Abstracts

Of all the social sciences, International Relations (IR) probably has been the one that is most concerned with the concept of order. This talk reviews the ways the concept of order has been used in IR, and its relation to other similar concepts. The goal is to see if existing definitions can help us better theorise disorder (and other similar concepts). The talk takes as its starting point the essay “Rethinking International Order” published in Ethics & International Affairs 38, no. 2 (2024).

This talk examines the parallel histories of two extraordinary writers active in seventeenth-century Maluku, the eastern part of the Indonesian archipelago. One of them is Imam Rijali, well-known as one of the leaders of the Great Ambon War against Dutch colonial forces, and the author of the only surviving seventeenth-century local chronicle in Maluku. The other is Georg Eberhard Rumphius, a soldier on the Dutch side in the same war, nowadays best known as a natural historian whose writings on the flora and the maritime life of the region still command respect. The talk focuses on the relationship between Rijali and Rumphius, and on how the Dutch naturalist appropriated the writings of his enemy. It is argued that, despite their enmity, Rumphius and Rijali struggled with somewhat similar questions when it came to understanding the diversity of religions, nature, and history in the Indonesian archipelago. Idolatry was a key concern for both authors, and it is this shared interest in fighting idolatry that explains why a Dutch natural historian decided to copy, sentence by sentence, the writings of his enemy into his own manuscripts.

This paper examines the Ottoman constitutional moment of 1876 through the political thought of Namık Kemal, focusing on the relationship between disorder and constitutional order. Kemal diagnosed the empire's political crisis through the language of sickness and istibdâd: a condition of arbitrary rule, concentrated power, and the breakdown of legal and institutional balance. Against this disorder, he reworked the Islamic principle of meşveret (consultation) into a modern constitutional ideal combining representative government, liberty, the separation of powers, and a strong but legally constrained executive. Drawing on Ottoman, Islamic, and European political languages, particularly Montesquieu, Kemal presented constitutionalism not as an imported model but as the recovery and reformulation of principles embedded in the empire's own political traditions. Yet the 1876 Constitution also institutionalised extensive executive prerogatives. The paper therefore argues that the constitutional order designed to overcome istibdâd paradoxically carried the possibility of renewed disorder within its own foundations.

The turn of the 17th century confronted the Ottoman intellectual world with profound manifestations of "disorder": from the socio-political fracturing caused by the Celali revolts to the pervasive anxieties surrounding the Islamic millennium. While the previous century often responded to such crises through messianic fervor and eschatological expectations, the mid-17th century witnessed a distinct epistemological shift toward stability, calculation, and rationalization. This paper examines Kâtib Çelebi’s (d. 1657) Takvîmü’t-tevârîh [Table of Histories, 1648] not merely as a historical reference, but as a primary instrument in this transition from "messianic disorder" to "bureaucratic order." I argue that for Kâtib Çelebi, history was no longer a stage for miraculous intervention or cyclic doom, but a calculable entity to be managed. By stripping the past of its mythological weight and compressing it into the rigid, grid-like structure of chronological tables, Kâtib Çelebi imposed a visual and intellectual "order" upon the chaotic flow of time. This approach signifies a departure from the "enchanted" time of the 16th century to a linear, verifiable "administrative time." By analyzing the structure and intent of the Takvîm, this paper demonstrates how chronology functioned as a political technology. By replacing the unpredictable anxiety of the apocalypse with the reliability of data, Kâtib Çelebi sought to restore confidence in the endurance of the Ottoman state. Ultimately, this study positions Ottoman chronology as a deliberate intellectual response to restore order in a geography perceived to be on the brink of dissolution, engaging with global themes of disenchantment and the bureaucratization of knowledge.

This paper explores how “order” and “disorder” were understood and debated in post- constitutional Iran through Sheikh Mohammad Khiyabani’s Azadistan (land of freedom) Government (1919–1920), centred in Tabriz in Iranian Azerbaijan. In the turbulent aftermath of the First World War, Iran faced a weakened central government, growing foreign intervention, and the wider shockwaves of revolutionary change across Eurasia. Rather than treating this period simply as political instability, the paper approaches it as a moment of intellectual uncertainty, when the very meaning of constitutional order was open to reconsideration. The study focuses on Khiyabani’s public speeches and parliamentary interventions to trace how he used the language of “order” (nazm) and “disorder.” For him, disorder did not mean popular unrest or provincial fragmentation. It meant something deeper: the erosion of constitutional principles, the paralysis of representative institutions, and the gradual loss of sovereignty under semi-colonial pressure. In this sense, disorder was less about chaos than about legitimacy. Seen from this perspective, the Azadistan Project appears not as a marginal uprising but as a serious attempt to rethink and restore political order. By appealing to constitutional balance, popular sovereignty, and local responsibility, Khiyabani sought both to stabilise authority and to redefine its moral and legal foundations. His project shows how moments of crisis can generate new political visions rather than simply mark collapse. By situating Azadistan within wider global debates about sovereignty, empire, and post-imperial reconstruction, the paper highlights how Iranian constitutional thought was part of broader transnational conversations about order. In doing so, it suggests that in semi-colonial contexts, disorder could become not only a sign of breakdown but also a space for imagining alternative constitutional futures. Iranian Constitutionalism, Azadistan Movement

This paper examines Soviet critiques of Western Marxism through the conceptual prism of “organization” (order) and “anarchy” (disorder), focusing on the accusation of “ultra-leftism” directed at Western Marxists (especially Lukács and Korsch) and left communists from the 1920s to the 1970s. I argue that these polemics were not merely intra-movement disputes over tactics but constituted a historically significant attempt to define the conditions of revolutionary order in the twentieth century. The analysis proceeds genealogically across three sites. First, I revisit early Comintern polemics of the 1920s, focusing on debates around council communism and the reception of Lukács and Korsch. Materials from the Communist International archives, alongside polemics published in journals such as Vestnik Kommunisticheskoi Akademii and Pod znamenem marksizma, show how Bolshevik theorists associated Western emphases on class consciousness and spontaneity with a lack of strategic discipline and party organization. Lenin’s critique of “left-wing” communism as an “infantile disorder” provided the conceptual template through which these tendencies were codified as ultra-leftist deviations. Second, the paper turns to Soviet philosophical criticism of “neo-Marxism” in the 1960s-70s. Journals including Voprosy filosofii and Filosofskie nauki, as well as monographs and Soviet contributions to the 1968 Paris Symposium on the Role of Karl Marx, framed Frankfurt School critical theory as substituting existential revolt and psychological negativity for organized proletarian struggle. Herbert Marcuse’s work, for instance, was read as dissolving revolutionary agency into diffuse protest, thereby undermining socialist political unity. I situate these debates within broader geopolitical conceptualizations of Western Marxism that emerged through Soviet engagements with European left communism and its philosophical codifications. The paper concludes by reflecting on contemporary returns to Leninist strategy in theorists such as Slavoj Žižek, arguing that these interventions reactivate the problem first crystallized in Soviet polemics.

This paper examines how republican political thought responds to moments of crisis by reconstructing the concept of “sensus communis” in Immanuel Kant and Hannah Arendt as a mediating principle between legality and public judgment. Rather than treating republicanism as a unified doctrine, the paper approaches it as a contested field of freedom, law and public evaluation. Kant and Arendt articulate two influential but divergent understandings of republican order. One is centered on constitutional right and lawful constraint, the other on political action and public judgment. Kant defines “sensus communis” in the Critique of Judgment as a capacity for an enlarged mentality and public communicability. This capacity appears not as a moral sentiment or private conviction but as a condition of shareable judgment that underpins claims of right and publicity (Öffentlichkeit) within a republican framework. In this way, a lawful order depends on communicable judgment particularly in times of instability and renewal. Arendt transforms the concept of the enlarged mentality into a faculty of political judgment oriented toward plurality and the common world. In contexts of rupture, political judgment as a non-sovereign and public capacity enables citizens to evaluate responsibility and political action beyond established legal frameworks. By placing these accounts in dialogue, this paper argues that republican crisis cannot be addressed by legal mechanisms alone but requires shared standards of public judgment. “Sensus communis” thus serves as a critical resource for understanding how republican orders confront breakdown and contestation.

This essay examines the political theology of Brahmabandhav Upadhyay (1861-1907) – an Indian nationalist and Bengali Hindu revivalist who converted to Roman Catholicism – through the global history of ‘culturalism’. It situates the tension between Catholic universalism and anti-colonial culturalism produced by Upadhyay's conversion in colonial Bengal within a history of the nineteenth-century global conflict between Catholicism and nationalism. Upadhyay’s thought was shaped during Bengal's ‘culture war' – which reorganised religion as the site of subjective cultural autonomy – produced by the crisis of colonialism. The fall of the ‘Union Bank’ (a joint venture between Europeans and Indians) in 1848, British racism towards Indians following the 1858 Crown takeover of India, and evangelical critiques of Hindu culture exposed the limits of liberalism under imperial rule. The Hindu elite responded by consolidating ‘Hindu culture’ against ‘Western materialism,’ while othering Christian converts as ‘Europeanised.’ In this context, Upadhyay's formulation of Indians as “Hindu in culture yet Catholic in spirit,” and his anti-Darwinian Catholic evolutionism of ‘nature to grace’ functioned as a political theology of nationhood. Through this, he simultaneously displaced British claims to civilizational superiority while reappropriating ‘universal civilization’ of Christianity within Hindu culture. His vision of an “Indian Catholic Church” that would liberate Indians from British rule articulates a problem that haunted the Catholic church: how could a transnational institution claiming universal truth assert legitimacy within nationalizing societies? Approaching ‘the cultivation of national culture’ as central to the global history of modernity, I situate Upadhyay’s conversion within a global convergence with contemporaneous struggles of European, American, and Chinese Catholic converts with nationalism. Through this, the essay unsettles the focus on difference between colony and metropole in postcolonial historiography, showing how nineteenth-century struggles between ‘universal order’ and ‘cultural sovereignty’ was a global phenomenon, forged through encounters between ecclesiastical hierarchy, imperialism, and nationalist aspirations.

The nineteenth century marked a profound turning point in how Islamic ideas approached the question of change. A tension emerged between seeing change as an attempt to re-establish the old order or a forward move in history. Theological debates on this spilled over into the bigger issue of how world history should be viewed. With changing ideas about history being governed by the laws of nature rather than a divine ‘plan’, the idea of innovation (bidat) started acquiring positive connotations in some quarters. During the Tanzimat the desire to preserve the old order was challenged but change was justified as an attempt to restore order and tradition and achieve religious renewal rather than a need to move forward and innovate. The requirement to safeguard the social order was not unique to Islamic societies in the nineteenth century and the Ottoman reformers were not exceptional in wanting to achieve restoration and renewal combined. But other concepts in the Tanzimat era were more intent on introducing change and some accepted the idea of progress, associating it with European supremacy. The paper will explore these nineteenth century debates and ask how they evolved in the twentieth century, particularly after the establishment of the Turkish republic in 1923. It will set out the continuities and differences in how Islamic thinkers grappled with the tension between restoration and renewal in the new context defined by a secular constitution.

