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jhideas.bsky.social
Journal of the History of Ideas
@jhideas.bsky.social
9.5K followers 850 following 270 posts
Official account of the JHI Blog. Zac Endter, Tomi Onabanjo, and @jacobsaliba.bsky.social.
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Today on the blog, Jon Catlin interviews Federico Marcon on his latest book, "Fascism: History of a Word," which uses semiotics to chart fascism’s changing political and heuristic meanings from its invention in Italy in 1919 to the present.
@joncatlin.bsky.social @uchicagopress.bsky.social
The Disadvantages of “Fascism” for Life: An Interview with Federico Marcon (Part I)
by Jonathon Catlin
www.jhiblog.org
November 26, 2025 at 2:34 PM
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In the JHI Blog's forum on political economy, Veronica Lazăr argues that the turn to global intellectual history has failed to take account of the financial and symbolic economy of contemporary knowledge production.
www.jhiblog.org/2025/11/24/t...
The Repressed Political Economy of Global Intellectual History
Veronica Lazăr This think piece is part of a JHI Blog forum: “The Return of Political Economy in Intellectual History.”
www.jhiblog.org
November 24, 2025 at 4:20 PM
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Today on the blog, Amartyajyoti Basu writes on the exploitation of transport workers in colonial Calcutta, demonstrating that Indian capitalism has operated through two temporal regimes: abstract, homogeneous clock-time and concrete, task-oriented time rooted in agrarian and communal rhythms.
The Fractured Clock: Exploitation and Control of Transport Workers in Colonial Calcutta
by Amartyajyoti Basu
web.sas.upenn.edu
November 19, 2025 at 2:45 PM
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For the JHI Blog’s forum on political economy, Ibanca Anand recounts how midcentury US growth economists' influential models of "multi-factor productivity" in agriculture systematically occluded the role of labor and supported narrow, warped criteria of economic health.
Zvi Griliches and the Productivity Puzzle in Midcentury American Agriculture
by Ibanca Anand This think piece is part of a JHI Blog forum: “The Return of Political Economy in Intellectual History.”
web.sas.upenn.edu
November 17, 2025 at 3:46 PM
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In today's think piece, Levi Thompson analyzes an under-explored shift from petro-modernity to petro-post-modernity through Fredric Jameson's theory of culture and film.
From Petro-Modernity to Petro-Post-Modernity: Disney and the American Cultural Imagination of the Oil Industry
by Levi Thompson
www.jhiblog.org
November 12, 2025 at 2:50 PM
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In a new think piece for the JHI Forum on political economy, Alexander Curtis intervenes into today's debates around neoliberalism, arguing for the role of "irrational subjecthood" in the context of Margaret Thatcher's economic policies during the 1980s. @alexandercurtis.bsky.social
The Roots of the Neoliberal Subject: Margaret Thatcher and the Creation of Homo Oeconomicus
by Alexander Curtis This think piece is part of the forum “The Return of Political Economy in Intellectual History.”
web.sas.upenn.edu
November 10, 2025 at 2:45 PM
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In today's think-piece, Julia Meghan Walton examines British-Chinese writer Winnifred Eaton, situating her life and career more broadly through concepts of "passing" and "civilizational equivalence."
“Passing” as Japanese at the Turn of the Century: On Civilizational Equivalence in Onoto Watanna’s Oeuvre
by Julia Meghan Walton
web.sas.upenn.edu
November 5, 2025 at 2:38 PM
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In a new think-piece for the JHI forum on political economy, Benjamín Gaillard-Garrido discusses the thought of 18th-century Catholic friar Joaquín de Finestrad as an attempt to reconcile sacred morality with materialist-oriented discourses of imperial economics and monarchism in South America.
