Books in the Intellectual History of the Modern Age series

The Spatial Reformation offers a sweeping history of the way Europeans conceived of three-dimensional space, between 1350 and 1850, and calls for a deliberate reconsideration not only of what constitutes the intellectual foundation of the early modern era but also of its temporal range.

In Survival, Adam Stern asks what texts and traditions have made survival a recognizable element of our current political vocabulary. Examining works by Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Franz Rosenzweig, and Sigmund Freud, Stern shows that survival belongs to a history of debates about the sovereignty and subjection of Christ's body.

Hannah Arendt was one of the foremost theorists of the twentieth century to wrestle with the role of violence in public life. In Violence and Power in the Thought of Hannah Arendt, Caroline Ashcroft argues that what Arendt opposes in political violence is the use of force to determine politics, an idea central to modern sovereignty.

The Belief in Intuition shows that intuition, as Henri Bergson and Max Scheler understood it, leads to a conception of freedom grounded in a sense of individuality that remains true to its "inner multiplicity," thus providing a distinct contrast to and critique of the liberal notion of the self.

A comprehensive account of how German and American historians after World War II tackled the question of the roots of National Socialism, History After Hitler traces the development of a transatlantic scholarly community as a key part of the intellectual history of the Federal Republic and of Cold War German-American relations.

In Assembling the Local, Upal Chakrabarti argues that the "local" should be reconceptualized as an abstract machine, which was itself central to the construction of the universal, namely, the establishment of political economy as a form of governance in nineteenth-century British India.

Yael Almog examines the works of thinkers such as Johann Gottfried Herder, Moses Mendelssohn, and Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher and reveals the tension between textual exegesis and confessional belonging. Secularism and Hermeneutics challenges the modern presumption that interpretation is indifferent to religious concerns.

Oded Y. Steinberg argues that historical periodization converged with racial, national, and religious themes to inform the historical perception of influential English and German scholars during the second half of the nineteenth century.

Nietzsche in the Nineteenth Century shows how Nietzsche formulated his thought in an ongoing dialogue with the concerns of his contemporaries and how his philosophy can be conceived as a contribution to the debates taking place in Europe at the time in the realms of politics, society, and science.

Focusing on four influential, yet typically overlooked, French thinkers-Regis Debray, Emmanuel Todd, Marcel Gauchet, and Alain de Benoist-The Anthropological Turn shows how key issues of religion, identity, citizenship, and the state have been conceptualized and debated across a wide spectrum of political opinion in contemporary France.

Suffering Scholars focuses on the medical and literary dimensions of the cult of celebrity that developed around intellectuals during the French Enlightenment. Anne C. Vila shows how the "suffering scholar" syndrome deeply influenced debates about the consequences of book-learning on both the individual body and the body politic.

The remarkable individuals whose stories make up Jerrold Seigel's Between Cultures-Richard Burton, T. E. Lawrence, Louis Massignon, Chinua Achebe, and Orhan Pamuk-without ever seeking to exit from the ways of life into which they were born, all devoted themselves to exploring a second cultural identity as an intrinsic part of their first.

Thinking in Public examines the ambivalence that public political life and the figure of the intellectual provoked in the generation of European Jewish thinkers born around 1900. By comparing Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, and Leo Strauss, Wurgaft offers a new perspective on the relationship between philosophers and politics.

The Labor of the Mind plumbs the Enlightenment's social and cultural logic of conceiving the mind as manly; considers the textual representations of the manly mind; and examines the ways in which it was subverted or at least subtly questioned.

Situated at the intersection of film studies, the history of science and medicine, and the history of modern Germany, Homo Cinematicus: Science, Motion Pictures, and the Making of Modern Germany connects the emergence of cinema as a social institution to an inquiry into the history of knowledge production in the human sciences.

In this densely contextualized biography, K. Steven Vincent describes how Elie Halevy (1870-1937), one of the most respected and influential intellectuals of the French Third Republic, confronted the Dreyfus Affair, World War I, and the rise of interwar totalitarianism while defending a distinctively French version of liberalism.

The Moment of Rupture demonstrates how Ernst Junger, Ernst Bloch, and Walter Benjamin fused the consciousness of war, crisis, catastrophe, and revolution with literary and philosophical formulations of the concept of the instant, tracing the formation of a distinct mode of experiencing time based on the notion of a discontinuous present.