Some books bought new or second-hand recently, including some for ‘Sunday History’ posts; the first two volumes of the Arden Shakespeare fourth series; and Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm, The Genealogy of Genealogy: Nietzsche, Foucault and the Coils of Critical History, which looks very interesting.
Benjamin Kohlmann, Revolutionary Subjects: A Radical History of the Bildungsroman – Verso, August 2026
A literary history spanning borders and centuries to explore radicalization as portrayed in fiction
Tracing the evolution of socialist world literature from the nineteenth century to the present, Benjamin Kohlmann uncovers the formal repertoires through which a set of political ideals found aesthetic expression. At the heart of this study is the radical bildungsroman, a genre that subverts dominant narratives of individual formation. Broad in scope, Revolutionary Subjects explores the work of Balestrini, Chernyshevsky, Ding Ling, Lessing, Nizan, Sartre, Weiss, Wright, and many others. These novels challenge conventional ideas of selfhood and belonging, presenting new ways to imagine the self in relation to collective struggle and global solidarity.
Jon Douglas Solomon, Foucault and Genocide: A Genealogy of a Fantasy of the West – Palgrave Pivot, 2026
Michel Foucault’s seminal realization that security is a species concept opens a new path for understanding how genocide is fundamentally related to aesthetic ideology. Fueled by the settler colonial imaginary, the logic of “speciation” inevitably acquires a fictional aspect that is an enduring site of potentially catastrophic instability for transitional modernity. The genealogical source of this catastrophic instability is nothing other than the West, the template for the apparatus of area and anthropological difference. The West’s quest to control political transitions throughout the world is an essential part of a larger project to control “speciation.” Inasmuch as “speciation” is tied, says Foucault, to security, and genocide is tied, according to A. Dirk Moses, to the search for permanent security, the attempt to seek permanent security through control over “speciation,” i.e., transition, lies at the root of modern genocide.
Allen Buchanan, Political Tribalism: How It Hijacks Our Minds and Diminishes Our Humanity – Routledge, May 2025
NDPR review by Alexander Motchoulski
Combining hard data with the author’s personal story of a life in the U.S. South and then as a university professor, this book sheds a new light on tribalistic ideologies. Such ideologies are a deeply troubling feature of civic life in America and in many Western democracies as they erode trust among citizens, sow divisions, and pervert a larger pursuit of truth and understanding. Philosopher Allen Buchanan weaves together his own autobiography with the latest research in psychology, politics, anthropology, and philosophy to better understand the nature and causes of ideological tribalism, its pernicious effects on the individual and society, and the best possible solutions for curbing its spread.
The story begins with Buchanan as a middle‑class, White boy in 1950s Arkansas, absorbing and espousing the racist ideas of his parents, church, and community. This beginning intentionally inculpates the author in subsequent criticisms of tribalism and—because Buchanan left this world and came to reject its values—makes convincing his arguments at the book’s conclusion on how to escape tribalism’s tight grasp. Before offering such final prescriptions, Buchanan examines the evolutionary origins of tribalistic thinking and shows how unyielding group ideologies short‑circuit truth‑seeking, attack the meaning and purpose of a liberal education, undermine a shared national identity, and—thanks to social media—prop up a shallow and false self‑identity.
With a sharp eye toward tribalistic ideologies on the Right and the Left, Political Tribalism: How it Hijacks Our Minds and Diminishes Our Humanity is a compelling call for a healthier and deeper intellectual life of a democracy’s polity and for its individual citizens.
Marc Bloch, Ecrire La société féodale: lettres à Henri Berr, 1921-1943 – ed. Jacqueline Pluet-Despatin, Éditions EHESS, June 2026
En 1939-1940, l’historien Marc Bloch publie les deux volumes de La société féodale dans la collection « L’évolution de l’humanité», chez Albin Michel. Ce livre propose d’entrer dans les coulisses de la conception et de l’écriture de ce grand classique de l’histoire du Moyen Âge, lu et discuté par des générations de médiévistes et dont les thèses sont à nouveau au centre du débat historiographique aujourd’hui. Il donne à lire la correspondance entre Marc Bloch et son éditeur, Henri Berr (1863-1954), qui fut aussi l’une des grandes figures intellectuelles de la France du début du XXe siècle et le directeur de la Revue de synthèse. Les lettres de Bloch, qui s’étalent sur plus de vingt ans, donnent un accès unique à une œuvre en train de se faire. Elles permettent de com-prendre les étapes du travail intellectuel de Bloch, mais aussi la fabrique matérielle d’une collection et d’un livre dans l’entre-deux-guerres. Accompagnée d’un appareil critique qui permet d’en comprendre toutes les implications, cette correspondance nous permet de lire Marc Bloch comme s’il pensait à voix haute et construisait sa réflexion sur la société féodale sous nos yeux.
