{"title":"Assessing Ethical Culture in Germany: Friedrich Albert Lange, Felix Adler-and Hermann Cohen.","authors":"Myriam Bienenstock","doi":"10.1353/jhi.2025.a959033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jhi.2025.a959033","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>A German Society for Ethical Culture, modeled on the Ethical Culture Society that Felix Adler had created in New York in 1876, was founded in Berlin in 1892, winning the support of prominent figures, among them Hermann Cohen. However, Cohen withdrew his support in the first years of the 20th century; he contended that universalistic ethical convictions must be defended politically by means of laws, otherwise they risk becoming marginalized and relapsing into the very \"confessionalism\" of the sectarian, \"religious\" communities they purport to eradicate. His argument remains particularly relevant in the realm of education.</p>","PeriodicalId":47274,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS","volume":"86 2","pages":"237-261"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144044755","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Kant on Moral Education and the Origins of Humanity.","authors":"Olga Lenczewska","doi":"10.1353/jhi.2025.a959032","DOIUrl":"10.1353/jhi.2025.a959032","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Kant's views on human history have been widely studied, but commentators have rarely discussed his speculative account of humanity's origins, assuming that it does not neatly fit into his critical philosophy. My paper challenges this assumption by defending two claims. First, Kant's major essay on this topic, \"Conjectural Beginning of Human History,\" is a key component of his teleological understanding of human history and should be incorporated into the study of his critical philosophy. Second, the story of humanity's origins informs Kant's prescriptions for our moral education by better explaining individual development and providing guidelines for it.</p>","PeriodicalId":47274,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS","volume":"86 2","pages":"217-235"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144030219","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Teaching and Being Taught: Melanchthon's Editions of the Greek Fathers and His Early Theological Thinking.","authors":"Marta Quatrale","doi":"10.1353/jhi.2025.a959040","DOIUrl":"10.1353/jhi.2025.a959040","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The first three years of Melanchthon's stay in Wittenberg (1518-1521) are marked by the \"hybrid\" nature of his figure. Until the publication of his Loci communes, he was enrolled as a theology student. Meanwhile, he worked as professor of ancient Greek. In these years, he also moved from an \"Erasmian\" to a \"Lutheran\" position. Did his relentless work on the Greek Fathers in a firmly Augustinian environment play a role in shaping Melanchthon's interpretation of Luther's standpoint? To what extent did this investigation affect the incipient theological thinking of the praeceptor Germaniae as we know it?</p>","PeriodicalId":47274,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS","volume":"86 2","pages":"367-380"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144040766","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Abstract King: Hellenistic Royal Wills and the Immortal State.","authors":"Luuk de Boer","doi":"10.1353/jhi.2025.a966901","DOIUrl":"10.1353/jhi.2025.a966901","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article treats the corpus of Hellenistic Royal Wills and argues that the regal testament helps conceive of a State that is not coterminous with the ruler but that is, instead, an entity that keeps on living when the king dies. The article makes this claim by drawing upon legal material, particularly the Roman law of inheritance and the Hellenistic sources on royal and other public wills. Tracing the ability of the testament to secure continuity, the article uncovers a quasi-corporation engendered by the public use of the will and offers a new perspective on the idea of the State.</p>","PeriodicalId":47274,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS","volume":"86 3","pages":"411-443"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144776538","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Max Weber and the Re-Enchantment of Charisma.","authors":"Chunjie Zhang","doi":"10.1353/jhi.2025.a949931","DOIUrl":"10.1353/jhi.2025.a949931","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article traces the emergence and application of Max Weber's influential concept of charisma in his \"Confucianism and Taoism\" (1920) and \"Politics as a Vocation\" (1919), two texts that have not received much attention in the discussion of charisma. Through these texts, we learn to appreciate Weber's engagement with classical Chinese philosophy and the global composition of this key idea in the twentieth century.