In Conversation: An OUP Podcast

New Subaltern Politics: Reconceptualizing Hegemony and Resistance in Contemporary India (Oxford University Press, 2015), edited by Alf Gunvald Nilsen and Srila Roy, is a wonderfully rich and theoretically coherent collection of texts that critically assess the legacies of Subaltern Studies through research into political movements in India today. The case studies range from students at elite higher education institutes shoring up their privilege, to queer activism in Kolkata, to Dalit villagers fighting land grabs, and the studies’ richness allows for a really nuanced relational understanding of subalternity, hegemony and the state that make the book a truly conceptually and ethnographically innovative collection.

At 2,300 pages and featuring 54 contributors and 42 contextual and interpretive essays, the second edition of The Jewish Study Bible (Oxford University Press, 2014) represents a monumental scholarly achievement. In my conversation with coeditor Marc Zvi Brettler, he talks about the complexity of that undertaking and the foundations upon which it was built. Marc Brettler is the Bernice and Morton Lerner Chair of Judaic Studies at Duke University’s Center for Jewish Studies. From 1986 to 2015, he taught Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University and since 2001 was the Dora Golding Professor of Biblical Studies. His academic research has been wide ranging. He has explored the use of religious metaphors in the Hebrew Bible (God Is King: Understanding an Israelite Metaphor, 1989), the nature of biblical historical texts as “literary” texts (The Creation of History in Ancient Israel, 1995), and gender and the Bible. He was a co-editor of The Jewish Annotated New Testament (2011) and The New Oxford Annotated Bible (2001 and 2010), the co-author of The Bible and the Believer (2012), the author of Biblical Hebrew for Students of Modern Hebrew (2002) and the co-editor of first edition of The Jewish Study Bible (2004), which was awarded a National Jewish Book Award. His book How to Read the Bible (2005) was published by the Jewish Publication Society and in paperback as How to Read the Jewish Bible (2007) by Oxford University Press. In addition to his published work, Brettler was awarded the Michael L. Walzer Award for Excellence in Teaching.

The political tradition of liberalism tends to associate political liberty with the individual’s freedom of choice. The thought is that political freedom is intrinsically tied to the individual’s ability to select one’s own path in life – to choose one’s occupation, one’s values, one’s hobbies, one’s possessions, and so on – without the intrusion or supervision of others. John Stuart Mill, who held a version of this view, argued that it is in choosing for ourselves that we develop not only self-knowledge, but autonomy and personality. Yet we now know that the image of the individual chooser that Mill’s view seems to presuppose is not quite accurate. It is not only the case that environmental factors of various kinds exert a great but often invisible influence over our choices; we must also contend with the limits of our cognitive resources. Sometimes, having to choose can be a burden, a hazard, and even an obstacle to liberty. In Choosing Not to Choose: Understanding the Value of Choice (Oxford University Press, 2015), Cass Sunstein examines the varied phenomena of choice-making. Bringing a range of finding from behavioral sciences, Sunstein makes the case that sometimes avoiding or delegating choice is an exercise of individual freedom.

Christine Desan, teaches about the international monetary system, the constitutional law of money, constitutional history, political economy, and legal theory at Harvard Law School. In this podcast we discuss her new book, Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2015). Per the books jacket, “Money travels the modern world in disguise. It looks like a convention of human exchange – a commodity like gold or a medium like language. But its history reveals that money is a very different matter. It is an institution engineered by political communities to mark and mobilize resources. As societies change the way they create money, they change the market itself – along with the rules that structure it, the politics and ideas that shape it, and the benefits that flow from it. One particularly dramatic transformation in money’s design brought capitalism to England. For centuries, the English government monopolized money’s creation. The Crown sold people coin for a fee in exchange for silver and gold. “Commodity money” was a fragile and difficult medium; the first half of the book considers the kinds of exchange and credit it invited, as well as the politics it engendered. Capitalism arrived when the English reinvented money at the end of the 17th century. When it established the Bank of England, the government shared its monopoly over money creation for the first time with private investors, institutionalizing their self-interest as the pump that would produce the money supply. The second half of the book considers the monetary revolution that brought unprecedented possibilities and problems. The invention of circulating public debt, the breakdown of commodity money, the rise of commercial bank currency, and the coalescence of ideological commitments that came to be identified with the Gold Standard – all contributed to the abundant and unstable medium that is modern money. All flowed as well from a collision between the individual incentives and public claims at the heart of the system. The drama had constitutional dimension: money, as its history reveals, is a mode of governance in a material world. That character undermines claims in economics about money’s neutrality. The monetary design innovated in England would later spread, producing the global architecture of modern money.” Some of the topics we cover are: * How the work’s assertion that money is a mode of governance in a material world undermines claims in economics about money’s neutrality. * The “free minting” system and why legal enforcement was essential to it. * The radical redesign of money that began in the 17th century.

