Malcolm Bull (b. 1960) holds the post of Professor of Art and the History of Ideas at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, where he teaches the history and theory of visual culture since 1900. He is a Senior Associate Research Fellow of Christ Church, a longstanding member of the editorial board of New Left Review, and an editor of the Oxford Art Journal. He writes often for the London Review of Books. His career has run mostly at Oxford, through Balliol, Wolfson, and St Edmund Hall, with periods abroad, the most recent at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and an earlier year as a Getty Scholar in Los Angeles. He took his first degree in Philosophy and Theology at Oxford and a master’s in the History of Art at London. That double training shapes everything he writes. He reads pictures with the eye of an art historian and arguments with the discipline of a philosopher, and he treats theology as a live subject rather than a dead one.
Bull resists the fields he moves through. Renaissance art, political theory, religious history, visual culture, and social theory all claim him, and none holds him. The coherence of his work lies in a question he returns to across every subject: What does a scheme of thought require that it cannot see? Most scholars study how power works, how ideology binds, how structure constrains. Bull turns toward the blind spots that let those structures stand. He looks for the excluded position, the neglected case, the standpoint a system needs and cannot acknowledge. The subjects change. The movement of his mind stays the same. He occupies the place a dominant order pushes to the margin, and from there the order becomes visible.
His first book grew out of this concern before he had named it. Seeking a Sanctuary: Seventh-Day Adventism and the American Dream, written with Keith Lockhart and published in 1989, traces the passage of Seventh-day Adventism from a millenarian sect born of failed prophecy into a durable American denomination. The Millerite movement had predicted the return of Christ in 1844. The date passed. The disappointment did not end the movement. It reorganized it. Bull and Lockhart show how a community manages a prophecy that does not arrive, how it converts expectation into institution, and how a vision of the end becomes a settled way of life. The book remains a standard scholarly account of Adventism, and it set the themes Bull would carry forward: transcendence and its routinization, the handling of historical expectation, the strain between a visionary ideal and the social form that preserves it.
He returned to apocalyptic thought as editor of Apocalypse Theory and the Ends of the World, a 1995 collection that gathered essays on millennial and end-time thinking across religious and secular traditions. The volume widened the frame. Apocalypse here becomes a recurring habit of mind, a way of imagining history as a story with a knowable conclusion. That habit reaches well past religion.
Seeing Things Hidden: Apocalypse, Vision and Totality, published by Verso in 1999, made the argument in full. Readers often take the book for a study of end-times doctrine. Its reach goes further. Bull treats apocalypse as a longing for total vision, a desire to stand at a point outside history from which the whole of history becomes legible. The apocalyptic mind wants the secret order behind events. It wants to overcome contingency by placing every fragment inside one comprehensive narrative. Bull cares less about particular doctrines than about the temptation they share. That temptation does not stay in the churches. It runs through modern political ideologies, social theories, and philosophical systems, each of them reaching for a vantage above the flux that promises to make the flux intelligible. The book turns the historian of religion into a critic of the modern wish for totality.
This concern with vision carried him into the history of art. The Mirror of the Gods: Classical Mythology in Renaissance Art, published in 2005 and issued in the United States as The Mirror of the Gods: How the Renaissance Artists Rediscovered the Pagan Gods, asks how the great painters of Western Europe, from Botticelli and Leonardo to Titian and Rubens, brought back the gods of Greece and Rome. By the close of the fifteenth century Christianity had buried the old religions, and many Europeans read the ruin of classical art as a divine verdict on the pagan deities. Bull tells the story of their return, a chapter to each god, Venus and Hercules and Bacchus among them. He rejects the easy account of a simple rediscovery of antiquity. The Renaissance did not recover the pagan gods. It remade them. Artists, patrons, and scholars carried ancient figures into a changed world and gave them meanings that belonged neither to the old paganism nor to Christian orthodoxy. The book reads myth through the eyes of the painters who used it, and it shows Bull’s lasting interest in the moment when an old order of meaning survives only through radical revision.
Anti-Nietzsche, published by Verso in 2011, ranks among his most original and contested books. Bull does not offer one more reading of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). He reconstructs the standpoint of the people Nietzsche held in contempt. Modern thought has absorbed a great deal from Nietzsche, his account of power, creation, excellence, rank, and self-overcoming, and even his critics tend to argue on his ground. Bull steps off that ground. He notices that readers of Nietzsche cast themselves as the higher man, the maker of values, the rare soul who rises above the herd. No one reads as the weak, the dull, the failed, the forgotten. Bull reverses the identification. He reads, in his phrase, like a loser. From that refused position he develops his most provocative idea, a subhumanism that accepts ordinariness, weakness, and failure as a deliberate stance. The gesture works as strategy, not confession. Aristocratic value depends on the degraded mass it claims to rise above, and once the mass embraces its own degradation, the whole scheme loses its footing. Bull argues this without recourse to liberal equality, Christian charity, or democratic theory. He inhabits the empty space inside Nietzsche’s own system, alongside readings of Heidegger (1889-1976), Gianni Vattimo, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Giorgio Agamben, and shows how a politics of failure might change what it means to be human.
