New Books in Intellectual History

In the wake of Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, French liberals set out to create an informal empire. Their efforts to cultivate unequal partnerships with Christian, Greek-speaking elites in southeast Europe shaped national identities and structured global civilizational hierarchies over the decades that followed. Unintended Nations: France’s Empire of Civilization, Southeast Europe, and the Post-Napoleonic World (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2025) tracks a notion of civilization that developed in early nineteenth-century France. Dr. Alex Tipei explores the constellation of ideas, beliefs, and practices this concept invoked – what she calls civilization-speak – and charts the cross-continental networks that employed it as an organizing principle. Drawing on archival and printed primary sources in six languages, Dr. Tipei maps out the uses of this civilization-speak on both sides of the continent, focusing on France and the lands that make up significant parts of present-day Greece and Romania. She shows how and why French liberals mobilized civilization-speak to, offering an innovative analysis of liberalism and capitalism’s relationship to informal empire. Calling into question long-standing assumptions about the rise of nationalism in southeast Europe, Unintended Nations explores how Franco-Balkan exchanges helped define political, civilizational, and biopolitical boundaries in the post-Napoleonic era. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Spike Bucklow, author of "The Year: An Ecology of the Zodiac," merges his background in chemistry and heritage conservation to explore the intricate connections between nature and human experiences. The discussion traverses the cyclical nature of time, emphasizing how seasonal shifts shape emotions and perceptions. Bucklow reflects on the balance of light and darkness, the ecological awakening of spring, and the deeper meanings behind the summer solstice. Through historical insights and literary reflections, he advocates for a harmonious understanding of science, nature, and cultural beliefs.

Are we already living in some kind of fascist or technocratic dystopia? How do we avert the AI dystopia? These are the types of things that you'll see thrown about in op-eds and analysis pieces all over the net and the press. Dystopia is doing some kind of work in our political vocabulary that goes beyond a reference to those iconic dystopian novels or their sort of contemporary successors. … Sometimes politics seems to be so absorbed in the train of fantasy and the imaginary that it becomes worrying. But like it or not, or like specific expressions of the political imagination or not, the political arena is an arena of the imagination. Habermas once said that people don't fight for abstractions, but they do battle with images.                                                                                                                    – Matthew Benjamin Cole, NBN interview 2025 After centuries of contemplating utopias, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers began to warn of dystopian futures. Yet these fears extended beyond the canonical texts of dystopian fiction into post-war discourses on totalitarianism, mass society, and technology, as well as subsequent political theories of freedom and domination. Fear the Future: Dystopia and Political Imagination in the Twentieth Century (U of Michigan Press, 2025) demonstrates the centrality of dystopian thinking to twentieth century political thought, showing the pervasiveness of dystopian images, themes, and anxieties. Offering a novel reading of major themes and thinkers, Fear the Future explores visions of the future from literary figures such as Yevgeny Zamyatin, Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell; political theorists such as Max Weber, Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, Jürgen Habermas, and Michel Foucault; and mid-century social scientists such as Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, David Reisman, C. Wright Mills, and Jacques Ellul. It offers a comparative analysis of distinct intellectual and literary traditions, including modern utopianism and anti-utopianism, mid-century social science, Frankfurt School critical theory, and continental political philosophy. With detailed case studies of key thinkers from the Enlightenment to the late twentieth century, the book synthesizes secondary literature and research from a range of disciplinary areas, including in political theory, intellectual history, literary studies, and utopian studies. This wide-ranging reconstruction shows that while dystopian thinking has illustrated the dangers of domination and dehumanization, it has also illuminated new possibilities for freedom. Professor Cole published his book with the University of Michigan Press as Open Access: find the detailed insights and arguments that Matthew discusses in our interview here as an online publication with downloadable options. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

