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The German council movements arose through mass strikes and soldier mutinies towards the end of the First World War. They brought down the German monarchy, founded several short-lived council republics, and dramatically transformed European politics. This book reconstructs how participants in the German council movements struggled for a democratic socialist society. It examines their attempts to democratize politics, the economy, and society through building powerful worker-led organizations and cultivating workers’ political agency. Drawing from the practices of the council movements and the writings of theorists such as Rosa Luxemburg, Anton Pannekoek, and Karl Kautsky, this book returns to their radical vision of a self-determining society and their political programme of democratization and socialization. It presents a powerful argument for renewed attention to the political theories of this historical period and for their ongoing relevance today.

Curing Madness? focuses on the institutional and non-institutional histories of madness in colonial north India. ‘Madness’ and ‘cure’ are explored as shifting categories which travelled across cultural, medical, national, and regional boundaries, thereby moving beyond asylum-centric histories. It is based on extensive research of archival materials gathered from various repositories in India and abroad. The book focusses on governmental policies, legal processes, everyday patterns of treatment, discipline and resistance behind the walls, and individual case histories. It also brings to fore the non-institutional histories of madness. While few ended up in asylums, most people suffering from insanity were cared for by their families and the local vidyas, ojhas, shamans, and pundits. Western medicine denigrated indigenous healing traditions forcing them to reconceptualize and reinvent themselves. The spread and dissemination of Western medical knowledge led to the reshaping of some of the Ayurvedic concepts of mental illness. Based on an examination of Hindi medical advice literature which primarily includes books, pamphlets, and periodicals, the study locates the history of madness within and beyond the asylum walls.

This book on the history of universities presents new materials and case studies in order to deepen understanding of the role of the academic milieu in the early modern reshaping of natural philosophy. The chapters included in this volume aim to pursue two main axes of research: the reconstruction and exploration of the dialectics between tradition and innovation in the reshaping of natural philosophy; the attempt to constitute and consolidate new traditions in natural philosophy. The introduction presents the general topic of the volume, the methodological approach developed by the contributors, and the contents of each contribution.

The study of Western racism has tended to concentrate on either the hatred and murder of Jews or the hatred and enslavement of black people. As chief objects of racism Jews and blacks have been linked together for centuries, peoples apart from the general run of humanity. In medieval Europe Jews were often perceived as blacks, and the conflation of Jews and blacks continued throughout the period of the Enlightenment. With the discovery of a community of black Jews in Loango in west Africa in 1777, and later of black Jews in India, the Middle East, and other parts of Africa, the figure of the hybrid black Jew was thrust into the maelstrom of evolving theories about race hierarchies and taxonomies. The new hybrid played a particular role in the great battle between monogenists and polygenists as they sought to establish the unitary or disparate origins of humankind. From the mid-nineteenth century to the period of the Third Reich, Jews and blacks were increasingly conflated in a racist discourse that combined the two fundamental racial hatreds of the West. While Hitler considered Jews “Negroid parasites,” in Nazi Germany as in Fascist Italy, through texts, laws, and cartoons, Jews and blacks were combined in the figure of the black/Jew, the mortal foe of the Aryan race.

Alexandre Rousselin biography explores how the French Revolution inspired an educated Parisian to become a terrorist and then spent the next forty-five years dealing with the consequences of his choices. Alexandre Rousselin became the confidential secretary of Camille Desmoulins and Georges-Jacques Danton before undertaking two missions to Champagne as a commissioner for the Committee of Public Safety in the fall of 1793. His enthusiastic implementation of the Terror left him vulnerable to denunciation as a terrorist after the fall of his patrons. Sent before the Revolutionary Tribunal, he was acquitted, as part of political shift that brought down Maximilien Robespierre. Rousselin spent the next few years in and out of jail as he sought rehabilitation despite ongoing denunciations. The coup d’etat of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1799 made him an outsider. Rousselin had to find other means of earning a living and being useful. Acquiring a noble title, he helped to found the liberal standard-bearer Le Constitutionnel, the bestselling newspaper in the world in the 1820s, where he fought against censorship and for limitations on government authority paving the way for the Revolution of 1830. Although the newspaper made him rich and influential, he retired in 1838 to write history in order to avoid the consequences of his past as a terrorist. His biography explores the role of emotions and institutions across the Age of Revolution for the large generation of survivors of this exceptional trauma: Rousselin’s choices show how a revolutionary became a liberal.

It is an enduring contradiction that Hindus revere their goddesses but their society is dominated by Brahmanical patriarchy. Although we assume that the worship of goddesses implies the celebration of so-called female power, we overlook how the development of such practices of devotion occurred within a highly patriarchal society that subjugated women in everyday life. Addressing this oversight, Mutating Goddesses traces the shifting fortunes of four goddesses—Manasā, Caṇḍī, Ṣaṣṭhī, and Lakṣmī—and their mutation within the goddess-invested tradition of Bengal’s Hinduism. It uses the vibrant laukika archive comprising religious practices and beliefs that, unlike the ṣāstrik perspective, have not been affected by the emergence and consolidation of the male Brahman and the Sanskrit language. Using narratives such as kathās, laukika bratakathās, and maṅgalkābyas, Sengupta explores the period between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries and investigates the correlation of gender, caste, and class in the sanctioning of female subjectivities through goddess formation. Thus, she excavates the multiple and layered heritage of Bengal to illustrate how tradition is a result of strategic selection by those in power.

In 1918, as Europe’s continental empires were violently replaced with a patchwork of nominally post-imperial nation-states, elites in Poland drew on the global language of civilization to launch an internal state-building mission. This book focuses on how these processes took shape in Volhynia, an eastern borderland province that was home to Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews, between 1918 and 1939. By following in the footsteps of an eclectic group of men and women that included border guards, military settlers, provincial administrators, regional activists, health professionals, urban planners, teachers, and academics, the book traces how imperial hierarchies of global civilization—in which Poles themselves were often viewed as uncivilized—were domestically recast. Throughout, doubts about the national strength of local Poles, competitions between diverse groups of self-declared civilizers, and mounting anxieties about the rise of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union turned Volhynia into a testing ground in which these second-tier actors redefined the precise contours of the modern Polish nation. Rather than simply a successor state embroiled in the quintessentially east European problem of “national minorities,” Poland became a place where the very distinction between empire and nation-state was contested.

Rollo May (1909‒1994), internationally known psychologist and popular philosopher, came from modest roots in the small town Protestant Midwest intending to do “religious work” but eventually became a psychotherapist and in best-selling books like Love and Will and The Courage to Create he attracted an audience of millions of readers in the United States, Europe, and Asia. During the 1950s and 1960s, these books combined existentialism and other philosophical approaches, psychoanalysis, and a spiritually-philosophy to interpret the damage bureaucratic and technocratic aspects of modernity and their inability of individuals to understand their authentic selves. Psyche and Soul in America deals not only with May’s public contributions but also to his turbulent inner life as revealed in unprecedentedly intimate sources in order to demonstrate the relationship between the personal and public in a figure who wrote about intimacy, its loss, and ways to regain an authentic sense of self and others.