New Books in Intellectual History

Americans have always had mixed emotions about schooling: in popular literature and television, teachers are often depicted as tyrannical authorities, even as in classroom settings they often try to style themselves as "friends." Dr. Rita Koganzon, professor of political science at the University of Houston, discusses the history of the idea of authority in education, dwelling on Enlightenment thi...

Americans have always had mixed emotions about schooling: in popular literature and television, teachers are often depicted as tyrannical authorities, even as in classroom settings they often try to style themselves as "friends." Dr. Rita Koganzon, professor of political science at the University of Houston, discusses the history of the idea of authority in education, dwelling on Enlightenment thi...

The socialist activist E. T. Kingsley occupies an odd place in the history of labor and the left. Often mentioned due to his prolific life of speaking, writing, traveling and organizing, he has still generally remained wrapped in obscurity, leaving little in the way of a paper trail for us to understand who he actually is. Fortunately, Benjamin Isitt and Ravi Malhotra have been working to correct...

The emergence of Haiti as a sovereign Black nation lit a beacon of hope for Black people throughout the African diaspora. Leslie M. Alexander's study reveals the untold story of how free and enslaved Black people in the United States defended the young Caribbean nation from forces intent on maintaining slavery and white supremacy. Concentrating on Haiti's place in the history of Black internationa...

The seventeenth century Reformed Orthodox discussions of the work of Christ and its various doctrinal constitutive elements were rich and multifaceted, ranging across biblical and exegetical, historical, philosophical, and theological fields of inquiry. Among the most contested questions in these discussions was the question of the necessity of Christ's satisfaction. Joshua D. Schendel's The Neces...

Today I talked to Ching Keng about his book Toward a New Image of Paramartha: Yogacara and Tathagatagarbha Buddhism Revisited (Bloomsbury, 2022). Yogacara and Tathagatagarbha are often regarded as antagonistic Indian Buddhist traditions. Paramartha (499-569) is traditionally credited with amalgamating these philosophies by translating one of the most influential Tathagatagarbha texts in East Asia,...

Political Theorist Lee Trepanier has a new edited volume focusing on thinking about human responses to disasters and diseases. Making Sense of Diseases and Disasters: Reflections of Political Theory from Antiquity to the Age of COVID (Routledge, 2022) was clearly an opportunity for many of the contributing authors to consider how we should think about ourselves and our physical and spiritual healt...

Edward Mead Earle was a historian, scholar, professor, and international relations expert; he was also a founding father of the field we know as Security Studies. Listen as David Ekbladh and International Security Editor Sean Lynn-Jones discuss Earle's contributions to the field, his views on what Security Studies should be, his seminar at the Institute for Advanced Study, and what he might think...

Max Kaiser's book Jewish Antifascism and the False Promise of Settler Colonialism (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022) takes a timely look at histories of radical Jewish movements, their modes of Holocaust memorialisation, and their relationships with broader anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles. Its primary focus is Australia, where Jewish antifascism was a major political and cultural force in Jewish c...

One of the most recognizable tropes in American society in the past few decades is the scarred war veteran, returning from foreign lands with wounds both visible and invisible. His experiences are incomprehensible to those who’ve not served, but we owe him everything, and it is our duty as American citizens to honor him with nonjudgmental empathy so that he might eventually heal and reintegrate in...

Revered by contemporaries and posterity for both his sanctity and his scholarship, Bede (672-735) is a pivotal figure in the history of the Church. Known primarily as an historian for his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Bede was also an accomplished pedagogue, hagiographer, and biblical scholar. Bede the Theologian: History, Rhetoric, and Spirituality (Catholic U of America Press, 20...

Arya Aryan's book The Postmodern Representation of Reality in Peter Ackroyd's Chatterton (Cambridge Scholars, 2022) explores the postmodernist representation of reality and argues that historiographic metafictional texts, such as Peter Ackroyd’s Chatterton (1987), are hetero-referential in their creation of a heterocosm, as opposed to representational and anti-representational views of art. It arg...

