New Books in Intellectual History

The field of Strategic Studies, which studies the use and threat of force for political purposes, has seen the repeated rise of concepts to dominate discourses and research agendas, only to eventually fall to the margins again. What explains this cyclical pattern? What are the consequences for our understanding of war?Reconceptualizing War: The Rise and Fall of Fashionable Concepts in Strategic Studies (Oxford UP, 2026) by Dr. Chiara Libiseller examines these questions by likening the coming and going of theories to fashions. While in vogue, fashionable concepts are used widely, becoming broader and vaguer until essentially stripped of meaning. At the same time, they are bestowed with authority and power that allows them to withstand criticism and marginalizes alternative perspectives. These characteristics severely affect the quality, depth, and diversity of research by narrowing and siloing the field of inquiry.Tracing three concepts—revolution in military affairs, counterinsurgency, and hybrid warfare—through their fashion lifecycle, Dr. Libiseller demonstrates how fashionability affects the concepts themselves, related research, and the field more generally. Embedded within a discussion of the history and dynamics of Strategic Studies, the book calls for more reflexivity in the study of war and strategy. 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/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

We were joined by Angus Burgin, Associate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University, and talked about how the arrival of the Internet remade life and politics in the 90s. Angus shared his thoughts on the motivations behind his upcoming book, which offers an intellectual history of the Internet. Lee Vinsel is a professor in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech. Benjamin Waterhouse is a professor of History at UNC Chapel Hill. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

The 1960s in Japan have long been understood as a period of radical political engagement. But as political movements from Old Left Communism to New Left revolts appeared to fail in their efforts to revolutionize Japanese society, artists and intellectuals came to reject the ideals of postwar politics. Instead, they advocated withdrawing from political participation and making self-transformation the grounds for social change.This provocative book uncovers a paradox at the heart of the 1960s: how political disillusionment became the basis for a new form of politics—a politics of the self. Examining aesthetic criticism, popular literature, avant-garde art, cinema, and political theory, Patrick Noonan argues that cultural producers in 1960s Japan cultivated what he calls an “ethos of disaffection” toward revolutionary politics and postwar society. Departing from approaches that define politics as contestation, Age of Disaffection: The Aesthetic Critique of Politics in 1960s Japan (Columbia UP, 2025) foregrounds cultivation, or the production of ways of feeling and relating to the world in efforts to redefine the political. It presents an unorthodox account of the 1960s: withdrawal from political activity developed not as the decade ended but as it was unfolding. Noonan reveals how Japanese artists and intellectuals in this period confronted a crucial question that continues to vex efforts at radical change today: transform institutions or alter how people relate to themselves and others? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Amongst the many achievements of the Castilian court of King Alfonso X (1221-184) is the Cantigas de Santa Maria, a collection of 429 songs preserved in four manuscripts. In The Cantigas de Santa Maria: Power and Persuasion at the Alfonsine Court (Oxford UP, 2024) Henry T. Drummon re-examines a subsection of this collection, the cantigas de miragre. These songs set miracle narratives to recursive, refrain-based musical structures. By situating the musical and poetic form of the cantigas de miragre against the backdrop of discourses about rhetoric animating 13th-century intellectual life, Drummond shows how these songs worked to communicate propagandistic messages on behalf of a crown in crisis. Available recordings of the cantigas discussed in the podcast include those from Jordi Savall and Hespèrion XXI, the Boston Camerata and the Andalusian Orchestra of Fez under the direction of Joel Cohen, and René Clemencic’s Clemencic Consort. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

