Progressive Geographies

Some of the academic books I’m looking forward to in 2025:

• Ben Anderson and Anna Secor, The Politics of Feeling: Populism, Progressivism, Liberalism (Goldsmiths Press/PERC Papers)
• Georges Bataille, Critical Essays Volume 2: 1949-1951, trans. Chris Turner, ed. Alberto Toscano and Benjamin Noys (Seagull)
• Madeleine Chalmers, French Technological Thought and the Nonhuman Turn (Edinburgh)
• Juliet Fall, Bornées: Une histoire illustrée de la frontière (Mētis)
• Fernanda Gallo, Hegel and Italian Political Thought: The Practice of Ideas, 1832-1900 (Cambridge)
• Lynne Huffer, These Survivals: Autobiography of an Extinction (Duke)
• André Leroi-Gourhan on Technology: A Selection of Writings from the 1930s to the 1960s, ed. Nathan Schlanger, trans. Nils F. Schott (Hau)
• Nitzan Itzhak Lebovic, Homo Temporalis: German Jewish Thinkers on Time (Cornell)
• Noam Leshom, Edges of Care: Living and Dying in No Man’s Land (Chicago)
• Ingrid A. Medby, Arctic State Identity: Geography, History, and Geopolitical Relations (Manchester)
• Mark Neocleous, Pacification: Social War and the Power of Police (Verso)
• Patricia Owens, Erased: A History of International Thought Without Men (Princeton)
• John Protevi, Regimes of Violence: Towards a Political Anthropology (Minnesota)
• Danielle Rosvally, Theatres of Value: Buying and Selling Shakespeare in Nineteenth-Century New York City (SUNY)
• Michael J. Shapiro, Negotiating Civic Life: Literature, Film, Politics (Edinburgh) – which I endorsed
• Quentin Skinner, Liberty as Independence (Cambridge) 
• Quinn Slobodian, Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right (Zone)
• Lyndsey Stonebridge, We are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience – Penguin (US; UK)
• Elaine Stratford, The Drowned (Palgrave)
• Federico Testa, On the Politics of the Living: Foucault and Canguilhem on Normativity and Biopolitical Resistance (Bloomsbury) – which I endorsed
• Georgios Varouxakis, The West: The History of an Idea (Princeton)
• Richard Wilson, Shakespeare’s Fascist Followers (Bloomsbury)

Some of these were published in late 2024 but I haven’t seen them yet, or come out in paperback in 2025. Here are the lists of books I liked from previous years – 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024.

Kenny Cupers, The Earth That Modernism Built: Empire and the Rise of Planetary Design – University of Texas Press, 2024 

New Books discussion with Miranda Melcher. Thanks to dmf for the link.

An intellectual history of architectural modernism for an age of rising global inequality and environmental crisis.

The Earth That Modernism Built traces the rise of planetary design to an imperialist discourse about the influence of the earthly environment on humanity. Kenny Cupers argues that to understand how the earth became an object of design, we need to radically shift the terms of analysis. Rather than describing how new design ideas and practices traveled and transformed people and places across the globe, this book interrogates the politics of life and earth underpinning this process. It demonstrates how approaches to modern housing, landscape design, and infrastructure planning are indebted to an understanding of planetary and human ecology fueled by settler colonialism and imperial ambition. 

Cupers draws from both canonical and unknown sources and archives in Germany, Namibia, and Poland to situate Wilhelmine and Weimar design projects in an expansive discourse about the relationship between soil, settlement, and race. This reframing reveals connections between colonial officials planning agricultural hinterlands, garden designers proselytizing geopolitical theory, soil researchers turning to folklore, and Bauhaus architects designing modern communities according to functionalist principles. Ultimately, The Earth That Modernism Built shows how the conviction that we can design our way out of environmental crisis is bound to exploitative and divisive ways of inhabiting the earth.

“Canguilhem, Dumézil, Hyppolite: Georges Canguilhem and his Contemporaries”, Revue Internationale de Philosophie, No 307, 2024, 27-48 – special issue on Georges Canguilhem beyond Epistemology and the History of Science, edited by Federico Testa.

“Foucault and Dumézil on Antiquity”, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol 85 No 3, July 2024, 571-600 (open access until end of January 2025).

