New Books in Intellectual History

A noted literary scholar traverses the Russian canon, exploring how realists, idealists, and revolutionaries debated good and evil, moral responsibility, and freedom. Since the age of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov, Russian literature has posed questions about good and evil, moral responsibility, and human freedom with a clarity and intensity found nowhere else. In Wonder Confronts Certainty: Ru...

Michael Kochenash published his revised dissertation from Claremont School of Theology as Roman Self-Representation and the Lukan Kingdom of God (Lexington Books/Fortress Academic) in 2020. A student of Dennis R. MacDonald, Kochenash has continued to pursue a similar brand of mimetic criticism as his Doktorvater—that is, a branch of source criticism that sees the composition of early Christian and...

Amidst increasing acrimony and political strain, many worry that democratic governance has an expiration date. To answer these concerns, Josiah Ober looks to the ancients. Here, he discusses his recent book (co-authored with Brook Manville), The Civic Bargain: How Democracies Survive (Princeton UP, 2023). How did democracies like Athens, Rome, and England overcome the challenges that accompanied w...

Walter Lippmann was arguably the most recognized and respected political journalist of the twentieth century. His "Today and Tomorrow" columns attracted a global readership of well over ten million. Lippmann was the author of numerous books, including the best-selling A Preface to Morals (1929) and U.S. Foreign Policy (1943). His Public Opinion (1922) remains a classic text within American politic...

Balthrop-Lewis's Thoreau's Religion: Walden Woods, Social Justice, and the Politics of Asceticism (Cambridge UP, 2021) presents a ground-breaking interpretation of Henry David Thoreau's most famous book, Walden. Rather than treating Walden Woods as a lonely wilderness, Balthrop-Lewis demonstrates that Thoreau's ascetic life was a form of religious practice dedicated to cultivating a just, multispe...

Tracy Rutler's Queering the Enlightenment: Kinship and Gender in Eighteenth-Century French Literature (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, Liverpool UP, 2021) explores the imaginaries of novels and plays from the "liminal" period that followed the end of Louis the XIV's reign in France. Examining a range of French works from the 1730s and 1740s, including writing by Antoine François Pr...

For working-class life writers in nineteenth century Britain, happiness was a multifaceted emotion: a concept that could describe experiences of hedonic pleasure, foster and deepen social relationships, drive individuals to self-improvement, and lead them to look back over their lives and evaluate whether they were well-lived. However, not all working-class autobiographers shared the same concepts...

In Vatsyāyāna's Commentary on the Nyāya-Sūtra: A Guide (Oxford University Press, 2023), Matthew Dasti unpacks a canonical classical Indian text, the Nyāyabhāṣya, while simultaneously demonstrating its relevance to contemporary philosphy. The commentary, the earliest extant on the Nyayasūtra, ranges over topics in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, dialectics, and value theory. Dast...

Today I talked to David B. Wong about his book Moral Relativism and Pluralism (Cambridge UP, 2023). The argument for metaethical relativism--the view that there is no single true or most justified morality--is that it is part of the best explanation of the most difficult moral disagreements. The argument for this view features a comparison between traditions that highly value relationship and comm...

Lenora Hanson's The Romantic Rhetoric of Accumulation (Stanford UP, 2022) provides an account of the long arc of dispossession from the British Romantic period to today. Lenora Hanson glimpses histories of subsistence (such as reproductive labor, vagrancy and criminality, and unwaged labor) as figural ways of living that are superfluous—simultaneously more than enough to live and less than what is...

Peter Adamson's book Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna): a Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 2023) provides an introduction to the most important philosopher of the Islamic world, Ibn Sīnā, often known in English by his Latinized name Avicenna. After introducing the man and his works, with an overview of the historical context in which he lived, the book devotes chapters to the different areas of Ibn Sīnā's th...

The East India Company is remembered as the world's most powerful, not to say notorious, corporation. But for many of its advocates from the 1770s to the 1850s it was also the world's most enlightened one.  Joshua Ehrlich reveals that a commitment to knowledge was integral to the Company's ideology. In The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge (Cambridge UP, 2023), he shows how the Comp...

