intellectual history – German Historical Institute London Blog

Solving the Population Question with Science: Robert Dale Owen’s Birth Control Tract Moral Physiology (1831) within a Transatlantic Reform Movement

Moral Physiology; or a Brief and Plain Treatise on the Population Question is a 48-page pamphlet that tells its readers how to limit their family size.¹ Its author Robert Dale Owen was the son of British factory owner turned early socialist Robert Owen. At the time of the pamphlet’s publication in 1831, he lived in New York and edited the progressive newspaper Free Enquirer along with fellow reformer Frances Wright. They advocated for a national school system in order to educate the American public. According to biographer Richard W. Leopold, Dale Owen wrote the pamphlet after fellow activist Thomas Skidmore challenged him to explain how fathers of large families could afford the school fee to educate all their children. Dale Owen replied that parents should only have as many children as they could provide for.² While he spent about three quarters of his pamphlet explaining why it was important to circulate knowledge about fertility control, he finally revealed his preferred method on page thirty-six: coitus interruptus, a method that he based on the experiences of French men he had met during his travels in Europe.³

Robert Dale Owen, Moral Physiology; or a Brief and Plain Treatise on the Population Question, 5th edn. (London, 1840; 1st pub. 1831), in The National Archives, HO 44/38, 36. All citations in this blog post are from the 1840 edition. [↩]
Richard William Leopold, Robert Dale Owen: A Biography (Cambridge, MA, 1940), 77–8. [↩]
Dale Owen, Moral Physiology, 36. [↩]

Viola Klein: A Neglected Key Theorist of Gender Studies

Names such as Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, or Simone Weil tend to evoke particular associations in people’s minds, even if these are somewhat vague or disparate. But we cannot say the same with any certainty for Viola Klein (1907–73). And yet, as a theorist and social researcher, she was highly attuned to the societal crises and failings of her time—especially the persistent gender inequalities and women’s experiences of oppression—and helped to address them. When comparing Klein to other thinkers, we must pay particular attention to her major work of social theory: The Feminine Character: History of an Ideology, published in 1946 by Routledge & Kegan Paul in the ‘International Library of Sociology’ series, which was founded by Karl Mannheim.

‘History of the Wahûma’? Publishing Practices and Colonial Knowledge Production

The first Europeans to travel through the interlacustrine region of East Africa, between Lake Victoria in the east and Lakes Albert, Edward, and Tanganyika in the west, were John Hanning Speke (1827–64) and James Augustus Grant (1827–92), who were searching for the source of the White Nile between 1860 and 1863. Sponsored by the Royal Geographical Society of London and supported by their guide and translator known as Sidi Mubarak (called ‘Bombay’ by Speke),¹ they travelled on foot from Zanzibar, through the Arab trading town of Tabora (then called Kazé), before turning north and wandering through the kingdoms of Karagwe, Buganda, and Bunyoro to the settlement of Gondokoro. Their roughly three-year journey was documented by Speke and Grant alike in extensive bound volumes.

Richard Burton recorded his name as ‘Seedy Mubarak Mombai (Bombay)’. Richard Burton, The Lake Regions of Central Equatorial Africa: A Picture of Exploration (London, 1860), 3. [↩]

Sketching Conceptual History’s ‘Janus Face’: Reinhart Koselleck and Karl Löwith

While a student at Heidelberg University between 1947 and 1948, Reinhart Koselleck (1923–2006) sketched a curious self-portrait. Drawn as part of his archaeology course, Koselleck sketched himself lying vertically, head down and feet up, under the surface of the earth, shovelling through layers of sediment in pursuit of artefacts with which to document a human past.¹ A talented caricaturist, Koselleck’s self-portrait is not alone in his collection. Alongside this sit sketches of his teachers: a fringe coterie of philosophers, including Karl Löwith (1897–1973), who left an indelible imprint on Koselleck’s intellectual world as a student.