</p>","PeriodicalId":47274,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS","volume":"86 1","pages":"169-192"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143014063","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"In the Shadow of Godlessness: Soviet Atheists, Proletarian Freethinkers, and the Fate of Secularism in Interwar Europe.","authors":"Victoria Smolkin, Daniel Peris","doi":"10.1353/jhi.2025.a966906","DOIUrl":"10.1353/jhi.2025.a966906","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This essay examines how the transnational interactions of two secularist organizations, the International of Proletarian Freethinkers (IPF) and the Soviet League of Militant Godless (League), and their social contexts, shaped the meaning, direction, and fate, of secularism in interwar Europe. It shows that while Soviet atheism played a central role in European secularism, its actual reach and influence abroad was indirect and, ultimately, limited. It also argues that Soviet atheism's most significant impact was the consolidation of an anti-secularist alliance against \"Godless Communism\" that cast a shadow long after the decline of atheism in the Soviet Union itself.</p>","PeriodicalId":47274,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS","volume":"86 3","pages":"569-599"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144776535","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Settler Colonial Ideal in Nineteenth-Century France: From Revolutionary Shipwreck to Settler Colonial Shores.","authors":"Charlotte Ann Legg","doi":"10.1353/jhi.2025.a949929","DOIUrl":"10.1353/jhi.2025.a949929","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article analyzes the published testimonies of French shipwreck survivors to trace the emergence of a settler colonial ideal in nineteenth-century France. Emerging from the encounters of French survivors with the men of the Anglo-World, this ideal encouraged compassionate, paternalist authority as a solution to the ongoing conflict of paternal despotism and disorderly fraternal freedom in France. The community of sentiment imagined in shipwreck testimonies was gendered and racialized, cultivating white compassion across colonial empires. These transimperial affective ties allowed the settler colonial ideal to persist in the early twentieth century, despite the abandonment of further projects for French settlement.</p>","PeriodicalId":47274,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS","volume":"86 1","pages":"109-139"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143014095","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"A Real WEA Tutor\": G. D. H. Cole, Socialist Democracy, and the Politics of Persona.","authors":"Sophie Scott-Brown","doi":"10.1353/jhi.2025.a966907","DOIUrl":"10.1353/jhi.2025.a966907","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>G. D. H. Cole is best known as a disillusioned theorist of guild socialism, but this article argues his work here must be read in tandem with his ideas of workers' education. It focuses on his construction of the WEA tutor who, as a pedagogical and political persona, embodied and transmitted the qualities needed to sustain a socialist democracy. In this way, Cole reconciled commitments to pluralism and individuality with a practical political program. Although dismissed as naive in the 1930s, this persona proved influential for early New Left thinkers seeking alternatives to the pessimism of the Cold War liberal critique.</p>","PeriodicalId":47274,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS","volume":"86 3","pages":"601-625"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144776532","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Rhetoric, Ambivalence, and Dissension in Renaissance Catholic Europe During the Sixteenth Century.","authors":"Kaarlo Havu","doi":"10.1353/jhi.2025.a966902","DOIUrl":"10.1353/jhi.2025.a966902","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In contrast to the prevalent interpretation that understands Renaissance rhetoric as an inherently ethical practice, this article presents three case studies-Erasmian rhetoric, Jesuit rhetoric, and French discussions during the Wars of Religion-in which rhetoric was interpreted as an ambivalent power. In the aftermath of the Reformation, all these traditions not only emphasized rhetoric as an ambivalent force with potential to create both discord and concord, but adjusted their understanding of the specificities of rhetoric-its scope and relationship to other arts-accordingly. The article also suggests that seventeenth-century anti-rhetorical discourse draws on this tradition.</p>","PeriodicalId":47274,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS","volume":"86 3","pages":"445-472"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144776537","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"J. G. A. Pocock: A Life in Letters.","authors":"Quentin Skinner","doi":"10.1353/jhi.2025.a949925","DOIUrl":"10.1353/jhi.2025.a949925","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>A memoir of J. G. A. Pocock derived from his correspondence with Quentin Skinner between 1965 and 2020. The letters follow the development of Pocock's career from his early years in New Zealand to his move to the United States in 1966 and his long period of teaching at Johns Hopkins University. Among the topics covered are the gestation and publication of Pocock's most famous book, The Machiavellian Moment, and the evolution of his six-volume study of Gibbon's history, Barbarism and Religion. Much new light is also cast on Pocock's personality, family life, relations with colleagues, and political beliefs.</p>","PeriodicalId":47274,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS","volume":"86 1","pages":"1-19"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143014035","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}