Murray Bookchin (1921–2006) is best known today for pioneering a novel synthesis between social anarchism and ecology in the 1960s. Both his writing and his activism had a substantial impact on the young New Left and the radical ecology movement, and were in polemic dialogue with radical environmentalists, anarcho-primitivists, and deep ecologists. This article explores the development of Bookchin’s early political thought within the framework of a “postwar environmental moment” and uncovers how he uniquely politicized ecological science in the 1950s. I argue that Bookchin’s early writings were a critical response to both the dire environmental issues of his time and the limitations he perceived in Old Left politics. Furthermore, I demonstrate that Bookchin’s understanding of ecological science was not simply a product of a turn to anarchism, but was directly linked to debates among 1950s ecologists, typically overlooked in the recent scholarship on Bookchin.

As the paragon of Chicago school macroeconomics in the late twentieth century, Robert Lucas is closely associated with the collapse of Keynesian hegemony in the 1970s and with neoliberalism more generally. This article explores Lucas’s changing political commitments using previously unexploited archival evidence. It shows that although he often articulated his views in the form of anti-Keynesian polemic, he had a deeply ambiguous relationship with the Keynesian project. Lucas upends interpretations of neoliberalism that emphasize ignorance in the face of the market, as his research program is premised on the hope that states and scholars can make the economy visible, and hence controllable, through stable policy rules. He was impressed by Keynesian successes and the technocratic worldview they made intelligible, but he remained suspicious of economists’ close collaborations with government.

This article is the first to reconstruct the intellectual history of Milton Friedman's criticism of business and its social responsibilities. Using original archival research and printed evidence, this article makes three major arguments. First, Friedman's criticisms of business and its social responsibilities evolved over time and emerged from persistent anxieties among economic liberals about monopoly, business interests, and political authority that were explicitly read from Adam Smith. Second, the article contributes to the emerging intellectual history of corporate social responsibility (CSR) by reconstructing the development of Friedman's criticisms, their transformations, and their reception within the context of American managerial thought from the 1950s to the 1980s. Finally, contextualizing Friedman's criticisms demonstrates his concern about decision-making logics within organizations, which in turn explains his belief that CSR would contribute to collectivization and enhances the understanding of neoliberal political thought.

This article examines the influence of Spinozism on Leszek Kołakowski’s humanist Marxism between 1953 and 1968. After historically exploring Kołakowski’s early Stalinism and his later belief that Hegel’s historical theodicy, in eradicating the contradiction between totality and particularity, abolished individual moral responsibility, it examines Kołakowski’s interpretation of Spinoza’s alternatively ahistorical and ambiguous relationship between substance and its modes, which Kołakowski admired despite finding it metaphysically contradictory. It shows that this interpretation contributed to Kołakowski’s Marxism, which focused on the moral freedom of the individual by accepting the permanence of contradiction between subjectivity and totality. His interest in Spinoza also changed Kołakowski’s understanding of modernity, which he increasingly identified with the seventeenth century, especially those forms of thinking that contradictorily blended elements of religious and rationalist thought. While Kołakowski abandoned Marxism, this interest in the relationship between religion and secularism defined much of his thought after 1968.

This article charts the intellectual development and application of communication theology, centering two church-led communication training programs in Nyegezi (Tanzania) and Nairobi (Kenya), from their founding amid East African decolonization in the 1960s through to the challenges of Africanization in the 1970s–1980s. This has implications for two growing bodies of scholarship. First, speaking to histories of Christian thought—particularly on ecumenism, secularization, and localization in the context of decolonization—I show that these training centers, their African staff, and their students enabled the elaboration of communication theology, and revealed its contradictions. Second, speaking to intellectual histories of attempts to decolonize information and communications, I reinsert theology into an often state-centric narrative, suggesting how these training programs informed debates about relevance and self-reliance in the media. I thus make the case for locating intellectual histories of both communications and Christianity in regions of the decolonizing world.

