New Books In Intellectual History

Plato is a key figure from the beginnings of Western philosophy, yet the impact of his lived experience on his thought has rarely been explored. Born during a war that would lead to Athens’ decline, Plato lived in turbulent times. In Plato: A Civic Life (Reaktion, 2025), Carol Atack explores how Plato’s life in Athens influenced his thought, how he developed the Socratic dialogue into a powerful philosophical tool, and how he used the institutions of Athenian society to create a compelling imaginative world. Accessibly written, this book shows how Plato made Athens the place where diverse ideas were integrated into a new way of approaching the big questions about our lives, then and now. Carol Atack teaches classical Greek and ancient philosophy at the University of Cambridge. She is the author and coauthor of two books, most recently Anachronism and Antiquity. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Crit

A cowboy hat-wearing Goldwater conservative named Dave Foreman got religion and then founded the most radical environmental group of recent memory, Earth First! They dreamed of a ‘deep ecology’ that recognized the inherent value of nature, and they committed to protecting that nature at almost any cost. Yet, in putting the earth first, did Dave Foreman relegate humanity to a distant second place? This is the third episode of Cited Podcast’s new season, Green Dreams. Green Dreams tells stories of radical environmental thinkers and their dreams for our green future. Should we make those dreams reality, or are they actually nightmares? For the rest of the episodes, visit the series page, and subscribe today (Apple, Spotify, RSS). Plus: Live in Toronto? Come out to our live event, October 2nd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

On this episode of International Horizons, RBI Acting Director, Eli Karetny talks with Richard Wolin (Distinguished Professor, CUNY Graduate Center) about the intellectual roots of today’s anti-liberal right. Tracing a line from Germany’s “conservative revolutionaries” (Carl Schmitt, Oswald Spengler, Ernst Jünger, Heidegger) to France’s nouvelle droite and “great replacement” rhetoric, Wolin shows how cultural critiques of egalitarianism and “decadence” resurface in contemporary movements—from the manosphere and Bronze Age Pervert to tech-elite flirtations with political theology and the “state of exception.” The conversation connects these currents to U.S. figures like Peter Thiel and JD Vance, exploring why myths of decline, warrior brotherhoods, and friend-enemy politics have regained appeal—and what that means for liberal democracy now. A bracing tour through ideas shaping our moment, and a call to understand them clearly before they reshape our institutions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaph

Nick Bromell is the author of By the Sweat of the Brow: Labor and Literature in Antebellum American Culture and Tomorrow Never Knows: Rock and Psychedelics in the Sixties, both published by the University of Chicago Press. His articles and essays on African American literature and political thought have appeared in American Literature, American Literary History, Political Theory, Raritan, and The Sewanee Review. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and he blogs at thetimeisalwaysnow.org. Nick Bromell’s book is a work of intellectual history and political theory that places Black thinkers—writers, activists, and artists—at the center of American democratic thought. He argues that African American intellectual traditions have continually reshaped the meaning of democracy in the U.S., offering critiques and visions that go beyond the frameworks typically emphasized in mainstream political philosophy. The title, taken from James Baldwin’s writings, reflectsthe idea that democracy is never fini

Dr. Jon Mills, has had an impressive career as practicing professional, researcher, educator and writer in the psychology and psychoanalytic field. His work bounds the world of philosophy and psychology, focusing upon both individual human behavior and the manifestation of the collective behavior in the social context. He is the author and/or editor of over 30 books in psychoanalysis, philosophy, psychology, and cultural studies He is Emeritus Professor of Psychology & Psychoanalysis at the Adler Graduate Professional School in Toronto, Canada and has had appointments as Honorary Professor, Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, Colchester, UK; Faculty member in the Postgraduate Programs in Psychoanalysis & Psychotherapy, Gordon F. Derner School of Psychology, Adelphi University, NY and the New School for Existential Psychoanalysis, CA Jon has received numerous awards for his scholarship including 4 Gradiva Awards, for his work that advances the field of psychoanalysis

