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New Books in Intellectual History

New Books Network

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox:

society & culture

All Episodes

46:29

D. J. Taylor, "Orwell: The New Life" (Pegasus Books,...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2026/01/09

A fascinating exploration of George Orwell--and his body of work--by an award-winning Orwellian biographer and scholar, presenting the author anew to twenty-first-century readers.We find ourselves in an era when the moment is ripe for a reevaluation of the life and the works of one of the twentieth century's greatest authors. This is the first twenty-first-century biography on George Orwell, with special recognition to D. J. Taylor's stature as an award-winning biographer and Orwellian. Using new

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75:06

Moritz Föllmer, "The Quest for Individual Freedom: A...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2026/01/09

What does it mean to see oneself as free? And how can this freedom be attained in times of conflict and social upheaval? In this ambitious study, Moritz Föllmer explores what twentieth-century Europeans understood by individual freedom and how they endeavoured to achieve it. Combining cultural, social, and political history, this book highlights the tension between ordinary people's efforts to secure personal independence and the ambitious attempts of thinkers and activists to embed notions of

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46:10

Matt Dawson, "The Political Durkheim: Sociology,...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2026/01/08

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 political sociology as a means of understanding our contemporary world, the author asks us to look again at

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55:53

Alison Stone, "Women Philosophers in...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2026/01/07

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 Shepherd, Harriet Martineau, Ada Lovelace, George Eliot, Frances Power Cobbe, Helena Blavatsky, Julia

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68:30

Jim Endersby, "The Arrival of the Fittest: Biology's...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2026/01/07

The Arrival of the Fittest: Biology’s Imaginary Futures, 1900–1935 by Jim EndersbyIn the early twentieth century, varied audiences took biology out of the hands of specialists and transformed it into mass culture, transforming our understanding of heredity in the process.In the early twentieth century communities made creative use of the new theories of heredity in circulation at the time, including the now largely forgotten mutation theory of Hugo de Vries. Science fiction writers, socialists,

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43:43

Mike Jay, "Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2026/01/06

Mike Jay's Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind (Yale UP, 2023) is a provocative and original history of the scientists and writers, artists and philosophers who took drugs to explore the hidden regions of the mind. Until the twentieth century, scientists investigating the effects of drugs on the mind did so by experimenting on themselves. Vivid descriptions of drug experiences sparked insights across the mind sciences, pharmacology, medicine, and philosophy. Accounts in journals and

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113:11

Richard Wolin, "Heidegger in Ruins: Between...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2026/01/05

What does it mean when a radical understanding of National Socialism is inextricably embedded in the work of the twentieth century's most important philosopher? Martin Heidegger's sympathies for the conservative revolution and National Socialism have long been well known. As the rector of the University of Freiburg in the early 1930s, he worked hard to reshape the university in accordance with National Socialist policies. He also engaged in an all-out struggle to become the movement's philosophical

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93:18

Youshaa Patel, "The Muslim Difference: Defining the...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2026/01/04

According to a famous prophetic report, “Whoever imitates a people becomes one of them.” What does “imitation” here mean? Rather, what does this statement really mean at all, and how have Muslims historically understood it? How did this simple report become a doctrine in the Islamic tradition? What does this hadith mean for Muslims today, in an increasingly interreligious atmosphere and especially for those living in the West or in other non-Muslim-majority contexts? Finally, why do humans invest so

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54:09

Betty Milan, "Analyzed by Lacan: A Personal Account"...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2026/01/03

Analyzed by Lacan: A Personal Account (Bloomsbury, 2023) brings together the first English translations of Why Lacan, Betty Milan's memoir of her analysis with Lacan in the 1970s, and her play, Goodbye Doctor, inspired by her experience.Why Lacan provides a unique and valuable perspective on how Lacan worked as psychoanalyst as well as his approach to psychoanalytic theory. Milan's testimony shows that Lacan's method of working was based on the idea that the traditional way of interpreting provoked

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76:45

Andrew S. Curran, "Biography of a Dangerous Idea: A...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2026/01/02

An engaging investigation of how 13 key Enlightenment figures shaped the concept of race, from the acclaimed author of Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely. Over the first decades of the 18th century, Christianity began to lose its grip on the story of humankind. Yet centuries of xenophobia, religious intolerance, and proto-biological ideas did not simply disappear. This raw material was increasingly “processed” by secularly minded thinkers who claimed the right to rethink the category of the

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46:34

Baijayanti Roy, "The Nazi Study of India and Indian...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2026/01/01

The Nazi Study of India and Indian Anti-Colonialism (2024) is the first detailed and critical study of the intellectual and political connections that existed between some German scholars specializing on India, non-academic ‘India experts,’ Indian anti-colonialists and various organs of the Nazi state published by the Oxford University Press. It explores the ways in which different knowledge discourses pertaining to India, particularly its colonization and the anti-colonial movement, were used by

