"Conceptualising the world: an exploration across disciplines." Global Intellectual History, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2

ABSTRACT Along with other printed items (such as journals, novels and textbooks), newspapers were instrumental in connecting different sectors of Chinese society in the early twentieth century, creating what Benedict Anderson calls ‘a homogeneous empty time’ for the Chinese. In this article, I will examine one commonly used strategy to increase readership – national disaster. As the late Qing government was confronting a series of crises (such as the palace coup d’état of 1898, the Boxer uprising of 1900, the death of Empress Dowager in 1908), newspaper publishers presented these crises as a continuing saga that revealed the doomed fate of their country. To show the effectiveness of this strategy, I focus on Zhengyi tongbao (1902–1908). Edited and published by Deng Shi (1877–1951), the newspaper was a hodgepodge of official documents, news columns, and political commentaries. What linked these different parts of the newspaper together was the urgency of national crisis. As I will show, Deng Shi was effective in using national disaster to attract readers’ attention. At one point, he even offered readers substantial discounts if they renewed their subscription ahead of time to avoid missing the new episodes of national disaster.

ABSTRACT This article argues that the role of the 1837–38 Canadian rebellions in early nineteenth-century British political thought has been under-appreciated. It shows that they were the occasion of major reconceptualizations of two important terms that would later become central to the political lexicon of modern Britain: ‘democracy’ and ‘nationality’. From the perspective of the Tories and Whigs who framed the rebellions in terms of ‘nationality’, the Canadian debate required reconfiguring previous uses of the word, in order to argue that some ‘nationalities’ were more worthy of respect than others, and that protecting ‘nationality’ could be compatible with membership of an imperial, multi-national state. Additionally, it also reinforced previous negative uses of ‘democracy’ by critics of the rebellions relying on familiar tropes inherited from the French Revolution. But the debate also showcased the quickly shifting Radical uses of both words. For the Radicals, who framed the Canadian crisis in terms of ‘democracy’, it provided a platform to deploy emerging Tocquevillian understandings of democracy in the North American context and reintroduce the word in British political discourse. Via the Durham report of 1839, it also established more civic-minded Radical redefinitions of ‘nationality’ as a core argument for British imperialist policy.

Early Modern Europe depended on Jesuit missionaries for information about China. The priests were the most learned interlocutors between the two continents, in large part because their strategy of ...

ABSTRACT Although Gandhi had rigorously identified himself as a ‘Sanātanī Hindū (traditional Hindu)’, his idea and practice of religious politics (i.e. satyāgraha) have inspired people across the world. Recent studies point out that Gandhi’s life-long experiments with ‘brahmacarya (sexual celibacy)’ were the key to understand Gandhi’s contextualized-universal idea of religious politics. This paper aims to examine the intellectual evolution of Gandhi’s concept of brahmacarya. Gandhi was a trilingual speaker in Gujarati, Hindi, and English, and no previous works have studied Gandhi’s concept of brahmacarya using primary materials in all three languages. In this paper, I will proffer a cross-linguistic exploration into the genealogy of Gandhi’s concept of brahmacarya. In so doing, I will highlight some of the professed ‘deep influence(s)’ on his life; I will assess how Śrīmad Rājcandra (a native Gujarati poet), Svāmī Vivekānanda (a Bengali intellectual and nationalist), and western progressive thinkers such as Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter, and John Woodroffe, ‘influenced’ Gandhi. As a result of these explorations, this paper concludes that Gandhi’s brahmacarya is best seen as a concept that entails multi-layered roots which transcend the epistemological boundaries between ‘Indian’, ‘imaginative’, and even the hybrid amalgam of ‘the (other) wests’.

ABSTRACT The Restoration remains an underserved era in the historiography of French political thought, particularly in scholarship focused on liberalism and representation. This article begins to remedy that deficit by reconstructing and contextualizing the views of a forgotten liberal theorist of representation, Pierre-François Flaugergues, who published two tracts on the subject in the electoral-reform controversies of 1820. Flaugergues is revealed to have been a thinker of force and originality, who advocated an electoral system anchored in class-based constituencies. Not only did Flaugergues ground his preferred representative arrangements in the first principles of moral psychology and natural right, but he linked his proposed scheme to a rich realm of values including deliberation, inclusivity, corporate agency, and stability. While Flaugergues's ideas of representation did not find much of a following in France, he can be understood as participating in a broader liberal tradition of thinking about the purpose and design of representative institutions.

ABSTRACT Although Cicero was the most revered and read classical figure in colonial America, his influence on the political thought of that era, specifically its most defining moment – the Constitutional Convention – has been underappreciated. But due to insights that recent scholarship on Cicero has provided, it is possible discern elements of uniquely Ciceronian strains of political thought alongside the more well-established Polybian ones in the debates at the Convention. This paper will argue that presence of Ciceronian constitutional thought at the Convention can be traced back to the founders’ early education as well as continued reading habits, of which Cicero's De Re Publica played a vital role. By proposing Ciceronian solutions to political issues, the founders advocated a unique form of republicanism which depended on the elites’ virtue, understood as their political wisdom, and the primacy of the elite-controlled Senate. Through virtue and the Senate so composed, the founders believed that they might harmonise differing class interests and establish a stable federal government.

In this ambitious work of literary history-cum-cultural criticism, Gunn states he will explore how the ‘spiritual imaginaries’ (1) of seventeenth-century American religion and eighteenth-century Am...

ABSTRACT My research explores the theoretical relevance of the Japanese intellectual historian Fujita Shōzō’s later concept of contemporary totalitarianism, the theoretical essence of which is captured by his concepts of ‘totalitarianism towards unruffled ease’ and ‘totalitarianism as market economy’. His conception of totalitarianism is clearly different from the concept as it is generally understood that his theoretical focus on totalitarian orientations can be seen particularly in his views of contemporary life and the market mechanism. Fujita essentially divides the semantic scope of contemporary totalitarianism into these two socio-political concepts, although he did not build a clear theoretical bridge between them. In this research I argue that Fujita’s concept of contemporary totalitarianism reveals totalitarian orientations in contemporary life under the dialectical social conditions involving the rationalised system of a market economy and the strong narcissistic impulse to satisfy unruffled ease, particularly through seeing twentieth-century society in continuity. Furthermore, I argue that this leads us to critically understand contemporary social and political phenomena, thereby bringing us self-criticism and self-reflection in socio-pathological terms.

ABSTRACT A populist turn in the argument for laissez-faire occurred between the mid-1970s and the early 1980s. The essay focuses on Milton Friedman, James Buchanan, the supply-side economists, and eulogists of free enterprise like Michael Novak. They reversed the standpoint of previous advocates of the minimal state, who had feared that the enfranchised poor majority would soak the rich, by arguing that the statist danger came in fact from the liberal elites, pressing on with the expansion of governmental functions against the will and interests of ordinary Americans. Such a shift complemented that occurring in the idiom of the political Right since the 1960s. The economic populism of Friedman and Buchanan, in particular, derived from a blend of abstract analysis and a reassertion of freedom as the constitutive value of the country – they combined the universality and prestige of the economic idiom with a normative vision of national identity.