Inventing Falsehood, Making Truth, published by Princeton in 2013, turns to the Neapolitan Enlightenment. Bull examines a tradition of thought, centered on Naples and on Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), that placed fiction at the root of social knowledge. The book studies how a culture builds truth out of useful falsehood, how myth and invention underwrite the founding of the social sciences, and how the Enlightenment in southern Italy thought about the human world it set out to describe. The art historian and the historian of ideas meet here. Bull keeps asking how a society makes its own arrangements visible to itself, and what it must invent to do so.
On Mercy, published by Princeton in 2019 and named a New Statesman Book of the Year, carries the method into political philosophy. Mercy once stood as a virtue. Kings drew legitimacy from acts of clemency, their pardon a sign of something close to divine power. By the end of the eighteenth century mercy had become an offense against society, arbitrary and contingent, with no place in a polity run on rational self-interest. Hobbes (1588-1679) wrote it out of his theory of the state. Hume (1711-1776) wrote it out of his theory of justice. Mercy dropped from the vocabulary of political thought. Bull challenges that exile. Justice can be codified, administered, distributed by rule. Mercy cannot. It stays discretionary, asymmetrical, hard to predict, and that resistance to calculation is its point. Bull argues for restoring the primacy of mercy over justice. If men remain open to harm from one another, then they stand in need of one another’s mercy, and a politics built on that need might restrain the powerful and free the powerless. The argument carries a sharp edge. If the case for capitalism is a case against mercy, then the case for mercy reaches the foundations of how we think about society and the state.
The Concept of the Social: Scepticism, Idleness and Utopia, published by Verso in 2021, presses against an assumption that underwrites sociology, economics, public policy, and much political theory, the belief that ‘the social’ exists as a single object that thought can analyze and that policy can manage. Bull doubts it. The figure who carries the doubt is the idle man. Capitalist and socialist alike assume that a worthwhile life runs through participation, production, communication, contribution. Bull studies idleness as a refusal of that demand. The idle man neither serves the social order nor rises against it. He withdraws from its claims. In Bull’s reading, idleness becomes a form of resistance, and the idle man takes a place that social theory cannot file. He resembles the subhuman of the earlier book. Both stand where the prevailing scheme cannot quite reach. The book offers an account of collective freedom won through doubt and inertia rather than through knowledge and action, and it keeps a utopian undertone, the future glimpsed darkly so that no one mistakes it for a program.
A single line runs through the whole body of work. In the study of apocalypse the excluded position lies outside ordinary historical time. In the Renaissance books it lives inside displaced worlds of pagan meaning. In Anti-Nietzsche it appears as the subhuman. In On Mercy it surfaces as the exception that justice cannot absorb. In The Concept of the Social it takes the form of the idle man. Bull keeps moving toward figures and standpoints that a dominant order needs and cannot name. They mark the limit of the order’s self-knowledge, and from that limit he writes his criticism.
His place in British and Anglophone intellectual life follows from this habit. He draws on continental philosophy, Christian theology, intellectual history, Renaissance humanism, and a native English skepticism, and he settles into none of them. He writes the clear, disciplined prose of a scholar while pursuing the large questions of a theorist, and he builds no system of his own. His seat on the New Left Review board places him within the left’s high theoretical culture, yet he often turns the critical gaze back on criticism, asking what assumptions let a critique proceed and what it leaves out of sight. That recursive turn gives his work its distinct standing. He has spent more than three decades on a single discipline of attention. Every scheme of vision, he keeps showing, makes its own blindness, and the work of thought begins where that blindness can be seen.
Malcolm Bull’s The Concept of the Social doubts that ‘the social’ exists as a coherent object that thought can analyze and that policy can manage. Bull and Turner stand on the same side of that wall. Both refuse to take the social as a given substance. The agreement runs only so far, and the directions split. Turner’s doubt is ontological and causal. The word has no referent, and sociology keeps minting referents it cannot cash. Bull’s doubt is historical and political. He treats the social as a contingent construction, asks what it shuts out, and ends in a utopian register with the idle man as his witness. Turner wants to clear the concept away. Bull wants to expose what the concept costs and then leave it suspended.
The harder result comes when you turn Turner back on Bull’s own vocabulary, because Bull builds essences of his own while dissolving the one. His master category is the excluded standpoint, the position a system requires and cannot see. He finds it everywhere: outside historical time in the apocalypse books; inside displaced pagan meaning in the Renaissance work; as the subhuman in Anti-Nietzsche; as the exception to justice in his account of mercy; and as the idle man in The Concept of the Social. Turner asks the question he asks of every recurring social object: Is this one thing that many systems share, or is it a sameness Bull reads into materials that have nothing in common? The cases sit centuries apart and belong to different orders, religion and painting and ethics and political theory. Bull asserts a structural recurrence across them. He does not give the causal story that might earn it. On Turner’s terms the recurrence is the analyst’s pattern, the excluded standpoint a ghost assembled from family resemblances and then treated as an entity that drives the history.
