Books & Ideas is slowing down for the summer and will be offering weekly selections of reviews and essays published over the last year. This week’s selection focuses on China today, its uses of digital technologies to govern, and the political theories developed by its intellectuals.
With China’s regained power on the world stage, making accessible and studying the way intellectuals reflect on their country and contribute to the global conversation has become indispensable.
Should the history of intellectuals also be a history of ideas? François Dosse’s book reorients scholarship in this field by integrating ideas and high culture into the traditionally more sociologically informed history of French intellectuals.
By insisting on the need to consider philosophical works as interventions in the general, ongoing political debates of their time, Quentin Skinner has profoundly renewed the history of ideas. In this interview, he revisits the main themes of his work.
Proving his mastery of Weber’s oeuvre, Scaff’s new book considers the imprint left by various aspects of Weber’s work on the imagination and production of three generations of authors from Europe and North America. He shows that the confrontation between contemporary scholars and Weber’s legacy is a show that will run and run…
What lies beneath Putinism? Taking a look at Russia’s history and culture, Michel Eltchaninoff shows that the success of Vladimir Putin’s anti-Western rhetoric, though drawn partly from pre-Revolutionary thought, is as much the result of the post-war Soviet Union’s strong nationalist streak that continues to shape Russian society.
Intellectual history and global history have both experienced a welcome revival in recent years, but is there a way to reconcile these two (re)emerging trends? This collection of essays offers a stimulating guide for future research, as well as some salutary warnings about the limitations of a global approach.
Antoine Compagnon discusses two recent projects that throw light on the intellectual history of the 20th century. The controversies surrounding the institutionalisation of sociology or anthropology illustrate how academic subjects have developed in France; a literary anthology situates the literature of the Great War within an international context.
Books&Ideas presents a second summer selection, in which contemporary historians tell us about the future of history as a discipline, about how they research and write history, and the way history affects their bodies and minds.
The hyper-specialisation of historical studies is not inevitable. For Harvard Professor David Armitage, intellectual history urgently needs to rediscover its taste for the longue durée. Otherwise, naturalist approaches may end up dominating what we now know as Big History.
Edward Baring’s exciting reinterpretation of Derrida’s early years paints a picture of a postwar French elite that was both scintillating in its intellectual prowess and deeply parochial: it was a world in which Derrida thrived.
The recent biography of Malcolm X provides us with a compelling intellectual history of the charismatic leader. Marable’s critical reevalution of Malcolm’s biography traces his ideas back to a long history of social and religious movements within African American society.
In the early 19th century, Europe saw the emergence of “utopian socialism”. Whereas in France utopian socialism is associated with thinkers such as Henri de Saint Simon, Charles Fourier and Pierre Leroux, in Great Britain it is attached to the figure of Robert Owen (1771-1858). The essay reassesses Robert Owen’s legacy as the father of British socialism and explores the nature of his intellectual legacy on British politics.
The methodology of the historians of this volume is centred on the polysemic nature of concepts, which are read as “‘vehicles for thought’” studied in their pragmatic and communicative applications in society. Their aim is to remind historians that their toolkits are put together on the basis of choices made at different times in history.