While nationalism is a term that is often associated with instability, violence, extremism, terrorism, wars and even genocide, in fact most forms of nationalism are nonviolent.  Beyond politics, it is a set of discourses and practices that shape economic, social, legal, and cultural life all over the globe.  Siniša Malešević's Nationalism as a Way of Life: The Rise and Transformation of Modern Subjectivities (Cambridge University Press, 2025) explores the global rise and transformation of nationalism and analyses the organisational, ideological, and micro-interactional mechanisms that have made it the dominant way of life in the twenty-first century.  In a series of case studies across time and space, the book zooms in on three key forms of lived experience: how nationalism operates as a multi-faceted meta-ideology, how national categories have become organisationally embedded in everyday practices and why nationalism has become the dominant form of modern subjectivity.  The book is aimed at readers interested in understanding how nation-states and nationalisms have attained such influence in contemporary world. Siniša Malešević is Professor of Comparative Historical Sociology at the University College, Dublin, and Senior Fellow at CNAM, Paris. He is the author of the award winning books Grounded Nationalisms (Cambridge, 2019) and Why Humans Fight (Cambridge, 2022). His work has been translated into fourteen languages.Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar with research areas spanning Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, Military History, War Studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, and Russian and East European history. He is currently the Book Review Editor for Comparative Civilizations Review. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

There was no more trenchant and substantive critic of the Left from the Left in the 1960s and 1970s than Bayard Rustin. Some liberals and leftists today valorize Rustin on the basis of his multiple oppressed identities and civil rights organizing. On the other hand, many others dismiss him for being compromised by his commitment to the Democratic Party or by his deep suspicion of the new forms of left activism that appeared in the mid-1960s. While Rustin certainly made some strategic mis-steps later in life, his challenges to the New Left, Black Power, and a regressing liberal establishment from 1964 until his passing in 1987 were insightful, cutting, and often quite prescient. At a time when the Left is in dire need of self-reflection and reorientation, Rustin’s work has gained a new relevance and urgency. In a new collection of Rustin's writings from this period, Fong and Prescod gathered together articles and speeches that represent Rustin's Challenge to the Left of his day. Some of the pieces of Rustin’s writing chosen for inclusion have been published before, but only in pamphlets or newspapers from many decades ago. Some will be published for the first time here.The volume also includes commentaries on these pieces by Adolph Reed, Jr., Jennifer Silva, Les Leopold, Mark Dudzic, Jen Pan, John-Baptiste Oduor, and many others, all contextualizing Rustin's challenge and demonstrating its continuing applicability. Matthis Frickhoeffer is a scholar of critical theory and French thought with a background in literature studies, linguistics and art theory. His work focuses on questions of form, semiotics, and intertextuality. He teaches at the University of Texas at Dallas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Today we think of land as the paradigmatic example of property, while in the past, the paradigmatic example was often a slave. In this seminal work, James Q. Whitman asserts that there is no natural form of ownership. Whitman dives deep into the long Western history of this transformation in the legal imagination – the transformation from the ownership of humans and other living creatures to the ownership of land. This change extended over many centuries, coming to fruition only on the threshold of the modern era. It brought with it profound changes, not only in the way we understand ownership but also in the way we understand the state. Its most dramatic consequence arrived in the nineteenth century, with the final disappearance of the lawful private ownership of humans, which had been taken for granted for thousands of years. James Q. Whitman is the Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale Law School. He earned his B.A. and J.D. from Yale University and Law School and also holds an M.A. in European History from Columbia University and a Ph.D. in Intellectual History from the University of Chicago. 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/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

In the mid-1930s the amateur French ethnographer and filmmaker Bernard de Colmont ventured into the mountainous state of Chiapas to study the Lacandón people and broadcast their way of life to a curious European public. Considered a “lost tribe,” the Lacandón were thought to be the closest living relatives of the ancient Maya.De Colmont became a celebrity explorer whose adventures generated considerable attention. The Lacandón themselves, however, were silenced in his tale. Nearly a century later, in In the Land of the Lacandón: A Graphic History of Adventure and Imperialism (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2025), Dr. Richard Ivan Jobs and Dr. Steven Van Wolputte have taken up this story in all its complexity, creating a graphic history from de Colmont’s narratives and images in the form of a heroic adventure comic. An essay contextualizing and historicizing the tale follows, as does an evocative, reflective poem by Tsotsil writer Manuel Bolom Pale, which offers an Indigenous perspective on the encounter. A captivating experiment in form, the book puts an immersive new spin on studying the past.In the Land of the Lacandón illuminates de Colmont’s expedition against the backdrop of late imperialism on the eve of the Second World War in Europe. It investigates the history of exploration, science, and media, revealing how these narratives represented and constructed Indigenous Peoples for the public – and how such representations continue to resonate. 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/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