Bull says the subhuman is a philosophical position rather than a sociological category. Read through Turner, that line admits the noun has no referent in the social world. No class of men is the subhuman. The word marks a stance a reader adopts, not a kind of person who exists. Turner would take the admission and extend it. If the subhuman names no one, what carries the weight when Bull writes as though it names a real site from which Nietzschean rank collapses? The essence has been granted causal force after its existence has been withdrawn.
Totality runs the same risk in Seeing Things Hidden. Bull treats the desire for total vision as a single recurring object, present in millenarian religion, in modern ideology, in philosophical system-building. Turner doubts that one mental thing recurs across those traditions. The apocalyptic monk and the Hegelian and the policy planner produce similar surface gestures toward the whole. That surface likeness tempts the historian to posit a shared longing underneath, and the longing is the construct. The grouping holds together in Bull’s prose. Whether it holds together in the world is the open question, and it is the question Turner forces.
Seeking a Sanctuary, with Keith Lockhart, leans on the sect-to-denomination types of Troeltsch and Niebuhr and on ‘the American dream.’ Those are reified objects. Bull comes out close to clean, because he tracks one movement through its actual history, the Millerite disappointment, the slow institutional settling, the changes in particular doctrines and offices. He uses the types as labels for stages he documents rather than as forces that cause the change. ‘The American dream’ floats as a collective abstraction doing rhetorical duty, and that phrase is the one place Turner would press. The body of the book stays empirical, so the charge lands soft.
Apocalypse Theory and the Ends of the World, the edited volume, makes its essentialism in the framing. The premise treats apocalyptic thought as one recurring phenomenon across traditions. Turner asks whether ‘apocalypse’ names a single shared thing or a family resemblance the editor assembles from cases that share a surface. The collection holds together as a heading. Whether the heading holds together in the world is left unasked.
Seeing Things Hidden carries the heaviest charge. Bull posits the desire for total vision as one object recurring in millenarian religion, in modern ideology, in philosophical system-building. No transmission runs between the medieval visionary and the Hegelian and the planner. The likeness is at the surface, the gesture toward the whole. Bull treats the longing underneath as real and shared and old. Turner reads that longing as the construct, a sameness read into materials centuries and worlds apart, then handed the weight of a recurring force.
The Mirror of the Gods reverses the verdict, and it shows Bull at his most anti-essentialist. He refuses the idea of a single pagan essence recovered from antiquity. He shows the gods remade case by case, Venus reinvented here, Bacchus there, each through a traceable line of sources, patrons, and commissions. The transmission is real and documented. There is no shared hidden substance behind the images, only particular acts of reinvention that produce a surface family of motifs. Turner would sign this book. It is the practice argument from The Social Theory of Practices carried out in paint.
Anti-Nietzsche restores the exposure through the subhuman. Bull treats the figure as a site from which Nietzschean rank collapses, then concedes that the subhuman is a philosophical position and not a sociological category. On Turner’s terms that concession withdraws the referent and keeps the force. No class of men is the subhuman. The word marks a stance a reader takes. Bull goes on writing as though it names a real place in the world that does real work against Nietzsche (1844-1900). The essence has been granted power after its existence has been denied.
Inventing Falsehood, Making Truth turns out an ally, almost a forerunner. Bull studies how the Neapolitan Enlightenment, with Vico (1668-1744) at the center, founded social knowledge on useful fiction. A society invents the collective objects it then treats as solid. That is the Turner thesis stated as intellectual history. The ghosts of social science are the fictions Bull watches a culture build and install. Here Bull does to the social what Turner does, by a longer historical route.
On Mercy works with ‘mercy,’ ‘justice,’ ‘capitalism,’ and ‘society’ as large abstractions. Mercy escapes the worst of the charge because Bull locates it in discretionary acts by particular men rather than in a shared substance that causes conduct. Justice as a codifiable order, capitalism as a system opposed to mercy, society as the field of vulnerability, these are the reified objects, and they carry the argument. Turner would grant that Bull argues at the level of principle, where some abstraction is the price of entry, and would still mark the slide from ‘men sometimes spare one another’ to ‘mercy’ as a force that might restructure the state.
The Concept of the Social is the convergence, and Bull stands with Turner against the central ghost. He doubts that ‘the social’ names a real object that thought can analyze or that policy can manage. The split is in the exit. Turner clears the concept away as a causal placeholder. Bull keeps it suspended as a contingent construction and asks what it excludes. The idle man arrives as the witness, and there the new essence forms. Bull starts to treat ‘the idle’ as a position with content, a site of a freedom won through doubt and inertia. He dissolves one collective object and seats another in the empty chair.
The cross-cutting result is plain once the books line up. Bull runs most essentialist when he reaches across history for one shared object, in Seeing Things Hidden, in the apocalypse volume, and in the master category that governs the whole shelf, the excluded standpoint. He runs least essentialist when his materials are concrete and traceable, in The Mirror of the Gods, and when his subject is the invention of social fictions, in Inventing Falsehood, Making Truth. The standpoint is the deepest ghost. Bull presents it as a discovery about how every system of thought works, that each one requires and conceals a position. Turner reads it as the signature of a single method applied to every body of material, the analyst’s recurring move mistaken for a property of the world. The man who dissolves the social keeps a private collection of essences, and the test he passes on the gods he fails on himself.