“To Repair Evil and Enrich the Nation”: Moral Doctrine and Political Economy in Joaquín de Finestrad’s Vasallo instruido
by Benjamín Gaillard-Garrido This think piece is part of the forum “The Return of Political Economy in Intellectual History.”
www.jhiblog.org
November 3, 2025 at 3:06 PM
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The October issue of the journal includes an article by Ian Merkel: "Laurette Séjourné and Leonora Carrington, Ethnography and Surrealism in Mexico." Read it here on Project Muse: muse.jhu.edu/pub/56/artic...
A quote from the article: "The critical force of much of interwar ethnography has dulled with the passage of time, but Séjourné and Carrington's engagement with Indigenous Mexico, past and present, continues to shine brightly."
October 30, 2025 at 3:24 PM
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On today’s episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Sophia Rosenfeld on her new book, “The Age of Choice," which explores how the idea of choice became related to what it meant to be free between the early modern period and the 20th century.
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The Age of Choice: Disha Karnad Jani Interviews Sophia Rosenfeld
by Disha Karnad Jani
web.sas.upenn.edu
October 29, 2025 at 3:08 PM
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The recent issue of the journal includes an article by Wojciech Engelking: "Schmitt's Reinterpretation of Hegel During His Nazi Period." Read it here: muse.jhu.edu/pub/56/artic...
A quote from the article: "Schmitt's essays . . . in which he presents a vision of the Third Reich as a post-state political organism . . . were for him an attempt to adapt Hegel's ethical state to the conditions of the 1930s and to identify the Third Reich as the political community that most fully realized the march of the spirit."
October 28, 2025 at 2:45 PM
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In this new think piece for the JHI Blog Forum on Political Economy, Vishal Verma studies the historical linkages between labor and caste through the intellectual debates underpinning the origins and evolution of the theorization of caste across time and space.

web.sas.upenn.edu/jhiblog/2025...
The Labor Question and the Critique of Caste in Global Intellectual History
by Vishal Verma
web.sas.upenn.edu
October 27, 2025 at 6:41 PM
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The recent issue of the journal includes an article by Hugo Bonin: "'True Liberal Democracy . . . Belongs to Napoléon III': The Rise and Fall of Démocratie Libérale in the French Second Empire" muse.jhu.edu/pub/56/artic...
A quote from the article: "In sum, démocratie libérale was not merely a theoretical project but a practical compromise—a balancing act between the demands of popular sovereignty and the fear of democratic excess. It reveals the ambivalence of both liberals and Bonapartists toward democracy, foreshadowing the uneasy cohabitation of democratic and authoritarian tendencies that continues to shape political systems today."
October 23, 2025 at 2:31 PM
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Today on the blog, Sam Franz and Véronique Mickisch interview Edward Baring about his forthcoming book, "Vulgar Marxism," which studies how projects for worker education shaped 20th-c. Marxist thought.
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The Intellectual History of Worker Education: An Interview with Edward Baring
by Sam Franz and Véronique Mickisch
web.sas.upenn.edu
October 22, 2025 at 1:44 PM
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The new issue of the JHI includes an article by Craig Martin: "Averroes Among the Paduan Physicians, 1540 to 1600": muse.jhu.edu/pub/56/artic...
A quote from the article: "Openness toward Averroes signaled a turn away from the anti-Arabic polemics that roiled medical humanism in the first decades of the sixteenth century and reveal a lack of concern about philosophical controversies surrounding his views about the human soul and the eternity of the world."
October 21, 2025 at 2:43 PM
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Miranda Johnson contributes to the JHI Blog’s forum on political economy with a think piece about how the mythos surrounding New Zealand’s "biculturalism" obscures older indigenous strategies of economic development and centuries-long relations between settlers and indigenous peoples.
“Culture Talk” and Indigenous Economic History
by Miranda Johnson This think piece is part of the forum “The Return of Political Economy in Intellectual History.”
web.sas.upenn.edu
October 20, 2025 at 1:54 PM
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The winner of the JHI’s 2024 Morris D. Forkosch Book Prize for the best first book in intellectual history is Priyasha Mukhopadhyay for Required Reading: The Life of Everyday Texts in the British Empire!