Why did the Ottoman authorities read the Sretenje Constitution of 1835 as “disorder”, abolish it, and replace it in 1838 with a hatt-ı şerif that Serbian historiography calls the “Turkish Constitution”? The paper starts from dvovlašće, the dual governance of a quasi-sovereign principality founded on international treaties and Ottoman hatt-ı şerifs under Russian guarantee. Comparing the political orders the two texts envisaged, their institutions and the roles they assigned to prince, council and suzerain, it shows that the differences were marginal; the decisive one was Sretenje's claim to supremacy over other legal sources. Disorder, then, lay not in the content of the order but in its author: a constitution created and adopted by a quasi-sovereign state. Serbia thus belongs to an early, under-conceptualised Ottoman local constitutionalism, in which a constitution was a means of legitimising sovereignty rather than its result. By 1869, when a new constitution stood on the 1838 text, the Porte had lost the power to decide who may constitute, and what counts as disorder.

In 1907, the Viennese sociologist and Social Democrat Rudolf Broda (1880-1932) launched a grand internationalist project in Paris to document, study, and organize global progress. Within a few years, six periodicals appearing in Paris (French), London (English), Berlin (German), Saint Petersburg (Russian), Budapest (Hungarian) and Madrid (Esperanto) carried a large debate across linguistic and political borders. In Paris, the Institut international pour la diffusion des expériences sociales and the Ligue pour l’organisation du progrès were founded. Their purpose was to coordinate an internationalist movement through local chapters across Europe and beyond, to conduct comparative sociological research on progressive developments, and to lobby politics according to these scientific findings. A transnational network of scholars, political leaders, writers and reformers representing a spectrum of political inclinations was engaged in Broda’s project. Building progress meant ‘building culture’, he argued, and thus he tried to create a broad alliance among the time’s ‘cultural movements’ which included but went beyond the labour movement and ‘bourgeois socialism’. During the time of the project’s existence (1907-1932), the debate on progress shifted several times. In its fin-de-siècle phase, it addressed a wide and arguably eclectic range of topics. During the Great War it focused on pacifism, (non-Bolshevik) socialist internationalism, international law and the creation of international institutions. Broda sketched plans for a post-war legal and political world order and drafted a constitution for a League of Nations. Broda’s understanding of progress and the structure he built were not only socialist and internationalist. I argue that his was a project of radical emancipation to peace and freedom, flavoured by particular Austro-Hungarian sensibilities. It was an attempt to foster a global, radical republican culture and to build a republican world order.

Everyone is born free, and liberty is the state of being that best befits all humans, claims Andreas Volanus (~1530-1610) in his De Libertate Politica sive Civili (1572). However, Volanus diagnoses an ailment in the body politic of the newly established Polish–Lithuanian Republic, caused by mistaking pernicious license for liberty. He instructs his readers on the difference between a well-ordered state and the chaotic tyranny of license. He then offers suggestions to exorcise license by means of legal reform. In doing so, he argues for the further criminalization of violence and the introduction of laws to curb luxury, drunkenness, gluttony, and lust. Volanus would later become (in)famous for his religious polemics against the Jesuits as the leader of the Reformed Evangelicals of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Previous research has treated his political thought and theological debates separately. However, this distinction is arbitrary, as his theological convictions informed his political thought just as much as learned humanist discourse did. The ancients provided Volanus with the tools to diagnose the ailing body politic; however, the cure he suggests is convincingly Protestant: legislation against the cardinal sins. The treatise was published during a tumultuous period in the newly established Polish–Lithuanian polity. After the death of Sigismund Augustus, the state faced its first royal election. It was also a time of opportunity, particularly due to ongoing legal reforms. Volanus was ideally positioned to voice his opinions and make his suggestions heard, owing to his service as a royal secretary and his close ties with power brokers of Evangelical conviction. In this talk, I reflect on Volanus as a late humanist and devout Evangelical whose theological convictions informed his proposals for legal reform—proposals that were eventually adopted in the Third Lithuanian Statute (1588). Bio: Povilas Dikavičius heads the Vilnius branch of the German Historical Institute Warsaw. His academic expertise lies in the Early Modern European history with a particular focus on 16th century Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Renaissance studies.

It may be argued that questions of revolution and disrupted order dominated the political and philosophical discourses of late eighteenth-century Britain. As a history of political thought, histories of revolution became something of an epistemological filter through which to view every literary endeavour; every political reappraisal of success and failure, every experimental feint of philosophy and science. The fundamental questions of stability and crisis that had for so long been considered in ecclesio-political terms, were by the 1760’s and 70’s being re-cast as economic and social questions, as questions of natural and scientific order. For Hume there were two critical revolutions or civil wars. The first of these was to be understood as a long Civil War; one that tested the limits of allegiance and the balance of interest not only in an established dynasty, but in a well-worn and ancient order. Arguably, it culminated in a decisive rupture. Whether “Glorious” or ignoble, the practicalities of establishing the new order required a repackaging of the crisis of 1688 as a ‘bloodless coup’; an almost voluntary and self-moving sequence of events that suggested no treason, no crisis, but only a slow, inevitable and reasoned progress. But by the 1770’s, the second great crisis of state and empire would be re-imagined as an insufficiently rapid sequence of reform or progress to be followed by a final rift and the irreconcilable end of the ‘new’ old order. The perception of these disruptions was shaped by expediency, but also through the lens of memory and revision. Coleridge wrote his own accounts of revolution and order. Like Hume he had two revolutions in mind. But while his first example was, similarly, to consider the American Revolution as a great watershed of change, it was the revolution to come that preoccupied his mind. Hume did not live to see the events of the 1790’s demolish the old institutions of the Ancien regime in France. But for Coleridge, as for Burke, the French Revolution suggested both echoes and novelties. And it required a radical reassessment of the engines of historical change. This paper will consider Coleridge’s engagement with Hume’s scientific and social accounts of progress. By the 1820’s, Coleridge would advance his own dynamic accounts of government, statecraft, and the fundamental forces of history through the twin principles of permanence and progression. By doing so, Coleridge offered an account of natural order as an expression of political vitalism.

This paper examines metaphor as a pivotal tool for conceptualizing „disorder” in post-World War I Europe. Drawing on Hans Blumenberg’s metaphorology, it explores how metaphors— viewed as fundamental modes of cognition rather than mere rhetorical figures—enabled intellectuals to grasp the totalizing nature of post-war transformation. In an era where traditional concepts failed to account for unprecedented chaos, „absolute metaphors” provided the groundwork for projects aimed at restoring „order”. The study focuses on the tension between crisis and the norm. It investigates metaphors coined by a contrast set of three intellectuals sharing a post-1918 problem horizon despite differing backgrounds: John Maynard Keynes, Paul Valéry, and Karl Mannheim. I analyze how they utilized metaphors to define normalcy in both its descriptive (typical) and normative (desirable) dimensions. Within this framework, the historical crisis appears as a „threshold” moment where metaphor compresses fragmented social processes into a coherent image, charting a course for normalization. The presentation discusses three distinct strategies: (1) Keynes’s „exhaustion”: Rooted in the body politic tradition, this imagery frames disorder as an external pathology, advocating for stability through the restitution of liberal frameworks. (2) Valéry’s „shipwreck”: This interprets the crisis as a result of cultural "diffusion" and the triumph of positivism, suggesting order requires the rule of a new „intellectual aristocracy.” (3) Mannheim’s „synthesis”: Here, metaphor expresses a culture alienated from life, assigning the intellectual the task of identifying order within non-theoretical worldviews (Weltanschauung). The paper argues that despite differing ideologies, all three thinkers converged on the conviction that restoring order was an intellectual responsibility. Amidst institutional collapse, they positioned the intellectual as a leader capable of navigating the crisis and articulating frameworks for a new normalcy. Ultimately, metaphors served as the medium through which these figures asserted their agency in European re-normalization.

This paper explores Iranian intellectual contributions to international thought through their engagement with the geopolitical implications of the Dungan Revolt (1864–1877) and the rise and fall of Ya’qub Beg’s Kashgar-based emirate. Focusing on articles published in Akhtar, a Persian-language newspaper in Istanbul (1876–1896), the study highlights how Iranian intellectuals conceptualised the Great Game, British and Russian imperialism, and China’s role in global politics. Highlighting the role of China within Cemil Aydin’s The Idea of the Muslim World and drawing on Joanne Sharpe’s concept of subaltern geopolitics, it examines how these intellectuals navigated their position between Chinese, Ottoman, Persian, Russian, and British imperial contexts by drawing on colonial knowledge, pan-Islamic thought, and Islamic historiography. Although not always explicitly anti-imperial, they constructed an alternative geopolitical imagination that framed China and Turkestan within a broader discourse of Muslim unity and imperial rivalry during the Great Game. This study contributes to the historiography of international relations by incorporating Persian perspectives, challenging Eurocentric narratives, and illustrating the transnational, co-constructed dimensions of geopolitical and international thought in the 19th century. The intellectual debates in Akhtar not only reflected anxieties about imperialism in Europe and the Ottoman Empire but also shaped enduring narratives about China, Islam, and global politics that persist in contemporary discourse.

Sub-themes: Intellectual histories of (dis)order; ideologies and order John Milton’s political thought was generated by revolutionary disorder and revolved around the popular right to revolution. He defended the achievements of the English Revolution (1640-1660) in ways which (sometimes) endorsed disorder, and (sometimes) accepted the ‘extraordinary’ nature of the events, outside normal structures of legitimacy. His sociological and psychological analysis of revolution condemned people not for being ‘hot and active’ at the start of the revolution, but for failing to maintain that fervour and falling away from the cause. He insisted that any free people always had the right to change their government or constitution, even if it was not tyrannical. This openness to constitutional change is in stark contrast with the exquisitely ordered ‘immortal commonwealth’ proposed by James Harrington. But Milton’s licensing of the potentially disorderly action of the people was always partial and constrained. He valued perseverance and constancy and emphasised that revolutionary ruptures expressed in military form had to be followed by the harder work – for which fewer were fitted – of consolidating a virtuous politics in peace. His validation of the people’s persisting right to overthrow their government and set up a new one was undercut by his tendency (although he was far from consistent in this) to place the people’s agency in their parliament. In 1659-60, reflecting that overthrowing a king was virtually impossible without bringing destruction on the country, Milton argued, against Harrington, for an elected council of members sitting for life to rule the republic. These restrictive proposals came under attack from Harringtonians whose bicameral constitution allowed for dynamic elements of rotation and election which Milton felt exposed the commonwealth to disorder. Both Milton’s and Harrington’s visions were vital and dynamic in some ways, highly contained in others; but they conceptualised order and disorder in crucially different ways.

