We have made this issue a special issue because it has a certain thematic unity. Sometimes directly and sometimes obliquely (but still pointedly), all the contributions deal with the history of liberalism; and together they suggest new avenues of approach to that subject within a transatlantic framework. At issue in the forum on Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club is how we are to understand the significance of American Pragmatism, which arguably has been critical to giving modern American liberalism its distinctive profile. As Kenneth Cmiel makes clear, John Higham's work has been centrally concerned with the potentialities and the pitfalls of liberal pluralism in the American context - and Higham has been an important liberal voice in his own right. In J.W. Burrough's The Crisis of Reason, reviewed here by Suzanne Marchand, we see European liberalism entering a crisis in the face of "the modern" even as it finds new groundings from the mid-nineteenth century onward.

The issue's central section features some of the papers presented at the Sawyer Seminar on "Liberal Cultures and their Critics: The Trials of a Transatlantic Tradition," which held monthly conferences in the academic years 1999-2000 and 2000-2001 and ended with a "capstone" conference in February 2002. The Seminar was conceived and organized by the Triangle Intellectual History Program, involving faculty and graduate students in history and other disciplines from Duke University, North Carolina State University/Raleigh, and The University of North Carolina/Chapel Hill as well as visiting scholars from other universities in the U.S. and the UK. Charles Capper (formerly UNC, now Boston University), Malachi Hacohen (Duke), Lloyd Kramer (UNC), Anthony La Vopa (NCSU), Martin Miller (Duke), and K. Steven Vincent (NCSU) have served as its Coordinators. The project was a major step in the Program’s effort to provide a national scholarly entrepôt for intellectual history, encompassing the diversity of work being done by Americanists and Europeanists and promoting awareness of their convergent interests. It also represents a fruitful collaboration between the Program and the National Humanities Center, which hosted the Seminar and played a critical role in securing the generous Mellon Foundation grant that made it possible. Our thanks to the Mellon, to Robert Connor, the Director of the Center, and to members of the Center staff who worked with us.

The Seminar was designed to build on a growing body of scholarship in several disciplines (history, philosophy, political theory, literature, etc.) that takes current controversies about liberal thought as an opportunity to reformulate questions about past moments of self-confidence, crisis, and self-doubt in the liberal tradition. Our agenda was political, in the broad sense, as well as scholarly. In recent years public discussion of the liberal tradition has been dominated by two radically discordant voices, each dismissive of the other, and neither informed by a close study of history. The first of these - what might be called liberal triumphalism - has been a prominent feature of conventional political rhetoric in the post-Cold War era, and has had special currency in the United States. In this view, the liberal tradition, having yielded a largely unproblematic formula for freedom and justice, is now poised to assume global ascendancy. A second voice, or group of voices, speaks largely from within the academy. It confronts the liberal vision of freedom and justice with a categorical skepticism, intent on demolishing the very premises on which it rests. In this view, the demise of the liberal tradition, though perhaps not imminent, is long overdue. The Seminar proceeded from the conviction that a new intellectual space was badly needed-one in which liberal cultures could engage in self-reflection and self-criticism, and in productive dialogue with their critics, eschewing triumphalism, but at the same time challenging "outside" critics to advance from facile dismissals to historically informed judgments. If that space is to be created, liberal thought will have to reorient and widen its dialogue with its own past.

The Seminar was not primarily concerned with the programmatic agendas of liberal political movements, or in liberal "ideology" construed in a one-dimensional political sense. While it repeatedly engaged the issues surrounding liberal rights claims, its focus was on the underlying assumption, norms, and rhetorical strategies that have distinguished liberal cultures. We were particularly interested in affinities and tensions between liberal conceptions of the self and constructions of community; between universalist claims and the exclusions that abound in the history of liberalism; between liberal cosmopolitanism and its national (and sometimes nationalist) variations; between the commitment to secularism that has been central to liberalism and its considerable debts to religious traditions and values.

