Princeton UP Ideas Podcast

Is libertarianism a progressive doctrine, or a reactionary one? Does libertarianism promise to liberate the poor and the marginalized from the yoke of state oppression, or does talk of "equal liberty" obscure the ways in which libertarian doctrines serve the interests of the rich and powerful? Through an examination of the history of libertarianism, The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism (Princeton University Press, 2023) argues that the answer is (and always has been): both. In this book, the authors explore the neglected 19th century roots of libertarianism to show that it emerged first as a radical and progressive doctrine. Libertarianism took a conservative turn in the 20th century primarily as a reaction against the rise of state socialism. Now, with international communism no longer a threat, libertarianism is in the midst of an identity crisis, with progressive and reactionary elements struggling to claim the doctrine as their own, most notably on issues of race. This book tells the history of libertarianism through an examination of six defining themes: private property, skepticism of authority, free markets, individualism, spontaneous order, and individual liberty. Matt Zwolinski is professor of philosophy at the University of San Diego, where he is director of the Center for Ethics, Economics, and Public Policy. John Tomasi is president of Heterodox Academy in New York City.Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

Listen to this interview of Helen Sword, professor emerita in the School of Humanities and the Centre for Arts and Social Transformation at the University of Auckland, founder of WriteSPACE, an international virtual writing community, and author of Writing with Pleasure (Princeton UP, 2023). We talk about how pleasure is difficult-but-good.Helen Sword : "If you have a text that has not been written with pleasure — it's been like pulling teeth for the author — it's going to feel the same way for the reader. So I think an issue with a lot of academic writing is that we have to read a lot of things that we don't enjoy, and then we get this message that that's how we're supposed to write too. So, it just becomes this never-ending cycle. But what if we brought in here the potentialities of play and reversed this situation and thought, 'Okay, I'm going to write with pleasure, I'm going to be excited about this, I'm going to create a beautifully crafted sentence or paragraph so that my reader will read it and just go, "Oh, wow, they put that so well."' And I don't even mean fancy or anything — I mean just good communication of the science, for example. A clearly written sentence about a complex idea — that is beautiful, and it's a joyful experience to read."

Teena Purohit’s new book Sunni Chauvinism and the Roots of Muslim Modernism (Princeton University Press, 2023) maps how various Muslim modernists from the 19th to the 20th centuries used their Sunni normativity to construct social and political boundaries around conceptions of tawhid or Islamic unity. The book distinctively focuses on how Muslim modernists such as canonical figures like Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Muhammad ‘Abduh, Rashid Rida and many others, focused on communities such as Shi‘as, Ismailis, Ahmadis, and Bahai’s in their activist and intellectual projects that aspired for a singular unified Islam against encroaching western modernity. For Muslim modernists who were anxious to reclaim a “lost unity” of Islam that existed in the past and believed could be achieved again in the future (though lacking in their time), non-Sunni groups, like Ahmadis for Muhammad Iqbal or esoteric groups for Rashid Rida, became communities that received disparaging attention and intolerant attitudes that led to a particular Sunni chauvinism, Purohit argues. And as such, this obsession with unity (tawhid) and the privileging of Sunnism that went with it was found in all forms of Muslim modernism. This book then invites a rethinking of our conceptualization of Muslim modernism in light of these thinkers approaches to esoteric (i.e., Sufi) and Shi‘a groups who were viewed as problematic for the social and political goal of tawhid. This accessible book will be of interest to those who think and write on Muslim modernism and non-Sunni movements in Islam. It will also be a great teaching resource for undergraduate and graduate classes.Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca. You can follow her on Twitter via @shobhanaxavier.

Please Make Me Pretty, I Don't Want to Die (Princeton UP, 2022) explores tactility, sound, sensuality, and intimacy. Set across the four seasons of a year, these fresh and original poems by Tawanda Mulalu combine an inviting confessional voice and offbeat imagery, and offer an appealing mixture of seriousness and humor.The speaker of these poems probes romantic and interracial intimacy, the strangeness and difficulty of his experiences as a diasporic Black African in White America, his time working as a teacher's assistant in a third-grade classroom, and his ambivalent admiration for canonical poets who have influenced him, especially Sylvia Plath. Juxtaposing traditional forms such as sonnets and elegies with less orthodox interjections, such as prose-poem "prayers" and other meditations, the collection presents a poetic world both familiar and jarring--one in which history, the body, and poetry can collide in a single surprising turn of image: "The stars also suffer. Immense and dead, their gasses burn / distant like castanets of antebellum teeth. My open window / a synecdoche of country."

How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education (Princeton UP, 2020) offers a short, spirited defense of rhetoric and the liberal arts as catalysts for precision, invention, and empathy in today's world. The author, a professor of Shakespeare studies at a liberal arts college and a parent of school-age children, argues that high-stakes testing and a culture of assessment have altered how and what students are taught, as courses across the arts, humanities, and sciences increasingly are set aside to make room for joyless, mechanical reading and math instruction. Students have been robbed of a complete education, their imaginations stunted by this myopic focus on bare literacy and numeracy. Education is about thinking, Newstok argues, rather than the mastery of a set of rigidly defined skills, and the seemingly rigid pedagogy of the English Renaissance produced some of the most compelling and influential examples of liberated thinking. Each of the fourteen chapters explores an essential element of Shakespeare's world and work, aligns it with the ideas of other thinkers and writers in modern times, and suggests opportunities for further reading. Chapters on craft, technology, attention, freedom, and related topics combine past and present ideas about education to build a case for the value of the past, the pleasure of thinking, and the limitations of modern educational practices and prejudices.Scott Newstok is professor of English and founding director of the Pearce Shakespeare Endowment at Rhodes College. A parent and an award-winning teacher, he is the author of Quoting Death in Early Modern England and the editor of several other books. He lives in Memphis, Tennessee.

