge to confront the ugliness and corruption of Victorian society, and to reject the hypocrisy of the utilitarian philosophy which underpinned it. This book is the first study to approach Ruskin's legacy in terms of the institutional and organisational contexts in which his ideas flourished. It recreates the associational culture of a network of influence which was united by a shared enthusiasm inspired by one man. The Guild of St. George embodied his social challenge, and provided a point of focus for his most loyal disciples. Many of the Oxford undergraduates inspired by his lectures, and his practical scheme to rebuild the road at Hinksey, helped to found and guide the university settlements. Ruskin societies emerged in the large cities to promote the study of his work and to effect civic reforms on Ruskinian lines. Many of the pioneers of the nascent Labour movement developed their political consciousnesses whilst reading his work. In the early life and career of John Howard Whitehouse, parliamentarian and educationist, these strands of influence combined, helping him to become Ruskin's truest disciple.

This book explores the knowledge underpinnings of agricultural change and growth in early modern Europe, building on the growing recognition among historians that ‘what people knew and believed’ had a bearing on their economic behaviour. Until recently researchers resisted arguments rooted in non-quantitative explanations of economic change which place the emphasis on cultural agents. The book focuses on the period circa 1750–1840 when an unprecedented amount of agricultural information was put into circulation which facilitated its consumption and incorporation into the practices of cereal and animal husbandry. In Scotland, England, and Denmark this precursor Agricultural Enlightenment triggered a modernization of the rural economy which can be labelled an Agricultural Revolution. Elsewhere the impact of the supply of agricultural knowledge was muted and it is hard to separate out the ingredients of the changes under way by the 1830s and 1840s. Adopting a continental perspective on agricultural growth, the book weighs up the effects of cultural factors by analysing the mechanisms governing knowledge production, diffusion, and adoption by farmers. Issues involving the transfer of knowledge and skill receive particular coverage. But equally the book explores the impact of demographic change, urbanization, and evidence that European agriculture was moving towards market-driven production by the end of the period. Governments were as influenced by the knowledge project of the Enlightenment as landlords and their tenants, and the book examines the proposition that institutional change ‘from above’ was the single most powerful catalyst of agricultural growth before industrialization transformed the European economy.

The cardinal role of Anglo-Saxon libraries in the transmission of classical and patristic literature to the later middle ages has long been recognized, for these libraries sustained the researches of those English scholars whose writings determined the curriculum of medieval schools: Aldhelm, Bede, and Alcuin, to name only the best known. This book provides an account of the nature and holdings of Anglo-Saxon libraries from the 6th century to the 11th. The early chapters discuss libraries in antiquity, notably at Alexandria and republican and imperial Rome, and also the Christian libraries of late antiquity which supplied books to Anglo-Saxon England. Because Anglo-Saxon libraries themselves have almost completely vanished, three classes of evidence need to be combined in order to form a detailed impression of their holdings: surviving inventories, surviving manuscripts, and citations of classical and patristic works by Anglo-Saxon authors themselves. After setting out the problems entailed in using such evidence, the book provides appendices containing editions of all surviving Anglo-Saxon inventories, lists of all Anglo-Saxon manuscripts exported to continental libraries during the eighth century and then all manuscripts re-imported into England in the tenth, as well as a catalogue of all citations of classical and patristic literature by Anglo-Saxon authors.

Anticorruption in History is the first major collection of case studies on how past societies and polities, in and beyond Europe, defined legitimate power in terms of fighting corruption and designed specific mechanisms to pursue that agenda. It is a timely book: corruption is widely seen today as a major problem, undermining trust in government, financial institutions, economic efficiency, the principle of equality before the law and human wellbeing in general. Corruption, in short, is a major hurdle on the “path to Denmark”—a feted blueprint for stable and successful statebuilding. The resonance of this view explains why efforts to promote anticorruption policies have proliferated in recent years. But while the subjects of corruption and anticorruption have captured the attention of politicians, scholars, NGOs and the global media, scant attention has been paid to the link between corruption and the change of anticorruption policies over time and place. Such a historical approach could help explain major moments of change in the past as well as reasons for the success and failure of specific anticorruption policies and their relation to a country’s image (of itself or as construed from outside) as being more or less corrupt. It is precisely this scholarly lacuna that the present volume intends to begin to fill. A wide range of historical contexts are addressed, ranging from the ancient to the modern period, with specific insights for policy makers offered throughout.

In turn-of-the-century Vienna, Karl Kraus created a bold new style of media criticism, penning incisive satires that elicited both admiration and outrage. Kraus' spectacularly hostile critiques often focused on his fellow Jewish journalists, which brought him a reputation as the quintessential self-hating Jew. This book overturns this view with unprecedented force and sophistication, showing how Kraus' criticisms form the center of a radical model of German-Jewish self-fashioning, and how that model developed in concert with Kraus' modernist journalistic style. It situates Kraus' writings in the context of fin-de-siècle German-Jewish intellectual society. The author argues that rather than stemming from anti-Semitism, Kraus' attacks constituted an innovative critique of mainstream German-Jewish strategies for assimilation. Marshalling three of the most daring German-Jewish authors—Kafka, Scholem, and Benjamin—he explains their admiration for Kraus' project and demonstrates his influence on their own notions of cultural authenticity.

