New Books in Intellectual History

Karl Marx in America (University of Chicago Press, 2025), by Andrew Hartman To read Karl Marx is to contemplate a world created by capitalism. People have long viewed the United States as the quintessential anti-Marxist nation, but Marx’s ideas have inspired a wide range of people to formulate a more precise sense of the stakes of the American project. Historians have highlighted the imprint made on the United States by Enlightenment thinkers such as Adam Smith, John Locke, and Thomas Paine, but Marx is rarely considered alongside these figures. Yet his ideas are the most relevant today because of capitalism’s centrality to American life.In  historian Andrew Hartman argues that even though Karl Marx never visited America, the country has been infused, shaped, and transformed by him. Since the beginning of the Civil War, Marx has been a specter in the American machine. During the Gilded Age, socialists read Marx as an antidote to the unchecked power of corporations. In the Great Depression, communists turned to Marx in hopes of transcending the destructive capitalist economy. The young activists of the 1960s were inspired by Marx as they gathered to protest an overseas war. Marx’s influence today is evident, too, as Americans have become increasingly attuned to issues of inequality, labor, and power.After decades of being pushed to the far-left corner of intellectual thought, Marx’s ideologies have crossed over into the mainstream and are more alive than ever. Working-class consciousness is on the rise, and, as Marx argued, the future of a capitalist society rests in the hands of the people who work at the point of production. A valuable resource for anyone interested in Marx’s influence on American political discourse, Karl Marx in America is a thought-provoking account of the past, present, and future of his philosophies in American society. Andrew Hartman is professor of history at Illinois State University. He is the author of A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars, published by the University of Chicago Press, and Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School. He is also the coeditor of American Labyrinth: Intellectual History for Complicated Times. 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

John recently published “Lying in Politics: Hannah Arendt’s Antidote to Anticipatory Despair" in Public Books. It makes the case against anticipatory despair in the face of the Trump administration's relentless campaign of lies, half-lies, bluster, and bullshit by turning for inspiration to his favorite political philosopher, Hannah Arendt. Half a century ago, in "Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers" (1971) she showed how expedient occasional lies spread to become omnipresent--not just in how America's campaigns in Vietnam were reported, but throughout Nixon-era governance. Recall this Book 153 is simply John reading the article aloud. It is an experiment (akin to Books in Dark Times and Recall This Story and Recall This B-Side) in soliloquy. Reach out and let us know if you think it should be the first of many, or simply a one-off. Mentioned in the episode: M. Gessen, Surviving Autocracy Harry Frankfurt, "On Bullshit" Vaclav Havel, "The Power of the Powerless" (1978) 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 Anthem Companion to Karl Jaspers (Anthem Press, 2025) edited by Hans Joas and Matthias Bormuth is a collection of articles by an international group of leading experts has its special focus on the relevance of Karl Jaspers’s philosophy for the social sciences. It also includes classical evaluations of Jaspers’s thinking by renowned authors Talcott Parsons and Jürgen Habermas. Several chapters are devoted to the relationship between Jaspers and his teacher (Max Weber), his famous student (Hannah Arendt) and crucial figures in his intellectual world (Wilhelm Dilthey, Georg Simmel). Others deal with his relevance for disciplines from psychiatry to the study of religion and the historico-sociological research about the Axial Age, a term coined by Jaspers. In his introduction, editor Hans Joas tries to systematise Jaspers’s relevance for the contemporary social sciences and to explain why Parsons had called him a ‘social scientist’s philosopher’. The contributions to this volume deal, on one hand, with thematic areas for which Jaspers’s work has been crucial: the Axial Age debate, a non-theological and non-reductive theory of religion; the understanding of psychoanalysis and psychiatry; and the possibilities of a diagnosis of one’s own age. On the other hand, they put Jaspers in contrast with Max Weber, Wilhelm Dilthey, Georg Simmel and Hannah Arendt. The volume also contains important chapters by Talcott Parsons, who called Jaspers ‘a social scientist’s philosopher’, and by Jürgen Habermas, who contrasts his own views on the role of communicative ethics in an age of religious pluralism with those of Jaspers. The book promises to become an indispensable source in the re-evaluation of Jaspers’s thinking in the years to come.Hans Joas is the Ernst Troeltsch Professor for the Sociology of Religion at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Matthias Bormuth is Professor for Comparative Intellectual History at the University of Oldenburg and is also the Director of the Karl Jaspers Haus.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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

