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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

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161:07

A Deep Dive on Karl Marx's "Capital"

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2024/10/07

Over 150 years ago, Marx published the first volume of Capital, a systematic and voluminous account of capitalism, from the economic bedrock all the way up to the social and political consequences. The book itself would stand as one of the most influential and decisive texts of all time, proving to be a wildly fruitful foundation for further research into everything it touched, and also becoming a cornerstone text for various political movements that would try and develop the critical analysis into

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41:40

Kyle Falcon, "Haunted Britain: Spiritualism,...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2024/10/06

The Great War haunted the British Empire. Shell shocked soldiers relived the war's trauma through waking nightmares consisting of mutilated and grotesque figures. Modernist writers released memoirs condemning the war as a profane and disenchanting experience. Yet British and Dominion soldiers and their families also read prophecies about the coming new millennium, experimented with séances, and claimed to see the ghosts of their loved ones in dreams and in photographs. On the battlefields, they had

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52:12

Iris Jamahl Dunkle, "Riding Like the Wind: The Life...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2024/10/06

In 1939, when John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath was published, it became an instant bestseller and a prevailing narrative in the nation's collective imagination of the era. But it also stopped the publication of another important novel, silencing a gifted writer who was more intimately connected to the true experiences of Dust Bowl migrants. In Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb (University of California Press, 2024), renowned biographer Dr. Iris Jamahl Dunkle revives the

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60:50

Michael J. Thompson, "Descent of the Dialectic:...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2024/10/05

In Descent of the Dialectic: Phronetic Criticism in an Age of Nihilism (Routledge, 2024), Michael J. Thompson reconstructs the concept and practice of dialectics as a means of grounding a critical theory of society. At the center of this project is the thesis of phronetic criticism or a form of reason that is able to synthesize human value with objective rationality.Thompson argues that defects in modern forms of social reason are the result of the powers of social structure and the norms and

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75:19

Alexandre Lefebvre, "Liberalism as a Way of Life"...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2024/10/04

Why liberalism is all you need to lead a good, fun, worthy, and rewarding life—and how you can become a better and happier person by taking your liberal beliefs more seriouslyWhere do you get your values and sensibilities from? If you grew up in a Western democracy, the answer is probably liberalism. Conservatives are right about one thing: liberalism is the ideology of our times, as omnipresent as religion once was. Yet, as Alexandre Lefebvre argues in Liberalism as a Way of Life (Princeton UP,

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97:25

Faisal Devji, "Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2024/10/04

Pakistan, founded less than a decade after a homeland for India's Muslims was proposed, is both the embodiment of national ambitions fulfilled and, in the eyes of many observers, a failed state. Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea (Harvard UP, 2013) cuts to the core of the geopolitical paradoxes entangling Pakistan to argue that India's rival has never been a nation-state in the conventional sense. Pakistan is instead a distinct type of political geography, ungrounded in the historic

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55:33

Sean McMeekin, "To Overthrow the World: The Rise and...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2024/10/04

When the USSR collapsed in 1991, the world was certain that Communism was dead. Today, three decades later, it is clear that it was not. While Russia may no longer be Communist, Communism and sympathy for Communist ideas have proliferated across the globe. In To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism (Basic Books, 2024), Sean McMeekin investigates the evolution of Communism from a seductive ideal of a classless society into the ruling doctrine of tyrannical regimes. Tracing

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59:55

William Cook Miller, "The Enthusiast: Anatomy of the...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2024/10/03

The Enthusiast: Anatomy of the Fanatic in Seventeenth-Century British Culture (Cornell UP, 2023) tells the story of a character type that was developed in early modern Britain to discredit radical prophets during an era that witnessed the dismantling of the Church of England's traditional means for punishing heresy. As William Cook Miller shows, the caricature of fanaticism, here called the Enthusiast began as propaganda against religious dissenters, especially working-class upstarts, but was

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42:30

Camille Owens, "Like Children: Black Prodigy and the...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2024/10/03

Like Children: Black Prodigy and the Measure of the Human in America (NYU Press, 2024) argues that the child has been the key figure giving measure and meaning to the human in thought and culture since the early American period. Camille Owens demonstrates that white men’s power at the top of humanism’s order has depended on those at the bottom. As Owens shows, it was childhood’s modern arc—from ignorance and dependence to reason and rights—that structured white men’s power in early America: by

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73:30

Naomi Seidman, "In the Freud Closet: Psychoanalysis...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2024/10/02

There is an academic cottage industry on the "Jewish Freud," aiming to detect Jewish influences on Freud, his own feelings about being Jewish, and suppressed traces of Jewishness in his thought. In Translating the Jewish Freud: Psychoanalysis in Hebrew and Yiddish (Stanford University Press, 2024), Naomi Seidman takes a different approach, turning her gaze not on Freud but rather on those who seek out his concealed Jewishness. What is it that propels the scholarly aim to show Freud in a Jewish

