Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) was one of the foremost European intellectuals of the twentieth century. He published hundreds of articles on modern history and culture, and his books became canonical works and bestsellers on both sides of the Atlantic. His crystal-clear writing, vast erudition, and ability to make his Marxist analysis digestible to a wide audience brought him worldwide renown.
Yet Hobsbawm was no academic hermit. Through his globetrotting journalism, he was embedded in an extraordinary web of politicians, activists, and fellow intellectuals across Europe, South Asia, and the Americas, including Manmohan Singh, Che Guevara, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Fernand Braudel, E. P. Thompson, Arno Mayer, and Salvador Allende. Emile Chabal traces the origins of Hobsbawm’s ideas and most famous writings by exploring his scholarly foundations, delving deep into the archives to uncover hidden links and unexpected conversations that shaped his pathbreaking work.
Going well beyond the Ages series of modern history books for which Hobsbawm is best known, Chabal offers the first substantial interpretation of Hobsbawm’s entire body of writing. Indeed, The Age of Hobsbawm is also a trove of unique insights into the generations of Marxist writers with whom Hobsbawm was in conversation—authors whose work continues to shape political debates globally.
This timely book provides a foundational overview of the governance and geopolitics of the Arctic, an area which has moved from the margins of world politics to a region of global relevance. Identifying the main trends and drivers shaping Arctic politics, the authors move beyond a simplified portrayal to bridge regional and global dynamics and offer a nuanced understanding of what is happening in the region.
Evaluating key tensions, complexities and relationships, Iselin Németh Winther and Andreas Østhagen analyse the subregions, resources, disputes, partnerships and actors that shape cooperation and competition in Arctic politics. They also look to the future with scenario-based explorations that emphasise the need for specificity, critical analysis and a multifaceted approach to studying this increasingly contested region.
This book is a crucial resource for students and scholars of Arctic studies, international relations, geopolitics, political science and international law. It is also prime reading for policy analysts, legal practitioners and historians seeking a deeper understanding of the factors that are driving Arctic politics.
A few years ago, after one of the presentations I’d given on reconstructing Émile Benveniste’s movements during the Second World War through various archives, one audience member said to another: “If I ever go missing, I want Stuart leading the search”.
I think this is the main reason I like Carlo Ginzburg’s work, despite the differences in subject matter and sometimes in approach – Ginzburg is explicit that the historian works as a detective. Ginzburg died in June 2026, and I collected some of the many tributes to him in a previous post on this site. Here, I want to say a little about his work, with a focus on one of his essays.
A photograph of most of Carlo Ginzburg’s books in English translation
One of his most famous collections is entitled Miti emblemi spie: Morfologia e storia, translated as Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method. One of its chapters is “Clues”. This is a different translation of a text which had previously appeared in English, including in a collection edited by Umberto Eco and Thomas Sebeok, The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Pierce. In The Sign of Three the piece is entitled “Clues: Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes”; in Ginzburg’s essay collection, “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm”.
As the title suggests, Ginzburg argues that Freud’s work in psychoanalysis and the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes share a similar approach to the art historian Giovanni Morelli. A series of articles were published in German by Ivan Lermolieff, a Russian art critic supposedly translated by Johannes Schwarze. Both Lermolieff and Schwarze were previously unknown, and Morelli later revealed his real identity (Morelli means dark or black, so Schwarze was a semi-translation; Lermolieff is an anagram of Morelli with a Russian suffix.) Morelli developed an approach to identifying paintings by looking at small details in them, less likely to be imitated by others – those of the same school, copyists or forgers. These might include the style of an ear, nails, fingers or toes in a secondary figure, for example. In contrast to the more central and obvious elements, these are stylistic fingerprints for an artist, helping to identify the person responsible. There are parallels to diagnosis in medicine, looking at various symptoms in relation to each other, and this makes sense, since Morelli was a physician by training. The ‘Morellian method’ was discussed by Ginzburg as akin to the work of a detective: “each discovering, from clues unnoticed by others, the author in one case of a crime, in the other of a painting” (“Clues: Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes”, p. 82). Or, as it reads in the other translation: “The art connoisseur resembles the detective who discovers the perpetrator of a crime (or the artist behind a painting) on the basis of evidence that is imperceptible to most people” (“Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm” pp. 88-89).
