Robert Westbrook
Occupy Wall Street’s march against police brutality, New York City, September 30, 2011. The preamble to the US Constitution boldly asserts a claim of popular sovereignty. The document declares itself the work of “We the People.” This claim, as many historians and others have pointed out, is a mystification: Insofar as ours is a democratic […] At its best, intellectual history is less the history of ideas than the history of thinking and of the social and cultural contexts in which thinking occurs—contexts that shape thinking and are, in turn, shaped by it. Joel Isaac’s Working Knowledge is intellectual history at its best. Isaac’s subject is the development of several of […] 
In The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels offered one of history’s best-known characterizations of modernity. In the “bourgeois epoch,” they said, “all fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.”