From Justinian’s Corpus Juris Civilis to modern projects of reconstructing order through law, attempts to organize legal knowledge have sought not only to determine what counts as law, but how law may be known. International law, however, developed through a more dispersed process. Its rules emerged from fragmented practices, agreements and usages among political communities, which influential jurists later conceptualized through legal categories. The establishment of the Permanent Court of International Justice (PCIJ) in 1920 introduced a new stage, and Article 38 of its Statute reflected a new ambition: a central reference point for the identification and application of international law. The debates of the Advisory Committee of Jurists in 1920 over “general principles of law [recognized by civilised nations]” brought this epistemological shift to the surface. Their inclusion among the rules to be applied by the PCIJ responded to a problem of legal order: international law had to remain sufficiently open to allow courts to decide disputes where treaty and custom provided no answer, while remaining sufficiently closed to prevent adjudication from becoming an unrestricted exercise of judicial lawmaking. Elihu Root objected to giving judges the power to apply principles that had not acquired the status of positive law, warning against allowing the Court to legislate. Other members were concerned with the opposite possibility: that restricting the Court to treaty and custom would produce non liquet -a refusal to resolve a dispute due to the absence of applicable law- and, ultimately, a denial of justice. The recognition of “general principles of law recognized by civilized nations” emerged as an attempt to preserve an opening in the international legal order while constraining its use. Yet the Committee stopped short of exhaustively prescribing the sources or methods through which such principles were to be identified. This paper traces the intellectual history of this tension from the Advisory Committee to the International Law Commission’s (ILC) recent work (2019–2025) on general principles. It focuses particularly on the competing approaches through which general principles have been identified. Bin Cheng approached general principles through international adjudicatory practice, systematizing principles that courts had recognized and applied. Schlesinger’s comparative project, by contrast, sought to identify common principles through systematic comparison of domestic legal systems and their possible transposition to the international sphere. The subsequent reception of Cheng’s work by international courts and tribunals illustrates a less orderly circulation of legal authority: publicists describe and systematize principles, courts rely upon those descriptions in recognizing them, and judicial recognition subsequently provides evidence of their legal status. The ILC’s recent work responds to this persistent openness differently. Rather than enumerating the principles belonging to Article 38, it specifies methodologies through which general principles are to be identified. In doing so, it largely adopts a comparative methodology centered on the identification of principles through domestic legal systems and their transposition to the international legal order. I argue that this represents a distinctive form of epistemological closure. Closure does not require an exhaustive enumeration of permissible legal norms; it may also operate by regulating the means through which a norm can be recognized as law. The object of ordering thus shifts from legal rules and categories to the permissible methods of knowing law. The history of general principles therefore reveals a recurring tension within international legal order between the desire to organize legal knowledge and the openness through which that order accommodates normative innovation. The question confronted in 1920 -how to preserve an opening in the law without conferring an unrestricted power of judicial lawmaking- has not disappeared. What has changed is the object of the effort at closure: increasingly, it is not only law that is ordered, but the methods through which law may be known.

Following the collapse of the Qing imperial order in 1912, Chinese reformers confronted what many perceived as a profound crisis of political and moral disorder. This paper examines how successive rewritings of Robinson Crusoe in Republican-era Chinese language textbooks became a vehicle for articulating shifting visions of social order between the 1910s and the 1940s. Drawing on comparative textual analysis, this paper shows how textbook editors systematically filtered the novel’s colonial and individualist elements in the early Republic. Crusoe was recast as a disciplined, industrious, and morally upright figure whose self-reliance embodied the virtues required for national regeneration. Conflicts with paternal authority were removed, and master–slave hierarchies were softened or erased. Through these interventions, educational elites constructed a model of autonomous subjecthood aligned with republican ideals of equality, civic responsibility, and moral self-cultivation. By the 1930s and 1940s, however, amid war, social instability, and intensified reflection on collective survival, this image was reconfigured. Later textbooks highlighted the hardships, vulnerability, and practical limitations of solitary existence. Supplementary questions and adjacent readings explicitly invited students to question the desirability and feasibility of “Robinsonian” isolation, redirecting attention toward cooperation, interdependence, and collective life. The pedagogical narrative thus shifted from celebrating individual self-sufficiency to promoting solidaristic order. This case demonstrates that educational adaptation of foreign literature functioned as a site of conceptual negotiation in modern China. Through the redefinition of Crusoe’s moral significance, textbook editors actively reimagined the relationship between individual autonomy and collective order, revealing how ideas of social organisation were reformulated in response to revolutionary rupture and national crisis. China; intellectual history

This paper investigates how Hausa vernacular historians in Hausa speaking northern Nigeria developed and sustained sophisticated systems of knowledge classification during the second half of the twentieth century. Drawing on archival research, close textual analysis of Hausa-language manuscripts and printed works, and oral interviews with contemporary custodians of historical knowledge, the study argues that these historians were central architects of epistemic order in a rapidly changing intellectual landscape. Their chronicles, genealogies, and narrative frameworks provided the classificatory foundations upon which colonial administrators, anthropologists, and later academic historians constructed their accounts of Hausa society, even as these same scholars dismissed indigenous historiography as unscientific or methodologically inadequate. Through case studies of Alhaji Abubakar Dokaji, Alhaji Maje Ahmad Gwangwazo, and Nasiru Wada Khalil, the paper traces how vernacular historians blended oral storytelling, Islamic scholarly traditions, and archival materials dating back to the Islamisation of Hausaland with Western academic methods introduced under colonial rule. Rather than being displaced by modernity, indigenous knowledge practices adapted to new media—print publishing, radio, and later digital platforms—expanding the circulation of historical knowledge among Hausa-speaking publics and reinforcing long-standing classificatory logics. By situating this tradition within the broader epistemic hierarchy that has shaped Nigerian historiography, the paper demonstrates how Western academic conventions have systematically marginalised intellectually rigorous scholarship produced in African languages. Yet colonial and postcolonial scholars relied heavily on indigenous sources such as the Kano Chronicle and Kano Ta Dabo Ci Gari, even as they questioned their legitimacy. The paper concludes that the classificatory practices of Hausa vernacular historians reveal how ordering knowledge has been inseparable from ordering society, and that these “silent scholars” played a foundational—though persistently overlooked—role in the making of Nigerian historical knowledge.

Keywords: Forcible Feeding, Prison Doctors, Hunger Strikes, Indian Medical Service, Anti-colonial Resistance In early twentieth-century colonial India, militant revolutionaries, political prisoners, and disobedient nationalists repeatedly made their bodies ungovernable and unmanageable, generating profound disorder within the disciplinary world of the prison. Hunger striking became a radical tactic through which detainees contested their classification as ordinary offenders in the imperial penal regime. Their refusal to eat was an embodied rejection of carceral authority, producing a crisis of order that the colonial state struggled to contain. It was in this volatile space that the prison doctor emerged as a pivotal figure. Tasked with managing bodies that refused to be managed, doctors confronted the tension between medical ethics and imperial imperatives. The Indian Medical Service, shaped by the convergence of medical and military rationalities, cultivated the figure of the “medical soldier,” whose duty was simultaneously to heal, discipline, and control. This distinctly colonial model of medicine blurred the boundaries between care and coercion, transforming medical duty into a shifting terrain: at times a form of moral but coerced paternalism, at others a disciplinary right exercised in the name of restoring institutional order. As hunger strikes proliferated, the state embedded a humanitarian technique, namely, force-feeding, into law, justifying the violation of bodily autonomy as a necessary response to self-destructive practices. Medical language itself shifted to obscure the violence of this intervention, reframing disorderly bodies as clinical problems requiring therapeutic correction. Through these linguistic and legal manoeuvres, medicine became a crucial technology for producing order in a world unsettled by anti-colonial resistance. In this paper, I argue that this colonial medical regime did more than manage crisis — it redefined the very meaning of (dis)order within prisons and, by extension, within the broader anti-colonial movement. The prison doctor, suspended between imperatives of ethics and empire, embodied the ambiguity at the heart of this project, an agent deploying coercive healing to correct colonial pathologies and restore order in a disordered, irrational and sentimental political world.

unrest, foreign intervention, and the recent deposition of two sultans. This paper argues that the constitution-making process was not merely a response to crisis but an intellectual and legal effort to redefine the relationship between order, disorder, and law in the late Ottoman Empire to keep territorial integrity. Drawing on a series of draft constitutional texts—many previously unexamined—this study reconstructs how Ottoman statesmen conceptualized political disorder and translated it into new legal categories. Archival evidence reveals competing constitutional projects and significant revisions introduced by the Drafting Commission, the Council of Ministers, and the Palace. These struggles were not only institutional but conceptual: they revolved around how far law could domesticate disorder and how far sovereign power had to remain unconstrained in order to restore order — not only in the face of international threats, but also amid internal power rivalries seeking to curtail sultanic prerogatives. The evolution of what became Article 113, the constitution’s emergency provision, offers a particularly revealing lens. Early drafts used the term muhasara hali (state of siege), a direct borrowing from French constitutional vocabulary. Later versions replaced it with idare-i örfiye (customary administration), redefining emergency rule as the temporary suspension of civil law under a special legal regime. At the same time, handwritten additions expanded the sultan’s personal authority to expel individuals deemed threats to state security, based on police intelligence. Law thus appeared simultaneously as an instrument of order and as a vehicle for enlarging sovereign prerogative. By tracing how “disorder” was transformed from a moral-political diagnosis into a juridified category of emergency governance, this paper shows how Ottoman constitutionalism functioned both as a project of legal ordering and as an opening to alternative constitutional futures in which the boundaries between law and autocracy remained deeply contested.

Sultan Abdülaziz's journey to Paris, London and Vienna in 1867 is usually explained by credit, Crete, the Tsar and the Khedive. This paper accepts those reasons and reads the journey as a moment of encounter: a Porte that needed to be seen as a partner, a Turkish-language official press addressing its own subjects, a French-language Ottoman press addressing Europe, and European publics with priorities of their own. Using the full 1867 run of Cerîde-i Havâdis, La Turquie, the Levant Herald and 2,171 documents from twenty-eight Paris titles, it reconstructs the Ottoman campaign at three levels of discourse and traces eighteen passages from their European originals into Turkish. The Porte spoke to Europe in Europe's terms and translated the answer for its own public within days, in a vocabulary chosen to live with religion; hierarchy was removed and the state's action kept. The journey was articulation, not entry, and the institutions of 1868 grew from that encounter.