Self-portrait by Reinhardt Koselleck. — Reinhart Koselleck, *Self-Portrait as an Archaeologist*, reproduced from Katharina Koselleck and Ruppe Koselleck (eds.), *Vorbilder—Nachbilder: Gezeichnet von Reinhart Koselleck* (Bielefeld, 1983), 4 . Reinhart Koselleck, *Ende einer Moritat bei Professor Wahle, Selbstdarstellung als Frühhistoriker*, 1947, 27.5 x 40.5 cm, ©Erbengemeinschaft Reinhart Koselleck.

Peculiarly, when interviewed by Christof Dipper in 1998, Koselleck cited his theoretical commitment to a panoply of figures at Heidelberg, including Otto Brunner and Carl Schmitt, but made no mention of Löwith.² Nonetheless, the intellectual lineage is self-evident; their pedagogical relationship clear. As a student, Koselleck co-translated portions of Meaning in History; he wrote the foreword to Löwith’s autobiography; and in 1967, he published ‘Historia Magistra Vitae’, the draft for his lexicographical article ‘Geschichte/Historie’, in a Festschrift for Löwith.³ Critical scholarship on the Koselleck–Löwith connection has thus far placed a thematic focus on the premise of a secularized eschatology and a historiographical focus on Koselleck’s Kritik und Krise (1954).⁴ This blog post will demonstrate, however, that Löwith’s influence on Koselleck is not limited to Kritik und Krise , nor indeed the premise of a secularized eschatology, but rather underpins Koselleck’s principles of Begriffsgeschichte (‘conceptual history’), as formulated within the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (‘Basic Historical Concepts’).

Some of Koselleck’s drawings have been published in Katharina Koselleck and Ruppe Koselleck (eds.), Vorbilder—Nachbilder: Gezeichnet von Reinhart Koselleck (Bielefeld, 1983). The drawings depict, among other things, teachers and friends from Heidelberg University, and scenes and impressions from German and international politics from 1947 until 1980. [↩]
Christof Dipper, ‘Begriffsgeschichte, Sozialgeschichte, begriffene Geschichte: Reinhart Koselleck im Gespräch mit Christof Dipper’, Neue Politische Literatur, 43 (1998), 187–205, at 187. [↩]
Reinhart Koselleck, ‘Historia Magistra Vitae: Über die Auflösung des Topos im Horizont neuzeitlich bewegter Geschichte’, in Hermann Braun and Manfred Riedel (eds.), Natur und Geschichte: Karl Löwith zum 70. Geburtstag (Stuttgart, 1967), 196–219. [↩]
See for instance Hans Joas, ‘Die Kontingenz der Säkularisierung: Überlegungen zum Problem der Säkularisierung im Werk Reinhart Kosellecks’, in Hans Joas and Peter Vogt, Begriffene Geschichte: Beiträge zum Werk Reinhart Kosellecks (Berlin, 2011), 319–39. [↩]

Essays and Reviews: The ‘Greatest Religious Crisis of the Victorian Age’?

One of the best-known controversies in nineteenth-century Britain revolved around the publication of a collection of theological writings in March 1860 titled Essays and Reviews. The book, edited by John William Parker, consisted of seven essays that explored various topics, such as the evidence for Christianity, religious thought in England, and—perhaps most controversially—the interpretation of scripture. The underlying theme behind these essays was theological methodology—namely, the exploration of German-speaking Protestant theological discussions within Anglican theological thought. Essays and Reviews was a cautious, partly implicit acknowledgement of scientific findings and historical–philological methods.

Conceptual History as a Philosophical Methodology: The Case of Hans Blumenberg’s Metaphorology

In a first blog post, I suggested that the figure of Hans Blumenberg can help us to understand one of the major differences between the ‘Cambridge School’ of intellectual history and Begriffsgeschichte, or conceptual history. This difference, I argued, is a disciplinary one: whereas Cambridge School intellectual history operates mainly in the fields of the historiography of political thought and contemporary political theory, conceptual historians intervene in a wider array of discourses and make more diverse use of historical insights. Hans Blumenberg, who is known as a philosopher, and not mainly as a political theorist, exemplifies this polydisciplinary outlook. At the same time, we can learn a lot about Blumenberg’s work if we interpret his early methodological writings in the context of conceptual history debates.