The parallels to Sherlock Holmes are therefore obvious, and Ginzburg says they were previously discussed by Enrico Castelnuovo. Ginzburg provides some examples, including a case where Holmes compared two severed ears with those of an old lady, indicating peculiarities and parallels, and identifying the victim and old lady were related. As Ginzburg says: “There are countless examples of Holmes’s shrewdness in discovering clues by means of footprints, cigarette ashes, and the like” (“Clues”, p. 82/89).
Freud is explicit about his debt to Morelli in his essay “The Moses of Michelangelo”. He discusses his reading of ‘Lermolieff’, and the discovery this was actually Morelli. He says that Morelli insisted “that attention should be diverted from the general impression and main features of a picture, and by laying stress on the significance of minor details, of things like the drawing of the fingernails, of the lobe of an ear, of halos and such unconsidered trifles which the copyist neglects to imitate and yet which every artist executes in his own characteristic way” (p. 265). Freud spends most of this essay putting this to work in the same register of art criticism, but importantly he says that Morelli’s “method of inquiry is closely related to the technique of psychoanalysis. It, too, is accustomed to divine secret and concealed things from despised or unnoticed features, from the rubbish-heap, as it were, of our observations” (p. 265). This is not claiming that psychoanalysis anticipated this approach to art-criticism, but the reverse, opening this section of his text with the claim that he discovered ‘Lermolieff’, who published his first essays between 1874 and 1876, “long before I had any opportunity of hearing about psychoanalysis” (p. 265). Ginzburg notes that this essay by Freud was also first published anonymously, perhaps in tribute to Morelli, before being acknowledged in his collected works.
The whole essay by Ginzburg is well worth reading or re-reading. Among other themes, Ginzburg identifies when Freud might have been introduced to Morelli’s work, and traces all three approaches of Freud, Morelli and Arthur Conan Doyle to medicine: “In each of these cases the model of medical semiotics is evident: that discipline which permits the diagnosis of diseases inaccessible to direct observation based on superficial symptoms, sometimes thought to be irrelevant in the eyes of the layman” (“Clues”, p. 87/92). He notes that there are connections between each of the pairings in the group Morelli, Holmes, Freud, and that Freud expressed interest in the stories of Holmes, and that Steven Marcus had already discussed the relation. “In each case, infinitesimal traces permit the comprehension of a deeper, otherwise unattainable reality: traces—more precisely, symptoms (in the case of Freud), clues (in the case of Sherlock Holmes), pictorial marks (in the case of Morelli)” (p. 87/92). Ginzburg then traces the roots of this “evidentiary paradigm” much further back historically.
The Sign of Three has a note that the original text was published in Italian in 1979 in a collection edited by Aldo Gargani, Crisi della ragione (The Sign of Three, p. 111 n. 1). The English version in the Eco and Sebeok collection had originally been published in the History Workshop Journal in 1980. There it is noted as being translated by Anna Davin (no translator is indicated in The Sign of Three, but it’s the same version). She notes that “the first sections, however, owe a great deal to Susanna Graham-Jones’s translation of an earlier, shorter version of the article, which she kindly made available” (p. 5 n. *). I don’t know if that earlier translation is available anywhere.
In Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method the first publication is noted as the Gargani collection, and its English versions in History Workshop Journal and the Eco and Sebeok reprint (Italian p. xvii/p. xxiii). The Italian note also indicates some translations in other languages. Unmentioned there is that an earlier, much shorter version of the text had appeared in Italian in 1978 in Rivista di storia contemporanea and was translated in 1979 in Theory and Society, “Clues: Roots of a Scientific Paradigm”. There, a note says that:
This is a draft of an on-going research, a first version of which was discussed at Bellagio, in June 1977, during a conference on “Humanities and Social Thought,” sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation. I am very grateful to all participants for their criticisms and suggestions, and to my translator, Marta Sofri Innocenti (Italian, p. 1 [without the final clause]; English, p. 288).
This text was expanded in 1979 for an article in the Ombre Rosse journal, which was the version reprinted in the Gargani collection. But the Ombre Rosse version has a note on its first page:
I present here an expanded (but still far from definitive) version of a research study that has already appeared elsewhere in a somewhat different form (see Rivista di storia contemporanea 7, 1978, 1-14; De Gids 2, 1978, 67-78).