As a philosophy of the sciences and societies grounded in the programmatic dyad “Order and Progress,” Auguste Comte’s positivism stands out as one of the intellectual propositions of European modernity most explicitly addressing the tension between “order” and “disorder.” In the positivist corpus, developed in the second half of the nineteenth century by orthodox or heterodox disciples across three continents, order is opposed not so much to disorder as to anarchy. In their view, this state of anarchy, primarily intellectual and moral, constitutes the main symptom of the “great crisis” affecting especially Western societies since the French Revolution and South American societies since the independence movements of the early nineteenth century. However, the positivists’ despairing critiques of their respective societies do not immediately clarify what they meant by “order” or “anarchy.” Anarchy is not the opposite of order—in an altogether different intellectual tradition, Élisée Reclus even stated that “anarchy is the highest expression of order.” More broadly, disorder is not the absence of order. In Henri Bergson’s terms, we characterize as “disorder” a certain order that does not correspond to our expectations, typically where we encounter a vital—organic and creative—order instead of a mechanical one, governed by strict laws. This presentation aims to explore the positivist conception of order from this perspective, demonstrating that, for positivists, the state of “anarchy” signifies that society is—paradoxically—not functioning according to its immanent laws. This discussion will provide an opportunity to problematize the notions of law, determinism, and predictability in the positivist corpus, considered on a global scale, thereby opening a reflection on the intellectual foundations of the technocratic conception of social governance.

Since the seventeenth century, comets, long associated with disorder, anomaly, and monstrosity, have served as sites for negotiating cosmological order and disorder. Newton’s domestication of the Comet of 1680 affirmed a law-governed cosmos, while Bayle’s Pensées diverses sur la comète (1682) detached comets from providential causality to imagine a viable atheist society. Building on these Enlightenment ambitions to transform disordering phenomena into objects of rational cosmology, this paper examines how such projects were unsettled and politicised in post-Enlightenment Britain and France. Taking the cometary knowledge-making in Paris and London surrounding the Great Comet of 1811, an object of extraordinary visibility during the Napoleonic wars, as a microhistorical prism, the paper draws on archival research in the Greenwich Observatory, the Observatoire de Paris, the Institut de France, and the Bibliothèque nationale de France. It advances two interrelated claims. First, it shows how universalist cosmological order was pluralised through institutional and national competition. British and French savants, often cast as Newtonian and Laplacian camps, competed for authenticity and authority through refined observation and calculation. Greenwich and the Paris Observatory functioned as rival meridians of cosmological order, each claiming universality while embedding celestial knowledge within nationally inflected regimes of verification. Second, the paper demonstrates that post-Enlightenment cometary knowledge continued to oscillate between ordered cosmology and the reproduction of disordering signification, most notably in the revival of state astrology. Charles Messier’s attribution of the comet of 1769 to Napoleon and the comet of 1811 to the King of Rome illustrates how anomaly could be reconfigured as proof of providential exception and dynastic legitimacy. Tracing these negotiations, the paper contends that cometary knowledge operated as a scientific and political laboratory for the governance of anomaly, demonstrating that epistemic order is not a given condition but an effect of continual negotiation between disorder, power, and authority.

What factors cause narratives of treaties to change, and why? This paper explores the Treaty of Nerchinsk and its evolving imprint on the eighteenth-century European intellectual landscape. Signed in September 1689, the Treaty is the first bilateral settlement of its nature between imperial Russia and China. It is a settlement with a remarkable history and possibly even more remarkable reception. Here, I triangulate, on one hand, Qing, Jesuit, Russian, and academic records of the Treaty’s negotiations and contexts, with, on the other hand, the use that a number of the Treaty’s commentators, historians, and observers made of them. These include the St. Petersburg academician Gerhard Friedrich Müller, the French philosophe Voltaire, and the author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Edward Gibbon. Building on a varied scholarship that underscores the multilateral, messy nature of the Nerchinsk negotiations and the ambiguity of the settlement, this paper focuses on the interactions of divergent legal regimes and evolving narrativization around the Treaty, not in order to assess the extent of its distortion, but rather to explore the factors that shape its refraction. Containing the germ of a larger, early-stages book project on Russian imperial expansion and the European Enlightenment, the paper shares this wider project’s overarching aim to examine the place of knowledge production and its narrativization in Russian imperial expansion and in European attempts to conceive of and react to it. This exploration of the Treaty of Nerchinsk, its aftermath and afterlives, constitutes the proposed book’s first chapter; subsequent chapters centre on further sites of Russian imperial ambition, including Taganrog and Orenburg.

In A Letter concerning Toleration (1689) and other writings on this subject, John Locke advocated toleration of not only Dissenting Protestants, but also non-Christian believers. A Letter concerning Toleration was far from promoting a complete freedom of conscience, in that its author focused mainly on affirming the separation of state and churches. Moreover, Locke denied toleration to Roman Catholics for their political allegiance to the pope and for following immoral practical principles, and he judged atheists to be intolerable because of their failure, or refusal, to recognize God’s existence and, thus, the divine moral law – that is, the law of nature. However, although Locke believed that only those who accepted and followed the Christian Law of Faith could achieve eternal salvation, he stated in the Letter that “neither Pagan, nor Mahumetan, nor Jew, ought to be excluded from the Civil Rights of the Commonwealth, because of his Religion.” The main reason for Locke’s tolerance of non-Christian believers is that he explained humankind’s moral and political duties in terms of natural duties embedded in the divinely given law of nature. According to Locke, God was the Creator of the normative natural order regulating human interactions, and theistic belief, being necessary to adhere to the normative natural order, was consequently the basic requirement for being tolerated in the civil commonwealth. Nonetheless, for Locke, not all non-Christian believers were the same, as is shown by his considerations, in An Essay concerning Human Understanding, on different sorts of American “savages,” on polytheists, and on atheistic but civilized Asian peoples. Locke’s views on several categories of non-Christians indicate that, in some cases, theistic belief was still not enough for one to fit within the moral and political order envisioned by Locke. Therefore, Locke’s position concerning non-Christian believers and their morality and tolerability needs additional clarification. (Abstract word count: 300)

This paper offers an intellectual history of the semantic relationship between “order” and “disorder” in the Hispanic imperial world from the late eighteenth century to the age of independence. It argues that disorder was not conceived as an episodic rupture of stability, but as a constitutive category through which political authority and public order were conceptualised and legitimised. In late colonial New Spain, debates on social discipline and urban governance reveal that disorder had already become a central analytical and normative category prior to the crisis of imperial sovereignty. A striking example is José Antonio de Villarroel’s Political Diseases Afflicting the Capital of New Spain (1785–1786), which described social, moral, and administrative instability as a “political disease” corroding the urban body and demanding corrective intervention. Such medical representations framed disorder as a condition requiring active governmental management. These local formulations interacted with the broader European science of police circulating across the Spanish Empire, including Nicolas De la Mare’s Treatise on the Police, Bielfeld’s Political Institutions, and Tomás Valeriola’s General Idea of Police. In these works, disorder functioned as a foundational premise legitimising the existence of police as a technology of governance: an art of government concerned with observation, regulation, classification, improvement, and reform. Rather than treating public order as a natural or pre-existing state, the paper conceptualises it as an unfinished and contested process within an imperial and transatlantic space of intellectual exchange. By combining conceptual analysis with the study of normative and doctrinal sources, it demonstrates how Hispanic American actors actively re-signified European political languages. Disorder thus emerges as a generative principle structuring competing visions of authority, legitimacy, and collective order in the global intellectual history of empire.

This paper examines Georg Simmel’s philosophical engagement with the First World War as a historically situated and dynamically evolving attempt to think war as crisis at the level of culture. Rather than treating Simmel’s wartime texts as a fixed position, it adopts a genetic and contextualizing perspective on a broad textual basis, reconstructing the transformations of his thought between 1914 and 1918 in close relation to two intersecting contexts: the shifting political-military reality of the war and the contemporary German discourse of the ‘Kulturkrieg’. Simmel understands war as crisis in a double sense: as an indicator of latent tensions within modern culture and as a catalyst capable of intensifying and potentially transforming them. He interprets the conflict through the lens of his metaphysics of life and culture, structured by a tragic oscillation between processes of vital dynamization and the rigidification of cultural forms. According to Simmel, war would push back „mammonism“, reconfigure the relationship between individual and society, end the autonomy of aesthetics from lived experience, and serve as the liberator and unifier of the ‘moral force’ of the German people. Eventually, the soldier appears as a privileged anthropological type, embodying quasi-eschatological aspirations of self-transcendence that suggest a distant resonance with Nietzsche’s notion of the ‘Übermensch’. Yet as the conflict evolves, his expectations undergo gradual disillusionment. The hoped-for cultural renewal gives way instead to experiences of inner fragmentation and the decline of European culture. In this process, Simmel’s philosophy of war turns reflexive: the thinking of crisis itself enters into crisis. Ultimately, Simmel’s intellectual development emerges as paradigmatic for a broad spectrum of contemporary intellectuals, while also tracing the gradual disillusionment of those aspirations that figures such as Emil Lederer and Gustav Radbruch had already regarded with critical distance at an early stage of the war.

Sub-theme: Intellectual Histories of (Dis)order “Terrorism” is one of the most globally significant and contested terms in the modern political lexicon. Yet, despite its centrality, its conceptual history remains underdeveloped. The Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe examined “terrorismus” only in relation to the French revolution, a bias that has persisted in intellectual history (Walter, 1990; Rapin, 2021). This paper, which provides the first sustained conceptual history of terrorism, seeks, therefore, to address a major gap. Building on a global approach to conceptual history (Pernau and Sachsenmaier, 2016), I argue that the decisive reconfiguration of the term occurred in the fin-de-siècle when, through a pan-European process of semantic transfer, “terrorism” absorbed and displaced the lay concept of “anarchism”. Between the 1870s and 1914, “anarchism” and “nihilism” emerged across German, Russian, and English debates as master-categories of political disorder. In the press, political rhetoric, literature, and international anti-anarchist congresses, “the anarchist” was constructed as a figure of uncompromising, apocalyptic negation. In the emerging field of international policing, “anarchism” became defined as a conspiratorial force waging war on civilisation itself. During this period, “terrorism” did not yet denote indiscriminate violence. It often referred to rhetorical extremism. In the early twentieth century, the semantic attributes attached to anarchism migrated onto “terrorism.” The concept thereby crystallised as a delegitimising Kampfbegriff symbolizing the idea of a blanket campaign of disorder. A global dimension was essential to this shift. In the context of imperial governance and transnational policing cooperation, “terrorism” proved a more flexible category than “anarchism.” Whereas “anarchism” was associated with specific ideological traditions of the European left, “terrorism” could be extended to anti-colonial actors and nationalist movements. “terrorism” thus emerged as a portable and delegitimising master-concept capable of encompassing ideologically diverse movements. The paper offers the first sustained intellectual genealogy of one of the most powerful categories of modern political thought. In doing so, it not only clarifies the historical relationship between anarchism and terrorism, but also exposes the conceptual instability of one of the most evocative terms in modern discourse. This has considerable implications for contemporary political thought and analysis.

