New Books in Intellectual History

At the height of literary nationalisms in the twentieth century, leftist internationalists from Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, India, and the Soviet East bonded over their shared love of the classical Persian verses of Hafiz and Khayyam. At writers' congresses and in communist literary journals, they affirmed their friendship and solidarity with lyric ghazals and ruba'iyat. Persianate poetry became the cultural commons for a distinctively Eastern internationalism, shaping national literatures in the Soviet Union, the Middle East, and South Asia. By the early Cold War, the literary entanglement between Persianate culture and communism had established models for cultural decolonization that would ultimately outlast the Soviet imperial project. In the archive of literature produced under communism in Persian, Tajik, Dari, Turkish, Uzbek, Azerbaijani, Armenian, and Russian, this book finds a vital alternative to Western globalized world literature.Samuel Hodgkin is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University. His articles have appeared in Comparative Literature Studies, Iranian Studies, Philological Encounters, Cahiers de Studia Iranica, and Cahiers d'Asie centrale. 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

David J Collins, SJ joins Jana Byars to talk about Disenchanting Albert the Great: the Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Magician (Penn State Press, 2024). Albert the Great (1200–1280) was a prominent Dominican friar, a leading philosopher, and the teacher of Thomas Aquinas. He also endorsed the use of magic. Controversial though that stance would have been, Albert was never punished or repudiated for what he wrote. Albert’s reception followed instead a markedly different course, leading ultimately to his canonization by the Catholic Church in 1931. But his thoughts about magic have been debated for centuries. Disenchanting Albert the Great takes Albert’s contested reputation as a case study for the long and complex history surrounding the concept of magic and magic’s relationship to science and religion. Over the centuries, Albert was celebrated for his magic, or it was explained away—but he was never condemned. In the fifteenth century, members of learned circles first attempted to distance Albert from magic, with the goal of exonerating him of superstition, irrationality, and immorality. Disenchanting Albert the Great discusses the philosopher’s own understanding of magic; an early, adulatory phase of his reputation as a magician; and the three primary strategies used to exonerate Albert over the centuries. In the end, Disenchanting Albert the Great tells the story of a thirteenth-century scholar who worked to disenchant the natural world with his ideas about magic but who himself would not be disenchanted until the modern era. This accessible and insightful history will appeal to those interested in Albert the Great, Catholic Church history, the history of magic, and Western understandings of the natural and the rational over time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Today, I am excited to talk to Marissa Greenberg and Rachel Trubowitz about the new collection of essays they have edited. Milton’s Moving Bodies (Northwestern University Press, 2024) gathers essays from Erin Webster, John Rumrich, Reginald Wilburn, Stephen Fallon, Achsah Guibbory, and Angelica Duran, among others. As our conversation will indicate, each essay has a unique and compelling approach to each of the title’s prompt “Milton’s” and “Moving” and “Bodies.”Marissa Greenberg is Associate Professor of English at the University of New Mexico. She is the author of Metropolitan Tragedy: Genre, Justice, and the City in Early Modern England (University of Toronto Press, 2015). She has served as a Fellow at UNM’s Division for Equity and Inclusion, where she advocates for academic communities of practice for faculty with disabilities.Rachel Trubowtiz is Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire. She is the author of Nation and Nurture in Seventeenth-Century English Literature (Oxford University Press, 2012), as well as the principal investigator in the NEH-funded “Milton and Mathematics” project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