The essay is part of a miscellaneous volume, soon to be published by Einaudi, entitled Crisi della ragione, edited by A.G. Gargani. The reader is referred to this volume for the notes, which are necessarily much reduced here (p. 80).
The version in De Gids was a Dutch translation of the original Italian text. The first English translation, of the 1978 article, was made by Innocenti. It’s not clear to me whether the translation mentioned by Davin by Graham-Jones is a different translation of the 1978 article, or another different version.
There are a few differences between the later versions, but essentially there are three distinct texts – the 1978 version, the 1979 expansion in Ombre Rosse, and the one with the additional notes in Crisi della ragione, which is reprinted in Miti emblemi spie. The third of these is the version translated in History Workshop Journal, with a differenttranslation in Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method. Davin made the original English translation, but the translators of Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, John and Anne C. Tedeschi, made a fresh one, though they reference the original in their Translators’ note (p. xxi). John and Anne Tedeschi also translated some of Ginzburg’s other books, including The Cheese and the Worms and The Night Battles.
This means there are several different versions of the text in Italian and English.
Rivista di storia contemporanea, 1978; with a Dutch translation in 1978 (Susanna Graham-Jones’s translation of an earlier, shorter version of the article – a version of 1?)
Theory & Society translation of 1, 1979
Expanded version in Ombre Rosse, 1979
Italian chapter in Crisi della ragione, 1979; a version of 3, but with additional notes
History Workshop translation of 4, 1980
Reprint of 5 in Eco & Sebeok eds. The Sign of Three, with minor changes, 1983
Reprint of 4 in Miti emblemi spie, 1986
English translation of 7 in Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, 1989, repaginated edition in 2013
The original title is “Spie: Radici di un paradigma indizario” (1), translated as “Clues: Roots of a Scientific Paradigm” (2). The expanded versions in Ombre Rosse (3) and the Gargani collection (4) have the same Italian title. This is retitled “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method” in the translation for History Workshop Journal (5), which is the same title it has in The Sign of Three (6). The reprint reverts to “Spie: Radici di un paradigma indizario” (7); the later translation “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm” (8). The Dutch title, interestingly, was “Tekens en symptomen: Morelli, Freud en Conan Doyle”, so in the subtitle it highlights the three figures which was not done until later versions in English, and not at all in Italian. (And instead of Holmes it is his creator.) The Dutch title would be close to “Signs and Symptoms” which plays on the semiological and medical notions.
What kind of paradigm? Ginzburg seems to alternate between an “paradigma indizario” or “indicative paradigm” (1, 2, 3, 4), “scientific method” (5, 6), before reverting to “indicative paradigm” or “evidentiary paradigm” as the Tedeschi translate it (7, 8).
The Italian collection of Ginzburg’s essays has the title Miti emblemi spie: Morfologia e storia which would translate literally as something closer to ‘Myths, emblems, clues: Morphology and history”. The French title is Mythes, emblèmes, traces. Morphologie et histoire, which is more literal than the English. Spie is an interesting term here – ‘clues’ is preferred in English, ‘traces’ in French, but it is also ‘spies’, though with a sense of symbols or signs. Ginzburg acknowledges this in the preface to the 2013 English edition of Clues, Myths and the Historical Method: “The Italian term, intentionally ambiguous, alluded to clues as well as to espionage”. He said that the book took its title from this essay, “the central essay in the collection” for two reasons, “from the start, ‘Clues’ was the essay most read and discussed, and, while serving to justify my prior works (including those presented here), it also profoundly shaped those that followed it without my being aware of it” (p. vii).
In the version in the Eco and Sebeok collection there is a note that “the author hopes to publish a revised and enlarged version in the near future” (p. 111 n. 1). This does not appear in the Miti emblemi spie version or the Clues, Myths and the Historical Method translation. The Eco and Sebeok chapter though was already a translation of the revised and enlarged version of the text.
