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  1.  3
    On Indexing: The Birth and Early Development of an Idea.Giancarlo Abbamonte & Craig Kallendorf - 2023 - Journal of the History of Ideas 84 (3):465-486.
    Incorporating techniques from book history into traditional intellectual history, this article traces the effective origin of indexing to the early printed editions of two lexicographical works, Lorenzo Valla's Elegantie and Niccolò Perotti's Cornu copiae, and then follows its development through the editions of the Roman poet Virgil published between 1500 and 1800. Indexing practices turn out to be tied to how books were read, with a new way of consuming books, which is labeled "transverse reading," emerging during this period.
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  2.  2
    Portable Scholasticism? The Intellectual Horizons of Gervase of Tilbury.Philippa Byrne - 2023 - Journal of the History of Ideas 84 (3):441-464.
    Abstract:The career of Gervase of Tilbury (c.1150–1220) opens a window into the complexity of the late twelfth-century intellectual world. Often dismissed as a mere compiler, Gervase was a scholastic thinker outside the schools who adapted complex theological arguments for an English prince, a Sicilian king, and a German emperor. His writing reveals the "portability" of scholastic thought. It also demonstrates how scholastic authors were molded by their experiences of royal courts. Gervase's time in the Norman Sicilian kingdom shaped his attitude (...)
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  3.  4
    Astronomical Chronology, the Jesuit China Mission, and Enlightenment History.Gianamar Giovannetti-Singh - 2023 - Journal of the History of Ideas 84 (3):487-510.
    Abstract:This article examines the use of astronomical chronology in Jesuit and secular works of history between the mid-seventeenth and mid-eighteenth centuries. It suggests that the highly visible adoption of astronomical records in historical scholarship in Enlightenment Europe by Nicolas Fréret and Voltaire was entangled with debates about Chinese chronology, translated by Jesuit missionaries. The article argues that the missionary Martino Martini's experience of the Manchu conquest of China was crucial in shaping his conception of history as a discipline. Political events (...)
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  4.  2
    The Wise Adviser Trap: Catastrophic Decision-Making in Herodotus and Thucydides.Emma Lunbeck & Robert Stone - 2023 - Journal of the History of Ideas 84 (3):417-439.
    Abstract:This paper reads parallel scenes in Herodotus and Thucydides to find a shared emphasis on flawed deliberation as the cause of catastrophic defeats for imperial powers. Both texts question the foresight and rhetorical strategies of self-styled wise advisers who ironically advance the very decisions they seek to forestall. Yet both authors also suggest that better strategies of advice could have altered the outcome. In contrast with those who read Herodotus and Thucydides as fatalists showing the futility of wise counsel in (...)
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  5.  19
    Hannah Arendt among the Cold War Liberals.Samuel Moyn - 2023 - Journal of the History of Ideas 84 (3):533-558.
    Abstract:Hannah Arendt wasn't a liberal, she repeatedly declared. Yet in a series of ways she was a fellow traveler of Cold War liberals. And caught up as she also was in neo-imperial and racist entanglements that go entirely unmentioned in promotional accounts of Cold War liberalism and have barely begun to be challenged even today, she helps cast their thought in relief. Yet there is a proviso. From another, exceptional, and unique perspective—that of their Middle Eastern politics—Cold War liberals did (...)
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  6.  7
    Art as Critical Experience in Theodor W. Adorno and John Dewey.Athanassia Williamson - 2023 - Journal of the History of Ideas 84 (3):511-532.
    Abstract:The idea of risk, of the willingness to be exposed to the possibility of total failure, is a core value of Adorno's philosophical and aesthetic modernism. This willingness to be exposed to risk is also a quality that Adorno associates most strongly, in aesthetics, with Deweyan pragmatism. Against tendencies to assume an irreconcilability of critical theory and pragmatism, this essay ventures that an appreciation of Adorno's acknowledgement of Dewey in his Aesthetic Theory would mean considering that it is in Dewey (...)
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  7.  3
    The Accountants of Nineveh: Exile Jews and Capitalism in British Imperial Thinking.Zvi Ben-Dor Benite - 2023 - Journal of the History of Ideas 84 (2):233-261.
    Abstract:This essay presents and discusses how James Rennel (1742–1830), a royal cartographer in eighteenth-century Bengal and father of British Modern Geography, presented and discussed the biblical concept of "exile" as a "practice" for the benefit of the empire. Following Rennell's readings in Biblical and Classical texts, this essay shows how Rennell intervened in contemporary European debates about Jews and trade.
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  8.  2
    Linguistic Diplomacy: Roman Jakobson between East and West, 1956–68.Michael Brinley - 2023 - Journal of the History of Ideas 84 (2):337-363.