In How the New World Became Old: The Deep Time Revolution in America (Princeton UP, 2024), Caroline Winterer, William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies at Stanford University, takes her reader on a journey through the historical strata of the United States’ relationship with deep time. From the early days of the republic to the first half of the twentieth century, Winterer retraces how the study of the continent’s geological past provided Americans with “a vocabulary with which to frame their nation’s place in the cosmic order.” If the bones of dinosaurs found in the West play an expected part in this history, the book highlights the forgotten roles of less conspicuous, yet just as fascinating, fossils, such as the remains of Silurian trilobites and Carboniferous ferns. The book shows how fossil finds throughout history helped re-imagine, many times over, the past, present, and future of the United States. Far from simply ennobling the “New World” with an antiquity that could compete with the depth of Europe’s past, the study of American fossils influenced how Americans thought about the origins, landscapes, resources, and the many peoples of the continent. Indeed, if the author makes room for the intriguing developments of paleontological discoveries and the riveting story of how “Americans crafted a virtual deep time” made of paintings, magic lanterns, and other models, she also addresses the violence, both toward ecosystems and people, often justified by deep time imaginaries. Through its historical investigation, How the New World Became Old reminds the reader that today’s responses to intertwined ecological and social challenges will inevitably be informed by our conceptions of deep time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Today I’m speaking with Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins about the new, edited volume, Did It Happen Here? Perspectives on Fascism and America (W.W. Norton, 2024). Danny is Assistant Professor in the College of Social Studies at Wesleyan University and the steward of a fantastic interview series in The Nation magazine. Did it Happen Here? presents a snapshot of the fascism debate being waged on American campuses, in magazines, and on social media. The most recent iteration of the fascism debate began, as with many debates about the state of American politics, with the election of Donald Trump. Since his first term in 2016, speculation about the true nature of Trumpism has generated countless think-pieces and books. Did It Happen Here? is the definitive summary of the major scholarly views on whether fascism has come to America. As Danny puts it, “the fascism debate is Rorschach test for understanding what is truly ailing American society.”Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins is Assistant Professor in the College of Social Studies at Wesleyan University.Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Nordic Fascism: Fragments of an Entangled History (Routledge, 2022) is the first comprehensive history in English of fascism in the Nordic countries. Transnational cooperation between radical nationalists has especially been the case in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Finland, where fascism has not only developed through interdependent processes but also through interactions between and beyond national boundaries, and where "racial relationship" has been a core argument. With chapters ranging from the inception of fascism in the interwar years up to the present day, this book offers the first fragments of an entangled history of Nordic fascism. It illuminates how The North occupies a special place in the fascist imagination, articulating ideas about the Nordic people resisting the supposed cultural degeneration, replacement, or annihilation of the white race. The authors map ideological exchange between fascist organisations in the Nordic countries and outline past and present attempts at pan-Nordic state building.This book will appeal to scholars of fascism and Nordic history, and readers interested in the general history of fascism.Nicola Karcher is a historian and an associate professor in social science at the Østfold University College, Norway.Markus Lundström is an economic historian and an associate professor in sociology at Uppsala University, Sweden. 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 episode of High Theory, Marcello Vitali-Rosati tells us about bugs! A bug can be a small insect, an illness, a spy device, or a digital malfunction. The computer bug, the ghost in the machine, derives from an older engineering use of bug as mechanical failure, and the insect, in turn, derives from an earlier sense of bug as specter, an invisible and frightening ghost. Like philosophy itself, the computer bug stops our ordinary workflow and causes us to think, to question the very task we had set out to undertake.Marcello’s new book, Éloge du bug: être libre à l’époque du numérique (Zones, La Découverte, Paris 2024), sings the praises of computer bugs. By stopping things from working as expected, the bug is a veritable Socratic demon: it enables the emergence of critical thinking and allows the multiplicity of thinking paradigms that characterizes philosophy. Instead of letting ourselves be seduced by a discourse which, promising to free us from all the material tasks of our lives, ends up enslaving us completely to a handful of companies, this book, with its praise of the bug, shows how to bring about a true critical spirit and a literacy capable of setting us free in our digital age. You can read the book online here!Marcello Vitali-Rosati is a philosopher and specialist in digital publishing. He works as a professor in the Department of French Literatures at the University of Montreal, and holds the Canada Research Chair in Digital Textualities and the Chair of excellence in digital publishing at the Université de Rouen (France). Through the study and practice of code, he analyzes how algorithms, formats, software, and platforms redefine the notions of human, identity, knowledge, and literature. An active contributor to the theory of editorialization, he works on designing new forms of knowledge production and dissemination as well as innovative editorial workflows. He also works as an editor, publishes widely, and leads several digital humanities projects. You can read more about his work on his website, in English, French, or Italian.The image for this episode shows a drawing of a moth on a purple and black patterned background. It was created by Saronik Bosu by manipulating public domain photograph of the circuitry of IBM 7030 and a drawing from a nineteenth century entomology textbook, also in public domain. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