The Maginot Line was a marvel of 1930s engineering. The huge forts, up to eighty meters underground, contained hospitals, modern kitchens, telephone exchanges, and even electric trains. Kilometres of underground galleries led to casements hidden in the terrain, and turrets that rose from the ground to fire upon the enemy. The fortifications were invulnerable to the heaviest artillery and to chemical warfare. Despite this extensive preparation, France fell to Germany in a little under six weeks. Eight decades on, the Maginot Line is still remembered as an expensively misguided response to obvious danger. In The Maginot Line: A New History (Yale University Press, 2025), Dr. Kevin Passmore presents a groundbreaking account reevaluating the Maginot Line. He traces the controversies surrounding construction, the lives of the men who manned the forts, the impact on German-speaking inhabitants of the frontier, and the fight against espionage from within. Far from a backward step, the Maginot Line was an ambitious project of modernisation—one that was let down by strategic error and growing dissatisfaction with fortification. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

A spellbinding look at the history of the world through the stories of twelve carpets Beautiful, sensuous, and enigmatic, great carpets follow power. Emperors, shahs, sultans and samurai crave them as symbols of earthly domination. Shamans and priests desire them to evoke the spiritual realm. The world's 1% hunger after them as displays of extreme status. And yet these seductive objects are made by poor and illiterate weavers, using the most basic materials and crafts; hedgerow plants for dyes, fibres from domestic animals, and the millennia-old skills of interweaving warps, wefts and knots. In Threads of Empire: A History of the World in Twelve Carpets (St. Martin's Press, 2025), Dorothy Armstrong tells the histories of some of the world's most fascinating carpets, exploring how these textiles came into being then were transformed as they moved across geography and time in the slipstream of the great. She shows why the world's powerful were drawn to them, but also asks what was happening in the weavers' lives, and how they were affected by events in the world outside their tent, village or workshop. In its wide-ranging examination of these dazzling objects, from the 5th century BCE contents of the tombs of Scythian chieftains, to the carpets under the boots of Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill at the 1945 Yalta Peace Conference, Threads of Empire uncovers a new, hitherto hidden past right beneath our feet. Dorothy Armstrong is a historian of the material culture of South, Central and West Asia. She has taught at the Royal College of Art, Edinburgh College of Art and the University of Oxford. She was the Beattie Fellow in Carpet Studies at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, where she is now honorary research fellow. Threads of Empire is her first book. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

The story of Judaism is the story of change. Throughout Jewish history, revolutionary events and subversive ideas have burst forth, repeatedly transforming Jewish experience. Re-forming Judaism: Moments of Disruption in Jewish Thought (Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2023), edited by Rabbi Stanley M. Davids (z’l) and Dr. Leah Hochman seeks to explore these ideas---and the individuals behind them---by delving into historical disruptions that led to lasting change in Jewish thought. The book includes distinguished array of scholars who take us on a journey from the disruptive prophets of ancient times, through rational, mystical, and extremist medievalists, to the impact of Haskalah and early Reform thought in modernity. It also explore contemporary innovations such as changes in liturgy and music, feminism, and post-Holocaust theology are included, as are insights into Sephardic and North African experiences. By showing how Judaism forms---then re-forms, and re-forms again---the contributors demonstrate that tensions between continuity and change have always been part of Jewish life, helping us to both understand the past and contemplate the future. Today, we are in conversation with Dr. Hochman Associate professor of Jewish thought at Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR) in Los Angeles. Our host, Rabbi Marc Katz is the Senior Rabbi at Temple Ner Tamid in Bloomfield, NJ. He is the author of Yochanan's Gamble: Judaism's Pragmatic Approach to Life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

