From the workings of financial markets to our response to the ecological crisis, economic theory shapes the world. But where do these ideas come from?
Ricardo’s Dream tells the fascinating story of David Ricardo, Adam Smith’s only real rival as the ‘founder of economics’. The wealthiest stock trader of his day, Ricardo introduced the study of abstract models to economics. He also developed the theory of trade that underpinned globalization and hides, behind its mathematical facade, a history of power, empire, and slavery.
Brimming with fresh ideas and stories, Ricardo’s Dream shows how too many economists, from Ricardo’s day to our own, have turned away from observing the real world and led us astray.
Rethinking Ernst Bloch offers a critical reassessment of the thought of Ernst Bloch, best-known for his groundbreaking study The Principle of Hope and one of the most significant European thinkers and public intellectuals of the twentieth century. It explores Bloch’s life, work and reception; his debt to Marx and Hegel; his central concepts of hope and utopia; his affinities with philosophers such as Gramsci and Žižek; and his radical reframing of our understanding of history, society and culture. Above all, this volume examines the relevance of Bloch’s ideas today, in a world still shot through with economic inequality and social injustice.
Contributors are: Agata Bielik-Robson, Ivan Boldyrev, Henk de Berg, Sam Dolbear, Vincent Geoghegan, Holger Glinka, Loren Goldman, Douglas Kellner, Cat Moir, Jan Rehmann, Nina Rismal, Johan Siebers, and Peter Thompson
British Library update – more of the collection available, remote ordering possible, with more detail here.
My anecdotal experience recently, in the two rooms I’ve used most over the past few years (Rare Books and Asian and African Studies) is that the new online ordering is a bit laborious, but that the staff are very helpful in getting you to see what you want. I was asking for something quite difficult in one case. It’s not as straightforward as it used to be, still, but certainly an improvement on earlier this year.
A devastating critique of the forces propelling us beyond critical temperature limits, by the bestselling author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline
The world is on the cusp of one and a half degrees of warming – just the rise it has committed itself to avoiding. Heat at such levels would be intolerable. Even before one and a half, seasons of climate disaster have struck with ever more devastating force, and yet a notion has taken hold that the cause is now lost: the intolerable has become unavoidable. The limit will be overshot – perhaps two degrees as well – and the best we can do is cool down the Earth at some later point, towards the end of the century, by means of technologies not yet proven.
How did this happen? How could the idea of overshoot gain such traction? What forces are driving us into a climate that people – particularly poor people in the global South – won’t be able to cope with? In Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown, Andreas Malm and Wim Carton present a history of the present phase of the crisis, likely to extend decades into the future, as the fossil fuel industry swims in the largest profits ever made. Money continues to flow into the construction of pipelines, platforms, terminals, mines – assets that will have to be destroyed for the planet to remain liveable. Too much heat has become officially acceptable because such revolutionary destruction is not. But should the rest of us abide by that priority?
Unflinchingly critical of business-as-usual and the calls for surrender to it, sweeping in scope, stirring and sobering, Overshoot lays out the stakes for the climate struggle in the years ahead.
In Apartheid Remains, Sharad Chari explores how people handle the remains of segregation and apartheid in South Africa as witnessed through portals in an industrial-residential landscape in the Indian Ocean city of Durban. Through long-term historical and ethnographic research, Chari portrays South Africa’s twentieth century as a palimpsest that conserves the remains of multiple pasts, including attempts by the racial state to remake territory and personhood while instead deepening spatial contradictions and struggles. When South Durban’s denizens collectively mobilized in various ways—through Black Consciousness politics and other attempts at refusing the ruinous articulation of biopolitics, sovereignty, and capital—submerged traditions of the Indian Ocean and the Black Atlantic offered them powerful resources. Of these, Chari reads Black documentary photography as particularly insightful audiovisual blues critique. At the tense interface of Marxism, feminism, and Black study, he offers a method and form of geography attentive to the spatial and embodied remains of history. Apartheid Remains looks out from South Durban to imaginations of abolition of all forms of racial capitalism and environmental suffering that define our planetary predicament.
