Progressive Geographies

Arthur Ghins, The People’s Two Powers: Public Opinion and Popular Sovereignty from Rousseau to Liberal Democracy – Cambridge University Press, January 2026

The People’s Two Powers revisits the emergence of democracy during the French Revolution and examines how French liberalism evolved in response. By focusing on two concepts often studied separately-public opinion and popular sovereignty-Arthur Ghins uncovers a significant historical shift in the understanding of democracy. Initially tied to the direct exercise of popular sovereignty by Rousseau, Condorcet, the Montagnards, and Bonapartist theorists, democracy was first rejected, then associated with the idea of rule by public opinion by liberals throughout the nineteenth century. This redefinition culminated in the invention of the term ‘liberal democracy’ in France in the 1860s. Originally conceived in opposition to ‘Caesarism’ during the Second Empire, the term has an ongoing and important legacy, and was later redeployed by French liberals against shifting adversaries – ‘totalitarianism’ from the 1930s onward, and ‘populism’ since the 1980s.

• Provides a chronological and contextual approach to the emergence of modern democracy and liberalism in France
• Identifies an overlooked conceptual distinction between public opinion and popular sovereignty
• Explains how, when, and why the term ‘liberal democracy’ was invented, and how it was historically redeployed against shifting opponents

Nathan Schlanger, The Invention of Technology: An Intellectual History with André Leroi-Gourhan – Cambridge University Press, January 2026; translation of L’Invention de la technologie: Une histoire intellectuelle avec André Leroi-Gourhan – PUF, January 2023

See also this interview with Stefanos Geroulanos for the Journal of the History of Ideas blog.

What is technology? How and why did techniques – including materials, tools, processes and products – become central subjects of study in anthropology and archaeology? In this book, Nathan Schlanger explores the invention of technology through the work of the eminent ethnologist and prehistorian André Leroi-Gourhan (1911–1986), author of groundbreaking works such as Gesture and Speech. While employed at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, Leroi-Gourhan initially specialized in ethnographic studies of ‘material civilizations’. By the 1950s, however, his approach broadened to encompass evolutionary and behavioral perspectives from history, biology, psychology and philosophy. Focused on the material dimensions of techniques, Leroi-Gourhan’s influential investigations ranged from traditional craft activities to automated production. They also anticipated both the information age and the environmental crisis of today. Schlanger’s study offers new insights into the complexity of Leroi-Gourhan’s interdisciplinary research, methods, and results, spanning across the 20th century social sciences and humanities.

Andy Hines ed. University Keywords – Johns Hopkins University Press, September 2025

How American universities operate as social and economic engines that shape society beyond their traditional educational roles.

University Keywords gathers, contextualizes, and develops original understandings of 27 key terms that define the study and operation of the American university today. Editor Andy Hines and the book’s contributors invite readers to rethink the university beyond its public image as a space of learning and understand how it also operates as a real estate powerhouse, a hedge fund, a debt machine, and even a crisis-producing entity embedded in the broader American economy…

Anders Stephenson, American Imperatives: The Cold War and Other Matters – Verso, July 2025

A radical reinterpretation of the Cold War by its most iconoclastic historian.

What was the cold war? Conventional wisdom makes it coextensive with an epoch stretching from the end of the Second World War to the collapse of the Soviet Union, a geopolitical period dominated by the confrontation between the United States and the USSR. In a fundamental challenge to prevailing orthodoxy, Anders Stephanson explodes this misconception, which has misled historians and obscured the US-centered nature of the entire process. He argues that “the cold war” is better understood as the frame that made the global role of the US after 1947 not only possible but imperative, and that in its classic form it ended in 1963, after the Cuban Missile Crisis.

American Imperatives does not assume that the causes of the great superpower rivalry rest solely with the United States. But the frame was unmistakably and ineradicably American. Without it, there would not have been, properly speaking, a cold war.

Nick Srnicek, Silicon Empires: The Fight for the Future of AI – Polity, October 2025

Looking beyond the flurry of rapid changes in artificial intelligence, Silicon Empires uncovers the deep economic forces guiding the expansion of AI. Nick Srnicek offers a clear-eyed view of the landscape of generative AI today, while situating it within the broader context of the recent deep learning and cloud computing paradigms. Far from being a disruptive technology, contemporary AI looks set to consolidate the power and position of Big Tech. Yet this power will not come without effort and costs.

Silicon Empires examines the strategies that Big Tech companies are using to expand their control within the AI value chain and across the economy. The implications of this consolidation of power are wide-ranging, particularly in the light of resurgent geopolitical tensions.

This book is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the forces that are shaping the future of AI.