David Petruccelli, A Scourge of Humanity: The Origins of Interpol and the End of Empire in Central and Eastern Europe – Oxford University Press, March 2026
New Books discussion with Miranda Melcher – thanks to dmf for the link
As the First World War came to a chaotic end, Europeans feared that a wave of crime and anarchy would sweep across their continent. The upheavals of the war and of the subsequent violent breakup of the Habsburg, German, and Ottoman empires magnified longstanding fears that an increasingly interconnected world offered the enterprising and unscrupulous new opportunities to break the law and evade capture. New kinds of international criminals and criminal enterprises demanded novel forms of international cooperation. Thus was born the International Criminal Police Commission, known today as Interpol. In the 1920s and 1930s, Interpol’s police officials and the lawyers who collaborated with them created lasting programs to combat counterfeiting, sex and drug trafficking, terrorism, and human smuggling, and other forms of international crime, which they labelled “a scourge of humanity.”
Drawing on press reports, police files, and criminal records in numerous languages and across multiple countries, David Petruccelli explores the origins of Interpol and the role Central and Eastern European actors played in developing criminal policing and law during the interwar period to bring stability to their region and reshape international institutions and norms. He shows how legal experts replaced a liberal focus on individual rights with an emphasis on a collective of international societies and of police officers who looked to the international sphere as a space for eluding the constraints of the rule of law at home. In doing so, their initiatives posed an alternative to the imperial and liberal internationalist programs pursued by many Western Europeans and Americans and laid the groundwork for more radical forms of persecution during the Second World War.
While bringing to life the stories of individuals involved in shady activities across borders, A Scourge of Humanity explores the vigorous policing and harsh criminal laws established by Interpol to combat their crimes and highlights illiberal forms of internationalism that have left a lasting mark on our world.
Kevin Inston, Rethinking the Politics of Belonging: Towards a Theory of Improper Community – Edinburgh University Press, May 2026
Develops an original understanding of community as asserting a common world rather than an exclusive identity, ethnicity or territory
- Builds an elucidating dialogue between four major theorists (Jean-luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Chantal Mouffe and Bonnie Honig) to rethink community in an open, inclusive and democratic form
- Analyses the strategies, principles, institutions and obligations that could foster and maintain the possibility of community without fixed identity and boundaries
- Explores examples including French Republican Racial Politics, proto-feminist movements, Black Lives Matter, recent housing and ecological occupations to interrogate and enrich the theoretical insights
- Engages the work of a wide range of other important thinkers including Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Mark Devenney, Roberto Esposito, Ernesto Laclau, John Rawls, Michael Sandel, Karl Schmitt and recent work in critical legal studies and critical race theory to contextualise and critique my main theories
Community has conventionally been understood as a unifying property (identity, ethnicity, territory) that establishes relations of belonging and non-belonging. However, that understanding necessarily causes exclusion and disenfranchisement, contradicting the idea of being together community implies. Through an original dialogue between four major thinkers (Jean-luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Chantal Mouffe and Bonnie Honig), Kevin Inston presents an alternative account of community which affirms its irreducibility to property and resistance to appropriation so that it remains available to diverse identities, practices and opinions.
Improper communities promote a shared world in which everyone counts equally. Rethinking the Politics of Belonging examines the strategies for refusing enclosure of the common, the rules and principles that could prevent identarian politics, and the ethos and public things that could affirm community as sharing rather than property. Exploring examples including Black Lives Matters, proto-feminist movements and recent housing and ecological occupations, it demonstrates how improper communities could reinvigorate democracy by enacting and defending universal freedom and equality.
Nathaniel O’Grady and Gemma Sou eds., Geography and Disasters: Places, Processes and the Human Geographical Imagination – Bloomsbury, May 2026
Drawing on global case studies, this is the first book to outline and elaborate on the ways that human geography has extended our understanding of disasters.