Textual Life: Islam, Africa, and the Fate of the Humanities (Columbia University Press, 2025), is a groundbreaking book that recasts the role of knowledge in the making of a colonial and postcolonial nation. It makes a case for a new literary and intellectual-historical approach to Islam in Africa. The Senegalese Muslim scholar Shaykh Musa Kamara (1864–1945) wrote History of the Blacks, a monumental history of West Africa, in a time when colonial discourses asserted that Africans lacked both writing and history. He sought to publish a bilingual Arabic and French edition of the book by working with humanists in colonial institutions, but the project was ultimately undermined by the disregard of the French state. Textual Life considers Kamara’s story as a parable about the fate of the humanities amid epistemic and technological change. Wendell H. Marsh argues that Kamara’s scholarship reflected what he calls the textual attitude, an orientation to the world mediated by reading. Colonial humanists shared this

In Measuring the Man: The Writings of Frederick Douglass on Abraham Lincoln (Reedy Press, 2025), acclaimed scholars Lucas E. Morel and Jonathan W. White assemble Frederick Douglass’s most meaningful and poignant statements about Abraham Lincoln, including a dozen newly discovered documents that have not been seen for 160 years. Readers will encounter the distrust and vitriol Douglass directed at Lincoln throughout much of the Civil War, including his anger and frustration with the president as he moved slowly, but methodically, toward emancipation. Douglass’s writings also reveal how three personal interactions between these two great men led to powerful feelings of friendship and mutual admiration. After Lincoln’s assassination—as Jim Crow laws and political violence gutted the hard-won rights of Black Americans—Douglass expressed greater appreciation for Lincoln’s statesmanship during the Civil War and praised him as a model for postwar America. There is no one better than Frederick Douglass to offer a crit

This is the second episode of Cited Podcast’s new season, Green Dreams. Green Dreams tells stories of radical environmental thinkers and their dreams for our green future. Should we make those dreams reality, or are they actually nightmares? For the rest of the episodes, visit the series page, and subscribe today (Apple, Spotify, RSS). An Albertan oil man and a socialist policy wonk from Saskatchewan banded together to think up “eco-development,” a precursor to today’s sustainable development. This unlikely duo forged a global consensus at the United Nations, effectively codifying the reigning orthodoxy of liberal environmental governance. They told us that capitalism and sustainability are indeed compatible. Might that be the most utopian of all green dreams? 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 Wound Man—a medical diagram depicting a figure fantastically pierced by weapons and ravaged by injuries and diseases—was reproduced widely across the medieval and early modern globe. In Wound Man: The Many Lives of a Surgical Image (Princeton University Press, 2025), Dr. Jack Hartnell charts the emergence and endurance of this striking image, used as a visual guide to the treatment of many ailments. Taking readers on a remarkable journey from medieval Europe to eighteenth-century Japan, Dr. Hartnell explains the historic popularity of this gruesome image and why the Wound Man continues to intrigue us today.Drawing on a wealth of original research, Dr. Hartnell traces the many lives of the Wound Man, from its origins in late medieval Bohemia to its vivid reincarnations in hundreds of manuscripts and printed books over more than three hundred years. Transporting readers beyond the specifics of bodily injury, Dr. Hartnell demonstrates how the Wound Man’s body was at once an encyclopedic repository of surgica

n a novel pairing of anti-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon with Marxist-Lacanian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, Zahi Zalloua explores the ways both thinkers expose the violence of political structures.This inventive exploration advances an anti-racist critique, describing how ontology operates in a racial matrix to produce some human bodies that count and others (deemed not-quite- or non-human) that do not. For Fanon and Žižek, the violence of ontology must be met with another form of violence, a revolutionary violence that delegitimizes the logic of the symbolic order and troubles its collective fantasies. Whereas Fanon begins his challenge to ontology by exposing its historical linkages to Europe's destructive imperialist procedures before proceeding to “stretch” Marxism, along with psychoanalysis, to account for the crushing (neo)colonial situation, Žižek premises his work on the refusal to accept the totality of ontology. Because of these different points of intervention, Fanon and Žižek together offer a powerfu