What does liberty entail? How have concepts of liberty changed over time? And what are the global consequences? This book surveys the history of rival views of liberty from antiquity to modern times. Quentin Skinner traces the understanding of liberty as independence from the classical ideal to early modern Britain, culminating in the claims of the Whig oligarchy to have transformed this idea into reality. Yet, with the Whig vision of a free state and civil society undermined by the American Revolution of 1776, Skinner explores how claims that liberty was fulfilled by an absence of physical or coercive restraint came to prominence. Liberty as Independence examines new dimensions of these rival views, considering the connections between debates on liberty and debates on slavery, and demonstrating how these ideas were harnessed in feminist discussions surrounding limitations on the liberty of women. The concept of liberty is inherently global, and Skinner argues strongly for the reinstatement of the understanding of liberty as independence.
Thanks to Tom Ashby for the link – and noting that the cover shows “La liberté” (c.1793-1794) by Nanine Vallain
Since the last update in September, I’ve continued working on the chapter of this project which looks at Benveniste and Dumézil’s parallel teaching careers at the Collège de France, through the 1950s and 1960s. This is the planned topic of an online Social Anthropology seminar at the University of St Andrews in November.
Much of the time recently has been spent in Paris, with shorter visits to archives and libraries in London and Cambridge. The main work in Paris was to continue working through Benveniste’s papers at the Bibliothèque nationale. A lot of these relate to journal articles or book chapters, where there was some combination of a manuscript, rough notes, a typescript, often with a lot of corrections, and then proofs. His typists were very good. Even though his handwriting is a lot better than some of the other people I’m working on, they would still have been challenging manuscripts to work with, especially the diacritics, transliterations and other alphabets. Occasionally there were letters to Benveniste, perhaps relating to the request to write something, or sending the proofs. Generally, these files related to published material, and were not especially revealing. More interesting, though harder to make sense of, are things relating to his teaching. Much has already been dated by the archivists, but having a list of his courses helps to situate them, between his annual courses at the EPHE and the Collège de France, and the year. The lack of a detailed online inventory for several boxes means I am not sure what is where – and there isn’t an obvious logic to the organisation. But I would probably want to work through everything myself anyway. Although I won’t need to look at every box again, I plan to return to some, and so one important task is making sufficiently detailed notes that I can find things again at some future point.
There is also a lot of material relating to Benveniste’s Vocabulaire book, some of which has caused me to rethink some of the assumptions I’d made about that project. I’m not sure how it all fits together quite yet, but it seems to me to be the most revealing part of the archive in terms of his publications. I also took a look at some of Tzvetan Todorov’s papers, also at the Bibliothèque nationale, for the material they have in relation to Benveniste, some of whose final courses Todorov attended.
One thing that really struck me, perhaps even more than in the similar work I’ve done with Dumézil’s archive, is just how many pieces Benveniste published were in Festschriften or other volumes celebrating another great scholar, perhaps for their 60th or 70th birthday. Dumézil does a lot of these too, and it’s very much a generational thing. Of the next generation, I’m struck that Foucault did almost none. There was a Hommage à Jean Hyppolite that he led, after Hyppolite’s death, to which he contributed the famous “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” essay and a brief avertissement which is not included in Dits et écrits (a scan is here). He and Georges Canguilhem had earlier spoken at a memorial event for Hyppolite at the ENS, and those were also published. But these are not tributes to a living scholar. Foucault reworked his introduction to Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathological for a special issue of a journal on Canguilhem shortly before his death, which was in 1985, which is probably as close as he got (a comparison is here). But those are two exceptions, for people Foucault was enormously indebted to as a teacher and/or as a mentor. I can’t think of examples where he was writing a piece for a collection of someone he knew much less well. With the Hyppolite ENS tribute and Canguilhem he is also writing about the person being remembered or honoured, while with the Hommage volume it is a piece on a different topic – something that is more common in a Festschrift. With Benveniste and Dumézil there are large numbers of those kinds of pieces. When I shared these thoughts on social media, Philipp Kendar pointed out that Foucault also contributed to a special issue of Critique on Georges Bataille in 1964. I should have remembered that – I even bought a copy of the issue a few years ago, since I wanted to see Foucault’s piece in context. But, again, it’s a tribute to someone recently deceased, and it is about their work.
