Princeton UP Ideas Podcast

One in four American workers says their workplace is a "dictatorship." Yet that number almost certainly would be higher if we recognized employers for what they are-private governments with sweeping authoritarian power over our lives. Many employers minutely regulate workers' speech, clothing, and manners on the job, and employers often extend their authority to the off-duty lives of workers, who can be fired for their political speech, recreational activities, diet, and almost anything else employers care to govern. In Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don't Talk about It) (Princeton UP, 2019), Elizabeth Anderson examines why, despite all this, we continue to talk as if free markets make workers free, and she proposes a better way to think about the workplace, opening up space for discovering how workers can enjoy real freedom.Elizabeth Anderson is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan and specializes in political philosophy, ethics, and feminist philosophy. She is the author of The Imperative of Integration, and Value in Ethics and Economics.Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly.

Walter Tschinkel has spent much of his career investigating the hidden subterranean realm of ant nests. This wonderfully illustrated book takes you inside an unseen world where thousands of ants build intricate homes in the soil beneath our feet.Tschinkel describes the ingenious methods he has devised to study ant nests, showing how he fills a nest with plaster, molten metal, or wax and painstakingly excavates the cast. He guides you through living ant nests chamber by chamber, revealing how nests are created and how colonies function. How does nest architecture vary across species? Do ants have “architectural plans”? How do nests affect our environment? As he delves into these and other questions, Tschinkel provides a one-of-a-kind natural history of the planet’s most successful creatures and a compelling firsthand account of a life of scientific discovery.Offering a unique look at how simple methods can lead to pioneering science, Ant Architecture: The Wonder, Beauty, and Science of Underground Nests (Princeton UP, 2021) addresses the unsolved mysteries of underground ant nests while charting new directions for tomorrow’s research, and reflects on the role of beauty in nature and the joys of shoestring science.Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

Settled in the mid-1970s by a small contingent of Hasidic families, Kiryas Joel is an American town with few parallels in Jewish history—but many precedents among religious communities in the United States. This book tells the story of how this group of pious, Yiddish-speaking Jews has grown to become a thriving insular enclave and a powerful local government in upstate New York. While rejecting the norms of mainstream American society, Kiryas Joel has been stunningly successful in creating a world apart by using the very instruments of secular political and legal power that it disavows.Nomi Stolzenberg and David Myers paint a richly textured portrait of daily life in Kiryas Joel, exploring the community’s guiding religious, social, and economic norms. They delve into the roots of Satmar Hasidism and its charismatic founder, Rebbe Joel Teitelbaum, following his journey from nineteenth-century Hungary to post–World War II Brooklyn, where he dreamed of founding an ideal Jewish town modeled on the shtetls of eastern Europe. Stolzenberg and Myers chart the rise of Kiryas Joel as an official municipality with its own elected local government. They show how constant legal and political battles defined and even bolstered the community, whose very success has coincided with the rise of political conservatism and multiculturalism in American society over the past forty years.Timely and accessible, American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New York (Princeton UP, 2022) unravels the strands of cultural and legal conflict that gave rise to one of the most vibrant religious communities in America, and reveals a way of life shaped by both self-segregation and unwitting assimilation.

In The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton (Princeton UP, 2021), Andrew Porwancher debunks a string of myths about the origins of this founding father to arrive at a startling conclusion: Hamilton, in all likelihood, was born and raised Jewish. For more than two centuries, his youth in the Caribbean has remained shrouded in mystery. Hamilton himself wanted it that way, and most biographers have simply assumed he had a Christian boyhood. With a detective’s persistence and a historian’s rigor, Porwancher upends that assumption and revolutionizes our understanding of an American icon.This radical reassessment of Hamilton’s religious upbringing gives us a fresh perspective on both his adult years and the country he helped forge. Although he didn’t identify as a Jew in America, Hamilton cultivated a relationship with the Jewish community that made him unique among the founders. As a lawyer, he advocated for Jewish citizens in court. As a financial visionary, he invigorated sectors of the economy that gave Jews their greatest opportunities. As an alumnus of Columbia, he made his alma mater more welcoming to Jewish people. And his efforts are all the more striking given the pernicious antisemitism of the era. In a new nation torn between democratic promises and discriminatory practices, Hamilton fought for a republic in which Jew and Gentile would stand as equals.By setting Hamilton in the context of his Jewish world for the first time, this fascinating book challenges us to rethink the life and legend of America's most enigmatic founder.Amber Nickell is Associate Professor of History at Fort Hays State University, Editor at H-Ukraine, and Host at NBN Jewish Studies and Eastern Europe.

At the end of the fourth century, as the power of Rome faded and Constantinople became the seat of empire, a new capital city was rising in the West. Here, in Ravenna on the coast of Italy, Arian Goths and Catholic Romans competed to produce an unrivaled concentration of buildings and astonishing mosaics. For three centuries, the city attracted scholars, lawyers, craftsmen, and religious luminaries, becoming a true cultural and political capital. Bringing this extraordinary history marvelously to life, Judith Herrin rewrites the history of East and West in the Mediterranean world before the rise of Islam and shows how, thanks to Byzantine influence, Ravenna played a crucial role in the development of medieval Christendom.Drawing on deep, original research, Herrin tells the personal stories of Ravenna while setting them in a sweeping synthesis of Mediterranean and Christian history. She narrates the lives of the Empress Galla Placidia and the Gothic king Theoderic and describes the achievements of an amazing cosmographer and a doctor who revived Greek medical knowledge in Italy, demolishing the idea that the West just descended into the medieval “Dark Ages.”Beautifully illustrated and drawing on the latest archaeological findings, Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe (Princeton UP, 2020) provides a bold new interpretation of Ravenna’s lasting influence on the culture of Europe and the West.Herrin is the author of a six book series on Byzantium. You can find those books here. 

Political Theorist Ross Carroll takes the reader through Enlightenment conversations about the use of ridicule and laughter in politics and political engagement in his new book, Uncivil Mirth: Ridicule in Enlightenment Britain (Princeton UP, 2021) explores, as a framework, two schools of thought on the place of ridicule in political engagement, Thomas Hobbes and those who took their approach to understanding human nature from Hobbes, and the Third Earl of Shaftsbury, and those who followed his arguments. Carroll dives into these two approaches to the use of ridicule, unpacking not only the ideas around how ridicule can be used in politics, but also how it might be managed appropriately, noting the dichotomous approach to ridicule as part of the Age of Enlightenment and Reason. The Hobbesian school was concerned with the corrosive impact of the use of ridicule since it can communicate contempt. The Shaftsbury school thought that ridicule could be used in an emancipatory way, as another means of engaging with political opponents while also undercutting the political claims of those opponents. Carroll traces these debates and those involved in them, while also providing a fascinating “case study” of the use of ridicule by Scottish Abolitionists. This particular chapter, focusing on the work of these polemicists, explores their use of ridicule “to expose defenders of African slavery as not merely mistaken but contemptable, and their arguments as absurd.” (Carroll, Uncivil Mirth, p. 152) This was an ambitious political project that took ridicule as the weapon or tool to attack the Atlantic slave trade and the immorality of slavery. Uncivil Mirth concludes with Mary Wollstonecraft’s commentary on the use of ridicule in terms of political education, and her own use of it in deconstructing sentimental teachings to women.There is a tension at the heart of the argument about ridicule and politics, namely that it can and often does make the political personal and the personal political. Thus, long before Second Wave Feminism would coin the adage that the “personal is political,” the British and Scottish Enlightenment thinkers and political activists were wrestling with how to manage the personal and the political, especially through the use of ridicule and laughter in politics.Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj.