The Queerness of Psychoanalysis: From Freud and Lacan to Laplanche and Beyond (Routledge, 2024) is an exploration of psychoanalysis' often complicated and fraught history with thinking about queerness, as well as its multifaceted heritage. Throughout the chapters, the contributors write about psychoanalysis’ relationship with queerness, the ways in which queerness is represented in the psychoanalytic archive, and how that archive endures in the present and creates various disruptive effects both within and beyond the clinic. Each chapter from the global cohort of contributors approaches queerness from a different angle: they consider the literary aspects of queerness’ presence in the analytic world; the clinical complexities of working with queer and trans people; metapsychological inclusion and exclusion of queerness, and many other subjects. Taken together these contributions constitute a decisive intervention into the psychoanalytic canon. They are an unabashed demand for accepting and furthering the repre

Spike Bucklow joins Jana Byars to talk about The Year: An Ecology of the Zodiac (Reaktion, 2025). This delightful book defies genre. It is a journey through nature’s yearly cycle, blending science, history and poetic reflection.The Year takes us on a journey exploring how nature transforms across twelve months, each chapter focusing on a specific month’s natural events, from spring’s beginning through to winter’s end. It opens with an overview of our evolving understanding of time and nature, from ancient astronomy to the present, and concludes with a chapter on the impact of climate change. Spike Bucklow draws on both modern ecological studies and historical naturalists such as Aristotle, Gilbert White, Thoreau and Aldo Leopold. Poetic reflections from Ovid, Shakespeare, John Clare and William Wordsworth enrich the narrative, giving further insights into nature’s changes. Blending modern science with traditional wisdom, The Year provides a positive perspective on ecological, global and personal change, appea

In the wake of Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, French liberals set out to create an informal empire. Their efforts to cultivate unequal partnerships with Christian, Greek-speaking elites in southeast Europe shaped national identities and structured global civilizational hierarchies over the decades that followed. Unintended Nations: France’s Empire of Civilization, Southeast Europe, and the Post-Napoleonic World (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2025) tracks a notion of civilization that developed in early nineteenth-century France. Dr. Alex Tipei explores the constellation of ideas, beliefs, and practices this concept invoked – what she calls civilization-speak – and charts the cross-continental networks that employed it as an organizing principle. Drawing on archival and printed primary sources in six languages, Dr. Tipei maps out the uses of this civilization-speak on both sides of the continent, focusing on France and the lands that make up significant parts of present-day Greece and Romania. She shows how an

Are we already living in some kind of fascist or technocratic dystopia? How do we avert the AI dystopia? These are the types of things that you'll see thrown about in op-eds and analysis pieces all over the net and the press. Dystopia is doing some kind of work in our political vocabulary that goes beyond a reference to those iconic dystopian novels or their sort of contemporary successors. … Sometimes politics seems to be so absorbed in the train of fantasy and the imaginary that it becomes worrying. But like it or not, or like specific expressions of the political imagination or not, the political arena is an arena of the imagination. Habermas once said that people don't fight for abstractions, but they do battle with images.                                                                                                                    – Matthew Benjamin Cole, NBN interview 2025 After centuries of contemplating utopias, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers began to warn of dystopian fut

The Maginot Line was a marvel of 1930s engineering. The huge forts, up to eighty meters underground, contained hospitals, modern kitchens, telephone exchanges, and even electric trains. Kilometres of underground galleries led to casements hidden in the terrain, and turrets that rose from the ground to fire upon the enemy. The fortifications were invulnerable to the heaviest artillery and to chemical warfare. Despite this extensive preparation, France fell to Germany in a little under six weeks. Eight decades on, the Maginot Line is still remembered as an expensively misguided response to obvious danger. In The Maginot Line: A New History (Yale University Press, 2025), Dr. Kevin Passmore presents a groundbreaking account reevaluating the Maginot Line. He traces the controversies surrounding construction, the lives of the men who manned the forts, the impact on German-speaking inhabitants of the frontier, and the fight against espionage from within. Far from a backward step, the Maginot Line was an ambitious