Professor James Gelvin joins host Jonathan Judaken to discuss the Arab Uprisings, democratization in the Middle-East and Northern Africa, ISIS, al-Qaeda, terrorism, and America’s role imposing neo-liberal economic policies in the Middle East that have strongly shaped the political economy of the region. James Gelvin is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at the University of California, Los Angeles. His most recent book is the revised and updated edition of The Arab Uprisings: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2012). If you want to be informed about what’s going on in the Middle East today, this short, easy-to-read book is the best work out there. For more information on James Gelvin, you can click here to visit his UCLA website.

Lisa Moses Leff joins host Jonathan Judaken to discuss her new book, The Archive Thief: The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2015). In the aftermath of the Holocaust, wracked by grief and determined to facilitate the writing of an objective history of catastrophe, the historian Zosa Szajkowski gathered evidence of the persecution from Jewish leaders in Paris and from the wreckage of bombed-out buildings in Berlin. Many Jews in France and the United States saw his collecting of those papers as a heroic effort; however, in time, this “rescuer” became a thief. Most of the documents he acquired in the 1950s–mostly pertaining to Jewish history in France since the seventeenth century–he stole from the archives. After World War II ended, Szajkowski married and worked at YIVO (also known as the Jewish Scientific Institute), where his prickly personality and unorthodox methods now needed to be curbed, leading to a temporary split from the organization, during which he established himself as a leading scholar of French Jewry. But as he did, the once heroic collector of documents now became an archive thief. By 1949, there were suspicions of his misdeeds in the archives. Lisa Leff is a historian of Europe since 1789 whose research focuses on Jews in France. Her first book, Sacred Bonds of Solidarity, examines the rise of Jewish international aid in 19th-century France. For more information on Dr. Leff, you can visit her American University webpage.

How can a practical philosophical perspective concerned with justice and fairness help us address the problem of climate change? Henry Shue (Merton College, Oxford) tackles this essential question in his book Climate Justice: Vulnerability and Protection (Oxford UP, 2014). The book collects twenty-five years of Shue’s innovative work on climate justice into one rich and comprehensive volume. This conversation discusses the relation between climate justice and international inequality, justice between generations, alternative energy, how the science of climate change can inform philosophy, and more. The book is sure to be important for philosophers, scholars of human rights and international ethics, environmental studies and political theory, international institutions and global politics scholars, and other fields.

Kyle G. Volk is an associate professor of history at the University of Montana. His book Moral Minorities and the Making of American Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2014) provides a compelling narrative of how nineteenth-century Americans negotiated the tension between majority rule and minority rights and between representative democracy and popular democracy. He focuses on debates in the antebellum northern states where moral reform efforts of Sabbatarians, temperance activist, and racial segregationists circumvented representative government to assert their social vision through direct majority rule. Volk shows how some Americans rejected majority reform projects of moral uplift as despotism. Non-elite minorities challenged the popular democracy initiatives that infringed on their constitutional rights to work on Sunday, sell and drink alcohol, and have access to integrated public transportation. Immigrants, blacks, abolitionists, liquor dealers, Catholics, Jews, Seventh-day Baptists, and others engaged in a proactive defense. They developed techniques to protect their rights through legal arguments, moral suasion of the press, and political action. The moral minorities of the nineteenth century bequeath the strategies for political and legal activism deployed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries by ethnic minorities and gay rights advocates. Volk’s work illuminates our understanding of American democracy and minorities’ position within it.

Almost 400 years ago, Galileo wrote that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. Today, mathematics is integral to physics and chemistry, and is becoming so in biology, economics, and other sciences, although amid great controversy. The messy reality of biological creatures and their social relations cannot be captured in mathematical models or computer simulations, it is argued. But what is the relation between mathematics and physical reality? Do highly abstract mathematical formalisms and computer simulations yield empirical knowledge? If so, when, and how? In Reconstructing Reality: Models, Mathematics and Simulations (Oxford University Press, 2015), Margaret Morrison, Professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, considers the epistemological status of the results of modeling and simulation as compared, and typically contrasted with, the results of experiment. She argues that no sharp distinction between simulating the world and measuring the world can be drawn in modern science, and that there is no justification for epistemically privileging the results of experiments over the new knowledge we derive from idealizations, abstractions, and fictional models.

Jennifer L. Lawless and Richard L. Fox are the authors of Running from Office: Why Young Americans Are Turned off to Politics (Oxford UP,2015). Lawless is a Professor of Government and the Director of the Women & Politics Institute at American University. Fox is a Professor of Political Science at Loyola Marymount University. The two conducted surveys of over 4,000 younger Americans. What they find is that their young Americans rarely think, talk or consider politics. While many seem to care about the world, this infrequently translates to running for office or aspirations to work in politics. They find: Just 11 percent of respondents said that they had thought about running office “many times” while 61 percent said they “never” considered it. Asked if various jobs paid the same, they find just 13 percent of respondents said they would want to be a member of Congress, versus 37 percent who chose business executive and 27 percent school principal; only 19 percent indicated that a future goal was to become a political leader. And less than 10% of respondents said that their parents would want them to pursue a job as a member of Congress, compared to around 50 percent for owning a business.