The papers presented here pursue these themes in a variety of innovative and provocative ways. Reflecting the Seminar's format, they are more in the nature of essays than research articles. Alan Ryan fittingly begins by discussing the competing visions of liberalism as a political and rights-based theory and as a "comprehensive" worldview predicated on a larger theory of the human condition. Defending the latter, he provocatively concludes that this sort of liberalism is "always unpopular." Gerald Izenberg and George Kateb ask whether our preoccupations with liberal "individualism" - whether conceived as market agency in a consumer culture or as the psychological/therapeutic nurturing of the self - has obscured the central role of a very different ideal of the "individuality" of the autonomous self in liberal traditions. Ruth Bloch explores the complex ways in which religious discourses, often mediated by literary movements, have both contributed to and limited the reach of liberal ethical norms, especially as they apply to intimate relationships. James Kloppenberg, Sarah Maza, and Dorothy Ross reflect on the social conditions, the cultural traditions, and the contexts of political contestation that have given liberal cultures their distinct national colorations; and Kloppenberg and Ross suggest how the American "exceptionalist" version of liberal nationalism has both given liberalism new groundings for radically inclusive and democratic applications and limited its parameters of perceived possibilities.

Emerson identified liberalism variously as the "party of movement" and the "party of hope," and in keeping with these optative turns we are pleased to announce a new hopeful beginning of our own. With this issue we conclude the Intellectual History Newsletter. It originated out of the 1977 Wingspread Conference on "New Directions in Intellectual History." Beginning two years later, and edited by, successively, Thomas Bender, David Hall, Richard Wightman Fox, and, most recently, Casey Blake and Howard Brick, the IHN has for (gasp!) twenty-three years served as a place of discussion, provocation, and new ideas in intellectual history. Making its appearance at a moment when the field was just emerging from its momentary partial eclipse by the rising tide of social history, the newsletter has served as a much-welcomed forum that has ensured intellectual history's vitality, adaptation, and revival in a period of Western historiography notable for both its healthy pluralism and its sometimes-lamented fragmentation. In its pages intellectual historians have argued the case for and provided examples of the history of mentalité, the social history of ideas, contextual intellectual history, the linguistic turn, cultural history, women’s intellectual history, and more. At this moment, what is needed is to take this rich diversity and give it a synergy, focus, and profile that only a full-fledged journal can provide.

With this in mind, and after canvassing the editors of the IHN and numerous other scholars in the field, we have contracted with Cambridge University Press to publish Modern Intellectual History. The MIH will be a trimester journal that will cover the "modern" era broadly defined, from the seventeenth-century Enlightenment through the twentieth century. It will be unique in encompassing both American and European intellectual history, and in having as one of its foci transatlantic intellectual exchanges. Our focus will necessarily remain on the West, where most of the work in intellectual history is being done, but we will also encourage submissions in non-Western intellectual discourses that open transnational windows on the West and the larger world. Finally, the MIH will encourage a "broad church" of subjects and methods without losing its raison d' être as a field. Specifically, it will regard the distinction between "intellectual" and "cultural" history more as a matter of emphasis than as a hard-and-fast divide, and will promote work that enriches both ends of this spectrum. It will provide a forum for new scholarship in the history of the disciplines - from politics and social theory and economics to the natural sciences, religious studies, and literature - as well as current work done in these fields that overlaps with intellectual history. And, as it reaches out to all these areas, it will retain its coherence by virtue of its central concern with historical understanding and interpretation - with the contextual recovery of the meanings of intellectual discourses, revealed both in their internal workings and in the patterns of their interrelationships.

The MIH will be edited by ourselves and Nicholas Phillipson of Edinburgh University. Reflecting its transnational and transatlantic focus, it will have an Editorial Board made up of scholars from the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, and Italy. The first number will appear at the beginning of 2004. Each issue will contain original research articles, essay reviews, book reviews, as well as periodically symposia and other forms for exchanging ideas about intellectual history and its allied fields and disciplines. The editors welcome submissions for the first issues. They should be sent to Modern Intellectual History, Boston University, Department of History, 226 Bay State Road, Boston, MA 02215.

Charles Capper and Anthony La Vopa