The Reformations, both Protestant and Catholic, have long been told as stories of men. But women were central to the transformations that took place in Europe and beyond. What was life like for them in this turbulent period? How did their actions and ideas shape Christianity and influence societies around the world?In Women and the Reformations: A Global History (Yale University Press, 2024), renowned scholar Dr. Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks explores the history of women and the Reformations in full for the first time. Dr. Wiesner-Hanks travels the globe, examining well-known figures like Teresa of Avila, Elizabeth I, and Anne Hutchinson, as well as women whose stories are only now emerging. Along the way, we meet converts in Japan, Spanish nuns in the Philippines, and saints in Ethiopia and America. Dr. Wiesner-Hanks explores women’s experiences as monarchs, mothers, migrants, martyrs, mystics, and missionaries, revealing that the story of the Reformations is no longer simply European—and that women played a vital role.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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

What really separates emancipatory thinking from its opposite? The prevailing Left defines itself against neoliberalism, conservative traditionalism, and fascism as a matter of course. The philosophical differences, however, may be more apparent than real. The Right-Wing Mirror of Critical Theory: Studies of Schmitt, Oakeshott, Hayek, Strauss, and Rand (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) argues that dominant trends in critical and radical theory inadvertently reproduce the cardinal tenets of the twentieth century’s most influential right-wing philosophers. It finds the rejection of foundationalism, rationalism, economic planning, and vanguardism mirrored in the work of Schmitt, Oakeshott, Hayek, and Strauss. If it is to be more than merely an inverted image of the Right, critical theory must reevaluate its relationship to what Julius Nyerere once called “deliberate design” in politics. In the era of anthropogenic climate change, a substantial—not merely nominal—departure from right-wing talking points is all the more necessary and momentous.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

It is only in recent years that sociologists and historians of the social sciences have given empire the attention it deserves in histories of the discipline. In this context, George Steinmetz’s The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought: French Sociology and the Overseas Empire (Princeton University Press) is likely to be a touchstone text in these debates. Providing a new history of the French national discipline inspired by a ‘Neo-Bourdieusian Historical Sociology of Science’, Steinmetz highlights the centrality of ‘colonial sociology’, work centered on and/or created in the French overseas colonies and protectorates to the discipline’s development. The French state, eager to consolidate its empire after World War II, were eager to draw on the expertise of sociologists in pursuing this goal; as Steinmetz shows therefore, during this period, a focus on ‘the colonial’ became central to French sociology to the extent that roughly half the French sociological field could be considered ‘colonial sociologists’. Despite this entanglement with the French state these colonial sociologists became strong critics of imperialism. Alongside the many stories he uncovers Steinmetz explores in depth the case of four such colonial sociologists: Raymond Aron, Jacque Berque, Georges Balandier and Pierre Bourdieu, seeking to show not just the centrality of colonialism to each writer but how their experiences of empire formed their basis for their future work; for example, how Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, capital and field can be traced to his experiences in colonial Algeria.In our discussion, which also marks the imminent release of the text in paperback, George takes us through this hugely enlightening text, including reflections on why there may have been some ‘disciplinary amnesia’ in sociology’s unwillingness to confront empire, the relations between sociology and other imperial disciplines, how sociologists from the colonies developed their own work, the lessons from his text about how we should confront colonial sociologists and whether Durkheim had an ‘imperial gaze’.Your host, Matt Dawson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow and is the author of G.D.H. Cole and British Sociology: A Study in Semi-Alienation (2024, Palgrave Macmillan), among other books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history