A spellbinding look at the history of the world through the stories of twelve carpets Beautiful, sensuous, and enigmatic, great carpets follow power. Emperors, shahs, sultans and samurai crave them as symbols of earthly domination. Shamans and priests desire them to evoke the spiritual realm. The world's 1% hunger after them as displays of extreme status. And yet these seductive objects are made by poor and illiterate weavers, using the most basic materials and crafts; hedgerow plants for dyes, fibres from domestic animals, and the millennia-old skills of interweaving warps, wefts and knots. In Threads of Empire: A History of the World in Twelve Carpets (St. Martin's Press, 2025), Dorothy Armstrong tells the histories of some of the world's most fascinating carpets, exploring how these textiles came into being then were transformed as they moved across geography and time in the slipstream of the great. She shows why the world's powerful were drawn to them, but also asks what was happening in the weavers' li

The story of Judaism is the story of change. Throughout Jewish history, revolutionary events and subversive ideas have burst forth, repeatedly transforming Jewish experience. Re-forming Judaism: Moments of Disruption in Jewish Thought (Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2023), edited by Rabbi Stanley M. Davids (z’l) and Dr. Leah Hochman seeks to explore these ideas---and the individuals behind them---by delving into historical disruptions that led to lasting change in Jewish thought. The book includes distinguished array of scholars who take us on a journey from the disruptive prophets of ancient times, through rational, mystical, and extremist medievalists, to the impact of Haskalah and early Reform thought in modernity. It also explore contemporary innovations such as changes in liturgy and music, feminism, and post-Holocaust theology are included, as are insights into Sephardic and North African experiences. By showing how Judaism forms---then re-forms, and re-forms again---the contributors demonstrat

An Arendt expert has arrived at Arendt-obsessed Recall This Book. Lyndsey Stonebridge discusses her widely praised 2024 We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience. Lesley sees both radical evil and the banality of evil at work in Nazi Germany and in the causes of suffering and death in Gaza today. She compares the moral idiocy of authoritarians (like the murderous Nazis and those who are starving Gaza) to that of philosophers who cannot hear the echoes of what they are doing. Lesley and John discuss Arendt’s belief in the fragile ethics of the Founding Fathers, with its checks and balances and its politics based not on emotion but cool deliberation. Arendt could say that “The fundamental contradiction of [America] is political freedom coupled with social slavery,”” but why was she too easy on the legacy of imperial racism in America, missing its settler-colonial logic? Arendt read W. E. B. DuBois (who saw and said this) but perhaps, says Lesley, not attentively enough.

Returning to NBN is the philosopher Santiago Zabala, here to introduce his new book Signs from the Future: A Philosophy of Warnings (Columbia University Press, 2025). Warnings, for Zabala, are not synonymous with predictions. They are instead as much about the present as the future. They point towards already present crisis and contradictions. They also attempt to reorient us towards alternative paths. Embedded deeply in the critical hermeneutics of writers such as Heidegger, Arendt and Beauvoir but exploring contemporary issues such as gender, climate change and machine warfare, Zabala’s book is an accessible and applicable text that simultaneously tries to destabilize us in our present complacency while grounding us in an urgent need to seek alternatives. Santiago Zabala is ICREA Research Professor of Philosophy at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. He is the author of numerous books, including one previously discussed on this show, Being at Large: Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts. Learn more

Diana Souhami talks about her new book No Modernism Without Lesbians, out 2020 with Head of Zeus books. A Sunday Times Book of the Year 2020. This is the extraordinary story of how a singular group of women in a pivotal time and place – Paris, between the wars – fostered the birth of the Modernist movement. Sylvia Beach, Bryher, Natalie Barney, and Gertrude Stein. A trailblazing publisher; a patron of artists; a society hostess; a groundbreaking writer. They were all women who loved women. They rejected the patriarchy and made lives of their own – forming a community around them in Paris. Each of these four central women interacted with a myriad of others, some of the most influential, most entertaining, most shocking and most brilliant figures of the age. Diana Souhami weaves together their stories to create a vivid moving tapestry of life among the Modernists in pre-war Paris. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad ch