For centuries, Jewish thinkers have asked two parallel questions. First, what is the reasoning behind an individual commandment and second, why bother heeding a command at all, something Dr. Brafman terms “reasons for” vs “reasons of” the commandments. In his newest book, Critique of Halakhic Reason: Divine Commandments and Social Normativity (Oxford UP, 2024), Dr. Brafman looks closely at the second of these questions. After considering answers from some of the most important Jewish thinkers of the 20th century, Joseph Soloveitchik, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, and Eliezer Berkovits, Dr. Brafman introduces his own system of thought. For him, the reasons for the commandments depend on a number of factors. We don’t follow them blindly. And they don’t always have to adhere to perfect and pure reason. Instead they are, to use a term he employs throughout is book, “constructed” based on any number of factors including our relationship with God and the norms that exist within our society. In conversation with some of the most important secular legal theorist and philosophers of the past 100 years, Dr Brafman charts a new course in Jewish theology, both defending and reimagining the place of our obligation to halakhah, Jewish law, for the 21st century. Professor Yonatan Brafman is Associate Professor of Modern Judaism in the Department of Religion, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Literary and Cultural Studies at Tufts University. Rabbi Marc Katz is the Senior Rabbi at Temple Ner Tamid in Bloomfield, NJ. He is most recently the author of Yochanan’s Gamble: Judaism’s Pragmatic Approach to Life (JPS) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Edward Said was one of the most influential intellectuals of the twentieth century. A literary scholar with an aesthete’s temperament, he did not experience his political awakening until the 1967 Arab–Israeli war, which transformed his thinking and led him to forge ties with political groups and like-minded scholars. Said’s subsequent writings, which cast light on the interplay between cultural representation and the exercise of Western political power, caused a seismic shift in scholarly circles and beyond. In this intimate intellectual biography, by a close friend and confidant, Nubar Hovsepian offers fascinating insight into the evolution of Said’s political thought. Through analysis of Said’s seminal works and the debates surrounding them, Edward Said: The Politics of an Oppositional Intellectual (American University in Cairo Press, 2025) traces the influence of Foucault on Said, and how Said eventually diverged from this influence to arrive at a more pronounced understanding of agency, resistance, and liberation. He consequently affiliated more closely with Raymond Williams, Antonio Gramsci, and more contemporaneously, with his friends the late Eqbal Ahmad and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod. Said held that it is the intellectual’s responsibility to expose lies and deceptions of the holders of power. A passionate advocate for the Palestinian cause, his solidarity did not prevent him from launching a sustained critique of the Palestinian leadership. Hovsepian charts both Said’s engagement with the Palestinian national movement and his exchanges with a host of intellectuals over Palestine, arguing that Said’s interventions have succeeded in changing the parameters of the discourse in the humanities, and among younger Jews searching for political affiliation. Drawing on his diaries, in which he recorded his meetings with Said, as well as access to some of Said’s private letters, Hovsepian illuminates, in rich detail, the trajectory of Said’s political thinking and the depth and breadth of his engagement with peers and critics over issues that continue to resonate to this day. Nubar Hovsepian is associate professor emeritus of political science at Chapman University in Orange, California. He is the author of Palestinian State Formation: Education and the Construction of National Identity, and he edited and contributed to The War on Lebanon. Hovsepian has devoted enormous time to the Israel/Palestine conflict, and served, from 1982 to 1984, as political affairs officer for the United Nations Conference on the Question of Palestine. Tugrul Mende holds an M.A in Arabic Studies. He is based in Berlin as a project coordinator and independent researcher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