The God Susanoo and Korea in Japan’s Cultural Memory: Ancient Myths and Modern Empire (Bloomsbury, 2022) traces reiterations and reinterpretations of the deity Susanoo regarding his relationship with Korea vis-a-vis Japan. Through careful examination of mythological texts and other primary sources, David Weiss examines Susanoo’s role in the construction of Korea’s image as Japan’s periphery. This...

Harvard's Department of Social Relations made history in the 1950s and 1960s as the most ambitious program in social science in the United States. Dedicated to a synthesis of sociology, anthropology, psychology, and other disciplines, the scope of its ambitions were matched only by the scope of its failures. Patrick Schmidt's new volume Harvard's Quixotic Pursuit of a New Science: The Rise and Fal...

The national purpose of the American state is to realize and then sustain the democracy and the equality that was the promise of our founding. I believe that requires perennial struggle and … groups like Black Lives Matter are an essential part of that struggle … Those are the social movements I hope to join, support, and that I hope will always be qualified by the adjective ‘liberal’. – Michael W...

Humility and humiliation have an awkward, often unacknowledged intimacy. Humility may be a queenly, cardinal or monkish virtue, while humiliation points to an affective state at the extreme end of shame. Yet a shared etymology links the words to lowliness and, further down, to the earth. As this study suggests, like the terms in question, T. S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett share an imperfect likeness....

What Is to Be Done? In her luminous biography Emma Goldman: Revolution as a Way of Life (Yale UP, 2011), Vivian Gornick brings us back to this question, originally made by Lenin after a novel which suggests that in order to achieve egalitarianism and sexual liberation, revolutionaries have to live “as though hunted:” no romance, no sex, no friends, no conversation. This was the revolutionary tradi...

To the Collector Belong the Spoils: Modernism and the Art of Appropriation (Cornell UP, 2023) rethinks collecting as an artistic, revolutionary, and appropriative modernist practice, which flourishes beyond institutions like museums or archives. Through a constellation of three author-collectors—Henry James, Walter Benjamin, and Carl Einstein—Annie Pfeifer examines the relationship between literar...

The long nineteenth-century--the period beginning with the French Revolution and ending with World War I--was a transformative period for women philosophers in German-speaking countries and contexts. The period spans romanticism and idealism, socialism, Nietzscheanism, and phenomenology, philosophical movements we most often associate with Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Marx--but...

Perhaps no category of people on earth has been perceived as more endangered, nor subjected to more preservation efforts, than indigenous peoples. And in India, calls for the conservation of Adivasi culture have often reached a fever pitch, especially amongst urban middle-class activists and global civil society groups. But are India’s ‘tribes’ really endangered? Do they face extinction? And is th...

Who's Black and Why?: A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race (Harvard University Press, 2022) is the first translation and publication of sixteen submissions to the notorious eighteenth-century Bordeaux essay contest on the cause of black skin. In 1739 Bordeaux's Royal Academy of Sciences announced a contest for the best essay on the sources of "blackness." The authors rang...

Hints on the Art and Science of Government was the first treatise on statecraft produced in modern India. It consists of lectures that Raja Sir T. Madhava Rao delivered in 1881 to Sayaji Rao Gaekwad III, the young Maharaja of Baroda. Universally considered the foremost Indian statesman of the nineteenth century, Madhava Rao had served as dewan (or prime minister) in the native states of Travancore...

Samuel Jay Keyser, Editor-in-Chief of Linguistic Inquiry, has shared a campus with Noam Chomsky for 40-odd years via MIT's Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. The two colleagues sat down in Mr. Chomsky's office to discuss ideas on language evolution and the human capacity for understanding the complexities of the universe. The unedited conversation was recorded on September 11, 2009. Support...

Many women wrote philosophy in nineteenth-century Britain, and they wrote across the full range of philosophical topics. Yet these important women thinkers have been left out of the philosophical canon and many of them are barely known today. The aim of Women Philosophers in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Oxford UP, 2023) is to put them back on the map. It introduces twelve women philosophers - Mary...

What would medieval English literature look like if we viewed it through the lens of the compendium? In that case, John Trevisa might come into focus as the major author of the fourteenth century. Trevisa (d. 1402) made a career of translating big informational texts from Latin into English prose. These included Ranulph Higden's Polychronicon, an enormous universal history, Bartholomaeus Anglicus'...