New Books in Intellectual History

Matt Colquhoun (author/editor of Egress and Postcapitalist Desire) speaks to to Thomas Moynihan about his most recent book X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction. From forecasts of disastrous climate change to prophecies of evil AI superintelligences and the impending perils of genome editing, our species is increasingly concerned with the prospects of its own extinction. With humanity...

World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth: Anticolonial Aesthetics, Postcolonial Politics (Fordham UP, 2020) recovers a genealogy of anticolonial thought that advocated collective inexpertise, unknowing, and unrecognizability. Early-twentieth-century anticolonial thinkers endeavored to imagine a world emancipated from colonial rule, but it was a world they knew they would likely not live to s...

If you asked a passerby on the street what anarchism is, they may answer that it is an ideology based on chaos, disorder, and violence. But is this true? What exactly is anarchism? Anarchism: a Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 2022) provides a new point of departure for our understanding of anarchism. Prichard describes anarchism as a lived set of practices, with a rich historical legacy, and s...

Under the light of ancient Western philosophies, our darker moods like grief, anguish, and depression can seem irrational. When viewed through the lens of modern psychology, they can even look like mental disorders. The self-help industry, determined to sell us the promise of a brighter future, can sometimes leave us feeling ashamed that we are not more grateful, happy, or optimistic. Night Vision...

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) is perhaps the most iconised historical figure in India. Born into a caste deemed ‘unfit for human association’, he came to define what it means to be human. How and why did Ambedkar, who revered and cited the Gita till the 1930s, turn against Hinduism? What were his quarrels with Gandhi and Savarkar? Why did he come to see himself as Moses? How did the lessons l...

Paulo Freire offers activists and academics everywhere a lesson in what it means to be a radical intellectual. He is known as the founder of critical pedagogy, which asks teachers and learners to understand and resist their own oppression. His subversive books have been banned and burned in many countries, including his native Brazil, where the military dictatorship of the 1960s imprisoned and the...

A New York Times bestselling Biblical scholar, reveals why our popular understanding of the Apocalypse is all wrong—and why that matters. You’ll find nearly everything the Bible has to say about the end in the Book of Revelation: a mystifying prophecy filled with bizarre symbolism, violent imagery, mangled syntax, confounding contradictions, and very firm ideas about the horrors that await us all....

The November 1970 coup that brought Hafiz al-Asad to power fundamentally transformed cultural production in Syria. A comprehensive intellectual, ideological, and political project—a Ba'thist cultural revolution—sought to align artistic endeavors with the ideological interests of the regime. The ensuing agonistic struggle pitted official aesthetics of power against alternative modes of creative exp...

Dr. Naoíse Mac Sweeney presents a radical new account of how the idea of the West has shaped our history, told through the stories of fourteen fascinating lives in her book The West: A New History of an Old Idea (Dutton, 2023). We tend to imagine Western Civilisation as a golden thread, leading through the centuries from classical antiquity to the countries of the modern West - a cultural genealog...

In this episode, I was joined by Nicholas Scott Baker to discuss his book, In Fortune’s Theater: Financial Risk and the Future in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Professor Baker is an Associate Professor of history at Macquarie University in Sydney Australia interested in the political and economic cultures of early modern Europe and the Mediterranean, with a particular focus...

Empire and Progress in the Victorian Secularist Movement: Imagining a Secular World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) by Dr. Patrick Corbeil is the first extensive historical analysis of the relationship between empire and the Victorian secularist movement. Historians have paid little attention to the role of empire in the development of organized free thought. Secularism as it developed in Britain and i...

U.S. foreign policy has long been built on a dichotomy of an irreplaceable "here" and an expendable "there." In his 2003 announcement of the military campaign in Iraq, George W. Bush declared that we would fight in the Middle East so we wouldn't have to fight "on the streets of our cities." But what do the millions of people who live over "there" have to say about U.S. interventions and the displa...

What is the American Right, where does it come from, and how has it changed over time? Journalist and author Matthew Continetti discusses his recent book: The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism. Continetti is Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and was formerly the founding editor and the editor-in-chief of the Washington Free Beacon. Previously, he was opinion e...

