In this revealing and eminently readable book, Geoffrey M. Hodgson takes readers on an intellectual odyssey through his distinguished career and his work as one of the leading institutional and evolutionary economists. Depicting his life throughout the Cold War, grappling with the military and economic rivalry of two different systems and the threat of nuclear war, to becoming an economist in the 1970s, and his ventures into institutional and evolutionary economics.
Examining the evolution of Hodgson’s thinking and citing the events and experiences that helped to transform his vision, chapters cover the impact of the Cold War and subsequent events on Hodgson”s thinking. He summarizes his main written contributions, with suggestions for the reform of economics and the development of its theoretical foundations. The book also calls for the development of better theories and policies in economics, helping to yield more effective outcomes to enhance human wellbeing and build a better and fairer world.
Showcasing some of the problems and potentialities of the discipline, From Marx to Markets is a useful resource for students considering, or having embarked on, the study of economics. It is also an essential read for academics in the social sciences and law.
Michel Foucault’s discussion on Dutch television with Noam Chomsky, moderated by Fons Elders, is of course well known.
The interview was part of a series, also including dialogues between A.J. Ayer and Arne Naess, Karl Popper and John Eccles, and Leszek Kołakowski and Henri Lefebvre. Edited transcripts of the discussions were published in the book Reflexive Water: The Basic Concerns of Mankind. The Foucault-Chomsky discussion is widely reprinted; the others less so. As part of his work for that discussion, Elders interviewed Foucault at his Paris apartment.
In that interview, unseen for a long time before being rediscovered and published in 2014 as a small book entitled Freedom and Knowledge, Foucault says that publishers have tended to illustrate his work on madness with Bruegel, Bosch and Goya. But he has another painting in mind: Frans Hals, De regentessen van het oudemannenhuis, the regents or regentesses of the men’s almshouse. He discusses it about 2 minutes into the video.
The painting is found, in a fairly poor quality black and white reproduction, in the 1972 Gallimard re-edition of Histoire de la folie, which is now out of print. It is not in any other French or English editions, and it is not discussed in the book. (On the different editions, see here.)
Here’s what Foucault says in the published interview with Elders:
So from here, well, if I were asked to illustrate with visual art the history of madness, I would not choose what my publishers ordinarily choose for the covers of my books. In general they pick Bruegel, Bosch, sometimes they choose Goya. That is not what I would choose. The problem basically is to show the transition from Bruegel to Goya; that is, how we moved from a certain experience of madness, which was, as it were, an objective experience. Madness was characterized with bizarre and imaginary figures that travelled the world, passed through it, and swarmed there; such was the experience of madness in the 16th century. And in the 19th century we see the emergence with Goya, with Fuseli, with Blake, of the subjective expression, as if it were from within madness, of what the mad feel, which Bruegel did not know.
Having come now into broad daylight, it’s as if we could finally see, hear, know, what was inside of madness. How did such passage from Bruegel or Bosch to Goya, Fuseli and Blake happen? I would say that it is through an experience that found its pictorial expression in one of the most famous paintings of Dutch art, by Frans Hals, that is to say, in “The Regents”. It is in “The Regents” of the hospital that my historical research on madness is illustrated best. There around a table are these five old women whose job it is to hold, to run this house of imprisonment, where during the 17th and later during the 18th century, all socially worthless people, the troublemakers were imprisoned. These women are actually the expression of our society’s rationalization that sets madness apart.
At the center of the painting we see a closed hand-held fan. This is the symbol of all pleasures, of society’s futility folded up on itself, excluded. Looking at both sides [of the painting], we can also see on the right a woman holding her big register under her hand; that’s the accounting of life, of things. And on the left, we see a woman holding coins in her hand; that is, basically the West’s accounting economy. Together they hold back the experience of madness. And it is from here on that the science of madness was able to develop. My history of madness is indeed best illustrated from that Frans Hals painting (pp. 26-27).
As far as I’m aware, the only other (very brief) mention of Frans Hals by Foucault is in a 1972 interview ‘Le grande enfermement’, text 105 in Dits et écrits. It is translated in the collection of texts about the Prisons Information Group, Intolerable. There, Foucault describes it as “one of the most unsettling [bouleversants] pieces ever painted in the West… an extraordinary work of which Claudel said some very beautiful things” (Vol II, p. 296; Quarto vol 1, p. 1164; Intolerable, p. 267). It is worth noting that while Foucault calls it The Regents, that is usually used to describe the pair to this painting, which is more commonly The Regentesses. The editors specify that Foucault’s reference is to Paul Claudel, “Introduction à la peinture hollandaise” in his L’œil écoute.
Paul Claudel, “Introduction à la peinture hollandaise” in his L’œil écoute, p. 42.