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56:25

From Tribalism to Common Humanity: A Conversation...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2024/10/02

For most of recorded history, neighboring countries, tribes, and peoples everywhere in the world regarded each other with apprehension—when not outright fear and loathing. Tribal or racial attitudes were virtually universal, no one group being much better or worse in this respect than any other—and for good reason given the conditions of life before the modern era. But in the last 500 years, relations between different peoples have undergone a slow but profound change. In our episode, explore Dr

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44:52

Julia Caterina Hartley, "Iran and French Orientalism:...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2024/10/02

Today I talked to Julia Caterina Hartley about Iran and French Orientalism: Persia in the Literary Culture of Nineteenth-Century France (Bloomsbury. 2023). New translations of Persian literature into French, the invention of the Aryan myth, increased travel between France and Iran, and the unveiling of artefacts from ancient Susa at the Louvre Museum are among the factors that radically altered France's perception of Iran during the long nineteenth century. And this is reflected in the literary

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70:15

Paola Bertucci, "In the Land of Marvels: Science,...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2024/10/01

How a journey through Italy casts light on secrets, stereotypes, and the manipulation of information in eighteenth-century science. In 1749, the celebrated French physicist Jean-Antoine Nollet set out on a journey through Italy to solve an international controversy over the medical uses of electricity. At the end of his nine-month tour, he published a highly influential account of his philosophical battle with his Italian counterparts, discrediting them as misguided devotees of the marvelous. Paola

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67:08

Samuel Ely Bagg, "The Dispersion of Power: A Critical...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2024/10/01

We commonly think of democracy as a social order governed by the people’s collective will. Given the size of the modern states, this picture is typically adjusted to say that democracy is a system of representative government, where elected officials are tasked with governing in ways that reflect the collective will of their constituents. Although it is familiar, this way of depicting democracy invites difficulties. The concept of a collective will is notoriously difficult to nail down. And,

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74:43

Jerome E. Copulsky, "American Heretics: Religious...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2024/10/01

A question has long hung over the the United States regarding the proper role of religion in public life. Those who long for a Christian America claim that the Founders intended a nation with political values and institutions shaped by Christianity. Secularists argue that those same Founders designed an enlightened republic where church and state should be kept separate. American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order (Yale UP, 2024), Jerome E. Copulsky examines the Americans who rejected

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62:02

Vanya Vaidehi Bhargav, "Being Hindu, Being Indian:...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2024/09/29

Vanya Vaidehi Bhargav’s book Being Hindu, Being Indian: Lala Lajpat Rai’s Ideas of Nationhood (Penguin Random House India, 2024) undertakes a systematic intellectual study of Lala Lajpat Rai’s nationalist thought through four decades of his active political life, lived between 1888 and 1928. It contests the dominant scholarly interpretation of Lajpat Rai’s nationalist thought as the nascent stage of Savarkarite Hindutva, and highlights the internally differentiated nature of ‘Hindu Nationalism’

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65:59

Estelle Tarica, "Holocaust Consciousness and Cold War...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2024/09/29

Holocaust Consciousness and Cold War Violence in Latin America (SUNY Press, 2022) proposes the existence of a recognizably distinct Holocaust consciousness in Latin America since the 1970s. Community leaders, intellectuals, writers, and political activists facing state repression have seen themselves reflected in Holocaust histories and have used Holocaust terms to describe human rights atrocities in their own countries. In so doing, they have developed a unique, controversial approach to the memory

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31:40

J. C. D. Clark, "The Enlightenment: An Idea and Its...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2024/09/28

Enlightenment studies are currently in a state of flux, with unresolved arguments among its adherents about its dates, its locations, and the contents of the 'movement'. This book cuts the Gordian knot. There are many books claiming to explain the Enlightenment, but most assume that it was a thing. J. C. D. Clark shows what it actually was, namely a historiographical concept. Currently 'the Enlightenment' is a term widely accepted across popular culture and in a variety of academic disciplines,

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65:14

Jack A. Goldstone, "Revolutions: A Very Short...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2024/09/27

In their pursuit of social justice, revolutionaries have taken on the assembled might of monarchies, empires, and dictatorships. They have often, though not always, sparked cataclysmic violence, and have at times won miraculous victories, though at other times suffered devastating defeat.Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 2023) illuminates the revolutionaries, their strategies, their successes and failures, and the ways in which revolutions continue to dominate world events and the

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63:35

David L. Swartz, "The Academic Trumpists: Radicals...

New Books in Intellectual History ·

2024/09/26

Remember the bleach drinking episode? Remember ‘alternative facts’? Remember ‘I have the best words’? These elements of the Trump presidency spoke to a fundamental part of his politics: truth and science were not prime among his considerations. Given this, one may assume that academics would have been especially unlikely to be drawn to the Trump presidency. Yet, in his fascinating book The Academic Trumpists: Radicals against Liberal Democracy (Routledge, 2024), David Swartz outlines a group of

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