Princeton UP Ideas Podcast

How is it that “liberalism” is a word so ubiquitous and yet we can hardly seem to agree on its meaning? In her book The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press, 2018), Helena Rosenblatt traces the history of the words “liberal” and “liberalism”...

Just when you thought that you knew everything and anything pertaining to the Cold War and the ending of it, along comes University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Professor Michael Cotey Morgan to tell you that you are profoundly wrong. Based upon voluminous archival research in eight countries and...

Lumbering late Tsarist Russia and international finance? Is there anything there?  The Bolsheviks and finance? How can there be anything there?   It turns out that the answer to both questions is yes.  In Dr. Hassan Malik‘s meticulously researched new book, Bankers and Bolsheviks: International Finance and the Russian Revolution (Princeton University...

The question of Palestinian autonomy has been a key element of Middle Eastern and Arab politics for much of the last century. A new history, by Seth Anziska, Preventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David to Oslo (Princeton University Press, 2018) redefines our understanding of the peace process and its ultimate failure:...

The specter of the “Godless” Soviet Union haunted the United States and continental Western Europe throughout the Cold War, but what did atheism mean in the Soviet Union? What was its relationship with religion? In her new book, A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism, Dr....

In Islamic intellectual history, it is generally assumed that the Ottomans did not contribute much to Islamic thought. With his new book, Caliphate Redefined: The Mystical Turn in Ottoman Political Thought (Princeton University Press, 2018), Hüseyin Yılmaz uses the Ottoman notion of the caliphate to push back against that assumption: he demonstrates how a new understanding...

How political are private foundations? Are they good or bad for democracy? Such are the big questions taken up by Rob Reich in his new book Just Giving: Why Philanthropy is Failing Democracy and How it Can Do Better (Princeton University Press, 2018). Reich is professor of political science and...

Winner of the Middle East Studies Association’s 2018 Albert Hourani Book Award, Alireza Doostdar’s The Iranian Metaphysicals: Explorations in Science, Islam, and the Uncanny (Princeton University Press, 2018) is a mesmerizing study of discourses and practices surrounding the Occult sciences or ‘metaphysicals’ in contemporary Iran. Thoroughly disrupting the common association...

In Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America (Princeton University Press, 2018), co-authors John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck explore the underlying question of American identity as a key component within the political landscape that was used during the 2016 primary and general election....

Though early American labor organizers agitated for the eight-hour workday on the grounds that they were entitled to “eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours for what we will,” free time as a political good has received little attention from politicians and political philosophers. In her...

Pretty much everyone knows that the American healthcare system is, well, very inefficient. We don’t, so critics say, get as much healthcare bang for our buck as we should. According to Bryan Caplan, however, the American educational system–higher education in particular–is much, much worse. In The Case against Education: Why the Education...

What can the Weimar Republic teach us about how democracies fail? How could the same vibrancy that gave us cultural touchstones spawn Nazism? In his new book Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton University Press, 2018), Eric D. Weitz challenges the belief that the fledgling democracy was doomed to fail. In...

The vast chasm between classical economics and the humanities is widely known and accepted. They are profoundly different disciplines with little to say to one another. Such is the accepted wisdom. Fortunately, Professors Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro, both of Northwestern University, disagree.  In their new book, Cents and...

Michael G. Hanchard’s new book The Spectre of Race: How Discrimination Haunts Western Democracies (Princeton University Press, 2018) is a rich and complex examination of the question of discrimination in general, and racial discrimination specifically, within the study of comparative politics as a discipline, but more broadly how this particular issue, discrimination—of...

In Genetics in the Madhouse: The Unknown History of Human Heredity (Princeton University Press, 2018), Theodore Porter uncovers the unfamiliar origins of human genetics in the asylums of Europe and North America. Rather than beginning his story with Gregor Mendel or 1909, the date when Wilhelm Johannsen coined the term “gene,”...

I’ve often asked myself this question: “How do religions begin?” I don’t know about you, but I think I would be very, very skeptical if someone told me that they’d had just received a revelation, communicated with some spiritual “higher power,” or had some sort of mystical-though-divinely-inspired experience. Ditto with...

Today I talked with Brian Stanley, professor of World Christianity at the University of Edinburgh, about his new book, Christianity in the Twentieth Century: A World History (Princeton University Press, 2018). Drawing on an extraordinary range of sources, and representing the expansion, assimilation and contraction of Christian religion in a...

In 2018, much attention has been drawn to candidates like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Randy Bryce: candidates for Congress who’ve made a living doing working class jobs. They are unusual because Congressional candidates are almost always drawn from white collar professions. Why do so few working class candidates run for office?...

At the heart of Michael Szonyi’s new book are two questions: 1) How did ordinary people in the Ming deal with their obligations to provide manpower to the army?, and 2) What were the broader consequences of their behavior?” The Art of Being Governed: Everyday Politics in Late Imperial China...

A much-maligned minority throughout American history, atheists have been cast as a threat to the nation’s moral fabric, barred from holding public office, and branded as irreligious misfits in a nation chosen by God. Yet, village atheists—as these godless freethinkers came to be known by the close of the nineteenth...

Culturally, idleness is widely derided as laziness, uselessness, and sloth.  Even within philosophy, the idle are criticized for being wasteful, selfish, and free-loading. Indeed, throughout the history of moral and political philosophy, it is frequently asserted (though not often argued) that humans must be perpetually active, busy, and, in a...

In his new book, The Italian Executioners: The Genocide of the Jews of Italy (Princeton University Press, 2018), Simon Levis Sullam, associate professor of modern history at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, examines how ordinary Italians became willing perpetrators and actively participated in the deportation of Italian Jews between 1943...

History is only recently opening up to previously marginalized groups: it is only just now that women’s history is being explored across different historical fields. Eve Krakowski in Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt: Women’s Adolescence, Jewish Law, and Ordinary Culture (Princeton University Press, 2017) uses Cairo Geniza documents, and Jewish...

What do the social worlds of teenage Muslim American boys look like? What issues do they grapple with and how do they think about issues that arise in their everyday lives? In his new book Keeping it Halal: The Everyday Lives of Muslim American Teenage Boys (Princeton University Press, 2017), John O’Brien answers...

This entertaining, enlightening, and humorous graphic narrative tells the exciting story of the seventeenth-century thinkers who challenged authority and contemporary thinking—sometimes risking excommunication, prison, and even death—to lay the foundations of modern philosophy and science and help usher in a new world. This unique book by dynamic father-son duo Steve...