The Festschrift as a literary form still endures, but it doesn’t seem to be nearly as common, or have nearly the same kind of status today as it once had. And while there were certainly problems with the model, they did include some interesting pieces that were probably quite difficult to place elsewhere – more than a review, not quite an article or more standard book chapter. But, they can be really difficult to track down if you are looking for a piece published in one. (My old thoughts on this, here.)
Hôtel Nevers, rue Colbertrue du Four site of the University of Paris
On the corner of the rue de Richelieu and the rue Colbert there is a rather dilapidated building which I understand now belongs to the BnF. It is the Hôtel Nevers, which once was the home of Cardinal Mazarin. But in 1958, it was where the Centre de recherches d’histoire des sciences et des techniques was established, directed by Alexandre Koyré, at the Centre International de Synthèse. It’s right next to the BnF Richelieu site. A little sign gives some of its history, but not what it was used for in the late 20th century. The Centre, now the Centre Alexandre Koyré, was relocated to the Museum of Natural History in the Jardin des Plantes in 1989, and is now at the Campus Condorcet. I’m interested in how much this Centre was an alternative centre in Paris to the Institut d’histoire des sciences et des techniques of the University of Paris, on the rue du Four, which Gaston Bachelard, Canguilhem and Suzanne Bachelard all directed.
The Koyré work is a parallel and growing side-project to the Indo-European work, although he is likely to feature as a minor character in the story I’m telling. As well as the article I wrote on his failure to get elected to the Collège de France (open access in History of European Ideas), I wrote a piece on Canguilhem and Koyré for a workshop on Canguilhem, and that paper opens up a wider discussion of his situation within a French tradition in the history of sciences, and beyond. An audio recording of my talk is here. Doing the research for that paper took me back to the Canguilhem archive at CAPHÉS at the École normale supérieure, and I also found that the Bibliothèque nationale has some correspondence between Koyré and the geographer Jean Gottmann, which I went to look at one afternoon. I say a bit more about those connections here. I also tried to find out a bit about Koyré’s visiting posts in Cairo, though as far as I can tell there are relatively few published sources for this part of his career. I also made a trip to the Archives nationales, which has some papers relating to Koyré and also to Dumézil’s teaching of Armenian. At the moment the last file I know I need to consult there is unavailable – there is apparently asbestos in one of the stores – and the date it might be accessible keeps getting put back.
While I was in Paris, my MacBook starting crashing, and trying to recover it made it worse; a factory reset at the Apple Store didn’t resolve the problem; and the cost of repair was so high (and the laptop relatively old), that I had to replace it when I got home. What this meant was that for several days in Paris I was working with pencil and notebook, which was fine for taking notes – though there was a lot I needed to write up when I had a working system again. (And, at times, I was trying to decipher my own handwriting…) But it made me realise how reliant I am on being able to check files when I’m working in libraries and archives. I have lots of lists of things to check, colour-coded highlights in my draft chapters and papers, indicating to me why I need to look at something or how it fits with things I’ve already consulted. Or an archive file had a draft of a published text and I wanted to compare it to the published one, many of which I have as a pdf. I was pulling up those files on the iPad while in the libraries, but it wasn’t nearly as coordinated a work process as I was used to having. It did make me grateful that nothing was saved on the laptop alone, and that I could access everything online in some way. For reading that was manageable, much less so for writing. As it was, I was able to work through most of the archive files I wanted to on this visit, and I didn’t have a pressing writing deadline which would have caused more problems. Fortunately, I’d already written my paper for Bristol the week after I returned. Writing emails or comments on PhD work was much harder. All the people I work on did their initial work by hand, and then usually got someone else to type it up before they corrected it, often by hand. It’s not a model I’m keen to replicate again.