Claudel says of the “five sinister ladies” of this painting that “Neither in Goya nor in El Greco is there anything so masterful and so terrifying, for even hell holds fewer terrors for us than the intermediate zone”. He goes on, describing them as “ghouls”, the middle one as having a “deceitful face made into a beak by a hideous grin [which] indicates that we are dealing with something in her that is more implacable than justice, which is nothingness”. He admits it Is hard “to describe this phosphorescent emanation, this vampiric aura, that emanates from these five figures, as if from decomposing flesh, and I would almost be tempted to say, if it were possible, from a [decomposing] soul” (p. 42). That’s what Foucault described as “some very beautiful things”!
The only discussion I know of Foucault’s interest in the painting is in the introduction to Gary Shapiro’s 2003 book Archaeologies of Vision Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying (pp. 12-18). Shapiro was writing before the publication of the interview with Elders, so he had only the inclusion of the painting and the brief comment in the 1972 interview to draw upon, but he develops an interesting reading, also translating part of Claudel’s commentary. Shapiro rightly notes that the 1972 interview is around the time of the publication of the new edition of the book, and we might add that the 1971 interview with Elders was presumably conducted around the time Foucault was deciding on the material to be included and excised.
The edition in print in France in the Gallimard Tel series has for its cover a detail from one of the images in Goya’s Los Caprichos series, known as “Ya tienen asiento [they’ve already got a seat]”, of women balancing chairs on their heads. That has been used on most of the editions of the full text in France – the exception is the 1972 edition which has no cover image, but De regentessen van het oudemannenhuis inside. The full translation of the text in English has a painting by Goya, and its forthcoming reedition uses the final image from William Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress, The Madhousefor its cover.
References
Paul Claudel, “Introduction à la peinture hollandaise”, L’œil écoute, Paris: Gallimard, 1967, 9-68.
Fons Elders ed. Reflexive Water: The Basic Concerns of Mankind, London: Souvenir Press, 1974.
Fons Elders ed. Michel Foucault Freedom and Knowledge: A Hitherto Unpublished Intervew, trans. Lionel Claris, Amsterdam: Elders Special Productions, 2014.
Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits, eds. Daniel Defert and François Ewald, Paris: Gallimard, four volumes, 1994.
Gary Shapiro, Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
Kevin Thompson and Perry Zurn eds. Intolerable: Writings from Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group, trans. Perry Zurn and Erik Beranek, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2021.
This is a revised and expanded version of a post from December 2015. It is the 86th 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. The pieces 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.
The growing economies of ancient Greece and Rome created an ever-increasing demand for enslaved labor, which was supplied by states on the peripheries of their empires. In Slaving States, archaeologists Elizabeth Fentress and Adam Rabinowitz examine how violent bands of warriors in the outlying regions of Gaul, Scythia, and the Fezzan (part of modern-day Libya) gradually became states that specialized in selling humans to the slave economies of Greece and Rome. They trace a series of transformations—of people into objects that could be bought and sold, of warrior bands into state-level societies, and of opportunistic captive-taking into slaving economies.
Fentress and Rabinowitz use as a model the West African state of Dahomey, whose development into a slaving state between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries is, unlike that of their ancient counterparts, well documented. Drawing on textual and archaeological evidence, they show that the slaving zones of early modern West Africa and of antiquity have much in common, rooted in the structure of slaving itself. The evolution of the ancient warriors of Gaul, Scythia, and the Fezzan from head-takers to slave merchants may have taken different paths, but it is clearly written in their histories. With Slaving States, Fentress and Rabinowitz offer an entirely new perspective on ancient slavery. By exploring the supply side of the market for enslaved people, they show that that slavery transforms the society that supplies enslaved people as much as it transforms the society that uses them.
By the mid-nineteenth century, geologists and palaeontologists had reconstructed an authoritative narrative of Earth’s deep history, from the planet’s molten origins to the rise of humanity. Many figures in transatlantic science across subsequent decades, however, had problems with this narrative: it was too secular, inhuman, and evolutionary, or controlled too exclusively by elite scientists. Speaking from palaeoscience’s unevenly professionalized and controversy-racked borders, Christian fundamentalists, charismatic psychics, and respected scholars alike voiced their objections. Until now, no study has brought their work together for detailed comparative analysis.
Spanning from the 1860s to the interwar decades, Contesting Earth’s History examines the fascinating stories of five significant examples of fringe or ‘borderline’ palaeoscience: old- and young-earth creationism, hollow-earth theory, clairvoyant time-travel, and sunken-continent catastrophism. Innovatively combining methods from literary studies with the history of science, this book attends not just to the conceptual content of these strange sciences, but also to their proponents’ communication of truth claims through diverse genres ranging from the scientific textbook and the technical monograph to the lost-world romance and the epic poem. By paying close attention to the hitherto overlooked textual forms and literary strategies of these works of ‘pseudoscience’, this volume throws into relief the variant conceptions of audience, evidence, and method that jostled and competed in wider scientific culture during this period. It also demonstrates that, for all their diversity, authors of borderline palaeoscience shared the desire to shift the balance of power, creating textual spaces where exclusive hierarchies of scientific expertise could be levelled away.
