Progressive Geographies

David Reisman, Economy and Utopia: More to Morris – Edward Elgar, April 2026

Introduction open access here

In this insightful book, David Reisman examines the various notions of a utopia that emerged in opposition to feudalism and capitalism between the publication of Thomas More’s Utopia in 1516 and William Morris’s News from Nowhere in 1890. The book adopts an interdisciplinary approach to analysing the concept of a utopia, its sources and roots and the spectrum of thought surrounding how it should be created. 

Reisman evaluates the ideas of renowned and lesser-known authors such as Francis Bacon, Henri de Saint-Simon, Gerrard Winstanley, Étienne Cabet, James Harrington and Edward Bellamy, who imagined an earthly paradise to replace social division and economic underperformance. The book explores science, communism, cooperation, citizenship, the constitution and the dystopia of control. It shows how utopian ideals continue to challenge narrow individualism. Providing a unique depth of coverage in this field, Reisman assesses how market exchange, cut-throat competition and private property would yield to a new and more communitarian approach to life and work.

Economy and Utopia is a crucial resource for students and scholars of economics and finance, political theory, public policy and philosophy. Its focus on past efforts to improve society will also benefit researchers in history and sociology.

Sarah Ellen Zarrow, Displays of Belonging: Polish Jewish Collecting and Museums, 1891-1941 – Cornell University Press, June 2025

New Books Network discussion with Paul Lerner

Displays of Belonging illuminates the lives and work of Polish Jewish collectors and museologists, who sought to preserve the treasures of the Jewish past while demonstrating Jewish belonging on Polish soil. As Jews comfortable in the Polish language and within Polish artistic and academic society, they saw themselves as intermediaries between less-integrated Jews and the Polish cultural elite.

At the turn of the century, Jewish ethnographers and museum creators staked their claim to belonging to the civic nation though the display of Jewish folk art, fine art, and Judaica. After the First World War, the nearly three million Jews in the Second Polish Republic were suddenly challenged with finding a place for themselves in a state that increasingly defined itself as a creation of the ethnic Polish nation, to which Jews, by many accounts, did not belong.

By tracing emergent documentation and display practices in partitioned Poland and in the interwar Second Polish Republic, Sarah Ellen Zarrow offers a better understanding of how integrated Jews identified with Polish culture and history and with non-Jewish Poles, and how they conceived of, negotiated, and argued their collective place within Poland. This is not a case of assimilation, nor of acculturation, but rather of displaying a parallel culture that was at once similar and yet distinctive.

Displays of Belonging offers a nuanced understanding of the multiplicity of ways in which Jews in Poland saw their present and dreamed of their future. It places Jewish ethnographic practice and art collection within a Polish context, and sheds light on ways in which ideas about belonging and national identity were negotiated in the space of museums.

The Essential Senghor: African Philosophy and Black Aesthetics – eds. Doyle C. Calhoun, Alioune B. Fall and Sheikh Thiam, Duke University Press, April 2026 

Senegalese poet, philosopher, and politician Leopold Sédar Senghor, together with Aimé Césaire and others, developed the influential and perennially relevant negritude movement—a Black artistic, philosophical, and political expression of Black presence in the modern colonial world. The Essential Senghor provides a new opportunity for English-language readers to engage with Senghor’s critical and philosophical writings spanning from 1937 to 1985. This collection includes Senghor’s key philosophical interventions in discourses on freedom, Blackness and being, humanism, history, and more. It portrays Senghor as a pivotal intellectual in the fields of African and Black studies whose work engages a wide range of disciplines, including literature, linguistics, anthropology, religion, and art history. The Essential Senghor invites readers not only to reflect on negritude and its importance for our political present, but also to reconsider intellectual genealogies of decolonial thought, Black liberation, and African philosophy.

The Introduction is open access at this link, and there is an interview with the editors by Unglid Paul at the Journal of the History of Ideas blog.

Last year, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Writings on Politics, edited by Yohann C. Ripert, was also published by Duke University Press, November 2025. The Introduction is also open access at this link.

Mary Pickering, Prophet of Science: The Vision and Passion of Auguste Comte – Reaktion, October 2026

A fascinating portrait of Auguste Comte, nineteenth-century mathematician and philosopher

Born during the ferment of the French Revolution, Auguste Comte was one of the foremost thinkers of the nineteenth century, his ideas influencing social reformers, philosophers, politicians and scientists. Advocating for what he called ‘the science of society’, he contended that facts and reason alone should matter in public discourse. But while Comte strove to create social harmony, he suffered from repeated disasters in his personal and professional life that ultimately endangered his health and undermined his project. An avid self-dramatizer, Comte’s increasingly erratic behaviour stood at odds with his philosophy of ‘order and progress’.
This readable intellectual and personal biography of the enigmatic thinker explains Comte’s importance to modern Western thought, and provides a fascinating psychological portrait of a deeply troubled yet brilliant man.