An Arendt expert has arrived at Arendt-obsessed Recall This Book. Lyndsey Stonebridge discusses her widely praised 2024 We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience. Lyndsey sees both radical evil and the banality of evil at work in Nazi Germany and in the causes of suffering and death in Gaza today. She compares the moral idiocy of authoritarians (like the murderous Nazis and those who are starving Gaza) to that of philosophers who cannot hear the echoes of what they are doing. Lyndsey and John discuss Arendt’s belief in the fragile ethics of the Founding Fathers, with its checks and balances and its politics based not on emotion but cool deliberation. Arendt could say that “The fundamental contradiction of [America] is political freedom coupled with social slavery,”” but why was she too easy on the legacy of imperial racism in America, missing its settler-colonial logic? Arendt read W. E. B. DuBois (who saw and said this) but perhaps, says Lyndsey, not attentively enough. Lyndsey is not a fan of Jonathan Glazer's Zone of Interest, because it makes the evil banality of extermination monstrous all over again (cf. her"Mythic Banality: Jonathan Glazer and Hannah Arendt.") Responsibility is crucial: She praises Arendt for distinguishing between temptation and coercion. Mentioned in the episode: Carnation Revolution in Portugal in 1974 one of the last great historical events in Arendt’s lifetime. Lyndsey praises “reading while walking” and the unpacking of the totalitarian in Anna Burns’s marvelous Norther Ireland novel, Milkman. Hannah Pitkin’s wonderful 1998 The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social, emphasizes Arendt’s idea that although we are free, we can forfeit that freedom by assuming we are rule-bound. Arendt on the challenge of identity: “When one is attacked as a Jew, one must respond not as a German or a Frenchman or a world citizen, but as a Jew.” The Holocaust is a crime agains humanity a crime against the human status, a crime "perpetrated on the body of the Jewish people".” Various books by Hannah Arendt come up: Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. (1963). Judgement in Arendt is crucial from earliest days studying Kant and in her final works (among The Life of the Mind) she speaks of the moments when "the mind goes visiting.” Her earliest ideas about love and natality are in Love and Saint Augustine (1929, not published in English until 1996). Hannah Arendt is buried at Bard, near her husband Heinrich Blucher and opposite Philip Roth, who reportedly wanted to capture some of the spillover Arendt traffic. James Baldwin's essay “The Fire Next Time” (1963) caused Arendt to write Baldwin about the difference between pariah love and the love of those in power, who think that love can justify lashing out with power. Recallable Books Lyndsey praises Leah Ypi's (Free) forthcoming memoir about her Albanian family, Indignity. John recalls E. M Forster, Howard’s End a novel that thinks philosophically (in a novelistic vein) about how to continue being an individual in a new Imperial Britain. Read transcript here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Returning to NBN is the philosopher Santiago Zabala, here to introduce his new book Signs from the Future: A Philosophy of Warnings (Columbia University Press, 2025). Warnings, for Zabala, are not synonymous with predictions. They are instead as much about the present as the future. They point towards already present crisis and contradictions. They also attempt to reorient us towards alternative paths. Embedded deeply in the critical hermeneutics of writers such as Heidegger, Arendt and Beauvoir but exploring contemporary issues such as gender, climate change and machine warfare, Zabala’s book is an accessible and applicable text that simultaneously tries to destabilize us in our present complacency while grounding us in an urgent need to seek alternatives. Santiago Zabala is ICREA Research Professor of Philosophy at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. He is the author of numerous books, including one previously discussed on this show, Being at Large: Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Diana Souhami talks about her new book No Modernism Without Lesbians, out 2020 with Head of Zeus books.A Sunday Times Book of the Year 2020. This is the extraordinary story of how a singular group of women in a pivotal time and place – Paris, between the wars – fostered the birth of the Modernist movement. Sylvia Beach, Bryher, Natalie Barney, and Gertrude Stein. A trailblazing publisher; a patron of artists; a society hostess; a groundbreaking writer. They were all women who loved women. They rejected the patriarchy and made lives of their own – forming a community around them in Paris. Each of these four central women interacted with a myriad of others, some of the most influential, most entertaining, most shocking and most brilliant figures of the age. Diana Souhami weaves together their stories to create a vivid moving tapestry of life among the Modernists in pre-war Paris. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Oswyn Murray, an Emeritus fellow of Balliol College, University of Oxford, brings his expertise in ancient history to the table. He discusses how perceptions of ancient Greece have transformed over three centuries, influenced by contemporary ideologies. Murray shares captivating stories about historical figures like Hegel and Nietzsche, revealing how their thoughts shaped modern understandings of liberty and culture. He also highlights how the study of Greek history reflects broader societal concerns, connecting past legacies to today's philosophical debates.