The JHI’s editorial board is delighted to announce the appointment of Adom Getachew, Professor of Political Science and Race, Diaspora and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago, to join Martin J. Burke (CUNY Grad Center, History), Stefanos Geroulanos (NYU, History), Ann Moyer (Univ. of Pennsylvania, History), Sophie Smith (University of Oxford, Politics), and Don J. Wyatt (Middlebury College, History) as Executive Editors of the journal. The board is tremendously grateful to Manan Ahmed (Columbia University, History) for his service as an Executive Editor since 2021 ..read more

The Journal of the History of Ideas awards the Selma V. Forkosch Prize ($750) for the best article published in the journal each year. The winner of the JHI‘s Selma V. Forkosch Prize for the best article published in 2023 is Abram Kaplan for “Occupy the Commonplaces: Machiavelli and the Aristotelian Tradition of the Topics” (volume 84, no. 1, pp. 29–50). The judging committee provides this statement about the article: Abram Kaplan’s essay can well be characterized by his own description of Machiavelli’s approach to the erudite tradition of anci ..read more

The latest issue of the Journal of the History of Ideas (volume 85, issue 2, April 2024) is now live on Project MUSE. Over the coming weeks, we will publish short interviews with some of the authors featured in this issue about the historical and historiographical context of their respective essays. Look out for these conversations under the rubric Broadly Speaking. Table of Contents April 2024 Prisoner, Sailor, Soldier, Spy: Hobbes on Coercion and ConsentDaniel Luban  The Speech without Doors: A Genre, 1627–1769Ruby Lowe  Sophie de Grouchy’s Political Thought in the L ..read more

by Joshua Madrid Religious endorsements of state sanctioned violence are common phenomena in modern warfare. For example, on 16 September 1939, the Catholic bishops of England and Wales issued a statement affirming their unilateral support to the British Government in the Second World War. Writing on behalf of the bishops, Cardinal Arthur Hinsley declared, ‘We, the Catholic Hierarchy of England and Wales, wish to urge upon all the faithful at this time of national trial and endeavour, the duty of loyal obedience to His Majesty the King, and of willing co-operation in every form of National Ser ..read more

The Journal of the History of Ideas and the JHI Blog invite graduate students from all institutions, disciplines, and stages of their degree to propose papers for our sixth-annual Graduate Student Symposium to be held via videoconference on Saturday, 28 September 2024. The event aims to convene a diverse group of graduate students from different disciplines working on a variety of topics, periods, genres, and regions. The theme for this year’s symposium is “The Uses and Abuses of History.” The 2024 symposium will explore how knowledge about the past has been used or abused by intellectuals, gr ..read more

by Gray Black Mid-summer’s musk had been made corpulent by the immense humidity of the previous rains. I, too, felt heavy. With June’s hot breath on the back of my neck, I wandered towards the woods. The afternoon’s storm had proved atmospheric for some avocational reading. Needing something a bit more meliorist, I selected an article about LEAL, an animal rights organization fighting for the protection of an incriminated bear. Contextually, the bear—denominated “JJ4”—is a member of a bear family deracinated from their Slovenian biome by the EU-funded program, Life Ursus, to repopulate the woo ..read more

by Faridah Zaman When the Grand National Assembly of Turkey deposed Sultan-Caliph Mehmed VI in 1922, they deposed the last figure to hold the dual office of Sultan-Caliph of the Ottoman Empire, a vast multi-ethnic and multi-confessional empire that had, at its greatest extent, stretched from North Africa through southern and eastern Europe, to the Middle East. The spiritual authority of the Caliph, nominally head of the global (Sunni) Muslim community, stretched even further. Mehmed VI’s deposition was followed by the abolition of the office of the sultanate. In his place, a purely spiritual c ..read more

by Manar Ellethy “I’m inspired by mostly women. Maybe because of my grandmother, and my mother, and the women in my life. Who is that said, ‘I’ve known rivers,’ well, I’ve known women?” ― Amina Baraka In the summer of 1968, Amina Baraka, a poet, artist, activist, and community organizer in Newark, New Jersey, joined forces with her husband, Amiri Baraka, to create a short documentary film titled The New Ark. While The New Ark ostensibly presents a patriarchal narrative, a closer look reveals a story of Black nationalist women working hard to break that narrative from within. Doing so required ..read more

by Martina Garategaray During the seventies and the eighties of the past century, Social Democracy, born and brewed in Europe, went beyond frontiers and settled in Latin America. As Bernd Rother and Fernando Pedrosa have argued, there was a mutual interest in these connections. On one hand, in the context of the Cold War and the bipolar world, Europe showed interest in what was happening in Latin America and the Caribbean with their struggle for democracy and human rights. Besides, the United States foreign policy towards Cuba and Vietnam, the support to the putsch against Allende in Chile, an ..read more

by Facundo Rocca The destruction of the communatés des métiers, the corporations which for centuries organized the work, life and exchange of trades in the kingdom of France, was undoubtedly a turning point in modern European history. Their dismantlement, which was first unsuccessfully attempted by Louis XVI’s minister Turgot in 1776, was a key element in the abolition of the feudal order during the French Revolution, and was later reinforced with the application of the Le Chapelier law in 1791, which fully banned any association or gathering in the workplace. The end of corporations seemingly ..read more