New Books in Big Ideas

The success of populist politicians and the emergence of social justice movements around the world, and the recent demonstrations against police violence in the United States, demonstrate a widespread desire for fundamental political, economic, and social change, albeit not always in a leftwards direction. What can movements and parties that hope to bring about fundamental social change learn from the past?In Anatomies of Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2019), George Lawson analyzes revolutionary episodes from the modern era (beginning with the Glorious Revolution of 1688) to discern how geopolitics, transnational circulation of ideas and people, organizational capabilities, and contingent choices come together to shape the emergence of revolutionary situations and the trajectories and outcomes of revolutions. He also explains why more moderate negotiated revolutions have been more common than far-reaching social revolutions since the 1980s.Finally, he suggests that the key for social movements to take advantage of systemic crises that could provide openings for revolutionary situations to emerge is the ability of opposition groups to form cohesive political organizations without succumbing to the authoritarianism and the “ends justify the means” logic that turned revolutionary forces into violent, authoritarian regimes in the past.George Lawson is Associate Professor, Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Is modern racism a product of secularization and the decline of Christian universalism? The debate has raged for decades, but up to now, the actual racial views of historical atheists and freethinkers have never been subjected to a systematic analysis. In his new book, Race in a Godless World: Atheism, Race, and Civilization, 1850–1914, Nathan Alexander sets out to correct the oversight. The book centres on Britain and the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century, a time when popular atheist movements were emerging and skepticism about the truth of Christianity was becoming widespread. This newly embraced secularization created a paradox. How could Western civilization represent the pinnacle of human progress, as most white atheists accepted, when the majority of these societies still believed in Christianity? The result of this tension was a profound ambivalence regarding issues of racial and civilizational superiority. At times, white atheists assented to scientific racism and hierarchical conceptions of civilization; at others, they denounced racial prejudice and spoke favorably of non-white, non-Western civilizations.  Covering racial and evolutionary science, imperialism, slavery, and racial prejudice in theory and practice, Alexander’s book provides a much-needed account of the complex and sometimes contradictory ideas espoused by the transatlantic community of atheists and freethinkers. It also reflects on the social dimension of irreligiousness, exploring how working-class atheists’ experiences of exclusion could make them sympathetic to other marginalized groups. Nathan Alexander is a Canadian historian, researching the history of race and racism, and the history of atheism and secularization. He finished his PhD at the University of St Andrews in the UK and was most recently a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies with the University of Erfurt, Germany.  Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

