Bücher der Reihe Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History

This book traces this German idea of freedom from the late Enlightenment through the early twentieth century. McGrath shows how German intellectual and artists invoked the ancient Greeks in order to inspire Germans to cultural renewal and to enrich their understanding of freedom as something deeper and more urgent that political life could offer.

Each chapter offers a novel interpretation of key topics, such as the Christian usury campaign, the commercial revolution, and gift economy / profit economy, to demonstrate how the revision of Jewish history leads to new insights in European history.

Pragmatist philosopher William James has long been deemed a dubious guide to ethical reasoning. This book overturns such thinking, demonstrating the coherence of James's efforts to develop a flexible but rigorous framework for individuals and societies seeking freedom, meaning, and justice in a world of interdependence, uncertainty, and change.

Some of the first figures the Nazis conscripted in their rise to power were rhetoricians devoted to popularizing the German vocabulary of Leben (life). This fascinating study reexamines this movement through one of its most prominent exponents, Ludwig Klages, revealing the philosophical-cultural crises and political volatility of the Weimar era.

This book examines British scientific and antiquarian travels in the "North," circa 1790-1830. British perceptions, representations and imaginings of the North are considered part of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century processes of British self-fashioning as a Northern nation, and key in unifying the expanding North Atlantic empire.

Music has been neglected by imperial historians, but this book shows that music is an essential aspect of identity formation and cross-cultural exchange. It explores the ways in which rational, moral, and aesthetic motives underlying the institutionalization of "classical" music converged and diverged in Britain and India from 1880-1940.

In most contemporary historical writing the picture of modern life in Habsburg Central Europe is a gloomy story of the failure of rationalism and the rise of protofascist movements. This book tells a different story, focusing on the Czech writers and artists distinguished by their optimistic view of the world in the years before WWI.

The essays in this volume seek to confront some of the charged meeting points of European - especially German - and Jewish history. All, in one way or another, explore the entanglements, the intertwined moments of empathy and enmity, belonging and estrangement, creativity and destructiveness that occurred at these junctions.

The Scottish Enlightenment shaped a new conception of history as a gradual and universal progress from savagery to civil society. The Scottish Enlightenment's legacy for modernity emerges here as a two-faced Janus, an unresolved tension between universalism and hierarchy, progress and the limits of progress.

This book traces the profound influence that Russian literature, which was tied inseparably to the political victory of the Russian revolution, had on China during a period that saw the collapse of imperial rule and the rise of the Communist Party.

Alfred Weber was an important participant in the dialogue over the political and cultural crises of the late Empire and Weimar Republic. This study connects Weber's career to the social, political, intellectual, cultural, and institutional contexts of the period.

In Russia at the turn of the twentieth century, printed literature and performances - from celebrity narratives and opera fandom to revolutionary acts and political speeches - frequently articulated extreme emotional states and passionate belief.

This book explores the French Enlightenment's use of cross-cultural comparisons - particularly the figures of the Chinese mandarin and American and Polynesian savage - to praise of critique aspects of European society and to draw general conclusions regarding human nature, natural law, and the rise and decline of civilizations.

This book uncovers practices surrounding acts of collecting, surveying, and antiquarianism during British colonial rule in India. By examining these practices, this book traces the colonial conditions of the production of 'sources,' the forging of a new historical method, and the ascendance of positivist historiography in nineteenth-century India.

The book explores the hotly disputed process by which the census was created and developed and examines how a wide cast of characters, including statisticians, novelists, national and local officials, political and social reformers, and journalists responded to and used the idea of a census.

This study offers an intellectual biography of the philosopher, political thinker, and historian of ideas Sir Isaiah Berlin. It aims to provide the first historically contextualized monographic study of Berlin's formative years and identify different stages in his intellectual development, allowing a reappraisal of his theory of liberalism.

Religious Transactions in Colonial South India locates the "making" of Protestant identities in South India within several contesting discourses. It examines evolving attitudes to translation and translation practices in the Tamil literary and sacred landscapes initiated by early missionary translations of the Bible in Tamil.

This is the first transnational study of British, Norwegian, and Swedish engagement with the Antarctic. Rather than charting how Europeans unveiled the Antarctic, it uses the history of Antarctic activity as a window into the political and cultural worlds of twentieth-century Britain and Scandinavia.

Szefel investigates the use of poetry in addressing political reform at the turn of the twentieth century. It charts the work of poets and editors - many of whom were women and minorities - who created a network of organizations to nurture writers who addressed the problems wrought by Progressive-era capitalism.

A fresh perspective on the history of Russian liberalism through the life and work of Alexander Kunitsyn, a teacher and philosopher of natural law, whose academic and journalistic writings contributed to the dissemination of Western liberal thought among the Russian public.

This book advances a new interpretation of the timing and character of French (and more broadly European) liberalism, and contributes to the ongoing debate concerning the place of morality, sociability, and conceptions of the "self" in modern liberal thought.

This work is a study of the nature and origin of nationality and modern social ideals in the Middle East, particularly Egypt, in the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries.

While there is an growing body of work on space and place in many disciplines, less attention has been paid to how a spatial approach illuminates the societies and cultures of the past. Here, leading experts explore the uses of space in two respects: how space can be applied to the study of history, and how space was used at specific times.

This volume takes a decentered look at early modern empires and rejects the center/periphery divide. With an unconventional geographical set of cases, including the Holy Roman Empire, the Habsburg, Iberian, French and British empires, as well as China, contributors seize the spatial dynamics of the scientific enterprise.

The first survey in the English language of the history of naturalistic monism in the works of Haeckel, Spinoza, and others. Contributors demonstrate that, to a greater extent than previously shown, monism provided an essential epistemological framework for numerous religious, political and cultural movements between the 1840s and 1940s.

This volume engages a fundamental disciplinary question about this period in American history: how did the bourgeoisie consolidate their power and fashion themselves not simply as economic leaders but as cultural innovators and arbiters? It also explains how culture helped Americans form both a sense of shared identity and a sense of difference.

This volume gathers essays that focus on the worldliness of science, its inseparable engagement in the major institutional bases of social life: law, market, church, school, and nation.

This book challenges a common historical narrative, which portrays medieval Jews as moneylenders who filled an essential economic role in Europe. This book also documents why it is a myth for medieval Europe, and illuminates how changes in Jewish history change our understanding of European history.

A collection that focuses on the role of European law in colonial contexts and engages with recent treatments of this theme in known works written largely from within the framework of postcolonial studies, which implicitly discuss colonial deployments of European law and politics via the concept of ideology.