These conjurors of lost worlds often captivated wide audiences and many of their bizarre, astonishing, and iconoclastic ideas remain with us to this day. Some even inspired early science fiction by the likes of H. P. Lovecraft and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Hijacking geologists’ and palaeontologists’ longstanding effort at making the prehistoric past visible, authors on the borderlines of palaeoscience asserted their right to scientific authority and encouraged readers to gaze into time’s abyss with bold new eyes.
This book presents a critical examination of Carl Schmitt’s political framework, particularly in the context of decisionist regimes in the Middle East. Departing from conventional discussions on Schmitt, it challenges the perceived stability and power promised by the ‘friend-enemy’ dichotomy, revealing the inherent chaos and dysfunction beneath the decisionist facade. By contextualizing Schmitt’s ideas within the complex political landscape of the Middle East, it sheds light on the region’s regimes, hitherto unexplored through a Schmittian lens. Distinctive in its approach, the book reframes Schmitt’s theoretical contributions, diverging from normative assessments and legal dichotomies to explore the functionality of his proposed political alternative. Through an interdisciplinary lens that integrates discussions of sectarianization, coup-proofing, and neopatrimonialism, it unveils the broader implications of decisionist practices, transcending conventional elite-centric power analyses. Offering a unique dual contribution to the literature, this book presents a fresh critique of Schmitt’s ideology, challenging its efficacy in ensuring long-term regime stability. Moreover, by applying a Schmittian perspective to the Middle Eastern context, it not only recontextualizes Schmitt’s concepts but also prompts new inquiries into the region’s political stability, marking a significant advancement in the understanding of decisionism and governance dynamics in the Middle East.
The Death of the Author and Anticolonial Thought promises to transform a decades old debate in literary studies about the relation between structure and agency, form and intention by giving a detailed account—previously unstudied—of the way colonized writers have responded to, learned from, and critiqued the death of the author postulate declared by Roland Barthes in 1967. The book is a cultural history of these debates—with a particular focus on two crucial two key case studies, Martinican poet and thinker Édouard Glissant and Palestinian literary and cultural critic Edward Said, this book, then, examines the immediate emergence and intensification of such responses to the postulate of the author’s deathly absence from the text, in order to suggest that metropolitan literary theory drew both critique and engagement from scholars of black, decolonial and Global South background from both before 1967 and Barthes’s declaration and in its wake. This book provides a focused account of the early history of the way global literatures have engaged with, critiqued, and occasionally adopted the lessons and limitations of the poststructuralist critique of that most fetishised and also reviled of figures: the author.
Captive Ecologies makes a case for the ecological significance of slavery’s afterlife, tracing the complex entanglements between racial capitalism and Black ecological freedom. Attending to the ways that racial capitalism implicates both captive bodies and captive land, Jennifer C. James brings into relief the harm that racial capitalism does to Black people as well as the human and non-human worlds they inhabit. James looks to a range of case studies and media from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, including Black music, ecopoetics, literature, social history, biography, and Black feminist and queer art, tracing the various ways that the environmental stakes of racial capitalism have shaped the Black ecological imagination. In these works, the concept of captivity signals not only slavery but also Black life in the “wake”: carceral spaces and enclosures, exploitative economic systems, sacrifice zones, and more. James offers novel concepts and frameworks to generate new modes of ecocriticism that are equipped to grapple with the unique demands and stakes of captive ecologies.
Kantian philosophy is typically viewed as providing a universal theory of knowledge and morality based on timeless principles retrieved from the human mind. In The Kantian Religion, Ian Hunter offers a starkly different account. Hunter contends that Kant’s arguments were assembled from purely historical sources and served as ascetic devices for crafting the towering self of the Kantian philosopher; they were exercises in intellectual self-clarification and moral transformation undertaken by a cohort of the philosophically educated in search of spiritual clarity and moral purity. These “solemn rites of the mind” were seen as heir and rival to the regenerative resources and cultural importance of the Christian religion, and Kantianism was characterized as a philosophical religion.
Hunter describes the ways that elite spiritual athletes performed a series of philosophically strenuous “acts of the self on the self” through Kant’s intellectual exercises. When Kantianism emerged as an insurgent cultural movement in the 1780s, it offered young academics training to be clergy and teachers a philosophy that was powerful enough to supplant Christian spirituality and to subordinate humanist scholarship and the natural sciences to philosophical self-reflection. For Kant and his followers, the religious disposition of Kantian philosophy came solely from the immanent practice of the philosophy itself. As a rival to conventional religion and as an academic interloper, Kantian philosophy unleashed a wave of conflicts in Germany’s ecclesiastical and scholarly cultures. Although recent Kant commentary typically views Kantianism as intrinsically secular and scientific, Hunter argues provocatively that Kant’s contemporaries viewed his philosophy as an extra-ecclesiastical path to spiritual refinement and moral regeneration.