A major new look at Africa’s influence on European culture and how colonization remade Africa in the image of a medieval Europe.Virgil. Chaucer. Petrarch. These names resonate with many as cornerstones of European culture. Yet, in Atlas’s Bones: The African Foundations of Europe (U Chicago Press, 2025), D. Vance Smith reveals that much of what is claimed as European culture up to the Middle Ages—its great themes in literature, its sources in political thought, its religious beliefs—originated in the writings of African thinkers like Augustine, Fulgentius, and Martianus Capella, or Europeans who thought extensively about Africa. In fact, a third of Virgil’s Aeneid takes place in Africa. Francis Petrarch believed his most important achievement was his epic Africa; while Geoffrey Chaucer wrote repeatedly about the figures of Scipio Africanus, actually two different men who defeated and destroyed Carthage.Smith tells the story of how Europe created a false “medieval” version of Africa to acquire resources and power during the era of imperialism and colonialism. The first half of the book, “Reading Africa,” traces Egypt’s, Libya’s, and Carthage’s influence on classical and medieval thinking about Africa, highlighting often ignored literary and legendary traditions, for example, that Alexander the Great named himself the son of an African god. The second part, “Writing Africa,” focuses on how the different cultures of the two great African cities—Carthage and Alexandria—shaped modern literary criticism and political theology and examines the cross-influences of modern anthropology, medieval studies, and colonial law.Atlas’s Bones firmly re-establishes the significance of Africa in European intellectual history. It will be essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how much of Africa informs our artistic and cultural world. D. Vance Smith is professor of English and former director of medieval studies at Princeton University. His many books include Arts of Dying: Literature and Finitude in Medieval England, also published by the University of Chicago Press. 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/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

In the decades before the establishment of a Jewish state in 1948, native and immigrant Jews in Palestine mediated between Jewish and Arab cultures while navigating their evolving identities as settler colonists. Hebrew Orientalism: Jewish Engagement with Arabo-Islamic Culture in Late Ottoman and British Palestine (Princeton UP, 2025) challenges the conventional view that Hebrew thinkers were dismissive of Arabo-Islamic culture, revealing how they both adopted and adapted elements of it that enhanced Zionist aims.Drawing on a wealth of sources ranging from Arabic medieval chronicles, travel narratives, and poetry to modern Hebrew geography and botany texts, Mostafa Hussein provides a nuanced understanding of Hebrew orientalism by focusing on the practical activities of Hebrew writers, such as recuperating the Jewish past in the East, constructing Jewish indigeneity, consolidating Jewish ties to Palestine’s landscape, enhancing understanding of the Hebrew Bible, reviving Hebrew language, and undertaking translation projects. Through the lens of a diverse group of Jewish intellectuals—ranging from Palestine-born Sephardi/Oriental and Ashkenazi Jews to Eastern European immigrants—he unveils the complex realities of cultural exchange and knowledge production, highlighting the dual role of these intellectuals in connecting with the East and promoting Zionist aspirations. Hussein offers fresh insights into the role of scholarly practices in advancing new perspectives on the region and its peoples and forging a modern Zionist Hebrew identity.Illuminating the intricate and often contradictory engagement of Hebrew scholars with Arabo-Islamic culture, Hebrew Orientalism informs contemporary discussions of postcolonialism and settler colonialism and enriches our understanding of the historical dynamics between Jews and Arabs in Palestine. Mostafa Hussein is assistant professor of Jewish-Muslim studies at the Jean and Samuel Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. He is the editor (with Brahim El Guabli) of Remembering Jews in Maghrebi and Middle Eastern Media. 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. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history