Every chapter analyses disasters through the lens of a different theoretical framework common to geography, including assemblage theory, post-colonialism, urban political ecology, governmentality, affect theory and scale. The case studies in the collection range from hurricane risk in the Caribbean and volcano eruptions in Chile to floods in India and many more. Thinking of them as processes rather than individual events, each contributor conceptualizes disasters as always-already entangled in the continual making and remaking of collective life.Overall, the chapters present a “pluriversal” perspective that mirrors geography’s methodological sensitivity to how disasters are shaped by the in-situ conditions in which they unfold. Following such a perspective, the volume both clarifies, and stays attuned to, the multiple, often cross-cutting, spatial and temporal registers upon which disasters are experienced. In doing so, the contributors also expand upon geography’s appreciation for how disasters arise from, but also actively contribute to, the material configuration and reconfiguration of space over time. This emphasis allows each chapter to address the complicated ways in which different political issues underpin disasters in different ways. Providing inspiration for future scholars in geography and further afield, the collection is essential reading for those interested in developing more advanced understandings of disasters and how they continue to affect us today.
Henri Lefebvre, Éléments de rythmanalyse et autres essais sur les temporalités – new edition, Eterotopia, April 2026
Thanks to John Raimo for this link. As far as I can tell, this has the same content as the 2019 edition of the text by the same publisher, though it may be reset as it has a different page count (and cover). As well as an avant-propos by Claire Revol and a postface by Thierry Paquot, this edition includes three essays not in the original 1992 edition. One of those on “The Rhythmanalysis Project” was included in the 2004 English book Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life – which includes the 1992 French book, translated as Elements of Rhythmanalysis. I remember unsucessfully trying to persuade what was then Continuum (now Bloomsbury) that we should include “Musique et sémiologie”. The third essay “La musique et la ville” is actually an interview – available open access here.
As far as I know, “Musique et sémiologie” and the interview remain untranslated into English.
Théoricien de la critique de la vie quotidienne, Henri Lefebvre, s’intéresse aussi bien aux habitudes, à la routine, aux rites calendaires qu’aux rythmes individuels et sociaux, qui donnent à chacun, comme à toute société, son tempo. L’ordinaire entrelace mille et un rythmes et combine aussi bien des moments répétitifs, comme dans l’usine taylorisée, que des ruptures festives ou cultuelles. Avec l’urbanisation les temporalités se modifient, le temps vécu se distingue à la fois du temps représenté et du temps rêvé. Pas de territorialité sans ses temporalités, d’où une rythmanalyse que Bachelard avait esquissée et que Lefebvre commence à théoriser. Publiés en 1992, ces Éléments de rythmanalyse. Introduction à la connaissance des rythmes, avec une préface de René Lourau et en annexe « Essai de rythmanalyse des villes méditerranéennes », rédigé avec Catherine Régulier, sont ici complétée de trois articles : « Musique et sémiologie » (1971), « La musique et la ville » (1976) et « Le projet rythmanalytique » (avec Catherine Régulier, 1985). Cet ensemble de textes constitue un précieux et indispensable corpus lefebvrien pour qui souhaite, non seulement approfondir sa connaissance d’un penseur exceptionnel, mais aussi prolonger ses réflexions sur les rythmes.
Henry Somers-Hall, Reading A Thousand Plateaus: Adventures in Nomad Thought – Edinburgh University Press, May 2026
A complete plateau-by-plateau analysis of A Thousand Plateaus
- Provides the first sustained, close reading of A Thousand Plateaus as a whole, reconstructing its argument through extensive cross-referencing between plateaus
- Integrates a wealth of untranslated and little-known sources, making available for the first time in English key influences on Deleuze and Guattari’s work
- Makes the text accessible to those new to studying Deleuze and Guattari
Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus is one of the most inventive works of philosophy of the 20th century, constructing a sustained argument for the need to develop a new model of thought.
Henry Somers-Hall provides a comprehensive reading of this masterwork as a philosophical text, drawing on the full range of its engagements within philosophy as well as disciplines such as anthropology, linguistics, political theory, economics, mathematics, musicology, literature and psychoanalysis. By interweaving these engagements into the structure of the argument itself, Somers-Hall shows how the rigorous philosophical core at the heart of the text opens out onto a novel politics of social organisation.
As well as an abundance of new research for those working within the field of philosophy, this book will be invaluable for those working in other disciplines who want to engage with the full force of Deleuze and Guattari’s distinctive approach.