While the version in Miti emblemi spie and the translation in Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method can be seen as definitive – or, at least, the version which Ginzburg does not appear to have further reworked – the history of the text is, I think, interesting for anyone concerned with the development of Ginzburg’s thought and his historical approach. It is a bigger question than I can cover here, but the text is a good indication of Ginzburg’s distinctive path between a naïve positivism and scepticism. He would discuss these and related themes in many other places. One particular example was a piece published in 2007: “Réflexions sur une hypothèse vingt-cinq ans après”.
Sherlock Holmes, Eco and the Judge
The essay’s interest in Sherlock Holmes and signs obviously fits thematically within the Eco and Sebeok collection. A note to that book says that when the editors were both working on the relation between linguistics, semiology and detective fiction, “Eco read a paper, published in 1979, which one of his colleagues at the University of Bologna had been announcing for a year or more” (p. vii). That colleague was Ginzburg. Eco is of course well known, and connects in various ways to my recent work, which I wrote about in Umberto Eco, Philosophers, Mythologists and Linguists. The Ginzburg connection would be another line to explore.
As is well known, in Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose, the main character, the monk William of Baskerville is a Sherlock Holmes type, investigating a series of mysterious deaths in an abbey with a detective’s zeal. The book is a chance for Eco to dramatize elements of the semiological method and deploy his early career expertise in medieval theology and history. Perhaps less well known is that the book has a framing device – Eco claims that the story was written in the fourteenth century, discovered in the eighteenth, translated into French in the nineteenth and then by him into Italian, before the French version was lost. Although there are other similar frames to pseudo-historical texts, such as Jan Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, there is perhaps a link to Morelli’s double pseudonym of Lermolieff and Schwarze. At the very least, that’s a conceit I think he would have enjoyed.
Sebeok is perhaps less recognised today, but he was an important figure in the history of linguistics and semiotics, who published some of Émile Benveniste’s articles and was an early supporter of Julia Kristeva’s work. Earlier in this series, I wrote about a small part of Sebeok’s career, where he was part of a team tasked with trying to come up with a means of communicating the dangers of nuclear waste storage to humans far in the future, when current languages would be unknown. Sebeok’s proposal of an atomic priesthood is a story which sounds like it could have come out of one of Eco’s novels – Thomas Sebeok, Umberto Eco and the Semiotics of Nuclear Waste.
Ginzburg used this approach to clues and other pieces of evidence in much of his academic writing, but also in an unusual work of contemporary activism, the 1999 book The Judge and the Historian about the case of Adriano Sofri. (He also wrote about the case in the London Review of Books.)Sofri was convicted of ordering the assassination of a policeman, and Ginzburg tried to expose the inconsistencies in the legal case. If some of his work uses the approach of a detective to history, here he is more using the forensic approach of a historian in relation to a crime. Although Ginzburg was unsuccessful in getting a new trial, the book also discusses the historian’s approach to evidence, here comparing it to a judge examining material, written and spoken sources. (The Italian judge is more of an inquisitor or investigator than a British one, who acts a bit more like an arbiter.) Ginzburg indicates many similarities and also some differences between judge and historian. As well as the approach of historian as detective, Ginzburg was able to draw upon his experience with studying witchcraft trials and the process of the inquisition. He had been a significant figure in getting the Vatican to open up previously closed archives.
Ginzburg discusses this case, The Judge and the Historian, and the consequences in an interesting late interview with Filippo Barbera and Maurizio Catlino. An even-wider ranging interview with Yehuda Safran and Daniel Sherer was published in Potlatch in 2022. Ginzburg’s interviews are often fascinating, and collecting them in a volume would be an interesting project for someone. There must also be a lot of uncollected essays, and even a comprehensive bibliography would be useful.
The relation between historian and detective is not new, of course. Robin W. Winks edited a collection entitled The Historian as Detective in 1969; thirty years later, Ray B. Brown and Lawrence A. Kreiser, Jr. produced the collection The Detective as Historian, to which Winks contributed a short preface. One interview by António Guerrerio with Ginzburg was entitled “The Historian as a Detective”. Ginzburg seems to exemplify this relation, and the important early essay I’ve focussed on here gives some significant clues as to how he worked.
Update: Mario Damen has pointed out that there is another Dutch translation of the essay – “Sporen Wortels van een indicatie-paradigma”, trans. Annie M.C. van Rest, Raster, 1981, https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/_ras001198101_01/_ras001198101_01_0013.php This appears to be a translation of the longer version which first appeared in Crisi della ragione, 1979, with the additional notes.
