There is a gap between the particulars ofour scholarly knowledge about Georg Simmel and our image of him as a mind in its totality. The existing paradigmatic interpretations of Simmel's thought as a whole are often outdated and driven by anachronistic motivations. The task of the historian is to update these paradigms on the basis of our better and broader knowledge of Simmel and his contexts. My book is one such attempt. The paradigm it puts forward may help us to discard the familiar stereotypes of Simmel, while offering a more nuanced understanding of the main parameters of his thought and its development. It can also serve as a foundation for future non-historical studies of Simmel.

The significance of the German philosopher and social thinker, Georg Simmel (1858–1918), is only now being recognised by intellectual historians. Through penetrating readings of Simmel's thought, taken as a series of reflections on the essence of modernity and modern civilisation, Efraim Podoksik places his ideas within the context of intellectual life in Germany, and especially Berlin, under the Kaiserreich. Modernity, characterised by the growing differentiation and fragmentation of culture and society, was a fundamental issue during Simmel's life, underpinning central intellectual debates in Imperial Germany. Simmel's thought is depicted here as an attempt at transforming the complexity of these debates into a coherent worldview that can serve as an effective guide to understanding their main parameters. Paying particular attention to the genealogy and usage of the concepts of Bildung, culture and civilisation in Germany, this study offers contextual analyses of Simmel's philosophies of culture, society, art, religion and the feminine, as well as his interpretations of Dante, Kant, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Goethe and Rembrandt.

This article aims to situate Isaiah Berlin’s influential conceptualization of the liberal idea of liberty in negative terms in the history of political ideologies, thus contributing to the understanding of the development of liberalism as an ideological tradition. More specifically, the article contributes to the understanding of two central themes in the ideological history of negative liberty. First, it shows that negative liberty has repeatedly served as an ideological weapon against radical democratic politics, while also pointing to an important shift in the manner of its employment: between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries, we argue, negative liberty had turned from a deflationary device associated with excessive democracy into a moderate ideal endangered by totalitarian democracy. The second theme that we highlight and account for is the late development of the association of the liberal conception of liberty with the idea of negativity.

Doing Humanities in Nineteenth-Century Germany, edited by Efraim Podoksik, is a collaborative project by leading scholars in German studies that examines the practices of theorising and researching in the humanities as pursued by German thinkers and scholars during the long nineteenth century, and the relevance of those practices for the humanities today. Each chapter focuses on a particular branch of the humanities, such as philosophy, history, classical philology, theology, or history of art. The volume both offers a broad overview of the history of German humanities and examines an array of particular cases that illustrate their inner dilemmas, ranging from Ranke’s engagement with the world of poetry to Max Weber’s appropriation of the notion of causality.

Michael Oakeshott and Edward Shils are thinkers similar in many respects. They both belonged to the intellectual current of the post-war anti-totalitarianism that was characterised by the opposition to the idea of regulating society by planning, by the rejection of ideological politics, and by the perception of similarity, if not identity, between the left-wing and right-wing radicalisms. They both occupied the conservative-liberal slot within the broad anti-totalitarian spectrum, combining their adherence to freedom and minimal state with their deep appreciation of tradition. At the same time, their different intellectual temperaments led them to opposite directions. Beneath Oakeshott’s apparent conservatism one often discovers an emancipatory and optimistic disposition grounded in his Romantic appreciation of radical individuality. Shils’ respectable liberalism, by contrast, often results in cultural pessimism and social conservatism.

In the early 1880s Gabriel Tarde wrote a piece of futuristic fiction that was first published in 1896 under the title “Fragment of Future History,” and several years later translated into English as Underground Man, with a preface by H. G. Wells. The gist of the story is this: the sun is extinguished and most of humanity perishes. The survivors descend underground taking with them all the treasures of human art and knowledge. There they build a new and happy society, a kind of utopia. Out of sensitivity to the particular literary context in which Tarde wrote this work, knowledgeable commentators sometimes call it “uchronia.” This neologism was first coined by Charles Renouvier in 1857. Whereas “utopia” literally means “no place,” “uchronia” accordingly means “no time.” The term is familiar today mainly to the fans of a very peculiar genre: alternative history. Renouvier's book (see Renouvier 1876) was indeed a piece of alternative history, telling us what course European history might have taken had the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius been succeeded, not by his son Commodus, but by Avidius Cassius. Tarde's text, however, is not about a nonactualized past but about a distant future. And dreams about an ideal society in such a future are generally called utopia.

The scholarly literature on Ferdinand Tönnies as one of the founders of classical sociology normally mentions the fact that he was also an intellectual historian who contributed significantly to the development of Hobbes scholarship, and whose interest in Hobbes might have influenced some of his own ideas. Likewise, the scholarly literature on Hobbes normally contains references to Tönnies's name, usually as an editor of Hobbes's manuscripts. In neither case, however, is Tönnies's work on Hobbes investigated in detail; in fact, it scarcely earns a nod. The few publications on this subject (see Bond 2011; Ilting 1971; Merle 2005), valuable though they are, limit themselves to specific matters such as Tönnies's liberal interpretation of Hobbes's politics, his early writings on Hobbes or his approach to Hobbes's notions of morality and natural law. The purpose of this chapter is to help fill this scholarly lacuna by offering a more comprehensive exposition of the subject. I believe that without doing so we cannot properly appreciate Tönnies's role in the development of twentieth-century Hobbes scholarship, or the evolution of his own thought.

NATIONALISM is normally conceived as an ideology or movement aiming at attaining and maintaining political autonomy, mainly in the form of state sovereignty, for a group of people called nation. This definition is coherent and widespread enough to enable a meaningful theoretical investigation of the phenomenon to which it refers. And vet theoretical discussion about nationalism often projects a strong sense of resignation. Many leading theorists claim that, since nationalism is such a complex phenomenon, it is impossible to reduce it to one theory or definition.'' It seems that one of the reasons for this feeling is that, although it is relatively easy to arrive at a coherent definition of nationalism, it is much more difficult to attain a clear understanding of its central component: the notion of nation.