New Books in Intellectual History

Star. Stjarna. Setareh. Thousands of miles apart, humans look up at the night sky and use the same word to describe what they see. Listen to these English, Icelandic, and Iranian words, and you can hear echoes of one of history's most unlikely, miraculous journeys. For all of these languages – and hundreds more – share a single ancient source. In a mysterious Big Bang of its own, this proto tongue...

Today, human exceptionalism is the norm. Despite occasional nods to animal welfare, we prioritize humanity, often neglecting the welfare of a vast number of beings. As a result, we use hundreds of billions of vertebrates and trillions of invertebrates every year for a variety of purposes, often unnecessarily. We also plan to use animals, AI systems, and other nonhumans at even higher levels in the...

Liberalism is in trouble. As a set of ideas, it has lost much of its historical authority in guiding public policy and personal behaviour. In this post-liberal climate, Russell Blackford asks whether liberalism is truly over. How We Became Post-Liberal: The Rise and Fall of Toleration (Bloomsbury, 2023) examines how Western liberal democracies became nations where traditional liberal principles of...

What does Islam, particularly Shīʿī Islam, really say about same-sex sexual relations? Can Islamic legal frameworks, rooted in centuries of jurisprudence, ever be used to imagine the possibility of an Islamically valid same-sex marriage? What terms and categories did pre-modern Islamic sources use to describe what we might now call “homosexuality,” and what is meant by the claim that “homosexualit...

In Somatic States: On Cartography, Geobodies, Bodily Integrity (Duke UP, 2025), Franck Billé examines the conceptual link between the nation-state and the body, particularly the visceral and affective attachment to the state and the symbolic significance of its borders. Billé argues that corporeal analogies to the nation-state are not simply poetic or allegorical but reflect a genuine association...

Reconciliation between Europe's Protestants and Catholics led to a new era of Christian collaboration.  Why did these erstwhile foes end their schism and begin to make peace?  In this riveting study, Udi Greenberg shows that ecumenism grew out of a shared desire to protect against perceived threats to Christian life.  The End of the Schism: Catholics, Protestants, and the Remaking of Christian Lif...

Christopher Harding’s The Light of Asia: A History of Western Fascination with the East (Allen Lane, 2024) is a fascinating survey of two millennia of Western encounters with Eastern culture, thought and religions. From Herodotus to Alan Watts, Harding profiles a range of engaging figures who have had a sometimes-overlooked impact on the way we in the West engage with and understand Asia. From the...

In this engaging life of the twentieth century’s most self-consciously learned dictator, Geoffrey Roberts explores the books Stalin read, how he read them, and what they taught him. Stalin firmly believed in the transformative potential of words, and his voracious appetite for reading guided him throughout his years. A biography as well as an intellectual portrait, Stalin's Library: A Dictator and...

Political Theorist Fernanda Gallo (Homerton College, University of Cambridge) has a fascinating new book, Hegel and Italian Political Thought: The Practice of Ideas, 1832-1900 (Cambridge UP, 2024), about how Georg Hegel’s philosophical thought made its way to Italy and how it was integrated into the various schools of thought within Italy. This is a fascinating exploration of the history of ideas,...

In The Nero-Antichrist: Founding and Fashioning a Paradigm (Cambridge UP, 2020), Shushma Malik reconstructs the means by which the emperor Nero came to be identified with the New Testament's antichrist. Malik surveys the first four Christian centuries to show how Nero mythology developed, often in ways that were much more positive than we might expect, and how early Christians appropriated this tr...

In Economic Thought in Modern China: Market and Consumption, c.1500–1937 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Margherita Zanasi argues that basic notions of a free market economy emerged in China a century and half earlier than in Europe. In response to the commercial revolutions of the late 1500s, Chinese intellectuals and officials called for the end of state intervention in the market, recognizi...

What does transphobic oppression have to do with sexism, heterosexism, and racism? How does a decolonial analysis help us understand trans oppression? How are the relatively recent concepts of person, self, and subject implicated in these forms of oppression? And what theorizations are already available within trans communities for thinking through this all?  In Beyond Personhood: An Essay in Tran...

