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As history became a narrative of contexts as well as of actions, the moral and exemplary character of the actions related was affected ... The narrative of action became a narrative of mystery, meaning not only the mystery of random contingency, but the mystery of how decision and action were framed in the face of contingency. Whether action had proved successful or disastrous, that which was exemplary about it was at the same time that which was arcane, formed in the depths of the human heart as it interacted with fortune. The epigraph comes from the "prelude" to the second volume of Barbarism and Religion , J. G. A. Pocock's masterpiece devoted to reconstructing the manifold contexts for understanding Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. In this passage, Pocock is addressing the transformation of historical understanding in the wake of the Pyrrhonian controversy that dominated early modern learning. Reconstruction of contexts, Pocock argued, was one answer to skepticism about our knowledge of the past, but it could not come at the expense of an understanding of action and motivations. For his part, Gibbon sought a neoclassical synthesis designed to generate "narrative at the point where the exemplary became the arcane." Such is the paradox of historiography as a modern craft. That which gives a historical episode its value (its exemplarity) is typically that which escapes the explanatory frameworks we bring to it (its arcana). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intellectual historians owe Nietzsche a debt for many things, not least for lending the quality of “untimeliness” a positive connotation. In the late 1990s, when Marxism was arguably at its nadir as an intellectual program, much less a political one, Warren Breckman published an insightful study of Marx's early thought and its genesis out of a series of disputes with the Young Hegelians concerning the state and its ambiguous relationship with theological conceptions of authority. The untimeliness of Breckman's intervention had much to recommend it. Taking his distance from the pallbearers, Breckman showed that a historical inquiry into the Marxist enterprise increased rather than diminished its contemporary relevance. In the wake of the eastern bloc's collapse, “civil society” had become the order of the day. Breckman showed that, far from being an innocuous panacea to the terror of state power, the concept had its own contested political history, one that Marx grappled with in ways whose resonance has only grown in the decade since Breckman's first book appeared. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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Ian Hunter's career as an intellectual historian has been grounded in a commitment to regionalism and the refinement of a methodology devoted to conceiving thought in terms of various modes of comportment. This essay suggests that Hunter's recent work on ‘The History of Theory’ downplays the first principle in its development of the second, and consequently risks abandoning the commitment to historical pluralism that has been a distinguishing feature of his singular contribution to intellectual history. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A literary criticism of the doctoral thesis "Le travail de l'oeuvre Machiavel," by French political philosopher Claude Lefort, which was retitled "Machiavelli in the Making," is presented. It outlines the philosophical work of Lefort on Italian historian Niccolò Machiavelli and anti-revolutionary republicanism. Moreover, it examines the political philosophy on Lefort's book.