New Books in Intellectual History
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field.
Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com
Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/
Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork
3301
Matthew Stanley, “Huxley’s Church and Maxwell’s...
“Show me how it doos.” Such were the words of a young James Clerk “Dafty” Maxwell (1831-79), an inquisitive child prone to punning who grew into a renowned physicist known for his work on electromagnetism. After learning to juggle and conducting experi...
66 min
3302
Martin Shuster, “Autonomy after Auschwitz: Ador...
The work of Theodore Adorno is well established as a crucial resource for understanding the complexities of contemporary capitalism, playing a foundational role in Critical Theory. Dialectic of Enlightenment,
45 min
3303
Sean Forner, “German Intellectuals and the Chal...
The Federal Republic of Germany is often held up today as one of the world’s great democracies, where the commitment to such ideals as transparency, careful deliberation, social and political equality, a vibrant public sphere,
77 min
3304
Erik C. Banks, “The Realistic Empiricism of Mac...
The Austrian physicist Ernst Mach, the American psychologist William James, and the British philosopher Bertrand Russell shared an interest in explaining the mind in naturalistic terms – unified with the rest of nature,
67 min
3305
Matthew A. Sutton, “American Apocalypse: A Hist...
Matthew Avery Sutton is the author of three books: Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America (2007), Jerry Falwell and the Rise of the Religious Right: A Brief History with Documents (2012), and, most recently,
60 min
3306
Todd H. Weir, “Secularism and Religion in Ninet...
If you look up the word “secular” in just about about any English-language dictionary, you’ll find that the word denotes, among other things, something that is not religious. This “not-religious-ness” would seem to be the modern essence of the word.
63 min
3307
Edward Ross Dickinson, “Sex, Freedom and Power ...
In this interview with historian Edward Ross Dickinson we talk about sex. Well, actually we talk about the talk about sex. Since Michel Foucault’s epochal work History of Sexuality (1976) how moderns talked about sex has been a central concern of cultu...
73 min
3308
William J. Turkel, “Spark from the Deep” (Johns...
“In a sense, all life consists of the colonization of an electric world. But to see that, we have to go back to the very beginning.” William J. Turkel‘s new book traces the emergence and inhabiting of an electric world through the span of human history...
67 min
3309
Steven Conn, “Americans Against the City: Anti-...
Americans have a paradoxical relationship with cities, Steven Conn argues in his new book,Americans Against the City: Anti-Urbanism in the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2014). Nearly three-quarters of the population lives near an urban ce...
55 min
3310
Mike O’Connor, “A Commercial Republic: America’...
Mike O’Connor is the author of A Commercial Republic: America’s Enduring Debate over Democratic Capitalism (University Press of Kansas 2014). He has also published articles in Contemporary Pragmatism and The Sixties.
16 min
3311
John Tresch, “The Romantic Machine: Utopian Sci...
After the Second World War, the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs described National Socialism as a triumph of irrationalism and a “destruction of reason.” It has since become commonplace to interpret modern European intellectual history as a prolonged st...
71 min
3312
Ajay K. Mehrotra, “Making the Modern American F...
Prior to the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment, the United States did not have a national system of taxation–it had a regional system, a system linked to political parties, and a system that, in many instances, preserved and protected trade.
37 min
3313
Mariam al-Attar, “Islamic Ethics: Divine Comman...
Mariam al-Attar, Islamic Ethics: Divine Command Theory in Arabo-Islamic Thought (Routledge, 2010) explores the meaning, origin and development of “Divine Command Theory” in Islamic thought. In the process,
47 min
3314
Iqbal Sevea, “The Political Philosophy of Muham...
The towering Indian Muslim poet and intellectual Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938) is among the most contested figures in the intellectual and political history of modern Islam. Heralded by some as the father of Pakistan and by others as a champion of pan-Islam...
54 min
3315
Mary-Jane Rubenstein, "Worlds Without End: The ...
An interview with Mary-Jane Rubenstein
59 min
3316
Anson Rabinbach and Sander Gilman, “The Third R...
Primary source readers represent an unusual historical genre. Unlike editions, their aim is not to enable the reader to hear, as clearly as possible, the voice of a single historical personage or institution.
52 min
3317
Richard Starr, “Equal As Citizens: The Tumultuo...
“We are not half a dozen provinces. We are one great Dominion,” Canada’s first Prime Minister, John A. Macdonald proudly declared. More than a century later, Canada has 10 provinces and three northern territories making it one of the biggest and riches...
55 min
3318
John Tresch, “The Romantic Machine: Utopian Sci...
John Tresch‘s beautiful new book charts a series of transformations that collectively ushered in a new cosmology in the Paris of the early-mid nineteenth century. The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon (University of Chicag...
71 min
3319
John Protevi, “Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and th...
Right now, humanists across very different disciplinary fields are trying to create the kinds of cross-disciplinary conversations that might open up new ways to conceptualize and ask questions of our objects of study.
66 min
3320
Ovamir Anjum, “Politics, Law, and Community in ...
In Politics, Law, and Community in Islamic Thought: The Taymiyyan Moment (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Ovamir Anjum explores a timely topic, even though his focus is hundreds of years in the past. In order to present his topic Professor Anjum ask...
66 min
3321
David B. Dennis, “Inhumanities: Nazi Interpreta...
I occasionally teach Western Civilization and you may have taken it in college. We all know the drill: Greeks-Romans-Dark Ages-Middle Ages-Renaissance-Reformation-Scientific Revolution-Enlightenment-Romanticism-Modernity. Or something like that.
53 min
3322
David N. Livingstone, “Dealing with Darwin: Pla...
David N. Livingstone‘s new book traces the processes by which communities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that shared the same Scottish Calvinist heritage engaged with Darwin and Darwinians in different local contexts.
72 min
3323
Bruce Ackerman, “We the People, Volume 3: The C...
Bruce Ackerman is the Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University. His book, We the People, Volume 3: The Civil Rights Revolution (Harvard UP, 2013) fills out the constitutional history of America’s “Second Reconstruction” period...
63 min
3324
Adam Phillips, “Becoming Freud: The Making of a...
For those who are savvy about all things psychoanalytic, be they analysts, analysands, or fellow travelers, the existence, presence, work, writing, and imprimatur of Adam Phillips is given long, as opposed to short, shrift.
52 min
3325
Ari Joskowicz, “The Modernity of Others: Jewish...
In 1873, the German scientist Rudolf Virchow declared in Parliament that liberals were locked in a Kulturkampf, a “culture war” with the forces of Catholicism, which he viewed as the chief hindrance to progress and modernity.
76 min