New Books in Intellectual History

Melinda Cooper, a Professor of Sociology at the Australian National University, delves into the paradox of neoliberal public finance in her new book. She explores how austerity is often paired with extravagant financial policies favoring asset holders. The discussion reveals the evolution of supply-side economics and its mixed impact on the working class. Additionally, Cooper critiques the Republican Party's historical ties to fiscal conservatism and examines the shifting class alliances that challenge traditional labor dynamics. It's a profound analysis of capitalism's complexities.

British poet John Milton published one of the earliest and still tremendously important defenses of free speech for our modern world. From his famous pamphlet Areopagitca (1644) to Paradise Lost (1667), Milton participated in debates regarding censorship and the right of the public to access the inner workings of Parliamentary politics. I spoke with Ruby Lowe about how today’s conception of free of speech emerged during the English Civil Wars, the intimacies between political adversaries in these debates, and how Milton’s crucial role in this media revolution informs his most seductive literary characters, including the devil, God, Adam, and Eve.Dr. Ruby Lowe is a Lecturer in the History of Ideas at Trinity College, the University of Melbourne and the John Emmerson Research Fellow at the State Library of Victoria, in Australia. Her forthcoming book is The Speech Without Doors: John Milton and the Tradition of Print Oratory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Histories of Britain composed during the "twelfth-century renaissance" display a remarkable amount of literary variety (Latin varietas). Furthermore, British historians writing after the Norman Conquest often draw attention to the differing forms of their texts. But why would historians of this period associate literary variety with the work of history-writing?Drawing on theories of literary variety found in classical and medieval rhetoric, Literary Variety and the Writing of History in Britain's Long Twelfth Century (York Medieval Press, 2023) by Dr. Jacqueline Burek traces how British writers came to believe that varietas could help them construct comprehensive, continuous accounts of Britain's past. It shows how Latin prose historians, such as William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon, and Geoffrey of Monmouth, filled their texts with a diverse array of literary forms, which they carefully selected and ordered in accordance with their broader historiographical aims. The pronounced literary variety of these influential histories inspired some Middle English verse chroniclers, including Laȝamon and Robert Mannyng, to adopt similar principles in their vernacular poetry. By uncovering the rhetorical and historiographical theories beneath their literary variety, this book provides a new framework for interpreting the stylistic and organizational choices of medieval historians.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Marcel Elias, an assistant professor at Yale and expert in medieval literature, dives into the intricacies of crusade romances in his latest work. He discusses how these narratives reveal anxieties about divine endorsement and the morality of violence. Elias explores the character of the Muslim warrior who converts, challenging Christian notions of power. He introduces 'reverse Orientalism,' depicting Muslim virtues alongside critiques of Christians. The conversation illuminates how these medieval texts express complex emotions and reflect on the crusading mindset.

Trevor Wilson, author and expert in interwar European intellectual currents, discusses his latest work on Alexandre Kojève. He delves into Kojève’s pivotal role in 20th-century philosophy and the influence of émigré culture. The conversation highlights the complexities of translating philosophical texts, touching upon the intricacies of identity within migration and the challenges posed by Kojève’s illegible handwriting. Wilson also offers a glimpse into his writing routine during the pandemic, emphasizing the supportive roles of community and service workers in academic life.

In this engaging discussion, Peter Burke, Emeritus Professor of Cultural History at the University of Cambridge, shares insights from his new book, exploring humanity's historical relationship with ignorance. He reveals how past societies viewed their own knowledge in contrast to earlier generations and discusses the complexities of ignorance in various contexts, including religion, war, and politics. Burke also highlights the often-overlooked benefits of ignorance as a driver of curiosity and scientific inquiry, urging listeners to rethink the value placed on knowledge.