Slavery appears as a figurative construct in countless cultural and historical contexts, especially during the English revolution of the mid-seventeenth century, and again in the American and French revolutions, when radical pamphleteers and theorists repeatedly represented their treatment as a form of political slavery. What, if anything, does this figurative, political slavery have to do with transatlantic slavery? This book explores connections between political and chattel slavery by excavating the tradition of Western political thought that justifies actively opposing tyranny. Political slavery, whether civil or national, is, it shows, frequently paired with its antagonist, political tyranny. The book tackles political slavery's discursive complexity, engaging Eurocolonialism, political philosophy, and literary studies, areas of study too often kept apart. The author proceeds through analyses not only of texts that are canonical in political thought—by Aristotle, Cicero, Hobbes, and Locke—but also of literary works by Buchanan, Montaigne, and Milton, together with a variety of colonialist and political writings. She argues that “antityranny discourse”—originating in democratic Athens, adopted by republican Rome, and revived in early modern Western Europe—provided members of a “free” community with a means of protesting a threatened reduction of privileges, or of consolidating a collective, political identity. Its semantic complexity, however, also enabled it to legitimize racialized enslavement and imperial expansion. Throughout the book, the author demonstrates how principles relating to political slavery and tyranny are bound up with a Roman jurisprudential doctrine that sanctions the power of life and death held by the slaveholder.

This book is a study of linguistics and its neighboring disciplines--psychology, logic, and philosophy--from ca. 1840 up until 1940 and the outbreak of World War II, that aims to give the reader an entirely new sense of where these disciplines came from and what their impact has been on the way we think about language and thought today. The central questions studied concern the nature of continuity and rupture, both in the world of ideas and in the political, social, and historical world in which we live. The over-arching vision that informs the book assumes that we are all part of an ongoing conversation on the nature of mind and thought that was carried out in many geographical and disciplinary venues throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries--and how the vast majority of researchers in these mind sciences are oblivious as to where the ideas that they use came from. The field of linguistics lies at the center of this account because the study of language has been at the crossroads of psychology, philosophy, and logic throughout the 100-year period covered by the book. Linguistics has emerged in a radically changed form, with little memory of its earlier concern for philology and for principles of proper grammar, and a pride in being the most scientific of the social sciences. It is the history of those who have shaped the field of linguistics, and how the larger social and intellectual forces have led the discipline to the form that it takes today.

The Bhagavadgita has lent itself to several readings to defend or contest various views on life, morality, and metaphysics. It has played an important role in the formation of nationalist discourse in India. The book examines the ways in which the Gita became the central terrain of nationalist contestation, and the diverse ethico-moral mappings of the Indian nation. It also discusses issues such as the relation between the nation and the masses, renunciation and engagement with the world, the ideas of equality, freedom, and common good, in the context of a nationalist discourse. It argues that the commentaries on this timeless text opened up several possible understandings without necessarily eliminating one another. The different applications of the Bhagavadgita in the nationalist discourse can be seen in the works of B.R. Ambedkar, Swami Vivekananda, and Mahatma Gandhi.

This book provides an account of the emergence of the concept of territory in Western political thought. It does so primarily through a contextualised reading of the texts of that tradition with one key question: what is the relation between place and power? It is therefore historical in its execution, philosophical in its interrogation of texts, and political and geographical in its significance. Taking a broad historical period—Ancient Greece to the seventeenth century—it traces the relation between politics and place in a range of different texts and contexts. This historical period looks at the key moments that led to the formation of our modern concepts. The book shows in detail how elements from classical, medieval and renaissance thought differ from our own time, and yet how they came together, were reread in new situations, and were transformed to give the idea of territory we have today. It addresses a range of historical, political, and literary texts and practices, as well as a number of key players—historians, poets, philosophers, theologians, and secular political theorists—and in doing so sheds new light on the way the world came to be ordered and how the earth’s surface is divided, controlled, and administered.

Examining the development of a secular, purely material conception of human beings in the early Enlightenment, this book provides a fresh perspective on the intellectual culture of this period, and challenges certain influential interpretations of irreligious thought and the ‘Radical Enlightenment’. Beginning with the debate on the soul in England, in which political and religious concerns were intertwined, and ending with the eruption of materialism onto the public stage in mid 18th‐century France, this book looks at attempts to explain how the material brain thinks without the need for an immaterial and immortal soul. It shows how this current of thinking fed into the later 18th‐century ‘Natural History of Man’, the earlier roots of which have generally been ignored. Although much attention has been paid to the atheistic French materialists, their link to the preceding period has been studied only partially, and the current interest in what is called the ‘Radical Enlightenment’ has helped to obscure rather than enlighten this history. By bringing out the importance of both Protestant theological debates and medical thinking in England, and by following the different debates on the soul in Holland and France, this book shows that attempts to find a single coherent strand of radical irreligious thought running through the early Enlightenment, coming to fruition in the second half of the 18th century, ignore the multiple currents which composed Enlightenment thinking.