References
Ray B. Brown and Lawrence A. Kreiser, Jr. eds. The Detective as Historian: History and Art in Historical Crime Fiction, Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 2000.
Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, trans. William Weaver, London: Minerva, 1992 [1983].
Umberto Eco and Thomas A. Sebeok, The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Pierce, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.
Sigmund Freud, “The Moses of Michelangelo”, in Art and Literature: The Penguin Freud Library Volume 14, trans. Alix Strachey, London: Penguin, 1985, 251-82.
Carlo Ginzburg, “Spie. Radici di un paradigma scientifico”, Rivista di storia contemporanea 7, 1978, 1-14; “Clues: Roots of a Scientific Paradigm”, trans. Marta Sofri Innocenti, Theory and Society 7, 1979, 273-88.
Carlo Ginzburg, “Spie: Radici di un paradigma indiziario”, Ombre Rosse 29, 1979, 80-107; reprinted as“Spie: Radici di un paradigma indizario”, in Aldo Gargani ed., Crisi della ragione, Torino: Einaudi, 1979, 57-106.
Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.
Carlo Ginzburg, “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method”, trans. Anna Davin, History Workshop Journal 9 (1), 1980, 5-36; reprinted as “Clues: Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes”, in Umberto Eco and Thomas A. Sebeok, The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Pierce, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988 [1983], 81-118.
Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi, New York: Penguin, 1983.
Carlo Ginzburg, Miti emblemi spie: Morfologia e storia, Torino: Einaudi, 1986.
Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989; new edition, 2013, with different pagination.
Carlo Ginzburg, Mythes, emblèmes, traces: Morphologie et histoire, trans. Monique Aymard, Christian Paoloni, Elsa Bonan and Martine Sancini-Vignet, Paris: Flammarion, 1989.
Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, trans. Raymond Rosenthal, London: Penguin, 1990.
Carlo Ginzburg, The Judge and the Historian: Marginal Notes on a Late-Twentieth-Century Miscarriage of Justice,trans. Antony Shugar, London: Verso, 1999.
Carlo Ginzburg, “Réflexions sur une hypothèse vingt-cinq ans après”, trans. Martin Rueff, in Denis Thouard ed. L’Interpretation des indices: Enquête sur le paradigme indiciare avec Carlo Ginzburg, Villeneuve-d’Ascq: Presses universitaires de Septentrion, 2007, https://books.openedition.org/septentrion/65335
Carlo Ginzburg and Bruce Lincoln, Old Thiess, a Livonian Werewolf: A Classic Case in Comparative Perspective, University of Chicago Press, 2020.
Carlo Ginzburg, “In Conversation with Filippo Barbera and Maurizio Catino: The Historical Method at the Crossroad of Social and Human Sciences”, Sociologica 20 (1), 2026, 111-24.
Giovanni Morelli, Italian Masters in German Galleries: A Critical Essay on the Italian Pictures in the Galleries of Munich—Dresden—Berlin, trans. Louise M. Richter, London: George Bell & Sons, 1883.
Jan Potocki, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, trans. Ian MacLean, London: Penguin, 1996.
Robin W. Winks ed. The Historian as Detective: Essays on Evidence, New York: Harper & Row, 1969.
Thanks to John Raimo for sharing some of these references.
This is the 83rd post of a weekly series, posted every Sunday throughout 2025, and continuing into a second year. The posts are short essays with indications of further reading and sources. They are not as formal as something I’d try to publish more conventionally, but are hopefully worthwhile as short sketches of histories and ideas. They are usually tangential to my main writing focus, a home for spare parts, asides, dead-ends and possible futures. I hope there is some interest in them. They are provisional and suggestions are welcome. A few, usually shorter, pieces in a similar style have been posted mid-week. I wasn’t sure I’d keep to a weekly rhythm throughout 2026, but have ideas for at least a few more pieces.
The full chronological list of ‘Sunday histories’ is here, with a thematic ordering here.
A complete portrait of French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, who plumbed both science and imagination.