Quran Commentary and the Biblical Turn (de Gruyter, 2024) examines the exegetical relationship between the Quran and the Bible in Islamic intellectual history. As the two have been called "intertwined scriptures" due to the Quran’s frequent invocation of biblical narratives and figures, a question is raised: what is the history of Muslims’ exegetical engagement with the biblical text? Through a su...

The city was one of the central and defining features of the world of the Greek and Roman Mediterranean. Challenging the idea that the ancient city 'declined and fell', Andrew Wallace-Hadrill argues that memories of the past enabled cities to adapt and remain relevant in the changing post-Roman world. In the new kingdoms in Italy, France and Spain cities remained a key part of the structure of con...

The 60s produced a Baby Boom generation that catalyzed the dawn of a new era—the space age, the age of television, the global age, and the beginnings of civil rights. At the same time, a new paradigm for parenting was unfolding that put emphasis on permissiveness, defined by what it permitted – the free and unfettered impulses of children. Others worried that the wildness of children, personified...

Democracy, argues David Wiles, is actually a form of theatre. In making his case, the author deftly investigates orators at the foundational moments of ancient and modern democracy, demonstrating how their performative skills were used to try to create a better world. People often complain about demagogues, or wish that politicians might be more sincere. But to do good, politicians (paradoxically)...

Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) never signed a painting, and none of his supposed self-portraits can be securely ascribed to his hand. He revealed next to nothing about his life in his extensive writings, yet countless pages have been written about him that assign him an identity: genius, entrepreneur, celebrity artist, outsider. Addressing the ethical stakes involved in studying past lives, in Leon...

In Predestination in Early Modern Reformed Theology (Reformation Heritage Books, 2024), Dr. Richard A. Muller delves into one of the most controversial doctrines of Reformed Theology: predestination. Muller carefully investigates key incidents that illustrate the doctrine's complexity and development by surveying Reformed thought on predestination in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Along...

The origins and nature of nationhood and nationalism continue to be topics of heated scholarly debate. This major new reference work with contributions from an international team of scholars provides a comprehensive account of ideas and practices of nationhood and nationalism from antiquity to the present. It considers both continuities and discontinuities, engaging critically and analytically wit...

Liberal democracies don’t age gracefully. Established systems of governance like those of the UK and the US which once served as blueprints are today experiencing a profound crisis of legitimacy. In Britain, a landslide general election result was quickly followed by a catastrophic tumble in approval ratings. In the US presidential campaign, meanwhile, voters were told that democracy itself was on...

In Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought (Princeton UP, 2024), Bruno Leipold argues that, contrary to certain interpretive commonplaces, Karl Marx’s thinking was deeply informed by republicanism. Marx’s relation to republicanism changed over the course of his life, but its complex influence on his thought cannot be reduced to wholesale adoption o...

In Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity: An Existential History of Chabad Hasidism (Stanford University Press, 2025), Eli Rubin provides a comprehensive intellectual and institutional history of Chabad Hasidism through the Kabbalistic concept of ṣimṣum. The onset of modernity, Eli Rubin argues, was heralded by this startling idea: existence itself is predicated on a self-inflicted "rupture" in th...

African Literature and US Empire Postcolonial Optimism in Nigerian and South African Writing (Edinburgh UP, 2024) demonstrates how African literature grapples with the enforced optimism of US empire that circulates in postcolonial nations: Unsettles chronologies that chart a growing disillusionment with the postcolonial nation and national development across the twentieth and twenty-first centurie...

Benjamin P. Davis’s Choose Your Bearing: Édouard Glissant, Human Rights and Decolonial Ethics (Edinburgh University Press 2025) provides one of the first readings, in English or French, of Édouard Glissant as an ethical theorist. What do we in the West owe those who grow our food, sew our clothes and produce our electronics? And what have we always owed one another, but forgotten, avoided, or simp...

In Throw Yourself Away: Writing and Masochism (Cambridge University Press, 2024), Julia Jarcho proposes that the desire to write is inextricably bound up with masochistic desires. In a series of readings that engage American and European works of fiction, drama, and theory from the late nineteenth through the early twenty-first centuries, Jarcho tests the limits of masochism as a pleasure-making e...