Back in England, I had a lot of things to catch up on and the Bristol conference, as well as some library work in London. One archive I’ve visited a few times before is the Ancient India and Iran Trust in Cambridge, which has the papers of Harold Bailey which include correspondence with many of the people I’m discussing. In particular, his correspondence with Benveniste – who examined his doctoral thesis – is extensive and covers many decades. But the Trust also has the papers of the Corpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum, and this shed some light on Benveniste’s planned volume on Old Persian Inscriptions, which was never completed. There is an interesting story here, I think, which I’ve been trying to reconstruct. There is some material relating to Benveniste’s progress there, but the draft parts of the text are missing, and I’m trying to find out where they might have ended up. The most recent reference I can find to them and their whereabouts is in 1994 – almost twenty years after Benveniste’s death – but thirty years ago now.
For various reasons I am unsure when I will next be able to get to these archives, but I feel I’ve made some good progress recently.
Previous updates on this project can be found here, along with links to some research resources and forthcoming publications. The re-edition of Georges Dumézil’s Mitra-Varunais now scheduled for December 2024. There is a lot more about the earlier Foucault work here. The final volume of the series is The Archaeology of Foucault, and the special issue of Theory, Culture & Society I co-edited on “Foucault before the Collège de France” has some important contributions on the earlier parts of Foucault’s career, and is currently available free to access. My article “Foucault and Dumézil on Antiquity” is in the current issue of Journal of the History of Ideas; “Alexandre Koyré and the Collège de France” is online first and open access.
Robcis traces how the Catalan psychiatrist François Tosquelles, together with his colleagues and patients in the village of St-Alban-sur-Limagnole, transformed the practice and theory of psychiatry during and after the Second World War. They did this by turning towards the institution of the hospital itself, and considering how psychiatric care could be rooted in an ethical and political critique of social conditions. This resulted in a new movement called institutional psychotherapy, which Robcis traces between Spain, France, and Algeria, and in the work and legacies of influential thinkers such as Jean Oury, Frantz Fanon, Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault.
To become sovereign, one must be seen as sovereign. In other words, a sovereign must appear—philosophically, politically, and aesthetically—on the stage of power, both to themselves and to others, in order to assume authority. In this sense, sovereignty is a theatrical phenomenon from the very beginning.
This book explores the relationship between theater and sovereignty in modern political theory, philosophy, and performance. Arthur Bradley considers the theatricality of power—its forms, dramas, and iconography—and examines sovereignty’s modes of appearance: thrones, insignia, regalia, ritual, ceremony, spectacle, marvels, fictions, and phantasmagoria. He weaves together political theory and literature, reading figures such as Plato, Aristotle, Montaigne, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Schmitt, Benjamin, Derrida, and Agamben alongside writers including Shakespeare, Cervantes, Schiller, Melville, Valéry, Kafka, Ionesco, and Genet.
Formally inventive and deeply interdisciplinary, Staging Sovereigntyoffers a surprising and original narrative of political modernity from early modern political theology to the age of neoliberal capitalism.
Update August 2025: There is an interview about the book with Richard B. Gibson at the Blog of the APA. Thanks to dmf for this link. There is also a review by K. Daniel Cho at Theory, Culture & Society.
The book is in English, but I can only find this abstract:
La Diplomatica è la scienza che studia i documenti, in modo particolare quelli di epoca medioevale. La parola ‘Diplomatica’ non ha nulla a che vedere con la diplomazia: il termine deriva da ‘diploma’, ossia un testo scritto certificato, dal valore giuridico. Gli oggetti di studio della disciplina sono i documenti pubblici e privati, le loro caratteristiche esterne ed interne, il linguaggio, la cronologia, la produzione, la trasmissione, la registrazione, l’edizione. Questo manuale colma un vuoto notevole negli studi di Diplomatica perché fornisce finalmente al pubblico di lingua inglese la possibilità di conoscere l’affascinante universo della documentazione medievale.