This is the first English biography of Gaston Bachelard, a philosopher who bridged the worlds of science and imagination. Raised in rural France, Bachelard served in the First World War, worked for the post office and pursued degrees in science and philosophy while teaching in his local school. His journey led to a professorship at the Sorbonne, where he influenced many prominent postwar French thinkers. Known as both a philosopher of science and author of works on the imagination inspired by the elements – earth, air, fire and water – Bachelard needed to negotiate a constant tension between science and poetry, calculation and dream. This biography provides a complete portrait of Bachelard, illuminating his struggles with the nature of knowledge itself.
Professor Ron Johnston OBE, FAcSS, FBA was one of the most celebrated geographers of his generation. Producing a prolific research record that spanned six decades, Johnston was an insightful, thoughtful, and open-minded contributor to debates and research practices in human geography, to understanding the histories and productions of geographical knowledge in modern Anglo-American geography, and to the study of electoral, political, urban, and social geographies. He was widely recognised as a champion of geography whose work continues to influence the field today.
Geography and a Geographer: Reimagining the Discipline After Ron Johnston brings together contributors whose work speaks to the geographies Johnston helped to shape. It offers an invitation to revisit Johnston’s body of work and consider its relevance for the future of the discipline. Across the volume, authors reflect on Johnston’s intellectual legacy, the evolution of human geography, disciplinary history and memory, mentorship, collaboration, and collegiality. Other chapters respond to calls to decolonise and pluralise how geography is narrated and practised, and encourage fresh thinking about the role of quantitative approaches in human geography.
Thought-provoking and forward-looking, this collection reflects Johnston’s passion for geography and celebrates his extensive contributions to the discipline. It pays tribute to his scholarship through engagement with the ideas and concepts he developed in his research, and reflects on where his work can take us next.
Now published – a major, and very expensive, reference work, though the e-book is less. I say a bit about my chapter, on Foucault and structuralism, here.
Michel Foucault is one of the most influential, and controversial, thinkers of the twentieth century. His work has had a transformative effect on the study of the humanities and social sciences. His engagement with topics such as truth, power and language continues to exert significant influence on a huge range of disciplines, from philosophy, sociology and anthropology to history, politics, law, literature, religion and many others. Yet, paradoxically, Foucault’s work is rarely discussed systematically within philosophy in the Anglophone world.
The Foucauldian Mind is an outstanding exploration and assessment of Foucault’s thought, demonstrating its coherence, insight and continuing relevance to current debates in a multiplicity of fields within philosophy, and beyond. Comprising over forty chapters authored by an international team of expert contributors, it addresses the following topics and more:
the formation of Foucault’s thought and his most important writings, from History of Madness and The Order of Things to Discipline and Punish, the History of Sexuality, and his later works on governmentality and the aesthetics of existence
Foucault’s theoretical and methodological engagements, including with phenomenology, existentialism, structuralism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, critical theory, pragmatism and feminism
Foucault’s contributions to ethics, political philosophy and law
Foucault’s often misunderstood engagements with science, race and gender
the legacy of Foucault’s thought, including for environmental studies, biopolitics, migration studies and philosophy of disability.
With its comprehensive analysis of Foucault’s work and its original discussion of both traditional and new topics, The Foucauldian Mind is a superb resource for anyone studying Foucault’s thought from a broadly philosophical standpoint.
This book explores the interaction of European Enlightenment thinkers with Chinese theory and shows how ideas from China and ideas about China had a profound impact on Enlightenment thought.
Challenging the orthodox account of the Enlightenment as an innovation that emerged solely among European men, the book argues that many ideas which led to human progress originated outside Europe. Focusing on the cultural interaction between Europe and China it demonstrates how Chinese theory precipitated debate and demanded theorization by fundamentally challenging the intellectual framework inherited from European antiquity. The result was neither European nor Chinese, but a dynamic fusion that has continued to produce theory right up to the present day.