An exploration of the mind of one of America's most beloved Founding Fathers and most brilliant minds, through the books he read and his social circles in the United States and Europe. Arguably the most intellectual, creative, cosmopolitan, and curious of the Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin is the only top-tier Founder not to have served as president. Despite not becoming the Chief Executive, Franklin played an active role in American politics and served the aspiring and young United States in the key European capitals. His prodigious reading and appetite for learning are epic. As he did in works about Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, Kevin J. Hayes interprets the life and mind of Franklin through what he read.  Undaunted Mind: The Intellectual Life of Benjamin Franklin (Oxford University Press, 2025) tells the story of the development of Franklin's intellect, starting with the earliest books he read as a child before examining his formal schooling and his independent study after his father pulled him from school. As an apprentice in his brother's printing house, Franklin's intellectual life developed through his contact with the Couranteers, the group of his brother's friends who contributed to his newspaper, and through his attention to his brother's excellent office library. After Franklin ran away to Philadelphia, he developed a new group of friends, all of whom loved reading. In many ways, the story of Franklin's intellectual odyssey is the story of the friends he made along the way. His time in London in his late teens introduced him to several important intellectuals who encouraged him to develop his mind.  After returning to Philadelphia from London, he and some friends formed the Junto, a club for mutual improvement that made reading and writing important activities. With other members of the Junto, he formed the Library Company of Philadelphia, the first subscription library in colonial America. His role as a printer put him in contact with the best eighteenth-century American writing and kept a steady flow of imported books coming from Britain. He became a scientist, assembling a great scientific library, which helped his electrical research. An educational reformer, Franklin founded the Philadelphia Academy, which would become the University of Pennsylvania. As agent for the Pennsylvania Assembly, Franklin lived in London for many years, where he befriended some of Britain's greatest minds. Different concentrations of books in his library reveal Franklin's interests in travel and exploration, warfare, and slavery. His time in Paris toward the end of his life gave Franklin another great intellectual experience, but he ultimately returned home to live the last five years of his life in Philadelphia, where he imparted his knowledge and experience to a new generation of Americans. In this gripping work, Benjamin Franklin is given a biography as rich and complex as his own intellectual life by master literary historian Kevin J. Hayes. Kevin J. Hayes is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Central Oklahoma. Caleb Zakarin is editor 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

Today I’m speaking with Bernd Roeck about his book, The World at First Light: A New History of the Renaissance (Princeton University Press, 2025). Bernd is professor of modern history at the University of Zurich and director of the German Centre for Venetian Studies in Venice. Translated by Patrick Baker, The World at First Light is a truly magisterial work. Much ink and paint has been spilled illuminating and interpreting the cultural flourishing known as Europe’s rebirth. The Renaissance was chiefly marked by a revival in classical literature and philosophy, artistic and scientific innovations embodied by polymaths like Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo Galilei, and William Shakespeare. In exploring this historical period, Bernd offers the most authoritative and up-to-date treatment of the Renaissance. Caleb Zakarin is editor 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 Bookish Words & their Surprising Stories (Bodleian, 2025) by Dr. David Crystal, explore how books have played a pivotal role in the history of English vocabulary. The noun itself is one of the oldest words in the language, originating from boc in Old English, and appears in many commonly used expressions today – by the book, bring to book and bookworm – to name a few. Alongside the arrival of the printing press came the development of the newspaper industry. Terminology such as stop the press, front page news and hit the headlines have developed into common English vernacular over time. Still, the emergence of the internet continues to change all languages. This anthology presents a selection of more than 100 words which show the influence of writing, reading and publishing books on our everyday vocabulary over the centuries, telling the stories behind their linguistic origins, and uncovering some surprising twists in the development of their meaning through time. 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

