BMET 27A27 - Intellectual History of the Atlantic

This course explores how ideas, ideologies, and intellectuals shaped — and were shaped by — the political and social transformations of the modern Atlantic world from the late nineteenth century to the present. Taking the Dreyfus Affair as a point of departure, when “the intellectual” first emerged as a public political actor, the course follows the circulation of ideas across Europe, the Americas, and the colonial world in an age of war, empire, revolution, and decolonization.

Rather than treating intellectual history as a story of abstract theories, the course centers on primary texts produced in moments of crisis: manifestos, speeches, novels, political tracts, philosophical essays, and social critiques. Students will read these sources alongside the historical struggles that gave their ideas force. These sources reveal how concepts such as liberty, race, civilization, gender, labor, and nation were debated and mobilized in struggles over power and belonging.

The course is organized around major historical turning points: the age of empire and mass politics, the interwar crisis of liberalism, the ideological conflicts of the Cold War, decolonization, and the emergence of postcolonial and global intellectual movements. Across these periods, we will analyze three recurring problems: how intellectuals relate to power; how states and empires shape knowledge; and how ideas travel across borders to produce both domination and resistance.

By combining close reading of primary sources with interpretive secondary scholarship, the course introduces students to intellectual history as a method for understanding the modern world; not as a history of timeless ideas, but as a history of struggles over meaning, authority, and political possibility in the Atlantic arena.