    Abstract:Roman Jakobson remains a crucial figure in the history of linguistics and literary criticism. This paper explores how a mid-twentieth-century intellectual curated his own legacy across Cold War divides. Thinking with Jakobson's own formulation of communication functions, this paper argues for a connection between the success of particular structuralist ideas in academic contexts and the tactical efforts of individual scholars embedded in scholarly institutions. Considered in this light, investigating Roman Jakobson's late career during the period known as the Thaw can (...)
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  9.  1
    Anarchism in One Country: Diego Abad de Santillán and the Invention of Participatory National Economic Planning in Interwar Anarchism.Robert Christl - 2023 - Journal of the History of Ideas 84 (2):313-336.
    Abstract:This article examines the transformation that occurred in anarchist political economy during the interwar period by tracing the intellectual trajectory of Diego Abad de Santillán, an important labor organizer and policymaker during the Spanish Revolution and Civil War (1936–39). Representative of a broader intellectual struggle within anarchism, Abad de Santillán moved away from nineteenth-century ideas about inaugurating anarchism through autonomous communes and gravitated toward participatory national economic planning. Uncovering this shift sheds light on the techniques of governance available to anarchists (...)
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  10.  6
    Mapping Atlantis: Olof Rudbeck and the Use of Maps in Early Modern Scholarship.Charlotta Forss - 2023 - Journal of the History of Ideas 84 (2):207-231.
    Abstract:This article merges the history of maps with new research on scholarship, showcasing how the use of maps significantly shaped early modern knowledge. More specifically, the article examines the scholarly practices of the seventeenth-century Swedish polymath Olof Rudbeck, who thought he had discovered Atlantis. The article identifies four areas of particular importance, highlighting how maps facilitated a conflation of history and geography for Rudbeck, how he tied information to geographical places through note-taking on maps, how access to maps shaped his (...)
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  11.  7
    Women's Reception of Kant, 1790–1810.Karen Green - 2023 - Journal of the History of Ideas 84 (2):263-285.
    Abstract:This article contributes to the re-evaluation of narratives in the history of ideas that have failed to consider women's writings. The laudatory assessment of Kant as a philosophical innovator promoted by Germaine de Staël is questioned and his moral epistemology examined in relation to that of Elise Reimarus, Catharine Cockburn, Catharine Macaulay, and Isabelle de Charrière. The moral and political philosophies of the first three, grounded in natural law, are used to undermine Staël's claim that Kant's moral philosophy offers a (...)
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  12.  1
    "A Primitive Kind of Superstition": The Idea of the Paranoid Style in Art, Psychiatry, and Politics.Nicolas Guilhot - 2023 - Journal of the History of Ideas 84 (2):365-390.
    Popularized by Richard Hofstadter, the notion of "paranoid style" is the most influential attempt at applying the category of paranoia to the study of politics. Yet, the success of this elegant formula conceals a complex history and a set of unarticulated assumptions about the connections between symbolic phenomena, psychopathological states, and politics. The article proceeds to recover these assumptions and suggests that the notion of "paranoid style" is ultimately indeterminate, making its application arbitrary and ideological.
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  13.  2
    The Romance of the Republic: Class Conflict and the Problem of Progress in Thomas Arnold's History of Rome (1838–42).Vicky Randall - 2023 - Journal of the History of Ideas 84 (2):287-311.
    Abstract:This article repositions Thomas Arnold as a major nineteenth-century historian through an analysis of his most important work, the History of Rome (1838–42). While scholars have focused primarily on Arnold's role as headmaster of Rugby School and Liberal Anglican theologian, I examine his historical contribution in the context of the Romantic movement. Building on the work of B. G. Niebuhr and Giambattista Vico, Arnold interpreted the contest between the patricians and plebeians at Rome as emblematic of a universal class struggle, (...)
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  14.  2
    The Cambridge Greek Lexicon: An Essay-Review.Christopher Stray - 2023 - Journal of the History of Ideas 84 (2):391-408.
    Abstract:This is an essay-review of The Cambridge Greek Lexicon.
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  15.  3
    How to Do Things with Words: Antifascism as a Differentially Mobilizing Ideology, from the Popular Front to the Black Power Movement.Giuliana Chamedes - 2023 - Journal of the History of Ideas 84 (1):127-155.
    This article argues that two distinctive varieties of antifascism took shape in the 1930s and endured through the late 1970s. These two varieties—Popular Front antifascism and anti-imperial antifascism—were in dialogue but in opposition to one another, and both were transnational mobilizing ideologies. Investigating these two antifascist movements allows us to place Europe in the wider world and demonstrate how anti-imperial activists of color simultaneously “provincialized” Europe and situated it within a global framework. The effort also highlights the need to rethink (...)