'The king can do no wrong' remains one of the most fundamental yet misunderstood tenets of the common law tradition. Confusion over the phrase's historical origins and differing meanings has had serious consequences, making it easier for the state to escape liability for the harm caused to individuals by governmental officials or institutions.In The King Can Do No Wrong: Constitutional Fundamentals, Common Law History, and Crown Liability (Oxford University Press, 2024), the first dedicated monograph on the topic, Dr. Marie-France Fortin traces the historical evolution of 'the king can do no wrong' in constitutional and public law to shed new light on our current understanding of crown liability. The different meanings conveyed by the phrase in the common law world are clarified; the contradictions between them revealed. Adopting a historical constitutional approach, the book delves deep into traditional legal sources to develop an intellectual history of this key legal idea. It explains the mutation from 'the king can do no wrong' to 'the crown can do no wrong' at the end of the nineteenth century, analyzing the resulting departure from core tenets of the constitutional arrangement of the seventeenth century. The study of the evolution of 'the king can do no wrong' in English legal thinking, mirrored in Canada, is complemented by a comparative analysis of the idea in Australia, Ireland, and the United States, where its relationship with the concept of sovereign immunity is scrutinized.Retracing the evolution of the king can do no wrong in legal thinking, this book enhances academics', students', practitioners', and judges' understanding of the law of governmental liability in the common law world.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

The academic field of international relations presents its own history as largely a project of elite white men. And yet women played a prominent role in the creation of this new cross-disciplinary field. In Erased: A History of International Thought Without Men (Princeton University Press, 2025), Professor Patricia Owens shows that, since its beginnings in the early twentieth century, international relations relied on the intellectual labour of women and their expertise on such subjects as empire and colonial administration, anticolonial organising, non-Western powers, and international organisations. Indeed, women were among the leading international thinkers of the era, shaping the development of the field as scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals—and as heterosexual spouses and intimate same-sex partners.Drawing on a wide range of archival sources, and weaving together personal, institutional, and intellectual narratives, Dr. Owens documents key moments and locations in the effort to forge international relations as a separate academic discipline in Britain. She finds that women’s ideas and influence were first marginalised and later devalued, ignored, and erased. Examining the roles played by some of the most important women thinkers in the field, including Margery Perham, Merze Tate, Eileen Power, Margaret Cleeve, Coral Bell, and Susan Strange, Dr. Owens traces the intellectual and institutional legacies of misogyny and racism. She argues that the creation of international relations was a highly gendered and racialised project that failed to understand plurality on a worldwide scale. Acknowledging this intellectual failure, and recovering the history of women in the field, points to possible sources for its renewal.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Ada Palmer joins Jana Byars to talk about her new book, Inventing the Renaissance (U Chicago Press, 2025) and the ways history is written and used. From the darkness of a plagued and war-torn Middle Ages, the Renaissance (we’re told) heralds the dawning of a new world—a halcyon age of art, prosperity, and rebirth. Hogwash! or so says award-winning novelist and historian Ada Palmer. In Inventing the Renaissance, Palmer turns her witty and irreverent eye on the fantasies we’ve told ourselves about Europe’s not-so-golden age, myths she sets right with sharp clarity.Palmer’s Renaissance is altogether desperate. Troubled by centuries of conflict, she argues, Europe looked to a long-lost Roman Empire (even its education practices) to save them from unending war. Later historians met their own political challenges with a similarly nostalgic vision, only now they looked to the Renaissance and told a partial story. To right this wrong, Palmer offers fifteen provocative portraits of Renaissance men and women (some famous, some obscure) whose lives reveal a far more diverse, fragile, and wild Renaissance than its glowing reputation suggests. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

In November 1839, a group of young women in Boston formed a conversation society "to answer the great questions" of special importance to women: "What are we born to do? How shall we do it?" The lives and works of the five women who discussed these questions are at the center of Bright Circle, a group biography of remarkable thinkers and artists who played pathbreaking roles in the transcendentalist movement.Transcendentalism remains the most important literary and philosophical movement to have originated in the United States. Most accounts of it, however, trace its emergence to a group of young intellectuals (primarily Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau) dissatisfied with their religious, literary, and social culture. Yet there is a forgotten history of transcendentalism--a submerged counternarrative--that features a network of fiercely intelligent women who were central to the development of the movement even as they found themselves silenced by their culturally-assigned roles as women.Bright Circle: Five Remarkable Women in the Age of Transcendentalism (Oxford UP, 2024) is intended to reorient our understanding of transcendentalism: to help us see the movement as a far more collaborative and interactive project between women and men than is commonly understood. It recounts the lives of Mary Moody Emerson, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, Lydia Jackson Emerson, and Margaret Fuller as they developed crucial ideas about the self, nature, and feeling even as they pushed their male counterparts to consider the rights of enslaved people of color and women.Many ideas once considered original to Emerson and Thoreau are shown to have originated with women who had little opportunity of publicly expressing them. Together, the five women of Bright Circle helped form the foundations of American feminism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history