This paper investigates the epistemic contours and interpretive complexities of regional mathematical traditions in early modern South India and their intersections with broader intellectual orders. While the history of mathematical and astronomical learning in South Asia has often prioritized Sanskrit treatises as markers of elite scholastic authority, this focus obscures the rich intellectual life encoded in vernacular mathematical texts. These regional works were not merely simplified vehicles for elite knowledge; rather, they articulated distinct pedagogical aims, textual forms, and audiences that challenged conventional hierarchies of scholarly worth. By foregrounding these parallel epistemic formations, the paper contributes to a more textured understanding of how intellectual orders were constituted, contested, and reconfigured outside canonical frameworks. I first examine late 18th- and early 19th-century colonial encounters with this corpus, tracing how colonial institutions, learned societies, and individual actors navigated, compared, and evaluated indigenous mathematical knowledge. These engagements reveal divergent epistemic strategies that both sought to impose new orders of classification and, in practice, produced zones of disorder in the valuation and transmission of mathematical ideas. Crucially, native scholars served as indispensable mediators whose labor shaped colonial knowledge regimes even as their contributions were variably acknowledged or marginalized. Turning to the late modern period, the paper traces regional efforts to renew and translate this mathematical knowledge through practices that deployed multiple vocabularies while retaining a locally grounded character. These ongoing translations complicate assumptions about the universality and neutrality of mathematical forms, prompting reflection on the extent to which intellectual content can be disentangled from its cultural and linguistic embodiments. In doing so, the paper illuminates how historically specific epistemic orders coexisted with, disrupted, and reframed global narratives of scientific and mathematical knowledge. PRIYAMVADA NAMBRATH

The first public mineralogical collection in Russia, the Mineral Cabinet, was established in Peter the Great’s Kunstkamera in 1714. The history of this collection demonstrates how, over the course of the eighteenth century, two conceptual and material orders of a mineralogical collection succeeded one another. Until the last third of the eighteenth century, there existed a clear academic imperative regarding how a properly organized mineral cabinet should be arranged: it was to serve as a material avatar of the system of mineralogy (the part of the system of Nature corresponding to the mineral kingdom). Spatially, minerals were stored in closed cabinets with drawers corresponding to the classes of the chosen mineralogical system. Verbal descriptions of collections—catalogues, inventories—were considered more “museum” than the physical assemblage itself. In the St Petersburg Academy’s publications of the time, references to specific specimens pointed not to a cabinet or drawer where the object could be seen, but to the page of the catalogue on which it was described. At the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this picture changed. The Mineral Cabinet came to be conceived as a kind of map: specimens were removed from closed cabinets and placed in flat glass‑covered displays, creating a broad, visually accessible space. New sections appeared—geographical, didactic; foreign and Russian minerals were displayed separately. The political dimension became essential: the Mundus Subterraneus was fragmented into separate parts claimed by different states. This order of the mineralogical museum continues to operate today. At the same time, minerals in many museums are increasingly displayed brightly lit and invisibly fixed within dark display cases, as if suspended in primordial chaos, detached from any systematic, political, or didactic order. This marks the beginning of a new chapter in the history of the mineralogical collection—one whose full content remains, for now, unclear.

This paper examines how Turkish and Armenian communists active in Cold War Eastern Europe imagined, contested, and redefined the “order” of Turkey. The term Turkish and Armenian communists refers both to members of Türkiye Komünist Partisi (TKP) banned in Turkey and to intellectuals who actively participated in its activities without holding formal membership. From the 1940s to the 1970s, these actors established transnational networks linking Leipzig, Sofia, Budapest, Vienna, Prague, and Bucharest. Prominent figures such as Zeki Baştımar, İsmail Bilen, Nâzım Hikmet, Sabiha Sertel, Aram Pehlivanyan, Fahri Erdinç, Abidin Dino, Vartan Ihmalyan, Zekeriya Sertel, Bilal Șen, and others functioned as border-crossing communist internationalists and produced a rich corpus of literary and non-literary works, including press publications, radio broadcasts, and a substantial body of unpublished writings. Drawing on archival research conducted in Bulgaria, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, and Turkey, and situating these materials within the frameworks of intellectual history, the paper explores how these actors understood Turkey’s “order” as something to be secured, restored, or radically transformed. It analyzes how the concept of “order” acquired shifting semantic layers across different linguistic, ideological, and social contexts shaped by exile, transnational circulation, and Cold War constraints. Focusing in particular on Turkish-language press, alongside memoirs, poetry, fiction, and theoretical writings, the study demonstrates how competing socialist, liberal, social democratic, and internationalist ideologies structured divergent diagnoses of Turkey’s political order and contrasting visions of its possible futures. By mapping both similarities and tensions within this transnational network, the paper shows how debates over order functioned as key analytical tools for interpreting political change, articulating critique, and imagining alternative political arrangements within and beyond the framework of the nation-state during the Cold War.

The Lebanese Constitution of 1926 has frequently been described as a confessional compromise designed to stabilize a plural society. This paper offers a different interpretation by reading the 1936 crisis as a revealing test of Michel Chiha’s constitutional theory of order. In 1936, treaty negotiations between France and Syria provoked sectarian unrest in Lebanon, as segments of the Muslim political elite questioned the durability and legitimacy of Lebanese separation from Syria. Rather than treating this episode merely as a prelude to later instability, this paper argues that the crisis exposed a structural feature of Chiha’s constitutional thought. Chiha conceived Lebanon not as a homogeneous nation-state but as an association of religious minorities whose survival depended on equilibrium. Order, in this framework, did not derive from majoritarian sovereignty or centralized authority; it emerged from a carefully maintained balance among communities, mediated through parliamentary representation. Yet the events of 1936 demonstrated that such equilibrium presupposed a shared commitment to Lebanese sovereignty that could not be guaranteed by constitutional design alone. The crisis revealed a paradox at the heart of communal constitutionalism: the dispersion of sovereignty protects minorities, but it simultaneously renders the state vulnerable to competing external and regional loyalties. Disorder thus did not erupt outside the constitution; it surfaced from within its architecture. By situating the 1936 crisis within interwar debates on sovereignty and pluralism, this paper argues that Chiha’s constitutionalism represents an intellectual attempt to institutionalize permanent tension rather than eliminate conflict. Lebanese order was imagined not as unity, but as the management of fragile equilibrium, a model that illuminates broader questions about constitutional thought in divided societies.

South Africa's post-apartheid constitutional order is widely described as being in crisis. Democratic backsliding, executive overreach, and the erosion of institutional norms have prompted scholars and commentators to speak of rupture and regression. This paper argues that such framings misread the nature of the crisis. The disorder that has characterised post-apartheid politics is not a departure from a once-stable constitutional settlement but a symptom of the deep contestations present at its founding. The 1994 transition produced not a consensus but a negotiated ambiguity, one that deferred rather than resolved fundamental tensions over sovereignty, redistribution, and the meaning of democratic self-determination in a post-colonial society. To recover these tensions, the paper turns to the intellectual itinerary of Pallo Jordan. Writing from within the ANC across four decades, Jordan was among the most searching critics of the movement's ideological compromises; before, during, and after the transition. His pre-1994 writings theorised the structural limits of negotiated settlements in post-colonial contexts, warning that the subordination of redistributive claims to constitutional procedure would leave the foundations of order perpetually unstable. His post-1994 reflections, marked by a deepening disillusionment, returned to these themes with new urgency, reading institutional decay not as betrayal but as the working out of a founding contradiction. Read across both periods, Jordan's thought offers an intellectual history of disorder from the inside, a sustained account of how the constitutional moment foreclosed as much as it opened. This paper thus argues that Jordan's trajectory illuminates something broader: that the current South African political crisis is less a pathology than a revelation, a making visible of the unresolved problem of order that decolonisation and democratisation, taken together, could not solve.

This paper argues that nineteenth-century mission medicine granted authority to black medical practitioners on the condition that they adhered to the imperial narrative of order. Mission medicine was intrinsically tied to imperial values and was therefore used as a remedy for the moral as well as physical ‘disorder’ that missionaries believed characterised ‘uncivilised’ peoples. In mid-century West Africa, the Jamaican medical missionary Dr Archibald Hewan used this notion of order to partly overcome racial discrimination in the Scottish presbyterian mission. This paper asks whether his medical authority and data practices renegotiated that imperial definition of order. First, the paper shows how his way into the medical mission was granted by stringent evaluations of his character and health that did not match the assessments of white missionaries. Second, it argues that his way to medical authority was conditioned by his medical mission as a testament to his orderly character. Third follows a discussion of how he circulated data which differed from common European imaginaries of Africans. The paper illuminates a key conflict of order and race in nineteenth-century presbyterian missions which created a liminal space in which Hewan could be defined more as a medical expert than as a black man. Definitions of civilisation and order were static enough to objectify black bodies and thereby complicate Hewan’s efforts, but they were diffuse enough to grant a place for Hewan once it was clear that he represented Western belief and healthcare. The mission was simultaneously dependent on racial discrimination and the partial defeat of its hallmarks. While his biomedical data indicates of efforts to transform European ideas of African health in the same manner, his contingent belonging in the order of mission medicine made it impossible to fully defy of such prejudices.

The collapse of empires in the early 20th century created a profound moment of rupture, forcing both Hungarian and Turkish intellectuals to redefine the concept of political and social "Order" amidst the "Disorder" of defeat. This paper conducts a comparative analysis of how the "East" (Turan) served as a stabilizing reference point in both traditions, offering a cure for perceived Western decadence. First, I examine the sociological approach to Order. I compare Ziya Gökalp’s distinction between hars (organic national culture) and medeniyet (imported civilization) with the Hungarian Turanist quest for the "Turanian Soul" (Turáni lélek). I argue that much like Gökalp, Hungarian thinkers (associated with the Hungarian Turanian Society) sought to prove that the nation could modernize technologically without surrendering its distinct, "Eastern" moral structure to Western materialism. Second, the paper explores the radicalization of this search through the lens of myth. I juxtapose Nihal Atsız’s idealization of the pre-Islamic, martial steppic past with the interwar Hungarian cult of Attila. Just as Atsız constructed a "Mythic Order" rooted in the martial vitality of the Huns and Göktürks, radical Hungarian Turanism re-interpreted Attila not as a barbarian destroyer, but as the supreme symbol of heroic, centralizing authority. By analysing these parallel intellectual trajectories, I demonstrate that Turanism was not merely a geopolitical aspiration but a philosophical instrument. Whether through Gökalp’s cultural cohesion or the myth of the Huns, both traditions utilized the "Eastern past" to impose structure on the uncertainties of the post-imperial body politic.