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  16.  9
    The Remnants of Giorgio Agamben: The Omnibus Homo Sacer upon Its Completion.Udi Greenberg - 2023 - Journal of the History of Ideas 84 (1):179-196.
    Abstract:This essay reviews Giorgio Agamben’s Omnibus Homo Sacer, a monumental project of nine books that was recently completed after two decades. Alongside outlining the project’s key claims, the essay reflects on its uneven reception: it seeks to explain why Agamben’s claims on politics, law, and violence received enormous attention, while his writings on economics and religion were largely ignored. The essay in particular discusses the values and limits of Agamben’s work for historians.
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  17.  5
    Occupy the Commonplaces: Machiavelli and the Aristotelian Tradition of the Topics.Abram Kaplan - 2023 - Journal of the History of Ideas 84 (1):29-50.
    Abstract:Anticipating sixteenth-century trends in vernacular Aristotelianism, Machiavelli concealed his theoretical engagement with Aristotle behind a veil of examples. Scholars have established that in The Prince, Machiavelli employed topical dialectic to update ancient maxims for the modern era. I show how he used dialectic to occupy and transform Aristotelian commonplaces that justified Renaissance philosophers’ appeal to the ideal in political reasoning. These occupations reveal Machiavelli’s preference for particulars over generalities as a considered judgment about the suitability of philosophy for popular readers. (...)
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  18.  11
    Max Weber, the Rise of the Polis, and the “Hoplite Revolution” Theory.Roel Konijnendijk & Fernando Echeverría - 2023 - Journal of the History of Ideas 84 (1):103-125.
    Abstract:With his essay “Agrarverhältnisse im Altertum,” Max Weber pushed the scholarly narrative of the rise of the Ancient Greek polis closer to what was to become the paradigm of the twentieth century: that the unique political development of Greece followed from the rise of a new kind of warrior, the hoplite. But the scholars who would enshrine this “hoplite revolution” theory seem to have been ignorant of Weber. His prescient work is never cited on this subject. This article explores the (...)
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  19.  3
    Knowing Old Age in the Renaissance: Medicine, Poetry, and Spirituality in Ulisse Aldrovandi’s Encyclopedia of Old Age.Hannah Marcus - 2023 - Journal of the History of Ideas 84 (1):51-75.
    Abstract:Over more than thirty years the Bolognese botanist, natural historian, and physician Ulisse Aldrovandi compiled his Pandechion epistemonicon—a manuscript encyclopedia composed of pasted note slips drawn from books he was reading. This article examines the 580 slips that comprise Aldrovandi’s Pandechion entry on old age. The entry allows us to examine how an early modern physician and his intellectual community approached old age as an epistemological problem with medical, poetic, and spiritual dimensions. Aldrovandi’s engagement with old age in the Pandechion (...)
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  20.  2
    Historians and Programmers in the 1970s: Formal Languages, the Writing of History, and Ideas of Science.Pedro Cristovão dos Santos - 2023 - Journal of the History of Ideas 84 (1):157-177.
    Abstract:This article analyzes some of the issues raised by historians after turning to computers for historical research in the 1960s and 1970s. The main point is to enrich this context by looking into the debates computer programmers were having in their own field at the same time. In particular, the use of formal languages to enhance the theoretical basis of both practices is discussed. A second point, the debates in programming, is also highlighted: as historians were turning to computer programming, (...)
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  21. Rome as “Part of the Heavens”? Leon Battista Alberti’s Descriptio urbis Romae (ca. 1450) and Ptolemy’s Almagest.Maren Elisabeth Schwab - 2023 - Journal of the History of Ideas 84 (1):1-27.
    Abstract:In his Descriptio urbis Romae, Leon Battista Alberti provides step-by-step instructions for how to draw the outlines of Rome. The image transmitted through Alberti’s text is so accurate that it is justly described as the first “map” of Rome after the Forma Urbis (3rd c. CE). Alberti's idea was sparked by the renewed reading of the works of Claudius Ptolemy: the Geography, but also—as I argue for the first time—the Almagest. I show how this image blends the ways that terrestrial (...)
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  22.  2
    The Abbé d’Aubignac’s Homer and the Culture of the Street in Seventeenth-Century Paris.William Theiss - 2023 - Journal of the History of Ideas 84 (1):77-102.
    Abstract:This article interprets the abbé d’Aubignac’s 1715 Conjectures académiques, ou, Dissertation sur l’Iliade—the first text to posit the non-existence of Homer—in light of the Parisian literary underground of the mid-seventeenth century. It shows that the city’s nascent street culture influenced regimes of authorship and, ultimately, classical scholarship on Homer. In general, it argues for a history of scholarship in dialogue with the architecture of the cities where it took place.
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