In 1842, the German poet, Henrich Heine, wrote that the bourgeoisie, ‘obsessed by a nightmare apprehension of disaster’ and ‘an instinctive dread of communism’, were driven against their better instincts into tolerating absolutist government. Theirs was a ‘politics … motivated by fear’. Over the next 150 years, the middle classes were repeatedly accused by radicals of betraying liberty for fear of ‘red revolution’. The failure of the revolutions of 1848, conservative nationalism from the 1860s, fascist victories in the first half of the twentieth‐century, and repression of national liberation movements during the Cold War — these fateful disasters were all explained by the bourgeoisie’s fear of the masses. For their part, conservatives insisted that demagogues and fanatics exploited the desperation of the poor to subvert liberal revolutions, leading to anarchy and tyranny. Only evolutionary reform was enduring. From the 1970s, however, liberal revolution revived on an unprecedented scale. With the collapse of Communism, bourgeois liberty once again became a crusading, force, but now on a global scale. In the twenty-first century, the armed forces of the United States, Britain and NATO became instruments of ‘regime change’, seeking to destroy dictatorship and build free‐market democracies. President George W. Bush called the invasion of Iraq in 2003 a ‘watershed event in the global democratic revolution’. This was an extraordinary turn‐around, with the middle classes now hailed as the truly universal class which, in emancipating itself, emancipates all society. The debacle in Iraq, and the Great Recession from 2008, revealed all too clearly that hubris still invited nemesis.This book examines this remarkable story, and the fierce debates it occasioned. It takes in a span from the seventeenth century to the twenty‐first, covering a wide range of countries and thinkers.

Before World War I there existed an intellectual turmoil in Britain as great as any in Germany, France, or Russia, as the debates over Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche and eugenics in the context of early modernism reveal. With the rise of fascism after 1918, these debates became more ideologically driven, with science and vitalist philosophy being hailed in some quarters as saviours from bourgeois decadence, vituperated in others as heralding the onset of barbarism. This book looks at several of the leading Nietzscheans and eugenicists, and challenges the long-cherished belief that British intellectuals were fundamentally uninterested in race. The result is a study of radical ideas that are conventionally written out of histories of the politics and culture of the period.

In this re-examination of the notion of cannibalism, the author offers the argument that cannibalism is mostly “cannibal talk,” a discourse on the Other engaged in by both indigenous peoples and colonial intruders which results in sometimes funny and sometimes deadly cultural misunderstandings. Turning to Polynesian societies in the early periods of European contact and colonization, the author deconstructs Western eyewitness accounts, carefully examining their origins and treating them as a species of fiction writing and seamen's yarns. He argues that cannibalism is less a social or cultural fact than a mythic representation of European writing that reflects much more the realities of European societies and their fascination with the practice of cannibalism. And while very limited forms of cannibalism might have occurred in Polynesian societies, they were largely in connection with human sacrifice and carried out by a select community in well-defined sacramental rituals. This book considers how the colonial intrusion produced a complex self-fulfilling prophecy whereby the fantasy of cannibalism became a reality, as natives on occasion began to eat both Europeans and their own enemies in acts of “conspicuous anthropophagy.”

The Chattering Mind shows how a characteristically unproblematic form of modern communication—everyday talk—became a communication problem in itself, notably one in need of careful conceptual commentary and now, in the digital age, ongoing technological support. Part One focuses on Søren Kierkegaard’s inaugural theory of “chatter,” paying special attention to the concept’s literary and philosophical origins, its early entanglement with modern democratic culture, and its corresponding annex of mid-nineteenth-century religious discourse. Part Two explores Martin Heidegger’s subsequent work on “idle talk” and several related terms, notably “babble,” “scribbling,” and “everyday discourse.” It shows how his development of these terms in the early-1920s not only served as a biting social critique of the university system in which he was struggling to secure a professorship, but also allowed him to elaborate a theory of discourse that would eventually culminate in the existential analytic of Being and Time. Part Three considers Jacques Lacan’s elusive notion of “empty speech” alongside its linguistic counter-possibility, “full speech,” reading both terms against the backdrop of his radical postwar return to the founding moment of psychoanalytic theory and technique: Freud’s iconic 1895 dream of Irma’s injection. By way of conclusion, The Chattering Mind suggests that the conceptual history of everyday talk which stretches from Kierkegaard’s notion of chatter to Heidegger’s theory of idle talk to Lacan’s treatment of empty speech also extends into our digital present, where small talk on various social media platforms has now become the basis for big data in the hands of tech-savvy entrepreneurs.