This virtual issue highlights recent publications in the JHI of relevance to French intellectual history since the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The reason for compiling it is relatively simple—we hope that readers might enjoy it. This string of recent publications (roughly since 2016) indicates some significant turns in the field. “French” intellectual history is certainly no longer limited to the hexagon, nor to the existentialist, Marxist, structuralist and “liberal 1980s” storylines. It belongs squarely in transnational and postcolonial discussions; it is invested in close philological and theoretical work as much as in detailed contexts and sociological frames, some of which have long been underexamined; and it is far more genuinely transnational than it has been before. The research expected nowadays of articles on classic authors is both denser and broader in scope than it was even a decade ago.
The essays in this set include work on the French Extreme Right, on classic figures like Deleuze and Foucault, on Black internationalism and anticolonialism, on Catholic theology, on the history of theory, and on a series of other topics. We also include texts which cut diagonally across the traditional field (like Asbrink’s “When Race was Removed from Racism,” whose second half considers Maurice Bardèche, ethnopluralism, and the New Right), Sarah C. Dunstan’s “The Capital of Race Capitals” (which considers Paris in the context of other sites of Black internationalism), and Nicolas Guilhot’s essay on the paranoid style (which brings Jacques Lacan’s early writings in conversation with the broader international discourse on the “paranoid style”). We as editors think that these are essential to seeing how to work transnationally on different registers.
—Stefanos Geroulanos, on behalf of the Executive Editors
Åsbrink, Elisabeth. “When Race Was Removed from Racism: Per Engdahl, the Networks that Saved Fascism and the Making of the Concept of Ethnopluralism.” Journal of the History of Ideas 82, no. 1 (2021): 133-151. doi.org/10.1353/jhi.2021.0006
Baring, Edward. “Ideas on the Move: Context in Transnational Intellectual History.” Journal of the History of Ideas 77, no. 4 (2016): 567-587. doi.org/10.1353/jhi.2016.0031
Bianco, Giuseppe. “The Antihumanism of the Young Deleuze: Sartre, Catholicism, and the Perspective of the Inhuman, 1945–48.” Journal of the History of Ideas 85, no. 4 (October 2024), 795-826. doi: https://doi.org/10.1353/jhi.2024.a944586
Chamedes, Giuliana. “How to Do Things with Words: Anti-Fascism as a Differentially Mobilizing Ideology, from the Popular Front to the Black Power Movement.” Journal of the History of Ideas 84, no.1 (Jan. 2023): 127-155. doi.org/10.1353/jhi.2023.0005
Doering, Jonathan. “The Linguistic Terror in France according to Jean Paulhan and Jean-Paul Sartre.” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 83 no. 4 (2022), 555-578. doi.org/10.1353/jhi.2022.0037
Drochon, Hugo. “Raymond Aron’s “Machiavellian” Liberalism.” Journal of the History of Ideas 80, no. 4 (2019): 621-642. doi:10.1353/jhi.2019.0034.
Dunstan, Sarah C. “The Capital of Race Capitals: Toward a Connective Cartography of Black Internationalisms.” Journal of the History of Ideas 82, no. 4 (2021): 637-660. doi:10.1353/jhi.2021.0036.
Elden, Stuart. “Foucault and Dumézil on Antiquity.” Journal of the History of Ideas 85, no. 3 (July 2024). doi:10.1353/jhi.2024.a933859
Guilhot, Nicolas. “‘A Primitive Kind of Superstition’: The Idea of the Paranoid Style in Art, Psychiatry, and Politics.” Journal of the History of Ideas 84, no.2 (April 2023): 365-90. doi: 10.1353/jhi.2023.0016
McGrath, Larry. “Bergson Comes to America.” Journal of the History of Ideas 74, no. 4 (2013): 599-620. doi:10.1353/jhi.2013.0032.
Monod, Jean-Claude. “Archives, Thresholds, Discontinuities: Blumenberg and Foucault on Historical Substantialism and the Phenomenology of History.” Journal of the History of Ideas 80, no. 1 (2019): 133-146. doi:10.1353/jhi.2019.0007.
Robcis, Camille. “Frantz Fanon, Institutional Psychotherapy, and the Decolonization of Psychiatry.” Journal of the History of Ideas 81, no. 2 (2020): 303-325. doi:10.1353/jhi.2020.0009.
Shortall, Sarah. “‘Building the Earth’: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Science, and the Spirituality of the United Nations.” Journal of the History of Ideas 85, no. 4 (October 2024), 827-56. doi: https://doi.org/10.1353/jhi.2024.a944587
Shortall, Sarah. “Theology and the Politics of Christian Human Rights.” Journal of the History of Ideas, 79 no. 3 (2018), 445-460. doi:10.1353/jhi.2018.0027.
Shurts, Sarah. “Identity, Immigration, and Islam: Neo-reactionary and New-Right Perceptions and Prescriptions.” Journal of the History of Ideas 83, no. 3 (2022): 477-499. doi:10.1353/jhi.2022.0023.
Steinmetz-Jenkins, Daniel, and Kevin Brookes. “The Many Liberalisms of Serge Audier.” Journal of the History of Ideas 79, no. 1 (2018): 45-63. doi:10.1353/jhi.2018.0002.
Terzi, Pietro. “Contingency, Freedom, and Uchronic Narratives: Charles Renouvier’s Philosophy of History in the Shadow of the Franco-Prussian War.” Journal of the History of Ideas 82, no. 2 (2021): 257-278. doi:10.1353/jhi.2021.0013.
Featured image: Gustave Le Gray, The Breaking Wave, 1857, Hugh Edwards Fund, Art Institute Chicago, CCO.
