New Books in Intellectual History

David Wiles, Emeritus Professor of Drama at the University of Exeter, delves into the intriguing intersection of democracy and theatre. He discusses how oratory and performance have been essential to democratic movements from ancient Greece to Gandhi. Wiles argues that political authenticity is a complex illusion, often requiring hypocrisy. By examining historical examples from the Puritan Revolution to modern populism, he challenges listeners to rethink the role of theatre in shaping political discourse and civic identity.

Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) never signed a painting, and none of his supposed self-portraits can be securely ascribed to his hand. He revealed next to nothing about his life in his extensive writings, yet countless pages have been written about him that assign him an identity: genius, entrepreneur, celebrity artist, outsider. Addressing the ethical stakes involved in studying past lives, in Leonardo da Vinci: An Untraceable Life (Princeton University Press, 2025) Dr. Stephen J. Campbell shows how this invented Leonardo has invited speculation from figures ranging from art dealers and curators to scholars, scientists, and biographers, many of whom have filled in the gaps of what can be known of Leonardo’s life with claims to decode secrets, reveal mysteries of a vanished past, or discover lost masterpieces of spectacular value.In this original and provocative book, Dr. Campbell examines the strangeness of Leonardo’s words and works, and the distinctive premodern world of artisans and thinkers from which he emerged. Far from being a solitary genius living ahead of his time, Leonardo inhabited a vibrant network of artistic, technological, and literary exchange. By investigating the politics and cultural tensions of the era as well as the most recent scholarship on Leonardo’s contemporaries, workshop, and writings, Dr. Campbell places Leonardo back into the milieu that shaped him and was shaped by him. He shows that it is in the gaps and contradictions of what we know of Leonardo’s life that a less familiar and far more historically significant figure appears.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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 episodes 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

In this discussion, Dr. Richard A. Muller, a leading scholar of historical theology, unpacks the complexities of predestination in Reformed thought. He challenges simplified interpretations of Calvin, revealing how his 'Institutes' were shaped by collaborative theological dialogue. Muller delves into the evolution of predestination through figures like Franciscus Junius, highlighting the nuanced debates between supralapsarian and infralapsarian views. His journey reflects the intricate development of this controversial doctrine in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The origins and nature of nationhood and nationalism continue to be topics of heated scholarly debate. This major new reference work with contributions from an international team of scholars provides a comprehensive account of ideas and practices of nationhood and nationalism from antiquity to the present. It considers both continuities and discontinuities, engaging critically and analytically with the scholarly literature in the field. The Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism (Cambridge UP, 2024) also explores nationhood and nationalism's relationships with a wide variety of cultural practices and social institutions, in addition to the phenomenon's crucial political dimensions. Its wide range of regional case studies brings a truly global, comparative perspective to a field long constrained by Eurocentric assumptions. Volume I tracks turning points in the history of nationhood and nationalism from ancient times to the twentieth century. Volume II theorizes the connections between nationhood/nationalism and ideology, religion and culture. Together, they enable readers to understand the roots of how nationhood and nationalism function in the present day.Cathie Carmichael is Professor of European History at the University of East Anglia, Norwich.Matthew D'Auria is a Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of East Anglia.Aviel Roshwald is an American historian and Professor of history at Georgetown University.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. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Liberal democracies don’t age gracefully. Established systems of governance like those of the UK and the US which once served as blueprints are today experiencing a profound crisis of legitimacy. In Britain, a landslide general election result was quickly followed by a catastrophic tumble in approval ratings. In the US presidential campaign, meanwhile, voters were told that democracy itself was on the ballot, with both candidates suggesting the election might well be the last one ever.The consensus underpinning the world’s most powerful democracies is, indeed, waning. The populaces have developed a deep dissatisfaction with their governments’ political procedures, yet no credible alternatives have emerged. In his latest book Legitimacy in Liberal Democracies (Edinburgh UP, 2024), Benjamin Studebaker argues that the kinds of disagreements which historically led to political violence today instead just linger throughout the state and society. Without alternatives, liberal democracy’s legitimation crisis leads to neither reform nor revolution.Studebaker depicts a legitimacy crisis rife with state capacity problems, in which citizens tell each other many conflicting legitimation stories as they search for ways to live with a dissatisfying political system they cannot replace. As different factions try to ‘save’ democracy in their own ways, they appear authoritarian to one another. Efforts to build legitimacy thus only spark greater inequality, pluralism, and ever-tighter gridlock.Benjamin Studebaker is a political theorist. He holds a PhD in Politics and International Studies from the University of Cambridge. He has written for Aeon, Sublation, Compact, Current Affairs, The Bellows, and Huffington Post, among others. He hosts Political Theory 101 and co-hosts the film podcast The Lack.Benjamin is also the author of The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy which we spoke about in 2023. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Bruno Leipold, a political theory fellow at the LSE and co-editor of Radical Republicanism, dives into the complexities of Karl Marx’s relationship with republicanism. He argues that Marx's thoughts on politics, democracy, and freedom were heavily influenced by republican ideals. The conversation explores Marx's early advocacy for a democratic republic, his critique of the 1848 French Republic, and how the Paris Commune shaped his views on citizen engagement and power. Leipold challenges common interpretations, revealing a nuanced Marx who valued democratic institutions as essential for true emancipation.

In Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity: An Existential History of Chabad Hasidism (Stanford University Press, 2025), Eli Rubin provides a comprehensive intellectual and institutional history of Chabad Hasidism through the Kabbalistic concept of ṣimṣum. The onset of modernity, Eli Rubin argues, was heralded by this startling idea: existence itself is predicated on a self-inflicted "rupture" in the infinite assertion of divinity. Centuries of theoretical disputations concerning ṣimṣum ultimately morphed into religious and social schism. These debates confronted the meaning of being and forged the animating ethos of Chabad, a dynamic movement in modern Judaism. Chabad's distinctive character and self-image, Rubin shows, emerged from its spirited defense of Hasidism's interpretation of ṣimṣum as an act of love leading to rapturous reunion. This interpretation ignited a literal conflagration, complete with book burnings, denunciations, investigations, and arrests. Chabad's subsequent preoccupation with ṣimṣum was equally significant for questions of legitimacy, authority, and succession, as for existential questions of being and meaning.Unfolding the story of Chabad from the early modern period to the twentieth century, this book provides fresh portraits of the successive leaders of the movement. Innovatively integrating history, philosophy, and literature, Rubin shows how Kabbalistic ideas are crucially entangled in the experience of modernity and in the response to its ruptures.Interviewee: Eli Rubin is a contributing editor at Chabad.org and received his PhD from the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, University College London.Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

African Literature and US Empire Postcolonial Optimism in Nigerian and South African Writing (Edinburgh UP, 2024) demonstrates how African literature grapples with the enforced optimism of US empire that circulates in postcolonial nations: Unsettles chronologies that chart a growing disillusionment with the postcolonial nation and national development across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries Brings together African literary studies, affect studies, and U.S. empire studies Diagnoses and critiques how U.S. empire is sustained through cycles of optimism and disappointment Includes chapters on both classic postcolonial fiction by writers such as Buchi Emecheta and Miriam Tlali and recent anglophone African novels by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Ekow Duker Postcolonialism has long been associated with post-nationalism. Yet, the persistence of nation-oriented literatures from within the African postcolony and its diasporas registers how dreams of national becoming endure. In this fascinating new study, Hallemeier brings together African literary studies, affect studies and US empire studies, to challenge chronologies that chart a growing disillusionment with the postcolonial nation and national development across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Nigerian and South African writings in African Literature and US Empire, while often attuned to the trans- and extra- national, repeatedly scrutinize why visions of national exceptionalism, signified by a ‘pan-African’ Nigeria and ‘new’ South Africa, remain stubbornly affecting, despite decades of disillusionment with national governments beholden to a neocolonial global order. In these fictions, optimistic forms of nationalism cannot be reduced to easily critiqued state-sanctioned discourses of renewal and development. They are also circulated through experiences of embodied need, quotidian aspiration and transnational, pan-African relationship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Benjamin P. Davis’s Choose Your Bearing: Édouard Glissant, Human Rights and Decolonial Ethics (Edinburgh University Press 2025) provides one of the first readings, in English or French, of Édouard Glissant as an ethical theorist.What do we in the West owe those who grow our food, sew our clothes and produce our electronics? And what have we always owed one another, but forgotten, avoided, or simply disregarded? Looking back on nearly a century of colonial war and genocide, in 1990 the poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant appealed directly to his readers, calling them to re-orient their lives in service of the political struggles of their time: ‘You must choose your bearing.’ Informed by the prayer camps at Standing Rock, and presenting Glissant alongside Stuart Hall, Emmanuel Levinas, Simone Weil, Enrique Dussel, Gloria Anzaldúa and W. E. B. Du Bois, this book offers an urgent ethics for the present – an ethics of risk, commitment and care that together form a new sense of decolonial responsibility. A sequel to the book, Another Humanity: Decolonial Ethics from Du Bois to Arendt, is forthcoming this year.Benjamin P. Davis is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Hispanic Studies at Texas A&M University and a Fellow at the Center on Modernity in Transition. He is the author of Simone Weil’s Political Philosophy: Field Notes from the Margins (Rowman & Littlefield 2023) as well as Choose Your Bearing: Édouard Glissant, Human Rights, and Decolonial Ethics (2023) and a sequel, Another Humanity: Decolonial Ethics from Du Bois to Arendt (2025), both published by Edinburgh University Press.Tim Wyman-McCarthy is a Lecturer in the discipline of Human Rights and Associate Director of Graduate Studies at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights and the Department of Sociology at Columbia University. He can be reached at tw2468@columbia.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

In Throw Yourself Away: Writing and Masochism (Cambridge University Press, 2024), Julia Jarcho proposes that the desire to write is inextricably bound up with masochistic desires. In a series of readings that engage American and European works of fiction, drama, and theory from the late nineteenth through the early twenty-first centuries, Jarcho tests the limits of masochism as a pleasure-making economy. Reading Henry James, Henrik Ibsen, Mary Gaitskill, and Adrienne Kennedy alongside Sigmund Freud, Gilles Deleuze, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Leo Bersani and others, Jarcho investigates the ways in which masochism rewrites and reinvigorates failures of desire, which critics have otherwise thought of as dead-ending masochism. Jarcho asks particularly difficult questions of masochism as a response to injurious social structures, which yield less uniformly white, searching, and uneasy views of both masochism and authorship. Throw Yourself Away reconsiders how writing and subjects are undone by the excesses and recesses of masochistic desire, which keeps the prospect of pleasure so painfully, so deliciously at bay. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history