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Congratulations to Priyasha Mukhopadhyay, winner of the Morris D. Forkosch Book Prize!
Announcing the winner of the JHI's 2024 Morris D. Forkosch Book Prize.
web.sas.upenn.edu
October 16, 2025 at 1:10 PM
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For the JHI Blog, Rose Facchini interviewed Gisèle Sapiro about her latest book, "Qu'est-ce qu'un auteur mondial? Le champ littéraire transnational" (Seuil, 2024), which studies the role of intermediaries, translators, and mediators in the making of world authorship.
@rosefacchini.bsky.social
Literature’s Circulation Across Fields and Nations: An Interview with Gisèle Sapiro
by Rose Facchini
web.sas.upenn.edu
October 15, 2025 at 1:56 PM
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In the new issue of the JHI, Daniel Sutton explores how ancient Greek theorists struggled to find the terminology to distinguish good and bad forms of popular government:
muse.jhu.edu/pub/56/artic...
A quote from the article: "We do not have an appropriate word for bad democracy in our constitutional discourse; and that is because we never had one."
October 14, 2025 at 1:57 PM
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In a new think piece for the JHI forum on Political Economy, Alexandre Aloy interrogates the concept and historical genealogy of neoliberalism by situating it alongside transnational narratives of authoritarianism.
“Authoritarian Neoliberalism”: The Concept of Our Time?
by Alexandre Aloy This think piece is part of the forum “The Return of Political Economy in Intellectual History”
web.sas.upenn.edu
October 13, 2025 at 1:28 PM
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The new issue of the JHI includes a discussion of the lexicon project, “The Twentieth Century in Basic Concepts: A Dictionary of Historical Semantics in Germany,” by Ernst Müller, Barbara Picht, and Falko Schmieder. Access is free for the next few weeks on Project Muse: muse.jhu.edu/pub/56/artic...
A quote from the article: "After the disciplinary differentiation of the individual sciences, which has replaced philosophy as a universal discourse from the nineteenth century onward, and with the emergence of plural public spheres based on new media, knowledge has become splintered and fragmented, so that the forms and contexts of the production of meaning can only be explored in an interdisciplinary and historical-epistemologicai perspective."
October 9, 2025 at 4:03 PM
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Today on the blog, Jacob Saliba interviews Brandon Bloch on his recent book, "Reinventing Protestant Germany: Religious Nationalists and the Contest for Post-Nazi Democracy."
@harvardpress.bsky.social
When Theology Became Political: An Interview with Brandon Bloch
by Jacob Saliba
web.sas.upenn.edu
October 8, 2025 at 1:37 PM
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Nayeli L. Riano's article in the new JHI, "The Pueblo and the Politics of History and Historiography in the Writings of Andrés Bello and Francisco Bilbao," is now available for free. Read it here on Project Muse: muse.jhu.edu/pub/56/artic...
October 7, 2025 at 6:19 PM
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In a new think piece for the JHI Forum on Political Economy, Oscar Hughff-Coates discusses Chicago School economist Thomas Sowell and how his work contributed to key discourses on race, post-war economics, and the state in the wake of the neoliberal order.
Freedom and the State in Thomas Sowell’s America
by Oscar Hughff-Coates This think piece is part of the forum “The Return of Political Economy in Intellectual History.”
web.sas.upenn.edu
October 6, 2025 at 2:09 PM
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The JHI's Graduate Student Symposium, "Between the Text and Material History," will be held this Saturday, October 4, on Zoom! Events kick off at 10:00 am Eastern. Check out the complete schedule and register here:
Welcome! You are invited to join a meeting: JHI Graduate Student Symposium, "Between the Text and Material History". After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the meeting.
Between the Text and Material History Saturday, October 4, 2025 10:00am (Eastern): Knowledge Beyond the Text Peter Gaber (Columbia University & London School of Economics) “Canon and Constitution: G...
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October 2, 2025 at 3:07 PM