We are schooled to believe that states formed more or less synchronously with settlement and agriculture. In Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (Yale University Press, 2017), James C. Scott asks us to question this belief. The evidence, he says, is simply not on the side of states. Stratified, taxing, walled towns did not inevitably appear in the wake of crop domestication and sedentary settlement. Only around 3100 BCE, some four millennia after the earliest farming and settling down, did they begin making their presence felt. What happened in these four millennia is the subject of this book: a deep history by “a card-carrying political scientist and an anthropologist and environmentalist by courtesy”, which aims to put the earliest states in their place.James Scott joins us for the fourth episode of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science to talk about state fragility and state persistence from Mesopotamia to Southeast Asia, the politics of cereal crops, domestication and reproduction, why it was once good to be a barbarian, the art of provocation, the views of critics, and, human and animal species relations and zoonoses in our epidemiological past and pandemic present.To download or stream episodes in this series please subscribe to our host channel: New Books in Political Science.Nick Cheesman is a fellow in the Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University, and a committee member of the Interpretive Methodologies and Methods group. He co-hosts the New Books in Southeast Asian Studies channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-selling 2000 book of the same name. In this episode, we talk about his latest popular book Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe (Random House, 2020)Until the End of Time gives the reader a theory of everything, both in the sense of a “state of the academic union”, covering cosmology and evolution, consciousness and computation, and art and religion, and in the sense of showing us a way to apprehend the often existentially challenging subject matter. Greene uses evocative autobiographical vignettes in the book to personalize his famously lucid and accessible explanations, and we discuss these episodes further in the interview. Greene also reiterates his arguments for embedding a form of spiritual reverie within the multiple naturalistic descriptions of reality that different areas of human knowledge have so far produced.John Weston is a University Teacher of English in the Language Centre at Aalto University, Finland. His research focuses on academic communication. He can be reached at john.weston@aalto.fi and @johnwphd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Consider a couple with an infant (or two) whose lives have become so harried and difficult the marriage is falling apart. Would it be ethical for them to take oxytocin to help them renew their emotional bonds, or would this be an unethical evasion of the hard work that keeping a marriage going requires? What if someone has sexual desires that they consider immoral – should they be able to take a drug to suppress those desires, or alternatively can society force them to? Debates about the ethics of using drugs for enhancement rather than treatment usually focus on the individual, such as doping in sports.In Love Drugs: The Chemical Future of Relationships (Stanford University Press, 2020), Brian Earp and Julian Savulescu consider the case for using drugs to alter our love relationships. Earp, who is Associate Director of the Yale-Hastings Program in Ethics and and Health Policy at Yale University, and Savulescu, the Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford, note that drugs that alter sexual desire and attachment are already available, although are restricted or illegal. What is needed, they argue, is more research into the interpersonal effects of drugs, and more discussion of the ethics of their use for non-medical purposes. Let’s turn to a fascinating interview on a complex topic with no easy answers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Around the world today, nationalism is back—and it’s often deeply troubling. Populist politicians exploit nationalism for authoritarian, chauvinistic, racist, and xenophobic purposes, reinforcing the view that it is fundamentally reactionary and antidemocratic.But Yael (Yuli) Tamir makes a passionate argument for a very different kind of nationalism—one that revives its participatory, creative, and egalitarian virtues, answers many of the problems caused by neoliberalism and hyperglobalism, and is essential to democracy at its best. In Why Nationalism? (Princeton University Press, 2019), she explains why it is more important than ever for the Left to recognize these qualities of nationalism, to reclaim it from right-wing extremists, and to redirect its power to progressive ends.Far from being an evil force, nationalism’s power lies in its ability to empower individuals and answer basic human needs. Using it to reproduce cross-class coalitions will ensure that all citizens share essential cultural, political, and economic goods. Shifting emphasis from the global to the national and putting one’s nation first is not a way of advocating national supremacy but of redistributing responsibilities and sharing benefits in a more democratic and just way. In making the case for a liberal and democratic nationalism, Tamir also provides a compelling original account of the ways in which neoliberalism and hyperglobalism have allowed today’s Right to co-opt nationalism for its own purposes.Provocative and hopeful, Why Nationalism is a timely and essential rethinking of a defining feature of our politics.Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a Jerusalem-based psychologist, Middle East television commentator, and host of the Van Leer Series on Ideas with Renee Garfinkel  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary research on the presence of slavery at higher education institutions in terms of the development of proslavery and antislavery thought and the use of slave labor; and (2) analysis on the ways in which the legacies of slavery in institutions of higher education continued in the post–Civil War era to the present day.The collection features broadly themed essays on issues of religion, economy, and the regional slave trade of the Caribbean. It also includes case studies of slavery’s influence on specific institutions, such as Princeton University, Harvard University, Oberlin College, Emory University, and the University of Alabama. Though the roots of Slavery and the University stem from a 2011 conference at Emory University, the collection extends outward to incorporate recent findings. As such, it offers a roadmap to one of the most exciting developments in the field of U.S. slavery studies and to ways of thinking about racial diversity in the history and current practices of higher education.Today I spoke with Leslie Harris about the book. Dr. Harris is a professor of history at Northwestern University. She is the coeditor, with Ira Berlin, of Slavery in New York and the coeditor, with Daina Ramey Berry, of Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (Georgia).Adam McNeil is a History PhD student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Everything we know about how planets form and how life arises suggests that human civilization on Earth should not be unique. We ought to see abundant evidence of extraterrestrial activity―but we don't. Where is everybody? In Extraterrestrials (MIT Press, 2020), science and technology writer Wade Roush examines one of the great unsolved problems in science: is there life, intelligent or otherwise, on other planets?This paradox (they're bound to be out there; but where are they?), first formulated by the famed physicist Enrico Fermi, has fueled decades of debate, speculation, and, lately, some actual science. Roush lays out the problem in its historical and modern-day context and summarizes the latest thinking among astronomers and astrobiologists. He describes the long history of speculation about aliens (we've been debating the idea for thousands of years); the emergence of SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) as a scientific discipline in the 1960s, and scientists' use of radio and optical techniques to scan for signals; and developments in astrobiology (the study of how life might arise in non-Earth like environments) and exoplanet research (the discovery of planets outside our solar system). Finally, he discusses possible solutions to the Fermi Paradox and suggests way to refocus SETI work that might increase the chances of resolving the paradox―and finding extraterrestrials. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Globalization is a modern phenomenon with a longer past than most people realize. As Valerie Hansen explains in her book The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World – and Globalization Began (Scribner, 2020), globalization became a reality a millennia ago when a series of unrelated events established the framework for a truly global pathway. Key to this, she demonstrates, were the Vikings, whose voyages westward from Greenland connected people from Afro-Eurasia to the Western Hemisphere for the first time in thousands of years. There they came into contact with peoples who already forging connections that could stretch across the Americas, as seen in the archaeological record today. The trade she chronicles involved many commodities, from cloth, beads, and amber to gold, ivory, and slaves, all of which often crossed considerable distances to find markets in various parts of the world. Hansen uses the development of the trade during this period to examine the establishment of both new bonds and new boundaries throughout the globe, ones that continue to define the world as we know it today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

It seems easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations - Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of TimeThomas Piketty, the French economist, was dubbed the modern Marx by The Economist in the wake of his bestselling Capital in the 21st Century, which presented historical data reaching back to the eighteenth century and focused on the dynamics of the distribution of wealth and income and the destabilizing force represented by: r > g – that is, the private rate of return on capital over time can be much higher than the rate of growth of income and output. Readers noted however, in addition to pointing out this ‘central contradiction of capitalism’ Professor Piketty was also clear that the purpose of social science is not to produce mathematical certainties that substitute for inclusive democratic debate. More importantly, he made the case for the progressive taxation of capital, and among many other things for going back to using the term ‘political economy’ for the field of economics – all of which did not render his analysis Marxist, although admittedly, the label made for more catchy magazine column titles in 2014.Six years in the making Piketty has extended the hopeful reach of his analysis by including a much larger global sampling of historical data – not just Western market economies this time, and by expanding the focus to include the political and ideological in his comparative analysis of capital accumulation and ‘inequality regimes’. The professor does so with the same underlying optimism and realistic eye on promoting the social learning process in which we all find ourselves as individuals within various cultures and societies. Enter his expanded interdisciplinary contribution to comparative political economy – Capital and Ideology (Harvard University Press, 2020) – essential reading.Thomas Piketty is a professor at the Paris School of Economics, and a Director of The School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences.Keith Krueger lectures at the SHU-UTS Business School in Shanghai. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas