New Books in Intellectual History

Elad Lapidot is Professor of Jewish Thought at the University of Lille, France. His work is guided by questions concerning the relation between knowledge and politics. Among his publications: State of Others: Levinas and Decolonial Israel (Indiana UP, forthcoming), Politics of Not Speaking (Albany: SUNY Press, 2025), Jews Out of the Question: A Critique of Anti-Anti-Semitism (Albany: SUNY Press, 2020), Hebrew translation of Hegel'sPhänomenologie des Geistes (Tel Aviv: Resling Publishing, 2020), Heidegger and Jewish Thought: Difficult Others, edited with M. Brumlik (London/New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), and Etre sans mot dire : La logique de ‘Sein und Zeit' (Bucarest: Zeta Books, 2010). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Dream the Size of Freedom: How African Liberation Mobilized New Left Internationalism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025) by Dr. R. Joseph Parrott explores how anti-colonial movements in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau reshaped US activist engagement with the Global South from the 1960s through the 1970s and influenced American foreign policy as the Vietnam War drew to a close. These Portuguese African liberation movements, led by nationalists like Eduardo Mondlane and Amílcar Cabral, built global solidarity networks to support their military and social challenges to empire while defending against Western intervention. US activists disillusioned with the Cold War came to see African self-determination as central to global campaigns for racial and economic justice. A broad coalition ranging from Black Power radicals to religious liberals mobilized against the North Atlantic alliance with Portugal. In the process, this grassroots movement helped define a New Left Internationalism that championed decentralized, multiracial organizing and a collaborative vision of US foreign policy to redress historic inequalities between Global North and South. Drawing on more than fifty oral histories and research in government and activist archives on three continents in English, Portuguese, French, and Afrikaans, Dr. Parrott reconstructs the transnational anti-imperial network that injected Global South priorities into US political debates. Popular protests and informational campaigns led to collaborations with legislators eager to constrain the powerful executive branch. In 1976, this grassroots-legislative alliance halted Gerald Ford's anti-communist intervention against the Soviet-backed government of newly independent Angola. This victory of New Left Internationalist ideas anticipated future anti-apartheid and Latin American peace movements while also fueling a conservative revival of Cold War containment. By exploring US engagement with the contested process of African decolonization, Dream the Size of Freedom highlights the origins of two contrasting visions of American foreign policy that defined debates over the country's proper role in the Global South into the 1990s. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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 interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Stealing the future and concealing the theft—capitalism's method, as examined by the author of the acclaimed Carbon Democracy Today, extraordinary wealth seems to arrive from nowhere. The trick of conjuring this unearned wealth is, in fact, the key to understanding capital­ism's origins and a clue to why the catastrophe of climate collapse is upon us: value is created by consuming the future. In The Alibi of Capital: How We Broke the Earth to Steal the Future on the Promise of a Better Tomorrow (Verso, 2026), Professor Timothy Michell explains how this came about through the imperial expansion of the West, en­cumbering today's generations with repayments on earlier extractions. Timothy Mitchell identifies the forms of capitalisation, credit, and coercion that turn prospective assets into present income. Rejecting the common idea that claims on the future create only financial or fictitious capital, he traces the terraforming projects – the destruction of rivers, the colonising of territory, the expan­sion of infrastructure, and the burning of carbon—through which the future has been squandered. Terms such as finance, technology, the economy, and growth function as alibis that conceal this devastating form of extraction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

The Devil's Castle: Nazi Eugenics, Euthanasia, and How Psychiatry's Troubled History Reverberates Today (Catapult, 2025) delves into the forgotten history of eugenics and links it to present-day psychiatry to explain how we as a culture continue to get mind care so wrong. In The Devil's Castle, Susanne Paola Antonetta weaves a haunting narrative that confronts the darkest chapters of psychiatric history while offering a bold vision for the future of mental health care. In 1939, the eugenics movement growing throughout the West did its worst in Nazi Germany. Through the Aktion T4 euthanasia program, five asylums and an abandoned jail were transformed into gas chambers. Tens of thousands of lives—predominantly adults with neuropsychiatric conditions—were extinguished in those structures, ultimately paving the way for the horrors of the Holocaust.  Interlacing her experiences of psychosis with the complex history of psychiatry, Antonetta sheds light on the intersections of madness and societal perceptions of mental difference. She brings to life the stories of Paul Schreber and Dorothea Buck, two historical figures who act as models for mind care and acceptance. This gripping exploration traverses the spectrum of neurodiversity, from the devastating consequences of dehumanization to the transformative potential of understanding and acceptance.  With The Devil's Castle, Antonetta not only unearths the failures of our past, but also envisions a more compassionate, enlightened approach to consciousness and mental health care. This is a story of tragedy, resilience, and hope—a rallying cry for change that dares to challenge the limits of how we define and support the human mind. Susanne Paola Antonetta is the author of The Devil's Castle: Eugenics, Nazi Euthanasia, and How Psychiatry's Troubled History Hurts Us Now. She is also the author of The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here, Make Me a Mother, Entangled Objects, Body Toxic, A Mind Apart, and four books of poetry. Her awards include a New York Times Notable Book, an American Book Award, an Amazon Best Memoir of the Year award, and others. Her essays and poems have appeared in The New York Times, Ms., The Huffington Post, The UK Independent, The Hill, Orion, Psychology Today, and The New Republic and have been featured on CNN as well as the CBC Ideas documentary series. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina. For more information about her work please visit her website here and sign up for notifications about her regular contributions to Psychology Today. Elizabeth Cronin, Psy.D., is a clinical psychologist and mindfulness meditation teacher in Massachusetts. You can follow her on Instagram, Insight Timer, YouTube (@drelizabethcronin) or visit her website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Martin Heidegger's sympathies for the conservative revolution and National Socialism have long been well known. As the rector of the University of Freiburg in the early 1930s, he worked hard to reshape the university in accordance with National Socialist policies. He also engaged in an all-out struggle to become the movement's philosophical preceptor, “to lead the leader.” Yet for years, Heidegger's defenders have tried to separate his political beliefs from his philosophical doctrines. They argued, in effect, that he was good at philosophy but bad at politics. But with the 2014 publication of Heidegger's Black Notebooks, it has become clear that he embraced a far more radical vision of the conservative revolution than previously suspected. His dissatisfaction with National Socialism, it turns out, was mainly that it did not go far enough. The notebooks show that far from being separated from Nazism, Heidegger's philosophy was suffused with it. In Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology, Richard Wolin explores what the notebooks mean for our understanding of arguably the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, and of his ideas—and why his legacy remains radically compromised. Join YIVO for a discussion with Wolin about this book led by YIVO's Executive Director Jonathan Brent. This book talk originally took place on September 20, 2023. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Freedom to Know: Creating Community with Ambedkar, Du Bois, Iqbal, Ramabai and Tagore (Edinburgh University Press, 2025) asks how a (world) community can be created to allow structural minorities equitable access to intellectual and material resources Draws on a range of primary sources Brings the work of W.E.B. Du Bois into conversation with his Indian contemporaries Adds a novel historical perspective to recent scholarship on critical social epistemology Diversifies current ways of doing Indian philosophy Abstract: In this book, Monika Kirloskar-Steinbach studies how Bhimrao Ambedkar (1891-1956), W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963), Mohammed Iqbal (1877-1938), Pandita Ramabai (1858-1922) and Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) diagnose the epistemic oppression they perceive and experience, their analysis of the coloniality of being as its cause, and their proposals to counter it. Kirloskar-Steinbach explores how these voices seek to co-create a space in which they can experience what it means to be free from the conceptual domination of academic frameworks, relish that freedom with their collaborators and, in the equal participation that that space affords, develop open-ended concepts that help them to resist the coloniality of being. Jessica Zu's personal reflection: This book models for readers and scholars alike on how to practice "hermeneutical democracy." The notion of hermeneutical philosophy resonates strongly with Artruso Escobar's philosophy of "pluri-verse" instead of Eurocentric metaphysics of "uni-verse", Roger Ames's "zeotology" or philosophy of the living in Chinese traditions, and Brook Ziporyn's mystical atheism against the dominant paradigm of "nous as arché". Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Today I'm speaking with Mordecai Kurz, Joan Kenney Professor of Economics Emeritus at Stanford University. We are discussing his latest book, Private Power and Democracy's Decline: How to Make Capitalism Support Democracy (MIT Press, 2026). After its high-water mark several decades ago, democracy's status continues to slide globally. Capitalism and democracy, which once seemed to complement each other, now appear at odds. Free-market policies and monopolistic technologies have enriched many while driving inequalities that harm workers. Many have opined on how to fix the political and economic problems of our day, from an embrace of radical libertarian policy to socialist ownership of the means of production. Mordecai Kurz's extensive study of capitalism and democracy charts a path for balancing economic and political freedom. Since the days of Adam Smith, technology has changed rapidly, necessitating new formulations that take into account the private power centers that exercise control much like monarchies did in the Age of Enlightenment. Despite the imbalance, capitalism still remains a driver of technological progress and innovation. How can we make both capitalism and democracy work for the good of everyone? I'm happy today to get the chance to speak with such an illustrious scholar and to learn a bit more about how to understand this defining puzzle of our age. Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

What has happened to Britain? As drivers on its roads can attest, it is the pothole capital of Europe. Once-beautiful towns now feature peeling paint, weeds, and broken railings. Public services are no longer fit for purpose. A malaise seems to infect every aspect of British life: its economy, polity, social order, sense of well-being, domestic regional relationships, and place in the world. In The Land Where Nothing Works: How Britain Lost the Plot (Princeton University Press, 2026), the distinguished historian A. G. Hopkins offers an explanation, tracing Britain's current problems to decisions made in the 1980s that abandoned its postwar experiment in social democracy and mimicked policies of deregulation and privatisation promoted by the United States. In 1945, the new Labour government's development programme aimed at creating a social democracy that would benefit all members of society. The counterrevolution launched by Margaret Thatcher's government in 1979, which remains in force today, promoted individualism and deregulation. The transition from one programme to another was a response to the growth of finance and services centred on the City of London, and to decolonisation, which redirected trade to Europe. The expansion of credit led to the financial crisis of 2008 and the years of austerity that followed, and fuelled the populist movement that culminated in Brexit. Hopkins argues that, instead of following the free-market policies of its mentor, the United States, Britain should draw on its own history of social democracy and borrow from its neighbours in Europe, where communitarian principles continue to be upheld. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Exemplarity and Allusion in Macrobius' Saturnalia (Oxford UP, 2026) offers a new framework for interpreting interactions with classical source material in Macrobius' Saturnalia. It argues that the Saturnalia, an educational dialogue from the fifth century ce, does not view its Greco-Roman models as hegemonic sources of authority but engages with these texts in dynamic and critical ways. In particular, Macrobius responds to both the literary and ethical agendas of his predecessors, a strategy which is termed ethical allusion. The book explores this intertwining of moral, social, and aesthetic commentary in the Saturnalia's allusions to authors such as Aulus Gellius, Cicero, Plato, Plutarch, and Virgil. It also examines Macrobius' ethical allusions alongside the aesthetic practices and moral thought of the late fourth and the fifth centuries, and sheds light on the Saturnalia's role in pioneering a late antique intellectual culture at once less hierarchical and less engaged with civic life. New Books in Late Antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review. Katherine Krauss is Assistant Teaching Professor of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies at Penn State. Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Tamil Buddhism and Brahminism in Modern India: Deep Resistance Against Caste (Oxford University Press, 2026) explores Tamil Buddhism in modern India, focusing on its emergence as a response to caste-based oppression during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Central to this movement was Pandit Iyothee Thass (1845–1914), a pioneering intellectual who reinterpreted India's Buddhist past to challenge brahminical dominance. Thass reasoned that it was because many Indians followed Buddhist cultural and material traditions in ancient times, that they were oppressed as untouchables and lower castes by self-privileging-caste groups, such as brahmins. Thus, Thass challenged brahminism/casteism in India by reconstructing and mobilizing a reading public about the casteless Buddhist history of Indians who were prone to caste oppression. His writings, petitions, and archives reveal the castelessness of Tamil Buddhists and their commitment to a radical political transformation in modern India. Key aspects of the Tamil Buddhist movement include public mobilization for caste-free societies, self-representation of oppressed communities, economic redistribution through affirmative action, and a feminist critique of caste and patriarchy. Through interdisciplinary methods drawn from Critical Caste Studies, this monograph uncovers the intellectual history of Tamil Buddhism and its radical call for vernacular emancipation. It highlights how Indigenous, Tamil/Indian communities used Buddhist foundations to resist caste and envision a modern, casteless future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Despite being one of the leading thinkers of the second wave feminist movement, today Shere Hite is little known, little written about, and, unsurprisingly, little read. Her groundbreaking book, The Hite Report, was the first feminist exploration of the link between sex and male power. It sold millions of copies when first published in 1976 and revolutionised the way people thought about marriage and the female orgasm. How, then, did it, and Hite, disappear from public consciousness? In The Book that Taught the World to Orgasm and then Disappeared: Shere Hite and The Hite Report (Melville House and New South, 2026), Australian historian Dr. Rosa Campbell combines original research and sharp cultural analysis to explore the complicated life and literary legacy of Shere Hite. Expanding on her ideas about sex – namely, that sex is sexist – the book explores Hite's fraught childhood, struggles working in the porn industry, and eventual cancellation by the far-right Evangelical movement. All the while, Dr. Campbell holds Hite and The Hite Report to account for their own failings and absence of intersectionality. In a post-#MeToo world, with the far-right on the march globally, Dr. Rosa Campbell's examination of shifting ideological movements is essential to understanding the current feminist movement, as well as how conservative and reactionary efforts can silence even the most successful of women. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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 interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Thomas Paine: Collected Writings (Princeton University Press, 2026) is the first major new edition of Paine's works, bringing together all his writings in six breathtaking volumes that dramatically revise our previous understanding of his activities as a writer and his importance as a democratic theorist in the age of revolutions. It includes about 180 new letters and some two hundred works newly attributed to Paine, with twenty-nine works previously regarded as Paine's being deattributed. Drawing on pioneering computerized text analysis that makes possible for the first time attributions of anonymous and pseudonymous texts, this collection includes in volumes 5–6 newly identified pamphlets and newspaper and journal contributions, and suggests that Paine was extremely active as a Grub Street oppositional Whig writer in the decade prior to the American Revolution. Many writings from the period of his residence in France (1792–1802) and his subsequent return to the United States are also restored to his published output. Paine emerges as a much more consistent and serious democratic theorist than is often assumed, whose contributions to revolutionary debates in America, Britain, and France were unparalleled in their time. This volume spans the years 1772 to 1782, a decade that witnessed a diverse output of writings from Paine, from editorials and magazine pieces to pamphlets and newspaper articles. The book includes the Forester Letters, the Crisis papers, the Deane Affair articles, and Common Sense, with Gregory Claeys's general introduction and commentary by the editors providing invaluable historical context. Gregory Claeys is professor emeritus of the history of political thought at Royal Holloway, University of London. Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

In preparation for the 250th anniversary of America's founding, it would be wise to look back at the ancient thinkers and writers who helped inspire its early leaders. Perhaps the preeminent role model was the Roman statesman and orator, Marcus Tullius Cicero. So here in Episode 11 of Season 5, I interview Michael C. Hawley to talk about the political philosophy of Cicero and his influence on the American Republic. Michael Hawley is an assistant professor in the School of Civic Life and Leadership at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. A 2025-2026 Visiting Fellow with the James Madison Program, he wrote the book, Natural Law Republicanism: Cicero's Liberal Legacy (2022). Now, he's working on a new one, Preaching to the Choir: The Rhetoric of Prophets, Reformers, and Demagogues. Hosted by Ryan Shinkel, Madison's Notes is the podcast of Princeton University's James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. The transcript for this interview is available on the JMP substack page, “Madison's Footnotes.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Between the 1880s and the 1930s, children became the focus of unprecedented scientific and professional interest in modernizing societies worldwide, including in the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union. Those who claimed children as special objects of investigation were initially spread across a network of imperfectly professionalized scholarly and occupational groups based mostly in the fields of medicine, education, and psychology. From their various perspectives, they made ambitious claims about the contributions that their emergent expertise made to the understanding of, and intervention in, human bio-psycho-social development. The international movement that arose out of this catalyzed the institutionalization of new domains of knowledge, including developmental and educational psychology, special needs education, and child psychiatry.Science of the Child in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia (Oxford UP, 2020) charts the evolution of the child science movement in Russia from the Crimean War to the Second World War. It is the first comprehensive history in English of the rise and fall of this multidisciplinary field across the late Imperial and Soviet periods. Drawing on ideas and concepts emanating from a variety of theoretical domains, the study provides new insights into the concerns of Russia's professional intelligentsia with matters of biosocial reproduction and investigates the incorporation of scientific knowledge and professional expertise focused on child development into the making of the welfare/warfare state in the rapidly changing political landscape of the early Soviet era. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

From the inside flap: “A rich resource of Deleuze's research that is unavailable in his published writing Includes summaries of 216 seminar sessions available in transcripts and recordings Summaries are based on research for the Deleuze Seminars project (co-directed by Charles J. Stivale and Daniel W. Smith), where full transcripts and translations, to which readers will have access for simultaneous or subsequent consultation, have been developed by an international team of scholar-translators Alongside summaries, an attached critical apparatus provides references to corresponding links within Deleuze's writings, seminars, and other sources to facilitate additional research The texts in this volume - summaries of the 216 seminars taught by Gilles Deleuze - provide unique insight into the latter half of Deleuze's teaching career. Deleuze understood his seminars as a laboratory for developing his ongoing research, and this volume is a guide to the creative becomings in the development of his philosophical works through teaching.From Anti-Oedipus (1972) to The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1987), Deleuze examined a wide range of philosophical perspectives in pursuit of successive thematic topics. These summaries and commentaries serve as incitement for further research, allowing readers familiar with Deleuze's work to find new angles of approach and providing greater access to readers coming to his work for the first time." New Books Network: Stivale, Charles J., and Daniel W. Smith. (2025-10-21). "Gilles Deleuze, On Painting" Machinic Unconscious Happy Hour: Stivale, Charles J., Taylor Adkins, and Cooper Cherry. (2025-08-12). "Deleuze and Guattari – How Do You Make Yourself A Body Without Organs" Stivale, Charles J., Daniel W. Smith. (2023-06-29). "Deleuze on Painting and Cinema". The Deleuze Seminars: here Nathan Smith is a PhD candidate in Music Theory at Yale University nathan.smith@yale.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

In Renaissance Italy, the gun was not only a tool of war but also a desirable object, a luxury item carried at court. Guns were in use on the battlefield by 1440; later in that century Leonardo da Vinci sketched a design for a faster-firing, more portable handgun that could be hidden beneath a cloak. As the gun proliferated in society, it became both a means of self-defence and a threat to civic order. In The Firearm Revolution: From Renaissance Italy to the European Empires (Princeton University Press, 2026), historian Catherine Fletcher explores the emergence of firearms in Renaissance Italy and beyond, describing the social transformations that accompanied the evolution of the handgun from innovative military technology to widely used personal accessory. Fletcher shows that as guns became smaller and the new wheellock mechanism made concealed carry possible, Italian states increasingly tried to control their use—even as they viewed firearms as necessary for their militias. In the end, Fletcher reports, the importance of civic defence trumped the concern for social order. As guns became ever more acceptable, stories of how firearms aided Europeans' overseas conquests created a new and more positive image for a weapon once considered the devil's work. Debates over the regulation of firearms five centuries ago—which included arguments over the restriction of gun ownership, the use of guns for self-defence and the regulation of an armed militia—in many ways anticipate discussions about gun control today. Fletcher's groundbreaking account sheds new light on how governments weighed the competing priorities of defence and social order as they set out to build empires. Catherine Fletcher is professor of history at Manchester Metropolitan University. She is the author of several books on early modern Italy, including The Roads to Rome, The Beauty and the Terror: An Alternative History of the Italian Renaissance and The Black Prince of Florence: The Life of Alessandro de' Medici. 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: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

He's been called the man academics love to hate. One time, when the author disclosed that he worked with Pipes, the colleague responded, “I will forgive you.” Love him or hate him, Richard Pipes (1923–2018), left an indelible mark on Russian and Soviet history in his long and remarkable life. This conversation delves into Pipes' personal and intellectual biography, scholarly contributions, the role he played in shaping late Cold War policy and a generation of American historians of the Imperial and Soviet Russia. Have a listen to get a better sense of this humanist historian—described as both polemical and preeminently polite—who cast such a long shadow on academia in and beyond the Cold War. Jonathan Daly is Professor of History at University of Illinois Chicago. In addition to The Man Who Knew Russia: Richard Pipes, Humanist and Cold Warrior (Stanford University Press, 2025), he is the author of several monographs on Russian and Soviet history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

The first book-length study on mythology reception in video games, Characters and Characterization in Mythological Video Games (Bloomsbury, 2026) examines how video games characterize mythological characters from the perspectives of classical reception and game studies. Characters are vital to most stories, and many video games. They allow us to enter the fiction of a game, and facilitate our embodiment in the game world. Over time, what are initially blank slates transform into fictional existents with well-developed personalities and goals. In this context, narratology uses the term 'characterization' to refer to how character traits are ascribed to the entities we call 'characters'. How does characterization operate in games? How do players impact this process? How is mythology transformed by video games? What can games 'do' that other media cannot? After establishing a theoretical framework, this book moves to six case studies that each analyze mythological characters in a particular game: Smite, Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Immortals Fenyx Rising, God of War, Theseus and Asgard's Wrath 2. The scope of these studies is diverse, incorporating examples from mainstream, indie and virtual reality gaming. While the book's main focus lies with Greco-Roman mythology, it also includes games with Norse and Egyptian settings, or with playable characters from a wide range of international mythological traditions. Through these case studies, Alexander Vandewalle leads his readers to an understanding of different modalities or 'languages' of mythology reception in games. He argues for a striking diversity in mythological games and their characters, and illuminates how the relationship between games and antiquity is fundamentally one of continuous dialogue and play. Rudolf Thomas Inderst (*1978) enjoys video games since 1985. He received a master's degree in political science, American cultural studies as well as contemporary and recent history from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich and holds two PhDs in game studies (LMU & University of Passau). Currently, he's teaching as a professor for game design and game studies at the University of Applied Sciences Neu-Ulm, has submitted his third dissertation at the University of Vechta, holds the position as lead editor at the online journal TITEL kulturmagazin for the game section and is editor of the weekly game research newsletter Game Studies Watchlist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

American democracy is in a period of crisis, so it seems natural to look back to its origins. So here in Episode 10 of Season 5, I interview Professor Josiah Ober. Having previously taught at Princeton University, Ober is a professor of political science, classics, and philosophy at Stanford University, the Director of the Stanford Civics Initiative, as well as a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. The author of many books, including Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens (1989), The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece (2015), and Civic Bargain (2023), co-written with Brook Manville, he was previously a Madison's Notes guest in Season 3. Drawing on his 2015 book, we discuss the history of ancient Greece and the political legacy of its classical period. Our conversation ranges from the Bronze Age Collapse and the age of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey to the rise of the Greek city-state and decline of democratic Athens. We discuss contingencies of the Peloponnesian war, the cases for and against Alcibiades, whether the polity flourished under Macedonian and Roman empires, the relationship of philosophy to civics, was Socrates guilty and how much did Plato invent about him, in what way the god Hermes symbolized Greek trade in the Mediterranean, if James Madison truly understood ancient history, and lastly Ober's work with the growing civics programs in American higher education. Hosted by Ryan Shinkel, Madison's Notes is the podcast of Princeton University's James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. The transcript for this interview is available on our new Substack page, “Madison's Footnotes.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

"Self-Made" success is now an American badge of honor that rewards individualist ambitions while it hammers against community obligations. Yet, four centuries ago, our foundational stories actually disparaged ambitious upstarts as dangerous and selfish threats to a healthy society. In Pamela Walker Laird's fascinating history of why and how storytellers forged this American myth, she reveals how the goals for self-improvement evolved from serving the community to supporting individualist dreams of wealth and esteem. Simplistic stories of self-made success and failure emerged that disregarded people's advantages and disadvantages and fostered inequality. Fortunately, Self-Made also recovers long-standing, alternative traditions of self-improvement to serve the common good. These challenges to the myth have offered inspiration, often coming, surprisingly, from Americans associated with self-made success, such as Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass, and Horatio Alger. Here are real stories that show that no one lives – no one succeeds or fails – in a vacuum. Pamela Walker Laird is Professor Emerita of History at the University of Colorado Denver. Laird's publications include her newest book, Self-Made: The Stories that Forged an American Myth (Cambridge University Press, 2025); Pull: Networking and Success Since Benjamin Franklin (Harvard University Press, 2006), which won the 2006 Hagley Prize for the best book in business history and is available in Chinese; and Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), a Choice Outstanding Academic Book. 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: https://www.youtube.com/user/a48266/videos Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

The relationship between the Church and the world has been a subject of debate since the Church's earliest days. In A Church for a Secular World: The Development of Klaas Schilder's Ecclesiology (Brill, 2025), Marinus De Jong explores how Stanley Hauerwas, with his emphasis on the Church as polis, made a significant contemporary contribution—one that has also faced strong criticism. This study examines the distinctive insights of second-generation neo-Calvinist theologian Klaas Schilder (1890-1952) on this issue. Neo-Calvinism is renowned for its development of Reformed theology, particularly in this area, and Schilder builds on this tradition with a critical eye. Engaging with the increasing secularity of the twentieth century, he carefully interacts with Karl Barth's writings while refining his own perspective. In doing so, Schilder's position comes close to the Anabaptist stance of Hauerwas, yet remains firmly rooted in the Reformed understanding of creation. Marinus de Jong, Ph.D., is assistant professor of the theology of neo-Calvinism at Theologische Universiteit Utrecht, the Netherlands. He co-editedThe Klaas Schilder Reader: The Essential Theological Writings (Lexham, 2022). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Curtis Dozier's The White Pedestal: How White Nationalists Use Ancient Greece and Rome to Justify Hate (Yale University Press, 2026) explores how white nationalist thought leaders use ancient Greece and Rome to claim historical precedent for their violent and oppressive politics.It is difficult to ignore the resurgence of white nationalist movements in the United States, many of which employ symbols and slogans from Greco-Roman antiquity. A long-established neo-Nazi website incorporates an image of the Parthenon into its logo, and rioters wore Spartan helmets in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. These juxtapositions may appear incongruous to people who associate the ancient world with enlightened political ideals and sophisticated philosophical inquiry. But, as Dozier points out in this thought-provoking book, it's hard to imagine a historical period better suited to rhetorical use by white nationalists. Indeed, some of the most widely admired voices from ancient literature and philosophy endorsed ideas that modern white supremacists promote, and the social and political realities of the ancient world provide models for political systems that white supremacists would like to establish today. Part introduction to contemporary white nationalist thought, part exploration of ancient racism and xenophobia, and part intellectual history of the political entanglements of academic study of the past, this book reveals that contemporary white nationalist intellectuals know much more about history than many people assume—and they deploy this knowledge with disturbing success. Curtis Dozier is associate professor of Greek and Roman studies at Vassar College. He is the director of the internationally recognized website Pharos: Doing Justice to the Classics, which documents appropriations of Greco-Roman antiquity by hate groups. He lives in Poughkeepsie, NY. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Surrender to God Across Languages: Multilingual Intellectual History of Premodern India (Oxford UP, 2026) explores the role of languages in the intellectual landscape of second-millennium India by way of six theological treatises composed between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, each written by a key intellectual figure: Vātsya Varadaguru, Periyavāccān Pillai, Meghanādari Sūri, Pillai Lokācārya, and Vedāntadeśika. Drawing on theories of language politics and translation, Manasicha Akepiyapornchai proposes a new theoretical framework of "language sphere" to better capture the linguistic and intellectual interaction from a micro perspective. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Athenian Democracy provides innovative readings of ancient theorists to reveal both the complexity of democracy's achievements and its limits. In Athenian Democracy: Modern Mythmakers and Ancient Theorists (U Notre Dame Press, 2026), noted political scientist Arlene W. Saxonhouse offers fresh and provocative explorations of ancient political theorists, lending new insights about democracy's foundations and principles. These insights are more relevant than ever in a moment when the viability of democratic regimes is under scrutiny. Saxonhouse provides an in-depth discussion of the modern mythmakers (Hobbes, Paine, Hamilton, Mill, and Arendt, among others) who, in praising or excoriating Athenian democracy, have in fact distorted it to support their own assessments of democracy. She then offers detailed reinterpretations of the writings on democracy of four ancient theorists who had directly experienced life in the first democratic regime: Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle. Saxonhouse argues that the mythmaking that often attends our views of Athenian democracy—whether as a flawed, slaveholding regime that fostered factions and oppressed women or as an ideal regime of egalitarian and participatory democracy—blinds us to the deeper understanding of democracies that these ancient theorists can offer. Arlene W. Saxonhouse is the Caroline Robbins Collegiate Professor of Political Science, Emerita, at the University of Michigan. She is the author of numerous books and articles dealing with ancient Greek political thought, including Free Speech and Democracy in Ancient Athens and Fear of Diversity: The Birth of Political Science in Ancient Greek Thought. 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: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

John Dewey is among history's most celebrated thinkers on democracy and education, yet he has often been underappreciated and misunderstood as a philosopher. This book paints a fresh portrait of Dewey as not only a reformer of schooling but also a profound theorist of human development, whose vision of the centrality of education to democracy, philosophy, and flourishing can still inspire us today. What can we learn from this great thinker as we face challenges such as widespread drudgery and disaffection, estrangement among individuals and groups, and a crisis of democracy? This book supplies the answers, offering a bold new account of Dewey as an educational theorist who is essential for our troubled times. Revealing the true scope of Dewey's educational vision, this book provides a new perspective on a neglected aspect of the philosophical tradition. Natalia Rogach Alexander's Growing People: The Enduring Legacy of John Dewey (Columbia University Press, 2025) presents an alternative canon—running from Plato to Rousseau to Du Bois—that recasts philosophy in terms of education and, in so doing, opens new pathways for social critique and the liberation of human potential. Natalia Rogach Alexander is a lecturer in philosophy at Columbia 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

What would the Enlightenment look like if we viewed it through the eyes of the philosophers as they were facing death? Joanna Stalnaker turns our usual perspective on the Enlightenment on its head, bringing to light a set of works written at the end of the Old Regime and at the end of their authors' lives. These works, all written before the French Revolution, cast a retrospective glance over the intellectual movement their authors participated in, and over the authors' own lives and works. Stalnaker shows that the beauty of these works stems from their authors' efforts to give literary form to the materiality and fragility of their dying bodies. As they reflected on writing as a means of reaching posterity, Enlightenment philosophers embraced the possibility that neither their names nor their writings would survive long beyond the decomposition of their bodies. They inscribed the silence and nothingness of death into their last works. Stalnaker's book The Rest Is Silence: Enlightenment Philosophers Facing Death (Yale UP, 2025) unsettles reigning interpretations of the Enlightenment as a precursor to our modernity and shows its protagonists at their moments of fragility and doubt, capturing their sense of an ending rather than the confidence in a glowing future so often attributed to them. Joanna Stalnaker is professor of French at Columbia University. She is the author of a prizewinning first book, The Unfinished Enlightenment: Description in the Age of the Encyclopedia. She lives in New York City. 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: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Veiling meant many things to the ancients. On women, veils could signify virtue, beauty, piety, self-control, and status. On men, covering the head could signify piety or an emotion such as grief. Late Roman mosaics show people covering their hands with veils when receiving or giving something precious. They covered their altars, doorways, shrines, and temples; and many covered their heads when sacrificing to their gods. Early Christian intellectuals such as Origen and Gregory of Nyssa used these everyday practices of veiling to interpret sacred texts. These writers understood the divine as veiled, and the notion of a veiled spiritual truth informed their interpretation of the bible. Veiling in the Late Antique World (Cambridge UP, 2026) provides the first assessment of textual and material evidence for veiling in the late antique Mediterranean world. Susanna Drake here explores the relation between the social history of the veil and the intellectual history of the concept of truth as veiled/revealed. New Books in Late Antiquity is Presented by Ancient Jew Review Susanna Drake is Professor of Religious Studies at Macalister College. Her first book was Slandering the Jew: Sexuality and Difference in Early Christian Texts. Michael Motia teaches Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

In the Middle Ages, hell was useful because it was vaguely defined. Canonical scriptures scarcely mention hell, leaving much to the imaginations of early Christians, who used it to sort out who belonged within the faith. Translating hell: Vernacular theology and apocrypha in the medieval North Sea (Manchester University Press, 2026) by Dr. Stephen C. E. Hopkins explores how hell became a place for literary experiments with local challenges in theology and identity. Following the reception and transformations of two popular hell apocrypha, it argues that they served as this role because of their liminal textual authority. As noncanonical scriptures, apocrypha afforded medieval writers space to revise their hells (since they were not actually scripture), while also encouraging readers to revere those experiments as valid (since they seemed like scripture). The book brings together adaptations from early medieval England, Iceland, Ireland, and Wales, placing the early vernacular theologies of the North Sea in comparative conversation. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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 interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

The Criminal State: War, Atrocity, and the Dream of International Justice (Princeton University Press, 2026) offers a gripping account of how law has confronted the most radical forms of state violence. Beautifully written, broad in scope, and bracingly original, it weaves history with political thought to trace the shifting legal response to state aggression and atrocities, from Leopold's rule over the Congo to Putin's war in Ukraine. At its heart is Lawrence Douglas's fresh interpretation of the law's reckoning with Nazi aggression and atrocity. He shows how the Nuremberg trials challenged centuries of thought—rooted in Hobbes and other canonical thinkers—that shielded sovereigns from legal scrutiny. Yet Nuremberg's bid to frame aggression as the cornerstone of a new order of international criminal law largely failed, giving way to a system now centrally concerned with crimes against humanity and genocide—while leaving unresolved the legality and effectiveness of using force to stop the worst violations of human rights. Providing rare historical perspective on the dilemmas facing international courts, The Criminal State is a sweeping, provocative history of the struggle to bring perpetrators of state violence to justice. Our guest is Professor Lawrence Douglas, who is the James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought at Amherst College. Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

The thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment have often been claimed for sociology. But, what does it mean to say these thinkers were sociologists, or at the very least precursors to the subject? Does it, for example, mean that intellectuals of 18th Century Scotland had the same concerns as we do today? Alternatively, does it mean we should think of sociology as an elite discipline, developed by men who were attached to power, albeit with some often critical insights? In turn, if we accept these thinkers as doing something distinct, how can this sociologically be explained? These are the questions which animate Alex Law's The Roots of Sociology: Scottish Enlightenment and the Civilising Process (Routledge, 2026). Structured around two sections, Sociology and the Scottish Enlightenment, as well as Sociology of the Scottish Enlightenment, Law sees these thinkers as thinking through what Elias would later call the civilising process. He so doing he explores how questions of state formation, violence and emerging commercial society structured their interest and how the particular position of Scotland, a stateless nation experiencing rebellion, provided the space for what he calls their ‘pre-sociology'. In our podcast we discuss how Law's attempt to see the Scottish Enlightenment thinks as concerned with the civilising process differs from other attempts to claim them for sociology, the legacy of the Act of Union for these writers and how one became a thinker in these times. We also discuss why Adam Smith is, for Law, an ‘ambivalent' figure for sociology and what we can learn from these writers about the scope and historical insight sociology should have. Your host, Matt Dawson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow and the author of G.D.H. Cole and British Sociology: A Study in Semi-Alienation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) and co-editor of The Anthem Companion to Henri Lefebvre (Anthem Press, 2026) along with other texts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

In 1656, a young Amsterdam merchant was excommunicated by his Portuguese-Jewish community in the harshest terms it had ever used. Baruch Spinoza was accused of unspecified “horrifying heresies,” but the precise reasons for his expulsion remain a mystery. When he published his Theological-Political Treatise in 1670, which was condemned as “the most atheistic book ever written,” he began to reveal to the world what his heresies may have been. Yet ever since the eighteenth century, most readers and scholars have assumed that Spinoza was a pantheist—even a “God-intoxicated man,” as the poet Novalis put it. After all, how could a person whose books are suffused with talk of God be an atheist? In Spinoza, Atheist (Princeton University Press, 2026), Steven Nadler, one of the world's leading authorities on the philosopher, aims to settle the question and show that that's exactly what he was. Nadler makes a powerful case that there is no real divinity for Spinoza. God is Nature, and isn't an object of worshipful awe or religious reverence but can only be understood through philosophy and science. There is nothing supernatural—no mystery, ineffability, or sublimity. Spinoza does speak of “blessedness” and “salvation,” but these, too, are to be understood in natural and rational terms, as the peace of mind and happiness that come from understanding ourselves and the world. Whether Spinoza believed in God is a fascinating and enduring controversy. Spinoza, Atheist promises to transform our understanding of his views and to make clear just how radical a thinker he was and remains.  Steven Nadler is Vilas Research Professor and the William H. Hay II Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His many books include Rembrandt's Jews, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Spinoza: A Life, Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die, and A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age. Abe Silberstein is a Ph.D. student in the joint doctoral program in History and Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Today, rats are nearly synonymous with plague, but this association is surprisingly recent. For centuries, plague devastated populations without being linked to animals. So how did the rat become the symbol of one of history's deadliest diseases? In How Plague Got Rats: Mastering a Zoonotic Pandemic (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026), Professor Christos Lynteris unravels this story by focusing on the Third Plague Pandemic, a global outbreak that began in China in the 1850s and claimed an estimated 15 million lives by the mid-twentieth century. This was the first major pandemic recognized by scientists as zoonotic—spread from animals to humans—and it marked a turning point in both medical science and global health. Through a gripping historical investigation, Professor Lynteris explores how rats entered the medical imagination of the time. He reveals how scientific thinking about disease vectors evolved in tandem with colonial power structures as plague responses unfolded across Asia, Africa, and the Americas. From laboratory discoveries to imperial interventions, the rat became central not just to understanding plague, but to shaping new forms of epidemiological reasoning. This provocative book shows how zoonosis emerged as a politically charged concept in the context of empire and pandemic crisis. It is a powerful history of how science, society, and colonialism converged around a creature now inseparable from the story of epidemic disease. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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 interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

From The New York Times–bestselling and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello, a groundbreaking collection of Thomas Jefferson's writings on race that every American should read Among America's Founding Fathers, none was more deeply, personally, or controversially entangled with race and slavery than Thomas Jefferson. The man whose Declaration of Independence proclaimed that “all men are created equal” enslaved more than 600 people of African descent even as he acknowledged the injustice of slavery, saw himself as its opponent, and condemned it in his writings. How is this possible? In Jefferson on Race: A Reader (Princeton University Press, 2026), Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed gathers Jefferson's most revealing writings about African Americans, slavery, and Native Americans, enabling readers as never before to directly explore his complex and contradictory thoughts, feelings, and decisions on these subjects—the most hotly debated aspect of his legacy. These selections come from Jefferson's public and private writings, letters, and plantation records, as well as accounts by contemporaries, including his son Madison Hemings and three other people formerly enslaved at Monticello. The book documents Jefferson's ideas about—and self-image in relation to—African Americans, slavery, and Native Americans, as well as his conduct, including interactions with individual Black and Native people. The writings show how Jefferson responded to living in a multiracial slave society while professing progressive ideals, and how his views on race and slavery were shaped by his experiences with enslaved Black people. Jefferson on Race is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand Jefferson's conflicted attitudes—and the impact of race and slavery on American history. Annette Gordon-Reed is a New York Times-bestselling historian and the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University. Her books include The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, which won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

The Wisdom of the Ancients: Four Ideas That Changed the World (Oxford UP, 2025) is about four cornerstones of modern thought that were put in place by people living in the ancient Mediterranean world. It covers approximately 2,000 years in time (from ca. 1000 BCE to 1000 CE) and spatially moves from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Mesopotamia (roughly, modern Iraq), through Greece and Rome, to the new Germanic states growing in what is now western Europe. The four ideas, as author H. A. Drake proposes, are monotheism, the idea that there is only one god, not many; individual rights, the idea that there is a limit to what the state can order us to do; naturalized citizenship, the idea that the full rights and privileges of citizenship can be extended to people who have no birthright to them; and creation of a standard by which to judge the performance of states. It is easy, now, to take these ideas for granted. For believers, it seems obvious that only a singular, omnipotent deity can account for the splendour of the universe. Similarly, the common notion that individuals can stand up for their rights, that citizenship can be freely given, or that governments ought to be held to a standard of justice for all, is often accompanied by the assumption that, at the time they were introduced, such ideas must have been immediately recognized as superior and gratefully accepted. The record is far more complicated, and that makes the story of their success far more interesting. By discussing these ideas in their historical context with clarity and wit, The Wisdom of the Ancients reminds readers how preposterous they were originally and how different our world would be if they had not taken hold. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

A rich and immersive reinterpretation of the history of Western thought, The Evolution of Western Thought: Volume 1, From the Ancient World to Late Antiquity (Cambridge UP, 2025) – the first in a major trilogy – explores the transmission and development of philosophical ideas from Plato and Aristotle to Jesus, Paul, Augustine and Gregory the Great. Christopher Celenza recalibrates philosophy's story not as abstract argumentation but rather as lived practice: one aimed at excavating wisdom and shaping life. Emphasizing the importance of textual tradition and elucidation across diverse contexts, the author shows how philosophical and religious ideas were transformed and readjusted over time. By focusing on the centrality of Christianity to Western thought, he reveals how ancient ideas were alchemized within religious frameworks, and how – across the centuries – ethical and intellectual traditions intersected to shape culture, memory, and the pursuit of sagacity. Ever attentive to ongoing conversations between past and present, this expansive intellectual history brings perspectives to the subject that are both nuanced and fresh. Christopher S. Celenza is an American scholar of Renaissance history and the current James B. Knapp Dean of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University, where he is also a professor of history and classics 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: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Looking beyond the marble elegance of Michelangelo's David, the pugnacious, passionate, and--crucially--important story of Renaissance manhood.  Timothy McCall's book Making the Renaissance Man: Masculinity in the Courts of Renaissance Italy (Reaktion, 2023) explores the images, objects, and experiences that fashioned men and masculinity in the courts of fifteenth-century Italy. Across the peninsula, Italian princes fought each other in fierce battles and spectacular jousts, seduced mistresses, flaunted splendor in lavish rituals of knighting, and demonstrated prowess through the hunt--all ostentatious performances of masculinity and the drive to rule. Hardly frivolous pastimes, these activities were essential displays of privilege and virility; indeed, violence underlay the cultural veneer of the Italian Renaissance. Timothy McCall investigates representations and ideals of manhood in this time and provides a historically grounded and gorgeously illustrated account of how male identity and sexuality proclaimed power during a century crucial to the formation of Early Modern Europe. Jana Byars is an independent scholar located in Amsterdam. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Meanings of Antiquity: Myth Interpretation in Premodern Japan (Harvard UP, 2023) is the first dedicated study of how the oldest Japanese myths, recorded in the eighth-century texts Kojiki and Nihon shoki, changed in meaning and significance between 800 and 1800 CE. Generations of Japanese scholars and students have turned to these two texts and their creation myths to understand what it means to be Japanese and where Japan fits into the world order. As the shape and scale of the world explained by these myths changed, these myths evolved in turn. Over the course of the millennium covered in this study, Japan transforms from the center of a proud empire to a millet seed at the edge of the Buddhist world, from the last vestige of China's glorious Zhou Dynasty to an archipelago on a spherical globe. Analyzing historical records, poetry, fiction, religious writings, military epics, political treatises, and textual commentary, Matthieu Felt identifies the geographical, cosmological, epistemological, and semiotic changes that led to new adaptations of Japanese myths. Felt demonstrates that the meanings of Japanese antiquity and of Japan's most ancient texts were—and are—a work in progress, a collective effort of writers and thinkers over the past 1,300 years. Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

What if, every time you wanted to write down 1,000,000, you had to draw a picture of a god? And what if that number were the biggest you had a symbol for? If you were doing math in ancient Egypt, those were the rules: anything bigger broke math.As mathematician Richard Elwes shows in Huge Numbers: A Story of Counting Ambitiously, from 4 1/2 to Fish 7 (Basic Books, 2026)this is the strange story of math. Even today, writing down some numbers is beyond us: try it with all the zeroes in a googolplex, or an outrageous alien number like TREE(3). Safer not to try: even harnessing every particle in the universe, you wouldn't come close. But this book is no mere bestiary of numerical monsters. It shows how, by hunting down and studying ever-bigger numbers, arithmetic has reshaped human thought and made our modern era of science and computation possible.Where many math books celebrate abstract algebra or ineffable infinities, Huge Numbers is both more practical and far weirder. It reveals a world where most numbers remain out of reach until we discover how to chase them down and tame them, and so remake our world again. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Codex Vaticanus is often regarded as a pillar of New Testament scholarship, ancient, authoritative, and decisive. In From Erasmus to Maius: The History of Codex Vaticanus in New Testament Textual Scholarship (de Gruyter, 2024) published by De Gruyter in 2024, Dr An-Ting Yi shows that this status was anything but inevitable.Rather than focusing on the manuscript's text, Dr Yi traces how Vaticanus gradually became authoritative. For centuries, it was known but rarely usable, constrained by restricted access, archival control, and scholarly methods that could not yet make sense of it. Only with nineteenth-century methodological shifts and, crucially, with its first printed edition did Vaticanus acquire the authority it now seems always to have had. The book's core insight is simple and powerful. Manuscripts do not possess fixed authority. They gain it through methods, institutions, and infrastructures. Well argued and meticulously researched, Dr Yi's study is less about a single manuscript than about how scholarly canons are formed, stabilised, and remembered. From Erasmus to Maius invites readers to rethink not only textual criticism but also the construction of academic authority. Amisah Bakuri (PhD) is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her work explores the intersections of religion, sexuality, gender, and migration, especially within African diasporic communities in the Netherlands. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

A central paradox of democracies is that they are always ruled by elites. What can democracy mean in this context? Today, it is often said that a populist revolt against elites is driving democratic politics throughout the West. But in Elites and Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2026), Hugo Drochon argues that democracy is more accurately and usefully understood as a perpetual struggle among competing elites—between rising elites and ruling elites. Real political change comes from the interaction between social movements and elite political institutions such as parties. But, although true democracy—the rule of the people—may never be achieved, striving towards it can bring about worthwhile democratic results. At the turn of the twentieth century, Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, and Robert Michels put forward “elite” theories of democracy and gave us terms such as the “ruling class” and “elites” itself. Drawing on their work and tracing the history of democratic thought through figures such as Joseph Schumpeter, Robert Dahl, C. Wright Mills, and Raymond Aron, Elites and Democracy reveals that this fundamentally elitist basis of democracy—democracy understood as competition between elites—was there all along. The challenge is to think it anew. Moving away from procedural or principled conceptions of democracy, Elites and Democracy develops a dynamic theory of democracy, one grounded in movement. With current politics defined by a populist backlash against elites, dynamic democracy offers the tools we urgently need to understand our contemporary predicament and to act upon it. Hugo Drochon is an Associate Professor in Political Theory at the University of Nottingham. He is a historian of modern political thought, with interests in Nietzsche's politics. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Carlos Martins joins the New Books Network to discuss his book Fascism: Beyond Hitler and Mussolini (Desassossego, 2022) (in Portuguese Fascismos: Para Além de Hitler e Mussolini), a comparative study of fascist movements across Europe and beyond. Working from a rigorous definition of fascism based on its ideological content, Martins examines eight case studies, analysing these specific manifestations of fascism to identify what they had in common and what separated them. In this conversation, we discuss the problem of defining fascism, the distinctions between fascism and populism and why Martins argues that not every dictatorship or radical right movement should automatically be classified as fascist. The discussion also turns to the Portuguese case, including the Estado Novo, National Syndicalism and the debate surrounding Salazarism's relationship to European fascism. At a moment when the word “fascism” is increasingly invoked in public debate, Martins makes the case for conceptual precision without losing sight of fascism's historical adaptability and political force. The result is a wide-ranging conversation about ideology, political modernity and the uses, and misuses, of language. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

In Empire of Skulls: Phrenology, the Fowler Family, and a New Nation's Quest to Unlock the Secrets of the Mind (Counterpoint Publishing, 2026), Dr. Paul Stob presents a tale of science and showmanship, ideology and enterprise, that provides not just a fascinating history of our country, but also crucial insight into the deep currents that continue to propel modern life. During the contentious and progressive antebellum era, the Fowler family preached a gospel of self-improvement to a nation eager to embrace its foundational beliefs. For the first time, this new “science” of phrenology offered all Americans the ability to improve their station by unlocking their innate mental and emotional truths. Revered politicians, quirky celebrities, infamous criminals, and social outcasts all found their way to the Fowlers for skull readings. Brimming with the energy to change the world, the Fowlers connected phrenology to practically every aspect of life in the young nation—from abolition to women's rights, temperance to prison reform, spiritualism and mesmerism to vegetarianism and sexual education. But there was a dark side to this fad and to the Fowlers, and soon nefarious forces co-opted this once-hopeful sensation to justify racism and xenophobia. Phrenology's complex history stands as a commentary on the dreams and follies of the American republic. Though phrenology (and the Fowlers) ran afoul of the tide of history, its aspirational insistence on an individual's ability to improve oneself became embedded in the fabric of the nation. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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 interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history