The so-called “occult sciences”—a diverse body of ideas and practices that posit the existence of hidden properties in nature—present particular difficulties for the classification of early modern knowledge. I approach these difficulties by focusing on a methodology that may at first seem counter-intuitive: historical reconstruction. In recent decades, historians of science and medicine have sought to recover pre-modern knowledge-making practices by replicating the practical operations of past historical actors; for instance, by reconstructing alchemical experiments in a modern laboratory setting. In the case of magic, however, both underlying theories and practical outcomes subvert the ordinary (and replicable) course of nature. How, then, should historians approach such an enterprise? One method is to trace how magical and alchemical practices moved between fields and categories of knowledge, leading practitioners to group together objects according to their perceived occult qualities. In this paper, I focus on ingredients that can be tracked across time and place, such as celandine—a yellow flower that appears in a variety of contexts, from natural history and dyeing practices to magical talismans and alchemical recipes. Reconstruction may fall short of doing magic, but it can offer insight into how past actors positioned such material substances within systems of knowledge, and used them to extend their understanding of the natural world.

In 1825, British factory owner and reformer Robert Owen presented the US Congress with a settlement scheme designed to create a new social order and solve the grievances of early industrialization. According to Owen, his scheme comprised a „system of union and co- operation [...] derived from a correct knowledge of the constitution of human nature.“ In his speech, he explained that he had obtained that knowledge through studying history, observing nature, conducting management experiments, and reflecting on the results. Knowledge was a central concept in Owenite social reform, appearing 172 times in Owen’s programmatic New View Of Society (1816), along with the terms happiness (131 times) and rationality (89 times). Scottish reformer Frances Wright, who had adapted Owen’s settlement scheme to abolish slavery in the US South, devoted an entire lecture series in 1829 to the question of what constituted the knowledge necessary for social progress. My paper investigates the concept of knowledge in early 19th century Owenite thinking. My source material consists of speeches, monographs, and tracts by Owen, his followers Frances Wright, John Adolphus Etzler, and his son Robert Dale Owen. While historians of knowledge have debated how to define knowledge, my paper adopts an intellectual history approach inspired by Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte, asking how 19th century transatlantic reformers conceptualized knowledge and contrasted it with ignorance and religious beliefs. Second, I discuss the methods of knowledge production they promoted, including observation, the study of history and experiments. Third, I discuss how they derived laws of the social from these practices and appropriated evidence practices from the natural sciences for the ordering of society. I argue that the dual transformation of industrialization and settler colonialism reshaped concepts of knowledge in the early 19th century and that the Owenite reformers’ quest for social order based on human knowledge played a central role in this transformation.

This contribution to the ISIH conference offers a comparative analysis of the concept of order found in two different strands of scholarship, the English School of International Relations and the works of Mary Douglas in anthropology. Only one study has offered such a comparison so far with a focus on Ernest Gellner’s work and that of English School scholar Hedley Bull who has pioneered the concept of ‘order’ in International Relations. My contribution will focus on the works of both Bull and other English School scholars such as Martin Wight whose understanding of order was based on cultural affinities between individuals, and Douglas’ groundbreaking work that related ‘order’ and ‘disorder’ to our fear (of pollution) from others. She also developed the concept of a ‘legitimate intruder’ who is an actor that has a well-defined role in one social system but an ambiguous one in another social system. Douglas’ work later concentrated on the subject of hierarchy and its inherent relationship to any kind of social order. What are the similarities between these bodies of scholarship and can these be fruitfully synthesized to advance our understanding of (dis)order? This paper aims at contributing to the Empire, Civilization and International Order theme of the conference especially with a discussion of how concepts like ‘legitimate intruders’, once re-interpreted against the backdrop of international order as defined by English School scholars, can help develop new approaches to managing pluralism and alternative world orders.

This article examines Muhammad Rashid Rida’s (1865–1935) conception of political freedom (ḥurriyya) in al-Manār during the Second Constitutional Era (1908–1909). Challenging historiographical views that divide his thought into disjointed modernist, Salafi, or nationalist phases, this study argues that Rida maintained a coherent political philosophy aimed at independence and civilizational renewal. Combining textual analysis with digital humanities tools, the article demonstrates that Rida conceptualized liberty not as unconstrained license, but as republican non-domination and institutional restraint against despotism (istibdād). By harmonizing Ottoman constitutionalism with Islamic jurisprudence, Rida established political freedom as essential for the moral and political emancipation of the ummah.

Taming Fortune: Gendered Dimensions of Political (Dis-)Order in Machiavelli This paper engages with the gendered dimensions of political order and disorder in Machiavelli's thought by reviewing the various types of masculinity and femininity in his works and their implications for creating and maintaining the political order. Drawing on feminist interpretations of Machiavelli, particularly Pitkin's analysis of Fortune as a woman, this paper argues, first, that Machiavelli's political project is a distinctly masculine endeavour and must be carried out in opposition to the "feminine" threat of disorder and destruction. While Machiavelli was traditionally considered as “the teacher of evil”, recent studies primarily focus on the egalitarian, anti-oligarchic aspects of his thought rooted in the republican tradition. Therefore, the paper connects, in a second step, the different types of masculinity in Machiavelli's works to the various “phases” in his thinking shaped by different contexts –politics of founding, politics of maintaining order and politics of fraternity. It argues that while “the politics of fraternity” is closet to republicanism and thus most promising project in terms of equality and solidarity, it too, remains a decisively male project in which women as citizens cannot participate. Against this background, the paper finally discusses the prospects of a feminist republicanism.

This paper reconstructs panarchism as a distinctive nineteenth- and early twentieth-cen- tury attempt to rethink political order under conditions of deep social and ideological dis- agreement. First articulated by Gustave de Molinari and Paul Émile de Puydt in the mid- nineteenth century, panarchism proposed a radical decoupling of political authority from territory: individuals would choose their government without relocating, and multiple ju- risdictions would coexist within the same geographical space. I argue that panarchism should be understood not merely as an eccentric precursor to some contemporary strands of libertarianism or anarchism, but as an intellectual re- sponse to a perceived crisis of order in nineteenth-century Europe. Liberal revolutions and the rise of new nation states generated anxieties about how heterogeneous popula- tions could be governed without repression or fragmentation. Against both homogenising national projects and imperial hierarchies, panarchists reconceived order as the out- come of voluntary affiliation rather than territorial sovereignty. Disagreement was no longer a pathology threatening collapse, but a structural feature to be institutionalised through overlapping jurisdictions. This reconceptualisation did not disappear with the consolidation of territorial nation- states. During the rise of nationalism in the early twentieth century, panarchist ideas were reformulated and adapted by figures such as Max Nettlau, while parallel debates on non- territorial authority emerged in Austro-Marxist theories of national-cultural autonomy as- sociated with Karl Renner. In these contexts, non-territorial governance functioned as a conceptual tool for managing national and ideological conflict without partition or forced assimilation, preserving political order through institutional pluralism rather than territo- rial unity. Recovering this genealogy contributes to global intellectual history in two ways. First, it highlights a neglected strand of anti-statist liberal and anarchist thought that challenged the territorial foundations of modern political order. Second, it offers a historical per- spective on contemporary debates about sovereignty, pluralism, and disagreement by showing that non-territorial responses to societal disorder have deep roots.

Recent scholarship has rightly questioned the misattribution of Durr-ı meknūn to Aḥmad Bicān and has dated the text to the end of the 15th century or the beginning of the 16th century. The work reflects the cosmological and scientific understanding of its period and is also quite important in terms of the eschatological anecdotes it contains. This paper proposes reading the apocalyptic narratives in Durr-ı meknūn primarily as a natural disorder. The analysis focuses specifically on the meaning of the Last Hour (eşrāt al-sā’a) within the text and argues that the fundamental element triggering the apocalyptic narrative is related to the macrocosmos rather than political or social events/disasters occurring in the sublunary world. In other words, the author's main cause for anticipating the imminent apocalypse is not the timing of the Last Hour, but rather the assumption that the lifespan of the cosmos is coming to an end, based on various astrological, astronomical, and mathematical calculations. That is, the social and political dimensions implied by the apocalypse acquire an eschatological character due to the potential discovery of timelessness. Therefore, according to Durr-ı meknūn, the apocalypse is essentially the death of the cosmos, an unstoppable cosmological decay that will end all life on earth. The paper also aims to highlight the occult, mathematical, and ontological dimensions of the apocalypse by interpreting the concept of the Last Hour as a natural disorder. Durr-ı meknūn, thus, presents an eschatological model that consists of a harmonious combination of various sciences. The time of the apocalypse is ambiguous in the text, and its actors are anonymous. On the other hand, the author offers a methodology to the reader that will historicize/define all the processes of the apocalypse. However, although the author appears to be in a state of anxiety, he adopts a more detached observational stance and leaves the apocalyptic theses to his audience. The detail that should be underlined here is that our author, instead of constructing a theory centred on the duration of humanity's life on earth, evaluates humanity's lifespan on earth via the potential age of the cosmos in light of the data. Ultimately, the paper traces the eschatological model given in Durr through eclectic yet inclusive selected sources, opening up a discussion on the death of the cosmos in the 16th-century Ottoman world and the reactions that arose from it.

The transformation in late Ottoman political and intellectual life brought about by the 1908 Young Turk Revolution was immense. The future of the empire was vigorously debated in public in ways that were impossible in the Hamidian period, whether in the parliament with vying political parties or in the writing of a press that exploded from the confines of earlier censorship. However, the initial euphoria gave way to a chaotic political environment characterized by increased control not unlike the Hamidian policies that had been the subject of years of Young Turk critique. The proclaimers of freedom turned to dictatorial suppression in the name of preserving order, and the rhetoric of Young Turk political thought found itself caught in discrepancies. These anxieties haunt Ahmet Emin (Yalman)’s analysis of his Ottoman homeland, written while pursuing graduate studies in the United States, which provides a unique perspective on Young Turk debates about order and disorder and the fate of the Ottoman Empire. This paper will focus on Ahmed Emin’s doctoral thesis to address how a young Ottoman intellectual studying in the United States understood the turbulent late Ottoman political and social context of the Second Constitutional Period. Ahmet Emin’s analysis is torn between critique of oppressive government and the value of freedom on one hand, and the need for the government to be strong enough to carry out reforms and therefore potentially needing to restrict excess freedoms in the name of progress. It is a personal wrestling with the situation of his homeland, and also an attempt to shape American academic view of and engagement with that homeland, and foreshadows the ambivalence of his later career as a ‘liberal’ political journalist with oppositional tendencies, and the tensions between order and disorder that would characterize much of late Ottoman and early Turkish Republican thought.

