Figures on the horizon

Trying to grasp the history of contemporary thought brings special opportunities and problems, providing a chance to participate in current intellectual life, but posing especially sharply the question about whether and how scholarship can distinguish itself from partisanship. The essays in this collection, taken from the Journal of History of Ideas, take sides on the issues they address, but they all proceed on the assumption that the past, even the recent past, must be understood and learned from before it can be turned to present uses. This twelfth volume in the Library of the History of Ideas includes discussions of a wide range of thinkers, from Nietzsche, Durkheim and Freud to Hans-Georg Gadamer and Werner Blumenberg, but it is unified by an attention to specific themes, notably individuals and their relations to society; the encounter between liberalism and movements of social reform; the evolution of psychology; and the relation between reason and metaphor in the interpretation of culture.