50 years ago, anarchism was written off by some as a set of outdated idealistic ideas that had no contemporary relevance. Then came protests at events such as World Trade Organisation meetings – protests by people who either described themselves as anarchists or were so described by the media. It all gave rise the question "Has anarchism actually got a future?" To answer this question, Ruth Kinna...

Julia Schneider’s Nation & Ethnicity: Chinese Discourses on History, Historiography, and Nationalism (1900s-1920s), published with Brill in 2017, is an erudite study of early twentieth century theories of Chinese nationalism. In the book, Schneider considers the writings of Qing reformers Liang Qichao, complicates received narratives about anti-Manchu revolutionaries Zhang Taiyan and Liu Shipei, a...

Throughout the early modern period, political theorists in France and England drew on the works of Plutarch to offer advice to kings and princes. Elizabeth I herself translated Plutarch in her later years, while Jacques Amyot's famous translations of Plutarch's The Parallel Lives led to the wide distribution of his work and served as a key resource for Shakespeare in the writing of his Roman plays...

McManus presents an intellectual history of the conservative and reactionary tradition, stretching from Aristotle and Filmer to Alexander Dugin and Patrick Deneen. Providing a comprehensive critical genealogy of the intellectual political right, McManus traces its core to a nostalgia for the hierarchical cosmos of antiquarian and scholastic thinking. The yearning for a shared vision of the univers...

Neil Tarrant challenges conventional thinking by looking at the longer history of censorship, considering a five-hundred-year continuity of goals and methods stretching from the late eleventh century to well into the sixteenth. Unlike earlier studies, Defining Nature's Limits: The Roman Inquisition and the Boundaries of Science (U Chicago Press, 2022) engages the history of both learned and popula...

The Earthly Paradise was a vibrant symbol at the heart of medieval Christian geographies of the cosmos. As humanity’s primal home now lost through the sins of Adam of Eve, the Earthly Paradise figured prominently in Old French tales of lands beyond the mundane world. This study proposes a fresh look at the complex roles played by the Earthly Paradise in three medieval French poems: Marie de France...

J.R.R. Tolkien's masterwork The Lord of the Rings delighted so many of us as children, yet it and its vast body of accompanying work, such as the Silmarillion, contain a rich depth not well understood by most adults. Tolkien's work reflects his academic interests in the history of language and the Medieval world, as well as his Catholic faith. What purpose and religious message does his writing co...

Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book sho...

The Aeneid stands as a towering work of Classical Roman literature and a gripping dramatization of the best and worst of human nature. In the process of creating this epic poem, Vergil (70–19 BCE) became a living legend. But the real Vergil is a shadowy figure; we know that he was born into a modest rural family, that he led a private and solitary life, and that, in spite of poor health and unusua...

The stories in the Thousand and One Nights, or the Arabian Nights, are familiar to many of us: from the tales of Aladdin, Sinbad the Sailor, Ali Baba and his forty thieves, to the framing story of Scheherazade telling these stories to her homicidal husband, Shahrayar.  Muḥsin Jāsim Mūsawī's The Arabian Nights in Contemporary World Cultures: Global Commodification, Translation, and the Culture Indu...

This radical work by one of the leading young scholars of Black thought delineates a new concept of Black dignity, yet one with a long history in Black writing and action. Previously in the West, dignity has been seen in two ways: as something inherent in one’s station in life, whether acquired or conferred by birth; or more recently as an essential condition and right common to all of humanity. I...

Early in the third century, a small group of Greek Christians began to gain prominence and legitimacy as intellectuals in the Roman Empire. Examining the relationship that these thinkers had with the broader Roman intelligentsia, Jared Secord contends that the success of Christian intellectualism during this period had very little to do with Christianity itself. With the recognition that Christian...

How does Robert Louis Stevenson’s engagement with Pacific Islands cultures demonstrate processes of inculturation and the transformation of global Christianity?  L. M. Ratnapalan's book Robert Louis Stevenson and the Pacific: The Transformation of Global Christianity (Edinburgh UP, 2023) re-orients the intellectual biography of Robert Louis Stevenson by presenting him in the distinctive cultural e...