The paper examines ideas about political economy that prevailed in England during the early seventeenth century by moving beyond the historical and analytical exegesis of the printed pamphlets of the time and focusing instead on the intellectual perspectives brought to bear on economic matters by three of the most prominent public figures of late Jacobean England: Lionel Cranfield, Francis Bacon, and Edward Coke. As civil servants, all three were directly involved in the formulation of public policies aimed at economic regulation. Bacon and Coke, however, approached this problem as part of a broader system of public policy intended to promote order and stability in the commonwealth at large. Cranfield, by contrast, brought a mercantile perspective to the issue, emphasizing the importance of a favorable balance of trade and stressing the value of quantitative data in assessing economic phenomena. While Tudor political and social philosophy still dominated the way in which the English crown addressed economic problems, the new perspective introduced by Cranfield exerted a perceptible influence within official circles. Microsoft Word 97-2003 Document

Many historians and philosophers today, when considering the topic of empathy, look back admiringly to David Hume and Adam Smith, who developed the first extensive theorizations of what they called ‘sympathy’, which they placed at the heart of Scottish Enlightenment moral philosophy. In recent decades, the discovery of so-called ‘mirror neurons’ in monkeys has been hailed by some as scientific proof of the essential correctness of Hume’s analysis of sympathy as interpersonal resonance, while a flurry of ‘self-help’-style reinterpretations of Hume and Smith have foregrounded the contemporary utility of their guidance on maximising our empathy. The intellectual history of fellow-feeling since the eighteenth century, though, is highly discontinuous. For much of the twentieth century, for example, many historians in the Rankean tradition turned away from emotionality, preferring instead to position themselves as rigorously social scientific practitioners of ‘objectivity’. Empathy reemerged as focus of historical research and pedagogy in the wake of the 1960s, and especially in the post-Cold-War 1990s. In this paper, I will comparatively explore two key periods of discontinuity in historical thinking about what we today broadly term as ‘empathy’. Firstly, I will discuss the impact of the French Revolution in displacing the genteel self-confidence of Humean and Smithian sympathy. In the Romantic era, writers such as Schiller, Carlyle and Michelet remained very interested in fellow-feeling, but focused in a much more emotionally wrought manner on communing with suffering. Secondly, I will consider the shift from the high-water mark of pedagogical empathy in the 1990s, when considerable emphasis was placed on empathetic engagement with victim perspectives on the Holocaust, to the increasingly contested terrain of our new millennium, in which competition for public empathy, especially in relation to Israel and Palestine, has become a major focus of emotional and intellectual dispute. Treasurer, ISIH

In 1887, Kaieda Nobuyoshi, a Japanese politician, visiting Vienna received private instruction on the theory of the state from Lorenz von Stein, a professor of political economy at the University of Vienna. Based on the insights gained from Stein, he produced an anatomical diagram that conceptualized the state as a human body. Underlying this illustration was an understanding of the human organism rooted in traditional Eastern medicine, representing a unique ideological attempt to transpose that perspective onto the organic structure of a modern state. This report explores the guiding principles of the constitutional drafting process in Meiji Japan in 1880s by analyzing this specific anatomical diagram. When the Constitution of the Empire of Japan—the nation’s first modern constitutional document—was promulgated in 1889, what was established was not merely a legal code. Rather, it was the "body politic" itself, as depicted in the diagram. By conceiving the state in this way as a human body, Meiji leaders envisioned a political order in which government and people would cooperate as interdependent parts of a single political organism. By examining the Western experiences of pivotal political leaders—such as the members of the Iwakura Mission (1871-1873), as well as Okubo Toshimichi and Ito Hirobumi—this paper elucidates how they came to perceive the state and its law in such organic terms. Through their firsthand observations of Western society, Okubo embodied the state as an entity composed of the nation, while Ito envisioned the constitution as the "clothing" to be fitted onto this nation-state as a body politic. This paper argues that this Meiji vision of the state sought to create a cooperative national order by both confronting and incorporating disorders generated by anti-government movements into the framework of the modern nation-state.

This paper examines how Duncan Forbes of Culloden, drawing on Hutchinsonian theology, construed Newtonian natural philosophy as a form of heresy that disrupted both theological and cosmic order in the long eighteenth century. While the Newtonian system presented a universe governed by mathematical laws and mechanical causation, Forbes regarded such views as a denial of divine immediacy in nature. For him, Newtonianism was not simply a new scientific order but a disordering of revelation, reducing God’s presence to abstract principles. Through an analysis of sermons, polemical treatises, and theological commentaries, the paper traces how Forbes redefined heresy in epistemological terms: as misplaced trust in human reason rather than revelation. By turning the language of heresy against natural philosophy, he transformed Hutchinsonian theology into a sustained critique of scientific modernity. In this inversion, the order of Newtonian rationalism becomes the disorder of spiritual error, while scriptural cosmology is recast as the true site of intellectual order. Placing Forbes’s Hutchinsonian critique within the broader context of Enlightenment epistemology, the paper argues that his response to Newtonianism reveals the fragility of Enlightenment order itself. It shows how theological dissent could generate its own rationality—an alternative framework in which the boundaries between science, religion, and heresy were not erased but fundamentally redrawn.

In his Questions concerning Aristotle’s ‘On Animals’, Albert the Great maintained that, if humans were naturally endowed with every kind of protection, their bodies would be ‘greatly disordered’ (nimis deordinatum). In place of the natural defences with which nature had equipped the other animals, humans had been furnished with hands — an instrument of the intellect capable of fashioning every other kind of instrument. Albert’s vindication of the orderliness of the human body was picked up by his student, Thomas Aquinas, when he set about to explain the origins of collective life in the opening chapter of his unfinished treatise On Kingship. In this paper, I argue that Aquinas’s model of human sociability can best be understood as an adaptation Albert’s argument about the order of the human body. According to Aquinas, what made humans more sociable than any other animal was not the telos of the virtuous life — as Aristotle had argued in the Politics — but the weakness of their bodies combined with the power of their intellect. Deprived of natural defences such as fangs, fur, and claws, they were compelled to live in the ‘society of many’. Modern scholars agree that this un-Aristotelian theory of human sociability has its roots in the Augustinian view of politics as a remedium peccati. As I argue in my paper, however, we can gain a clearer understanding of Aquinas’s views by investigating its principal sources: the zoological works of Aristotle and Albert, as well as the naturalistic psychology of Avicenna. In particular, I demonstrate how Aristotle’s claim in the Parts of Animals that, because humans owned hands, they could not be considered the ‘worst-ordered’ of animals, allowed Aquinas to claim that, within society, human reason provided all the protection which fangless, furless, and clawless humans could ever expect to receive.

How did the political-economic processes of the period shape Ottoman bureaucratic elites’ understanding of the “new order,” (nizam-ı cedid) and to what extent did their interpretations of nizam and reform reflect contemporary class and social configurations? To address these questions, this paper critically examines reform treatises (layihas) written by late eighteenth- century Ottoman bureaucratic elites, including Tatarcık Abdullah Efendi, Ebubekir Ratib Efendi, Mahmud Raif Efendi, and Behiç Efendi. These treatises largely, though not exclusively, responded to Sultan Selim’s call for proposals regarding comprehensive reforms within the Ottoman state. As such, they created an intellectual and discursive space that allows us to trace the formation of Ottoman conceptions of nizam and nizam-ı cedid, situating these ideas within the broader political-economic transformations of the late eighteenth century. In the latter period, Ottoman bureaucratic elites were increasingly involved in capital accumulation processes, particularly through çiftliks and/or the military-industrial initiatives of Ottoman administrations. In this context, the paper analyzes the relationship between the economic practices and dynamics of the period and Ottoman elites’ evolving understandings of nizam, as reflected in these treatises. It argues that the new conceptions of order were not merely intellectual innovations, but were deeply embedded in shifting economic structures and emerging class dynamics. Drawing on a broader research project that examines the evolution of the concept of order within the framework of wider socioeconomic developments during the long nineteenth century, this paper reassesses the dominant narratives that portray bureaucratic elites as the principal actors and driving forces behind sociopolitical change during the intensive reform period. Engaging recent scholarship in intellectual and social history, it offers a more nuanced reading of these treatises, highlighting the connections between evolving ideas of order and the socioeconomic positions and relationships of the bureaucratic elites who articulated them during a period of imperial transformation.

This paper examines the emergence of Tanzîmât as a political concept through the lexical and semantic dynamics observable in the Ottoman official gazette, Takvîm-i vekayi‘, during the reign of Mahmud II. Focusing on the 1830s, it argues that the proliferation of reform-related expressions structured around nizâm (order) and usûl (principles, procedures) signals a moment of conceptual indeterminacy preceding terminological stabilization. Rather than interpreting this multiplicity as rhetorical inconsistency, the paper reads it as evidence of an ongoing process of conceptual formation. Drawing on Quentin Skinner’s contextualist approach, it traces how inherited political vocabularies were redeployed and resemanticized to articulate new forms of administrative change. The apparent continuity of nizâm thus conceals a significant semantic shift: from a divinely grounded and cosmological order (nizâm-ı âlem) toward a procedural, future-oriented understanding of order increasingly associated with reform, regulation, and improvement. Engaging Reinhart Koselleck’s notion of conceptual condensation, the paper further argues that Tanzîmât crystallized retrospectively as a collective noun that unified heterogeneous reform experiences between 1826 and 1839. Once stabilized, this concept came to structure historical perceptions of both the preceding period of experimentation and the transformations that followed. In other words, disparate meanings were retrospectively aggregated and endowed with coherence. Finally, the paper foregrounds Takvîm-i vekayi‘ not as a passive chronicle but as an active governmental dispositif. As a state-produced periodical primarily addressed to administrative functionaries, it functioned as a discursive interface in which reformist vocabularies were tested, circulated, and aligned. By repeatedly articulating administrative change through convergent yet unstable lexical forms, the gazette materially and discursively facilitated the formation of a new political concept of order emerging from the tension between inherited semantic frameworks and reform-induced uncertainty. Intellectual Histories of (Dis)order or Ideologies and Order

Henry Parker (1604-1652) was arguably the most famous defender of parliamentary sovereignty at the beginning of the English Civil War. As for how he defended it, there are currently two main interpretations. The traditional interpretation—whose principal contemporary defender is Michael Mendle—holds that Parker believed Parliament, as the supreme governing authority when the king was unable to function due to any reason, possessed the supreme administrative power by which it could make any decision for the good of the people, even if this meant violating the law of the land. Another interpretation, now chiefly advanced by Alan Cromartie, maintains that Parker in fact continued the position expressed by the Long Parliament upon its first assembly in 1640, namely that Parliament held the supreme judicial authority, by virtue of which it could adjudicate, according to law, the exercise of any political power. This study argues that Parker’s position was in fact a combination of the two, and that the key to this combination lies in the concept of disorder. Under normal conditions—that is, when rulers could promote the well-being of the people by acting in accordance with the law—all exercises of political power ought to follow the law, and the supreme judicial authority should supervise the exercise of all power according to the law. Under such circumstances, Parliament, being the ‘High Court’, was sovereign. In disorder—that is, when law conflicted with the people’s good, and rulers acting in accordance with the literal provisions of the law would harm the well-being of the people—Parliament, as the supreme administrative authority, might do whatever it considered conducive to the people’s good, even if this contravened the literal provisions of the law.