In illustrating how cultural interaction with alien perspectives, civilizations, and worldviews can further human development, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of Chinese and European history and philosophy.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra– trans. Paul S. Loeb and David F. Tinsley, Stanford University Press, August 2026
Thus Spoke Zarathustra stands alone among Nietzsche’s published works as a poetic and narrative rendering of his most sophisticated ideas through the medium of Zarathustra’s uniquely prophetic voice. It is also the first place where Nietzsche proposes his theory of will to power, and it is the only place in his published works where he elaborates his concept of the superhuman and his doctrine of eternal recurrence. Nietzsche himself regarded this book as his most important philosophical contribution because it proposes solutions to the problems he poses but does not resolve in his other works—for example, his cure for the human disposition to vengefulness and his creation of new values as the antidote to nihilism.
This translation precisely and consistently renders each element so that readers may experience Nietzsche’s phrasing, wit, and wordplay in equivalent English. The extensive editorial notes in this edition include numerous cross-references to earlier drafts and variants that are found in his notebooks, and published in Volumes 14 and 15 of The Complete Works, thus allowing the reader to view the evolution of Nietzsche’s thought from first drafts to their final published versions. The Translators’ Afterword includes a discussion of translation issues unique to Zarathustra, and a glossary of key terms, as well as a discussion of Nietzsche’s views concerning this book’s contributions to the development of the German language.
The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche inches towards completion, with the works Nietzsche published now all available. I think just two volumes of notes and the final volume, with Editors’ comments, Chronology and index will remain after this.
Over the last 500 years, capitalism has produced a world that is highly interdependent and at the same time highly asymmetrical. These asymmetries were often established by violent means and are in many cases vigorously defended to this day. In his ambitious global history of capitalism, Friedrich Lenger charts the course of these developments, which have left no one unaffected – from the indigenous people of America to the silk weavers of Bengal. This is a story of flagrant wealth and extreme poverty, of violence and oppression, and of the relentless exploitation both of labour and of our planet, for which we are now paying the price.
Among the global inequalities produced by capitalism are the unequal consumption of fossil fuels and the environmental degradation that affects different parts of the world in different ways and to different extents. The indifference capitalists display towards the natural world resembles their past indifference to human suffering. The millions of slaves forced to work on American plantations until well into the nineteenth century is just one example of how oppressive labour and a capitalist economy go hand in hand.
This brilliant and wide-ranging book tells the story of the rise and triumph of capitalism from the fifteenth century to the present day and lays bare its fundamental dynamic: capitalism will never place limits on itself, underlining the fact that any restrictions have to be imposed from outside. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the modern world, the fundamental problems we face today, and the economic solutions upon which our survival as a species will depend.
Review in The New York Times; feature in The New Yorker (requires subscription). Thanks to dmf and Alin Constantin for the alert. Update: there is also a piece in the Financial Times (requires subscription).
When Emily Eakin arrived at Harvard in the late 1980s, she fell under the spell of an eclectic body of philosophical texts by a handful of French authors. This was French theory, a set of recondite ideas that had taken American campuses by a storm during the preceding decades. In retrospect, the influence of these men and their writings seems both extraordinary and improbable. The Frenchmen argued that language is all-powerful, meaning unstable, and the self is an illusion. Their prose was brilliant, dazzling even, but often mystifyingly elaborate and highly abstract. Yet American students and scholars flocked to their books and lectures, intoxicated by a powerful new means of understanding—and perhaps even changing—the world. For Eakin, an unsophisticated graduate of a small-town Midwestern high school, theory was no mere intellectual exercise but a way of being—a heady shortcut to worldly glamour and wisdom.
The Frenchmen is the story of Eakin’s youthful love affair with French theory, alongside a wider examination of its rise and fall. Looking closely at Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Félix Guattari, Jacques Lacan, and the French-speaking Belgian Paul de Man, Eakin untangles their famously difficult works with peerless, delightful clarity. What’s more, she brings to light the eccentric, scandalous—at times criminal!—lives of thinkers who themselves were often highly averse to biography, in a daringly original weave of storytelling and exegesis.
As she explores the magnetism of their work, Eakin illuminates not just the Frenchmen’s enduring legacy but some of today’s deepest political, social, and intellectual arguments. She neither rejects nor flatters the Frenchmen’s ideas but instead reveals how they indelibly changed our understanding of power, truth, and identity. Eakin shows how, for better or worse, the Frenchmen continue to shape and unsettle our lives today.
The reviews and previews are not encouraging, and I fear that the stories are going to be reheated versions of things in existing biographies, or some of the unfounded allegations previously made.