Hate crimes. Misinformation and conspiracy theories. Foiled white-supremacist plots. The signs of growing far-right extremism are all around us, and communities across America and around the globe are struggling to understand how so many people are being radicalized and why they are increasingly attracted to violent movements. Hate in the Homeland shows how tomorrow’s far-right nationalists are being recruited in surprising places, from college campuses and mixed martial arts gyms to clothing stores, online gaming chat rooms, and YouTube cooking channels.Instead of focusing on the how and why of far-right radicalization, Cynthia Miller-Idriss seeks answers in the physical and virtual spaces where hate is cultivated. Where does the far right do its recruiting? When do young people encounter extremist messaging in their everyday lives? Miller-Idriss shows how far-right groups are swelling their ranks and developing their cultural, intellectual, and financial capacities in a variety of mainstream settings. She demonstrates how young people on the margins of our communities are targeted in these settings, and how the path to radicalization is a nuanced process of moving in and out of far-right scenes throughout adolescence and adulthood.Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right (Princeton UP, 2020) is essential for understanding the tactics and underlying ideas of modern far-right extremism. This eye-opening book takes readers into the mainstream places and spaces where today’s far right is engaging and ensnaring young people, and reveals innovative strategies we can use to combat extremist radicalization.

What happened in the years following World War II to create a democratic revolution in the western half of Europe? In Western Europe’s Democratic Age: 1945-1968 (Princeton UP, 2021), Martin Conway provides an innovative new account of how a stable, durable, and remarkably uniform model of parliamentary democracy emerged in Western Europe—and how this democratic ascendancy held fast until the latter decades of the twentieth century.Drawing on a wide range of sources, Conway describes how Western Europe’s postwar democratic order was built by elite, intellectual, and popular forces. Much more than the consequence of the defeat of fascism and the rejection of Communism, this democratic order rested on universal male and female suffrage, but also on new forms of state authority and new political forces—primarily Christian and social democratic—that espoused democratic values. Above all, it gained the support of the people, for whom democracy provided a new model of citizenship that reflected the aspirations of a more prosperous society.This democratic order did not, however, endure. Its hierarchies of class, gender, and race, which initially gave it its strength, as well as the strains of decolonization and social change, led to an explosion of demands for greater democratic freedoms in the 1960s, and to the much more contested democratic politics of Europe in the late twentieth century.Western Europe’s Democratic Age is a compelling history that sheds new light not only on the past of European democracy but also on the unresolved question of its future.

We think of grief as a normal response to the death of a loved one. We’re familiar with the so-called “five stages” of grief. Grief seems as an emotional episode that befalls us along life’s way, something to be endured and then gotten over. But grief isn’t as straightforward as it might seem. For one thing, we can grieve for strangers. And although there seems to be something like a duty to grieve, it’s not clear to whom such a duty could be owed. Perhaps grief is indeed a psychologically normal response to death, but might it nonetheless be bad for us to grieve?Despite such questions, there has been surprisingly little attention given to grief among philosophers. In Grief: A Philosophical Guide (Princeton University Press, 2021), Michael Cholbi bucks that trend. He offers a philosophical analysis of grief as a complex affective process that focuses attention on matters that can contribute to self-knowledge. Robert Talisse is the W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University.

In Empires of Vice: The Rise of Opium Prohibition across Southeast Asia (Princeton University Press, 2020) Diana Kim situates the regulation of vice at the heart of colonial state building. Through a layered comparison of opium prohibition in Burma, Malaya and Vietnam she shows how petty bureaucrats told stories to one another about opium that incrementally transformed into official problems, which those same bureaucrats and their successors had to solve. Prohibition did not come through grand decisions and decisive moments in old European metropoles and new international organizations so much as it did via accumulated observations and interpretations by thousands of “bad ethnographers” in the British and French imperial civil services.Empires of Vice won the Giovanni Sartori Best Book Award, Qualitative Methods Section of the American Political Science Association, and got honourable mentions from the committees for the Charles Taylor Book Award, Interpretive Methodologies and Methods section of APSA, and the Allan Sharlin Memorial Award, Social Science History Association.This is the fifth episode of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science to featuring an exemplary monograph in interpretive political or social science. The others are Natasha Behl on Gendered Citizenship, Lisa Wedeen on Authoritarian Apprehensions, James Scott on Against the Grain, and Sarah Wiebe on Everyday Exposure. To download or stream episodes in the series, please subscribe to our host channel: New Books in Political Science.Nick Cheesman is an associate professor in the Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University. He is a committee member of the Interpretive Methodologies and Methods group and co-convenes the Interpretation, Method, Critique network.