This paper examines how African diaspora intellectuals — including Edward Wilmot Blyden in Liberia, James Johnson in Sierra Leone, and Anténor Firmin in Haiti — intervened in mid- to late nineteenth-century debates over the alleged “failure” of imperial civilising missions. It argues that their writings articulated a distinct and systematic critique of empire that has been marginalised in prevailing accounts of nineteenth-century international thought. By the mid-nineteenth century, the crisis of imperial legitimacy provoked by disappointing outcomes in colonies such as Sierra Leone, Fernando Po, and Jamaica generated two dominant explanatory frameworks in metropolitan debate. Liberal-imperial thinkers, including John Stuart Mill, John Wilson, and Theodore Parker, reaffirmed the contingent and developmental basis of civilisational hierarchy while defending the legitimacy of colonial governance. By contrast, anthropologists such as Josiah Nott, James Hunt, and Winwood Reade increasingly invoked the “law of Nature”, attributing imperial failure to the innate “uncivilisability” of African peoples. Departing from both the liberal contingency thesis and the racial law thesis, African diaspora thinkers advanced a third position. They located the failure of civilising missions not in African incapacity but in the symbolic and epistemic violence embedded within the civilising project itself. Civilisation, as Blyden argued, functioned as a mechanism of internalised oppression, cultivating what he termed “the inculcated belief” in African inferiority. This diagnosis of empire as mental “bondage” reframed colonial “civilisation” as a site of psychic and cultural domination. By recovering this third explanatory mode — centred on embodiment and “mental emancipation” — the paper complicates narratives that cast nineteenth-century imperial thought as a linear progression from liberal optimism to scientific racism. It instead positions African intellectuals as theorists of empire in their own right, whose analyses prefigured later decolonial projects associated with figures such as Nnamdi Azikiwe and Kwame Nkrumah.

This paper examines how the South Manchuria Railway Company (Mantetsu) sought to visualize and theorize “peace” as an imperial order during the Japanese imperial enthronement of Emperor Shōwa in 1928. While the enthronement was a national rite of the metropole, Mantetsu utilized it to rebrand the leased territory not merely as a colonial enclave, but as a "Peaceful Manchuria"—a civilizational project grounded in technological modernity and agrarianism. Crucially, the strategic absence of the Emperor's image in local celebrations allowed for the imagination of an alternative order: a "Manchuria Republic" distinct from imperial rule. However, this decoupling of the territory from the dynastic center failed to comfort Japanese settlers, who feared rising Chinese nationalism, while simultaneously attempting to manage imperial pluralism through the rhetoric of "Civilization." Focusing on a constellation of media practices—including the propaganda film The Cry of the Nation (1928), industrial exhibitions, and multilingual print media—I argue that Mantetsu functioned as a producer of political knowledge that articulated a hierarchical coexistence. The Cry of the Nation, based on a novel by a Chinese Mantetsu employee, romanticized a "New Heaven" of Pan-Asian agrarianism. This visual order united Japanese and Chinese intellectuals against military violence but strategically erased the resistance of Korean migrants, the actual pioneers of Manchurian rice farming. Yet, this projection of order generated immediate "disorder" outside the Japanese sphere. By analyzing the reception of Mantetsu intellectuals' discourse in China—specifically the writings of Yamada Takekichi and Hosono Shigekatsu—this paper demonstrates a "boomerang effect": Chinese intellectuals decoded these "pacifist" texts as blueprints for territorial annexation, fueling anti-Japanese nationalism. Furthermore, a comparison with the Korean film Crossing the Tumen River (1928) reveals a counter-narrative that reimagined the "peaceful" frontier as a site of displacement and struggle. Ultimately, the 1928 celebrations illuminated the fractures of the "Manchurian Dream," exposing the inherent contradictions of a universalism premised on colonial exclusion.

The collapse of imperial rule in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is often narrated as a rupture that marked the emergence of modern Chinese political thought. From this perspective, national self-rule appears chiefly as a reaction to imperial crisis and an attempt to emulate Western models of the nation-state. This paper contends that the deeper intellectual reconfiguration underlying this rupture began much earlier, in the seventeenth century, when the normative authority of universal kingship entered sustained crisis. By the mid-seventeenth century, China was increasingly entangled in global commercial networks shaped by the silver trade. Commercial expansion, social stratification, and political instability exposed the limits of legitimacy grounded in universal moral principles. As dynastic collapse and the Manchu conquest unfolded, literati began to question not merely the existing political institutions but the very foundations of normative order and the sources of authority. Focusing on Wang Fuzhi (1619–1692), the paper examines how order was reimagined through a fundamental reinterpretation of normativity, articulated in the Confucian tradition through the problem of “names” (ming). Revising the classical doctrine of the rectification of names, Wang shifted attention away from restoring fixed moral hierarchies toward the historical constitution of normative categories themselves. For him, “names” did not designate pre-given ethical roles grounded in cosmic order; they emerged from material culture, linguistic practice, and the conditions of collective survival. Normativity thus became historically generated rather than metaphysically secured. More broadly, his generation transformed classical scholarship: Confucian learning, once oriented toward moral self-cultivation, became a project of reconstructing the symbolic and historical foundations of cultural community. By locating the source of norms within historically constituted forms of life, Wang articulated an anti-centralist vision of constitutional order rebuilt from within society rather than imposed from transcendent authority. Situating Wang within early modern global transformation, the paper argues that this turn to historical normativity constituted a distinctive response to the crisis of order and provided an alternative genealogy of national self-rule. In limited comparison with early modern European reflections on autonomy, rights, and the nation-state, Wang’s thought reveals a parallel yet non-derivative rethinking of political authority in a globally transforming world.

for the International Society for Intellectual History Anthony Ascham’s Of the Confusions and Revolutions of Governments (1649) stands as one of the most revealing attempts to conceptualise political order and disorder during the crisis years that followed the I English Revolution. Written at the height of constitu- tional uncertainty, the treatise offers a distinctive reflection on the meaning of confu- sion and revolution, terms that Ascham treated not merely as descriptive labels for polit- ical turmoil, but as analytical categories with normative force. Yet despite the relevance of his writings, Ascham remains a strikingly understudied figure in English-language scholarship. Apart from Marco Barducci’s recent monograph, his work has attracted re- markably little attention. This neglect is especially notable given the sophistication of his attempt to theorise political breakdown at a moment of extraordinary constitutional flux. In Ascham’s account, confusion denotes the moment when the normal channels of civil and political obligation are suspended: public authority has lost the capacity to pro- tect, former covenants have been rendered void by events, and individuals are thrown back upon natural law, self-preservation, and scriptural principles such as Romans 13. Yet for Ascham, confusion is not a conceptual void. It is a legally and morally significant condition governed by what he calls ‘plenary possession’ of power, that is, the effective capacity to re-establish order for the common good. Conversely, revolution does not sig- nify ideological rupture but the factual replacement of one governing power by another. By situating Ascham’s analysis within the broader intellectual conversation on order and disorder, my paper shows that his categories of confusion and revolution constitute a distinctive attempt to theorise political instability at the very moment it was unfolding. Rather than treating disorder as a mere interruption of lawful authority, Ascham interprets it as a structurally meaningful condition in which new sources of obligation emerge and former frameworks are dissolved. In this respect, Of Confusion and Revolution offers an alternative early modern model for understanding political transformation, one that views ruptures, power vacuums, and unsettled allegiances not simply as threats to order, but as conditions that reveal how order is re-imagined, renegotiated, and ultimately reconsti- tuted. Ascham’s analysis thus illuminates the fraught semantic and normative terrain on which early modern thinkers, both locally and in broader global contexts, sought to con- ceptualise the relation between order and disorder.

Dominant narratives of nineteenth-century German intellectual history often focus on Romantic nationalism and the “War of Liberation”, leaving little room for what might be called a “Bonapartist moment”. This paper revisits that moment by recovering the work of Friedrich Buchholz (1768–1843), a Prussian writer who welcomed the Napoleonic Empire not as foreign domination but as a remedy for European disorder. The paper argues that Buchholz sought to rebuild “order” on two interconnected levels: the domestic and the global. Domestically, his 1806 work, Der neue Leviathan, diagnosed “polyarchy” (e.g., revolutionary turmoil) as the primary source of political chaos. He argued that only a Hobbesian supreme power - a “constituting Leader” rather than a “constitutional King” - could guarantee civil freedom and legal equality. Drawing on the tradition of Enlightened Absolutism, this argument anticipates a modern paradox where the security of liberal rights depends on ominous “decisionism”. Moreover, extending this diagnosis to the international level, Buchholz advocated for the Napoleonic Empire as the antidote to global disorder. In Rom und London (1807), he criticized the British “Balance of Power” as a mask for a “Mercantilist Universal Monarchy” that maintained global anarchy. In contrast, he envisioned a Napoleonic “Universal Monarchy” based on law and right, designed to guarantee the “Freedom of the Seas”. This vision bridges the tradition of the jus gentium with the rise of positive international law. Deeply shaped by the crisis of his time, Buchholz turned to Napoleon as a solution. His ideas gained significant influence but quickly lost relevance after 1815. Yet, Buchholz remains a crucial link between the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century. Through his intervention in the politics of his time, Buchholz temporalized the vocabulary of natural law, thereby contributing to the conceptual foundations of modern global politics.