Irene I. Vega, Bordering On Indifference: Immigration Agents Negotiating Race and Morality – Princeton University Press, May 2025

New Books discussion with Christina Gessler – thanks to dmf for the link

Immigration agents have a frontline view of the racial, economic, and legal inequalities that undocumented migration reflects—and yet most agents do not think of the role their jobs play in those inequalities. Instead, they consider themselves law enforcers, trained to confine their work strictly to crime control and security. In Bordering on Indifference, Irene Vega offers an original, detailed analysis of the rationales that shape how U.S. immigration agents understand and carry out their professional responsibilities. Drawing on interviews with ninety immigration agents—Border Patrol Agents and ICE Deportation Officers, most of whom are Mexican Americans from the region around the border—Vega examines why they took the job and how their training and socialization shape the ways that they grapple with the racial and moral issues raised by their work.

Vega shows that indifference is the bureaucratic resource that allows agents to look away from the most morally ambiguous aspects of their work and helps them cultivate legitimacy for their employer. She traces the development of the agents’ “moral economy”—the configuration of norms, values, and sensibilities that undergirds how they perform their work. She also shows how the immigration system benefits from minoritized bureaucrats’ labor. With Bordering on Indifference, Vega opens the closed doors of nondescript government buildings and goes into remote areas of the Southwestern borderlands to uncover the hidden normative world that immigration enforcement agents inhabit.

A.J.A. Woods, The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West –Verso, April 2026

I’ve shared news of the book before, there is now a New Books network discussion with Morteza Hajizadeh – thanks for dmf for the link

The definitive history of a dangerous right-wing conspiracy theory 

“Cultural Marxism” is one of the far right’s favorite buzzwords. But despite its currency, the meaning and origins of the term are rarely investigated. This book uncovers the bizarre story of the cult leaders, right-wing intellectuals, and White House officials who believe a coterie of left-wing scholars and students is plotting to undermine Western civilization. Drawing on years of archival research and using the tools of critical theory, A.J.A. Woods reveals how a group of German thinkers known as the Frankfurt School was recast as the sinister orchestra-tors of a global conspiracy. Instead of simply debunking this conspiracy theory, Woods offers a sharp analysis and critique of the political movements that have declared war on all that passes for Cultural Marxism in the US, the UK, and Brazil.

Only when we understand the practices and weaknesses of those reactionaries committed to fighting this illusory threat—a conflict causing real-world damage—can we effectively resist. This is an essential book for anyone seeking to understand the ideological currents shaping politics in the twenty-first century.

Emma Ingala, Cillian Ó Fathaigh, Gavin Rae eds. Transformation in Contemporary French Philosophy – Edinburgh University Press, July 2026

Unfortunately no paperback yet, and even the e-book is very expensive.

Traces the articulation of the concept of transformation across twentieth-century French philosophy, from Bergson to Malabou

• Engages contemporary French philosophy through the notion of transformation
• Reveals that the notion of transformation is heterogeneous and itself subject to transformation
• Offers innovative readings of individual thinkers within this periodisation
• Includes chapters on thinkers – such as Cornelius Castoriadis, Paul Ricoeur, Raymond Ruyer, Gilbert Simondon, Michel Serres – that are often ignored in discussions of contemporary French philosophy

This collection brings together an international range of specialists to explore the multi-faceted ways in which twentieth-century French philosophy affirms the fundamental importance of transformation. The essays enhance our understanding of how various individual French philosophers have conceived the term, including the innovative implications of their respective conceptions. They show that although emphasis is often placed on its heterogeneity and the differences between its proponents, twentieth-century French philosophy is fundamentally, if implicitly, shaped around a common focus on the primordial importance of transformation.

By engaging with the thinking of Bergson, Sartre, Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Fanon, Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, Ricœur, Ruyer, Simondon, Serres, Castoriadis and Malabou, the contributors also rethink a range of issues, including ethics, information, ontology and politics.

Geoffrey M. Hodgson, From Marx to Markets: An Intellectual Odyssey – Edward Elgar, 2026

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.