Derek Parfit (1942-2017) is the most famous philosopher most people have never heard of. Widely regarded as one of the greatest moral thinkers of the past hundred years, Parfit was anything but a public intellectual. Yet his ideas have shaped the way philosophers think about things that affect us all: equality, altruism, what we owe to future generations, and even what it means to be a person. In Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality (Princeton UP, 2023), David Edmonds presents the first biography of an intriguing, obsessive, and eccentric genius.Believing that we should be less concerned with ourselves and more with the common good, Parfit dedicated himself to the pursuit of philosophical progress to an extraordinary degree. He always wore gray trousers and a white shirt so as not to lose precious time picking out clothes, he varied his diet as little as possible, and he had only one serious non-philosophical interest: taking photos of Oxford, Venice, and St. Petersburg. In the latter half of his life, he single-mindedly devoted himself to a desperate attempt to rescue secular morality--morality without God--by arguing that it has an objective, rational basis. For Parfit, the stakes could scarcely have been higher. If he couldn't demonstrate that there are objective facts about right and wrong, he believed, his life was futile and all our lives were meaningless.Connecting Parfit's work and life and offering a clear introduction to his profound and challenging ideas, Parfit is a powerful portrait of an extraordinary thinker who continues to have a remarkable influence on the world of ideas.

Over the past few centuries, vast areas of the world have been violently colonized by settlers. But why did states like Australia and the United States stop settling frontier lands during the twentieth century? At the same time, why did states loudly committed to decolonization like Indonesia and China start settling the lands of such minorities as the West Papuans and Uyghurs? Settling for Less: Why States Colonize and Why They Stop (Princeton University Press, 2023) by Dr. Lachlan McNamee traces this bewildering historical reversal, explaining when and why indigenous peoples suffer displacement at the hands of settlers.Dr. McNamee challenges the notion that settler colonialism can be explained by economics or racial ideologies. He tells a more complex story about state building and the conflicts of interest between indigenous peoples, states, and settlers. Drawing from a rich array of historical evidence, Dr. McNamee shows that states generally colonize frontier areas in response to security concerns. Elite schemes to populate contested frontiers with loyal settlers, however, often fail. As societies grow wealthier and cities increasingly become magnets for migration, states ultimately lose the power to settle frontier lands.Settling for Less uncovers the internal dynamics of settler colonialism and the diminishing power of colonizers in a rapidly urbanizing world. Contrasting successful and failed colonization projects in Australia, Indonesia, China, and beyond, this book demonstrates that economic development—by thwarting colonization—has proven a powerful force for indigenous self-determination.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

Most dictators no longer rule by fear but by spin instead. That’s the contention of Sergei Guriev who has co-authored (with Daniel Treisman) Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century (Princeton UP, 2022). He explains his thinking to Owen Bennett Jones.Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.

Spanning twelve presidents, from John F. Kennedy to Joe Biden, and eight Federal Reserve chairs, from William McChesney Martin to Jerome Powell, this is an insider's story of macroeconomic policy. Focusing on the most significant developments and long-term changes, Alan Blinder traces the highs and lows of monetary and fiscal policy, which have cooperated and clashed through many recessions and several long booms over the past six decades. From the fiscal policy of Kennedy's New Frontier to Biden's responses to the pandemic, the book takes readers through the stagflation of the 1970s, the conquest of inflation under Jimmy Carter and Paul Volcker, the rise of Reaganomics, and the bubbles of the 2000s before bringing the story up through recent events, including the financial crisis, the Great Recession, and monetary policy during COVID-19. A lively and concise narrative, A Monetary and Fiscal History of the United States, 1961-2021 (Princeton University Press, 2022) is filled with vital lessons for anyone who wants to better understand where the economy has been and where it might be headed.Alan S. Blinder is the Gordon S. Rentschler Memorial Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University, a former vice chair of the Federal Reserve Board, and a former member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers.Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

Dr. Ari Joskowicz, Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and History at Vanderbilt University, is the author of Rain of Ash: Roma, Jews, and the Holocaust (Princeton University Press, 2023). Jews and Roma died side by side in the Holocaust, yet the world has not recognized their destruction equally. In postwar decades, the Jewish experience of genocide increasingly occupied the attention of legal experts, scholars, curators, and politicians, while the genocide of Europe’s Roma went largely ignored. Dr. Joskowicz tells the story of how Roma turned to Jewish institutions, funding sources, and professional networks as they sought to gain recognition and compensation for their wartime suffering. Rain of Ash recounts the entanglement of Jewish and Romani quests for justice, challenges us to rethink the way we remember the Holocaust, and probes the means by which historical narratives are made and transmitted.Vladislav Lilic is a doctoral candidate in Modern European History at Vanderbilt University.