Georges Dumézil, Mitra-Varuna: An Essay on Two Indo-European Representations of Sovereignty, translated by Derek Coltman, critical edition and introduction by Stuart Elden, afterword by Veena Das, HAU books, 2024 (Introduction and Afterword are open access on the HAU site).

“Alexandre Koyré and the Collège de France”, History of European Ideas, online first (open access).

Three of these four publications were completed before last year’s health problems and revisiting them for copy-editing and proofs was a bit strange. The fourth was conceived, written, reviewed and published in a much shorter period of just a few months this year.

The vast majority of what I’ve written in 2024 – and really since mid-2022 – is for the book manuscript under the working title Mapping Indo-European Thought in Twentieth-Century France, on which I’ve been sharing research updates through the year. The articles above all connect to this project, even though none of them use parts of the text. So far, I’ve not excerpted material for separate publication.

A couple of other things are forthcoming, again both completed some time ago, along with a couple of more recent book reviews and a chapter on “Foucault and Structuralism”. I’m hoping that I will complete a first draft of Mapping Indo-European Thought by the end of 2025 – that’s the entire focus again, and talks next year will all present parts of that work.

Things Hidden: The Life and Legacy of René Girard (YouTube)

Website and trailer at the film’s site – Things Hidden

Dan Davies, The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions—and How the World Lost Its Mind – University of Chicago Press, 2024

Longlisted for the 2024 Financial Times Book of the Year. How life and the economy became a black box—a collection of systems no one understands, producing outcomes no one likes.

Passengers get bumped from flights. Phone menus disconnect. Automated financial trades produce market collapse. Of all the challenges in modern life, some of the most vexing come from our relationships with automation: a large system does us wrong, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

The problem, economist Dan Davies shows, is accountability sinks: systems in which decisions are delegated to a complex rule book or set of standard procedures, making it impossible to identify the source of mistakes when they happen. In our increasingly unhuman world—lives dominated by algorithms, artificial intelligence, and large organizations—these accountability sinks produce more than just aggravation. They make life and economy unknowable—a black box for no reason.

In The Unaccountability Machine, Davies lays bare how markets, institutions, and even governments systematically generate outcomes that no one—not even those involved in making them—seems to want. Since the earliest days of the computer age, theorists have foreseen the dangers of complex systems without personal accountability. In response, British business scholar Stafford Beer developed an accountability-first approach to management called “cybernetics,” which might have taken off had his biggest client (the Chilean government) not fallen to a bloody coup in 1973.

With his signature blend of economic and journalistic rigor, Davies examines what’s gone wrong since Beer, including what might have been had the world embraced cybernetics when it had the chance. The Unaccountability Machine is a revelatory and resonant account of how modern life became predisposed to dysfunction.

The music I enjoyed this year, either bought in physical form, often through Burning Shed, or digitally through bandcamp.

1. 212°, Transmissions
2. Anchor & Burden, Extinction Level & Afterglow EP
3. The Aristocrats, Duck
4. Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin, Spin & Ronin Rhythm Clan, Moonday EP
5. Bass Communion, The Itself of Itself
6. BASta!, III
7. Big Big Train, The Likes of Us
8. Black Country Communion, V
9. Tim Bowness, Powder Dry
10. Caligula’s Horse, Charcoal Grace
11. Jon Durant, Momentarily
12. Fractal Sextet, Sky Full of Hope
13. Frost*, Life in the Wires
14. Gavin Harrison and Antoine Fafard, Perpetual Mutations
15. Neal Morse, Joseph Part II: The Restoration
16. Neal Morse and the Resonance, No Hill for a Climber
17. Opeth, The Last Will and Testament
18. PAKT, No Steps Left to Trace
19. The Pineapple Thief, It Leads to This and Last to Run EP
20. Pure Reason Revolution, Coming Up to Consciousness
21. Quartet Diminished, Deerand
22. Trevor Rabin, Rio
23. Stefan Thelen and Markus Reuter, Rothko Spaces Volume 2
24. Stefan Thelen and David Torn, Rothko Spaces Volume 1
25. Devin Townsend, Powernerd
26. Tears for Fears, Songs for a Nervous Planet
27. Transatlantic, The Absolute Whirlwind
28. Whom Gods Destroy, Insanium
29. Weather Systems, Ocean without a Shore
30. Mark Wingfield, The Gathering

For previous years: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013 and 2012.