Friedrich Hayek, the Austrian economist, and Stafford Beer, best known for engineering socialist Chile's CYBERSYN project, met exactly once, at the 1960 Symposium on the Principles of Self-Organization, hosted by the Biological Computer Laboratory at the University of Illinois. Independently, in the decade that followed, Beer and Hayek each sought to apply the principles of self-organization to the design of economic institutions. They were joined in the belief that the full enjoyment of human liberty would require a self-organizing world economy. To understand why, this article delves into the explanatory logic and intellectual history of “self-organization.” I use points of convergence between Beer's thought and Hayek's to reframe a key moment in the history of neoliberalism.

In the early 1970s, Christopher Stone and Peter Singer influentially rejected the anthropocentrism of liberalism, contending that animals and nature deserved moral and legal consideration independent of humans. This article historicizes the emergence of nonhuman personhood by showing how they and other writers attempted to dismantle liberalism’s anthropocentrism at a dynamic time in humanist politics. Writers asserted nonhuman personhood as a continuation of 1960s liberation movements, employing the narrative of a “natural” extension of rights and equality from marginalized humans to nonhumans. This determinism, however, obscured nonhumans’ specific inability to make political claims. Drawing on the incipient 1970s human rights movement, writers circumvented this problem of political agency by emphasizing nonhumans’ capacity to suffer. Suffering allowed humans to see themselves in nonhumans and thus recognize their personhood. This turn to empathetic identification as the driver of historical change inaugurated an anti-anthropocentric humanism that extended personhood beyond humanity but reinscribed a more fundamental distinction between those able and those unable to make political claims. Drawing on both 1960s challenges to humanism and 1970s humanist preoccupation with suffering, anti-anthropocentric humanism preserved the very limitations of liberal politics into a new definition of personhood that effaced political agency from both personhood and history.

This article analyzes the relationship between living systems theory (LST) and the army's military doctrine in the 1980s. General Donn Starry, Colonel Mike Malone, and Major James Cary worked with James G. Miller, the founder of LST, to make the army more efficient at fighting a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. LST conceptualized that living organisms organized matter and energy and that its components could function because they worked as a part of the whole to adapt to their environment. The article reveals how these officers employed LST as a framework to model a reciprocal relationship between individual agency and collective unity in the army's hierarchical organization. Situating this doctrinal reform in the years after the end of the draft and the mainstreaming of neoclassical economics in the 1980s, it finds that the army officers were using LST to replace Robert McNamara's mechanical strategic paradigm used in the Vietnam War.

For two weeks in July 1967, several thousand people attended the International Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation in London, a sprawling event that is now largely remembered as a point of convergence for an unlikely roster of prominent radical intellectuals—Stokely Carmichael, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Goodman, and Herbert Marcuse among them. This article uses a broad array of sources to present the congress as a mass counterinstitution in which a variety of social actors—including not only the invited speakers, but also conference organizers and audience members—struggled to establish nonauthoritarian forms of knowledge production. The record of these efforts, and in particular the audience's demand to participate directly in the production and exchange of ideas, illuminates the ways in which radical intellectuals' challenge to dominant institutions in the global North during the late 1960s threatened to undermine their own discursive authority.

As a collection of methods oriented toward the artefacts of human expression and the minds that shaped those expressions, intellectual history seems well placed to mobilize the category of the aesthetic, yet the aesthetic is rarely a focus on methodological discussions. The special forum that this article introduces explores what an “aesthetic approach” to intellectual history might look like. It focuses on the work of leading twentieth-century liberal Isaiah Berlin (1909–97), whose amorphous role in the history of intellectual history means that his work offers a parallax view on important questions of method and approach. In introducing this special forum, this article situates Isaiah Berlin’s distinctive approach and varied work as a historian of ideas and defender of liberalism within several larger contexts. One is Berlin’s response to tendencies in post-World War II British philosophy, and his turn to the history of ideas—an understanding of this area of study as requiring essentially aesthetic qualities of judgment, imagination, pattern recognition, and empathetic entry into the perspectives of others. A second is the development of other, more influential approaches to the history of ideas, to which Berlin’s approach is briefly contrasted. A third is the ideological struggles of the Cold War; in this last connection, we explore the affinities between Berlin’s awareness, and affirmation, of the aesthetic and the ethical in his articulation of liberalism.

Among many conundrums in Isaiah Berlin's thought are the apparent tension between a strongly “personalist” approach to ideas and appreciation for Romanticism, and his warnings against the identification of freedom with human perfection and of politics with aesthetic projects, and aversion to any form of excessive “zeal,” as potentially oppressive, callous, and cruel. Berlin the moderate, skeptical liberal coexisted with Berlin the enthusiast and hero-worshipper. This article argues that, over the course of his writing career—both in early, largely unknown writings on contemporary musicians, and in better-known work on the history of ideas and “personal impressions” of contemporaries—Berlin brought these disparate elements of his outlook together through an aesthetizing of heroism, and a close identification of the aesthetic with the ethical. It concludes by suggesting that Berlin's way of understanding heroism may have something to tell us about how commitment to liberalism and appreciation for heroism may coexist and intertwine in ways that contribute to a greater appreciation, and more compelling defense, of liberalism.

This article clarifies the relationship between Isaiah Berlin’s liberalism, pluralism, humanism, and “aestheticism” by analyzing his unique approach to, and stories about, the history of ideas. I argue that Berlin should be understood as a reformer of liberalism, who understood his intervention in intellectual-historical terms. Reacting against what he saw as threats to human liberty and dignity rooted in the monist rational–scientific aspirations and expectations of Enlightenment-influenced political ideologies, Berlin responded by reinterpreting liberalism’s commitment to negative liberty through an aesthetic conception of the human being and a pluralist way of thinking about politics. In addition to reconstructing how Berlin’s writings on the history of ideas enact this liberal reformation, and clarifying the ways in which his resulting liberalism is and is not aesthetic, I also evaluate the potential implications of Berlin’s work for thinking about liberal politics in the present.

Of the various topics that have occupied readers of Isaiah Berlin—liberty, pluralism, nationalism, Marxism, romanticism, to name just a few—very few have focused on the role of judgment in his philosophy.1 One possible reason for this is that the concept of judgment, unlike other concepts in the political-theory lexicon, seems too indistinct to permit careful analysis.2 Judgment often seems too circumstantial, too contextual, to have a theory of. What is good judgment in one situation will not be so in another. It consists, to a large degree, in our capacity to read the times, and I do not mean the New York Times. The concept of judgment is invariably connected to character, but good character seems as elusive as good judgment. Do certain kinds of people simply have good judgment and, if so, what are the characteristics that produce it? We seem to be caught in a vicious—or, should I say, virtuous—circle.

This article aims to contribute to recent discussions about the status of the “aesthetic” in the history of liberalism, by considering the ways in which ideas about music—specifically a “love of music [that is] both aesthetic and ethical”—has shaped liberal thought. Focusing on the work of the prominent twentieth-century liberal Isaiah Berlin (1909–97), and drawing from unpublished correspondence and neglected published writings, it introduces music as a form through which Berlin approached thinking about the tension between sensation and idea, or feeling and thinking, thereby shaping his approach to intellectual history.

The conventional approach to Isaiah Berlin's writings has been to treat them discursively, as philosophical texts. While such approaches are insightful, there is more to Berlin's writings than his arguments. Among his literary strategies is a comparative approach that involves the use of metaphors, similes, and analogies. As I will argue, Berlin's use of metaphor constitutes a core component of his work, where his meaning is often suggestive more than precise. Berlin's intention seems to be to exhibit those aspects of experience reflective of uncertainty, where our choices are not determined by necessity. Such an intention ostensibly exhibits his value pluralism, as well as an oft-neglected sensitivity to the forms of language. By resorting to metaphors Berlin accomplishes several things: he shows how the intelligibility of experience is partially imagistic, he illustrates how meaning can be structured comparatively but nondiscursively, and he exemplifies the importance of these things for decision making.