New Books in Intellectual History

Mark Siderits’ How Things Are: An Introduction to Buddhist Metaphysics (Oxford University Press, 2022) is a wide-ranging survey of how Buddhist philosophers think about the nature of the world. The book takes readers through topics such as the well-known claim that there is no self, in addition to issues involved in causation, consciousness, and the metaphysics of time. Siderits argues that, as me...

Genius or Charlatan? This is the story of Jacob Taubes, the controversial Jewish thinker whose tortured path led him into the heart of twentieth-century intellectual life Scion of a distinguished line of Talmudic scholars, Jacob Taubes (1923–1987) was an intellectual impresario whose inner restlessness led him from prewar Vienna to Zurich, Israel, and Cold War Berlin. Regarded by some as a genius,...

In Improbability, Chance, and the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel (Ohio State UP, 2020), Adam Grener advances a new approach to evaluating realism in fiction by arguing that nineteenth-century literary realism shifted attention to the historical and social dimensions of probability in the period’s literature. In an era in which probability was increasingly defined by statistical concepts of aggre...

Matt Seybold talks about the development of economics as a discourse inside and outside the academy, its success in making itself felt to be the only discourse that can talk about resource management and distribution, and its many complicities with capitalism. The conversation ranges from the origins of economics in the concept of household management, to the possibilities of a utopian economics i...

In The Atlantic Realists: Empire and International Political Thought Between Germany and the United States (Stanford UP, 2022), intellectual historian Matthew Specter offers a boldly revisionist interpretation of "realism," a prevalent stance in post-WWII US foreign policy and public discourse and the dominant international relations theory during the Cold War. Challenging the common view of reali...

Debates about science and religion are rarely out of the news. Whether it concerns what's being taught in schools, clashes between religious values and medical recommendations, or questions about how to address our changing global environment, emotions often run high and answers seem intractable. Yet there is much more to science and religion than the clash of extremes.  As Thomas Dixon and Adam S...

Rethinking 'Classical Yoga' and Buddhism (Bloomsbury, 2021) revisits the early systemic formation of meditation practices called 'yoga' in South Asia by employing metaphor theory. Karen O'Brien-Kop also develops an alternative way of analysing the reception history of yoga that aims to decentre the Eurocentric and imperialist enterprises of the nineteenth-century to reframe the cultural period of...

James Joyce's Ulysses is considered one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. The Cambridge Centenary Ulysses: The 1922 Text with Essays and Notes (Cambridge UP, 2022) - published to celebrate the book's first publication - helps readers to understand the pleasures of this monumental work and to grapple with its challenges. Copiously equipped with maps, photographs, and explanatory foot...

In Female Genius: Eliza Harriot and George Washington at the Dawn of the Constitution (U Virginia Press, 2022), Mary Sarah Bilder looks to the 1780s—the Age of the Constitution—to investigate the rise of a radical new idea in the English-speaking world: female genius. Bilder finds the perfect exemplar of this phenomenon in English-born Eliza Harriot Barons O’Connor. This pathbreaking female educat...

In 1802, President Thomas Jefferson distilled a leading idea in the early American republic and wrote of a wall of separation between church and state. That metaphor has come down from Jefferson to 21st-century Americans through a long history of jurisprudence, political contestation, and cultural influence. Separating Church and State: A History (Cornell UP, 2022) traces the development of the co...

What is mathematical music? In Mathematical Music from Antiquity to AI (Routledge, 2022), musicologist Nikita Braguinski discusses how mathematics has historically been used to make music, how it continues to influence musical composition, and the ways in which it may influence music in the future, including through artificial intelligence (AI). From pre-historic sounds to Gregorian chant to jazz...

Varsha Venkatasubramanian discusses the many trajectories of modernization as a theoretical concept. She focuses mainly on the history of development in the US and in India, through the cold war years and continuing to the present day. Varsha (@varsha_venkat_ on Twitter) is a graduate student focusing on the history of dams in the US and the World as it relates to foreign policy, policy history, e...

Originally published in 1978 in Portuguese, For a New Geography is a milestone in the history of critical geography and it marked the emergence of its author, Milton Santos (1926–2001), as a major interpreter of geographical thought, a prominent Afro-Brazilian public intellectual, and one of the foremost global theorists of space. Published in the midst of a crisis in geographical thought, For a N...