Independent Africa: The First Generation of Nation Builders (Indiana UP, 2023)explores Africa's political economy in the first two full decades of independence through the joint projects of nation-building, economic development, and international relations. Drawing on the political careers of four heads of states: Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Ahmed Sékou Touré of Guinea, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Julius Kambarage Nyerere of Tanzania, Independent Africa engages four major themes: what does it mean to construct an African nation-state and what should an African nation-state look like; how does one grow a tropical economy emerging from European colonialism; how to explore an indigenous model of economic development, a "third way," in the context of a Cold War that had divided the world into two camps; and how to leverage internal resources and external opportunities to diversify agricultural economies and industrialize. Combining aspects of history, economics, and political science, Independent Africa examines the important connections between the first generation of African leaders and the shared ideas that informed their endeavors at nation-building and worldmaking. Professor Akyeampong is the former Oppenheimer Faculty Director of the Harvard University Center for African Studies and the Ellen Gurney Professor of History and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He joined the History faculty at Harvard upon receiving his Ph.D. in African History from the University of Virginia in 1993. He received his master's degree at Wake Forest University in North Carolina in 1989, where he concentrated on English labor history, and his bachelor's degree in History and Religions from the University of Ghana at Legon in 1984. Professor Akyeampong is currently the Ellen Gurney Professor of Professor Akyeampong's publications include Themes in West Africa's History (2005), which he edited; Independent Africa: The First Generation of Nation Builders (2023); Between the Sea and the Lagoon: An Eco-Social History of the Anlo of Southeastern Ghana, 1850 to Recent Times (2001); and Drink, Power and Cultural Change: A Social History of Alcohol in Ghana, c. 1800 to Present Times (1996). He was a co-chief editor with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., for the Dictionary of African Biography, 6 Vols. (2012). Professor Akyeampong has been awarded several research fellowships, and from 1993 to 1994, he was the Zora Neale Hurston Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study and Research in the African Humanities at Northwestern University. He was named a Corresponding Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2002, and was nominated to be a Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2018 he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws by the University of Ghana. At Harvard, Professor Akyeampong is a faculty associate for the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and a member of the executive committee of the Hutchins Center. As a former chair of the Committee on African Studies, he has been instrumental, along with Professor Gates, in creating the Department of African and African American Studies and formerly served as the Oppenheimer Faculty Director of the Center for African Studies. You can learn more about Professor Akyeampong’s work here Afua Baafi Quarshie is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on mothering and childhood in post-independence Ghana. 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 Unseen History of International Law (Oxford University Press, 2025) locates and describes almost one thousand surviving copies of the first nine editions of Hugo Grotius' De iure belli ac pacis (IBP) published between 1625 and 1650. Meticulously reconstructing the publishing history of these first nine editions and cataloguing copies across hundreds of collections, The Unseen History provides fundamental data for reconstructing the impact of IBP across time and space. The authors, Dr. Mark Somos, Dr. Matthew Cleary, Dr. Pablo Dufour, Dr. Edward Jones Corredera, and Dr. Emanuele Salerno, also examined annotations that thousands of owners and readers have left in IBP copies over four centuries, offering original insights into the development of international law.Grotius' De iure belli ac pacis has been commonly regarded as the foundation of modern international law since its first appearance in 1625. Most major international law scholars have engaged with IBP, often owning and richly annotating their own copies. At key moments - including the demise of the Holy Roman Empire, the fall of Napoleon, and the end of both world wars - IBP was reissued with new commentaries by multinational projects devoted to restarting the international order. Despite the enormous literature on IBP's reception and influence, we cannot fully understand its impact without uncovering the history of IBP as a physical object, with hundreds of thousands of unpublished annotations arguing or agreeing with the text, updating and adapting its contents.Approaching Grotius' seminal work as a physical vehicle of the author's, the publishers', owners', and readers' engagement, The Unseen History radically expands and revises our understanding not only of IBP, but also of the academic discipline and lived practice of modern international law over the last four centuries. In addition to delving into the first nine editions' printing history, descriptive bibliography, and both Grotius' and the publishers' marketing and donation strategies, the book explores Grotius' subsequent impact on pro-slavery and abolitionist litigation as a case study of how the census' original findings can be applied to specific areas of reception. 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/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history