This book engages in a dialogue with Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya (K.C. Bhattacharyya, KCB, 1875-1949) and opens a vista to contemporary Indian philosophy. KCB is one of the founding fathers of contemporary Indian philosophy, a distinct genre of philosophy that draws both on classical Indian philosophical sources and on Western materials, old and new. His work offers both a new and different readi...

The vast and vibrant world of biblical commentary has, over the generations, shaped not only our understanding of the Tanakh, but Judaism's worldview and values as well. The biblical commentator - or parshan - is a spiritual seeker, proposing answers to the theological and existential questions raised by the text and serving as mediator between Tanakh and the reader. Keenly aware of their contempo...

On Theology: Herman Bavinck's Academic Orations (Brill, 2020) presents four previously untranslated works by Herman Bavinck (1854-1921), here introduced and translated by Bruce Pass. These four speeches offer important insights into Bavinck's conceptualization of the discipline of theology, its place in the modern university, and the relation in which theology stands to religion. In the introducto...

In Horizons: A Global History of Science (Mariner Books, 2022), James Poskett, Associate Professor in the History of Science and Technology at the University of Warwick, begins by asking, “Where did modern science come from?” Arguing against the traditional narrative focusing on “genius” European men, Poskett invites us to reconsider and expand the geography of the history of modern science. Drawi...

In The State (Princeton University Press, 2023), the prominent political philosopher Philip Pettit embarks on a massive undertaking, offering a major new account of the foundations of the state and the nature of justice. In doing so, Pettit builds a new theory of what the state is and what it ought to be, addresses the normative question of how justice serves as a measure of the success of a state...

Cosmopolitan Cultures and Oceanic Thought (Routledge, 2023) imagines the ocean as central to understanding the world and its connections in history, literature, and the social sciences. Introducing the central conceptual category of the ocean as a method, it analyzes the histories of movement and traversing across connected spaces of water and land sedimented in literary texts, folklore, local his...

Israeli political philosopher Yoram Hazony ('86) discusses the Enlightenment, the American Founding, his latest book: Conservatism: A Rediscovery, and Conservatism's past and future. Dr. Hazony is the President of the Herzl Institute, based in Jerusalem, and the chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation, a public affairs institute based in Washington D.C., which recently hosted the popular National...

Modern social and political discussions all seem to revolve around the concept of identity. Dr. Carl Trueman, theologian and former William E. Simon Fellow in Religion and Public Life here at the Madison Program, discusses how thinkers like Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche created a world in which sexuality is politicized, and in which we all instinctively know what it means to "identify as."  Dr. Truem...

Before Modernism: Inventing American Lyric (Princeton UP, 2023) examines how Black poetics, in antagonism with White poetics in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, produced the conditions for the invention of modern American poetry. Through inspired readings of the poetry of Phillis Wheatley Peters, George Moses Horton, Ann Plato, James Monroe Whitfield, and Frances Ellen Watkins H...

What links Vajrayana Buddhism and Vajrayogini to Alistair Crowley and the neo-Platonists? A topic of speculation, desire and imagination, the Subtle Body, also known as the energy body, is an odd phenomena with deep roots in Taoism, Hinduism and Buddhism, but many are unaware that it has a rich history in European thought too. Simon Cox traces its roots in his recent work entitled The Subtle Body:...

The christocentric character of Herman Bavinck's thought has long been acknowledged, but an analysis of Bavinck's christocentrism has not been forthcoming. The Heart of Dogmatics: Christology and Christocentrism in Herman Bavinck (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020) redresses this situation, offering a comprehensive study of Bavinck's concept of a christocentric theological system. Building on the more...

Matt Dawson's The Political Durkheim: Sociology, Socialism, Legacies (Routledge, 2023) presents Durkheim as an important political sociologist, inspired by and advocating socialism. Through a series of studies, it argues that Durkheim’s normative vision, which can be called libertarian socialism, shaped his sociological critique and search for alternatives. With attention to the value of this poli...