What Is, and To What End Do We Study, Intellectual History?: A Comparison of Two Approaches: The ‘Cambridge School’ and ‘Conceptual History’

From 2–4 June 2022, the German Association for British Studies will host its annual conference under the title of ‘From Cambridge to Bielefeld—and Back? British and Continental Approaches to Intellectual History’. Two specific—and local—schools of thought and their respective groups of thinkers are thus at the heart of the conference: Cambridge, where intellectual historians in the tradition of J. G. A. Pocock, Quentin Skinner, and John Dunn’s more or less shared outlook still apply linguistic and historical methods to modern political thought; and Bielefeld, where Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck edited the monumental lexicon on key historical terminology entitled Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe¹ (GG), and where Koselleck was involved in shaping the institutional and methodological outlook of the now well-known Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF).²

Otto Brunner, Reinhart Koselleck, and Werner Conze (eds.), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, 8 vols. (Stuttgart, 1972–97). [↩]
E.g. Koselleck was executive director of the centre in the years 1974–5 and played a leading role in the management of its research from 1968 until 1979. See Ipke Wachsmuth, ‘Gedenkrede des Geschäftsführenden Direktors des Zentrums für Interdisziplinäre Forschung der Universität Bielefeld’, in Neithard Bulst and Willibald Steinmetz (eds.), Reinhart Koselleck 1923–2006: Reden zur Gedenkfeier am 24. Mai 2006 (Bielefeld, 2007), 41–3, at 41–2. In various functions, Koselleck was responsible for attracting Norbert Elias to the centre and for institutionalizing the format of the so-called ‘working groups’, among other things. The centre’s research agenda often reflected the methodological impulse of the conceptual history approach, and this can also be seen in Koselleck’s own work; consider e.g. the ZiF’s role as an institutional enabler for his work on the French Revolution: Reinhart Koselleck and Rolf Reichardt, Die Französische Revolution als Bruch des gesellschaftlichen Bewusstseins: Vorlagen und Diskussionen der internationalen Arbeitstagung am Zentrum für Interdisziplinäre Forschung der Universität Bielefeld, 28. Mai–1. Juni 1985 (Munich, 1988). [↩]

Perspectives on Political Parties in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Since the emergence of the first nation states in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, political parties have become one of the most important and influential actors in Western political systems. It is hard to imagine a functioning Western democracy without the presence of political parties, yet they have always been accompanied by criticism and rejection. As parties developed into elementary components of constitutional states and their tasks and responsibilities expanded, an intense theoretical preoccupation with the potential dangers they posed took place, especially in Britain.¹ This debate about parties was marked by conflicting views, but the repetition and recurrence of similar lines of argument by authors at different times throughout the nineteenth century is striking.

See, for example, Arthur Aspinall, ‘English Party Organization in the Early Nineteenth Century’, English Historical Review, 41 (1926), 389–411; J. A. W. Gunn, ‘Party before Burke: Shute Barrington’, Government and Opposition, 3/2 (1968), 223–40; id., Factions No More: Attitudes to Party in Government and Opposition in Eighteenth-Century England. Extracts from Contemporary Sources (London, 1972); Paul Webb, ‘Political Partiesand Democracy:The Ambiguous Crisis’, Democratization, 12/5 (2005), 633–50, at 633–4. [↩]

Intervention on Behalf of Foreign Subjects during the Anglo-Spanish War, 1585–1604

It is fitting that my dissertation on the idea of intervention and protection of foreign subjects during the Anglo-Spanish War (1585–1604) has been published in the GHIL’s series, as it touches on one of the most researched periods of English history: the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and the Anglo-Spanish War. My study investigates the conflict-ridden relationship between Protestant England and Catholic Spain in the incipient Age of Confession as reflected in publications and drafts of declarations of war and war manifestos, which scholarship has shown to be sources of vital importance for the history of political thought in the early modern period.