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67:40

Amit Varshizky, "The Metaphysics of Race: Science and...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2025/12/31

The Metaphysics of Race seeks to reframe debates on the conflicting scientific and spiritual traditions that underpinned the Nazi worldview, showing how despite the multitude of tensions and rivals among its adherents, it provided a coherent conceptual grid and possessed its own philosophical consistency. Drawing on a large variety of works, the volume offers insights into the intellectual climate that allowed the radical ideology of National Socialism to take hold. It examines the emergence of

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58:52

Scott A. Mitchell, "The Making of American Buddhism"...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2025/12/30

Scott A. Mitchell is the Dean of Students and Faculty Affairs and holds the Yoshitaka Tamai Professorial Chair at the Institute of Buddhist Studies in Berkeley. He teaches and writes about Buddhism in the West, Pure Land Buddhism, and Buddhist modernism.As of 2010, there were approximately 3-4 million Buddhists in the United States, and that figure is expected to grow significantly. Beyond the numbers, the influence of Buddhism can be felt throughout the culture, with many more people practicing

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82:23

Martin Jay, "Immanent Critiques: The Frankfurt School...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2025/12/30

The Frankfurt School’s own legacy is best preserved by exercising an immanent critique of its premises and the conclusions to which they often led. By distinguishing between what is still and what is no longer alive in Critical Theory, Immanent Critiques: The Frankfurt School Under Pressure (Verso, 2023) seeks to demonstrate its continuing relevance in the 21st century. Fifty years after the appearance of The Dialectical Imagination, his pioneering history of the Frankfurt School, Martin Jay

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86:23

Philippe Huneman, "Why?: The Philosophy Behind the...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2025/12/29

Why did triceratops have horns? Why did World War I occur? Why does Romeo love Juliet? And, most importantly, why ask why? In Why?: The Philosophy Behind the Question (Stanford UP, 2023), philosopher Philippe Huneman describes the different meanings of "why," and how those meanings can, and should (or should not), be conflated. As Huneman outlines, there are three basic meanings of why: the cause of an event, the reason of a belief, and the reason why I do what I do (the purpose). Each of these

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69:29

Lisa Silverman, "The Postwar Antisemite: Culture and...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2025/12/28

In his influential Anti-Semite and Jew, French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre observed "If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him." In doing so he articulated the figure of an Antisemite responsible for imagining the Jew in a formulation that has lasted for decades. This figure became an indispensable trope in the period immediately after the war. It enabled Germans and Austrians to navigate a radically changed political and cultural landscape and reestablish lives upended by war by

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46:44

Lin Hongxuan, "Ummah Yet Proletariat: Islam, Marxism,...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2025/12/25

In contemporary Indonesia the idea that Islam and Marxism are inherently incompatible has become deeply entrenched. However, as Lin Hongxuan's work Ummah Yet Proletariat: Islam, Marxism, and the Making of the Indonesian Republic (Oxford University Press, 2023) shows, the relationship between them in Indonesian history is deeply intertwined. Based on a wealth of Indonesian language sources, Lin traces over the half century between 1915 and 1965 how Islam and Marxism coexisted and converged in the

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63:35

Douglas Morris, "Legal Sabotage: Ernst Fraenkel in...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2025/12/25

During the mid-1930s, Germans opposed to Adolf Hitler had only a limited range of options available to them for resisting the Nazi regime. One of the most creative and successful challengers in this effort was Ernst Fraenkel, who as an attorney sought to use the law as a means of opposing Nazi oppression. In Legal Sabotage: Ernst Fraenkel in Hitler’s Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Douglas G. Morris describes the ways in which Frankel stood up to the Nazis and what understandings he drew

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65:04

Marcus Willaschek, "Kant: A Revolution in Thinking"...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2025/12/24

Immanuel Kant is undoubtedly the most important philosopher of the modern era. His Critique of Pure Reason, “categorical imperative,” and conception of perpetual peace in the global order decisively influenced both intellectual history and twentieth-century politics, shaping everything from the German Constitution to the United Nations Charter.Renowned philosopher Marcus Willaschek explains why, three centuries after Kant’s birth, his reflections on democracy, beauty, nature, morality, and the

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69:13

Johannes Zachhuber, "Gregory of Nyssa: on the...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2025/12/22

Johannes Zachhuber and Anna Marmodoro, eds., Gregory of Nyssa: On the Hexaemeron: Text, Translation, and Essays (Oxford UP, 2025)This book presents Gregory of Nyssa's On the Six Days of Creation (In Hexaemeron) as a specimen of Early Christian philosophy. It comprises Gregory of Nyssa's text in its Greek original accompanied by a new English translation, and seven accompanying essays by international specialists from diverse backgrounds. Each essay focuses on a section of the text and the arising

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