The history of revolutionary politics is rich enough that it includes the full spectrum of inspiration and tragedy. Those with revolutionary aspirations have a number of rocks in their shoes to deal with, perhaps most famously the failure of the Soviet Union and the shadow of Stalinism. Those looking to remain faithful to the spirit of revolutionary Marxism while still seriously reckoning with the...

Today’s guest is Leslie Leonard, who received their doctorate in American Studies and 19th C. American Literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Their dissertation, The Burdens and Blessings of Responsibility: Duty and Community in Nineteenth-Century America, is a study of the emergent idea of personal responsibility as it conflicted with more established ideas of duty in the writin...

Dr. Michael Coogan is lecturer on Old Testament/Hebrew Bible at Harvard Divinity School and the director of publications for the Harvard Semitic Museum. He is the author of God and Sex, The Ten Commandments: A Short History of an Ancient Text, The Old Testament: A Historical and Literary Introduction to the Hebrew Scriptures, and numerous textbooks on the Old Testament. He joined me on the phone t...

This striking contribution to Black literary studies examines the practices of Black writers in the mid-twentieth century to revise our understanding of the institutionalization of literary studies in America.  In Outside Literary Studies: Black Criticism and the University (U Chicago Press, 2022), Andy Hines uncovers a vibrant history of interpretive resistance to university-based New Criticism...

Revolutionary politics are experiencing a resurgence in popularity, and a quick look at today’s headlines make it easy to see why. For those dipping their toes in the massive history and theory under the revolutionary umbrella, however, it can be quite intimidating, with shelves upon shelves of massive tomes confronting readers, filled to the brim with dense jargon and obscure theories. Knowing wh...

Olga Bertelsen's In the Labyrinth of the KGB: Ukraine's Intelligentsia in the 1960s-1970s (Lexington Books, 2022) focuses on the generation of the sixties and seventies in Kharkiv, Soviet Ukraine, a milieu of writers who lived through the Thaw and the processes of de-Stalinization and re-Stalinization. Special attention is paid to KGB operations against what came to be known as the dissident milie...

The uprising which shook France in May 1968 also had a revolutionary effect on the country's most prominent film journal. Under editors Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, Cahiers du cinéma embarked on a militant turn that would govern the journal's work over the next five years. With a Marxist orientation inspired by the thinking of Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes, the "red yea...

Richard G. Marks's book Jewish Approaches to Hinduism: A History of Ideas from Judah Ha-Levi to Jacob Sapir (12th-19th Centuries) (Routledge, 2021) explores past expressions of the Jewish interest in Hinduism in order to learn what Hinduism has meant to Jews living mainly in the 12th through the 19th centuries. India and Hinduism, though never at the center of Jewish thought, claim a place in its...

Chinese science fiction has been booming lately through the translation of books like Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem, but where did the current surge come from? In Celestial Empire: The Emergence of Chinese Science Fiction (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), Nathaniel Isaacson introduces the genre’s origins in China and tracks its development from roughly 1904 to 1934. During that period, China...

Inventing Secularism: The Radical Life of George Jacob Holyoake (McFarland, 2021), by Ray Argyle is the first modern biography of the founder of Secularism, describing a transformative figure whose controversial and conflict-filled life helped shape the modern world. Jailed for atheism and disowned by his family, Holyoake came out of an English prison at the age of 25 determined to bring an end to...

Ask you average high school student or undergraduate about nineteenth century US history and if nothing else, they likely know the phrase "manifest destiny." The idea that the United States was destined, even pre-ordained, to construct a continent-spanning nation is widely assumed to have been a motivating force in American political life in during the pre-Civil War era, and is similarly thought t...

In Sorcery or Science? Contesting Knowledge and Practice in West African Sufi Texts (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022) Ariela Marcus-Sells examines two Sufi Muslim theologians, known as Kunta scholars, who rose to prominence in the western Sahara Desert in the late eighteenth century. Sīdi al-Mukhtār al-Kuntī (d. 1811) and his son and successor, Sīdi Muḥammad al-Kuntī (d. 1826), influ...