intellectual history

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  4/24/2021
  

  The Woman Who Shattered the Myth of the Free Market

  Joan Robinson theorized the problem of monopsony as workers attempting to sell their labor are hurt by the small number of buyers. 

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• SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education
  4/19/2021
  

  ‘If We Don’t Adapt, We Will Wither Away’: Louis Menand on the University

  "What we teach in the liberal arts — hermeneutics, history, and theory — are intended to help you do this. Professional schools don’t teach these things. You are not going to learn them anywhere else."

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• SOURCE: London Review of Books
  4/15/2021
  

  The Gatekeeper

  by Adam Tooze

  Paul Krugman's career as a politically influential economist has reflected the political dead end of the Clinton-era ideal of technocratic governing. His new book suggests that the intellectual authority of the economics profession may no longer prevent active government or deficit spending. 

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• SOURCE: The New Republic
  4/14/2021
  

  How Americans Lost Their Fervor for Freedom (Review of Louis Menand)

  by Evan Kindley

  Before lamenting the death of "freedom" as the highest social ideal, it's important to reckon seriously with what the term means outside of the context of the Cold War.

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  4/10/2021
  

  Marshall D. Sahlins, Groundbreaking Anthropologist, Dies at 90

  Marshal Sahlins was an innovator in the practice of campus "teach-ins," developed as a way for he and colleagues to protest the war in Vietnam without disengaging from contact with their students. 

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  4/5/2021
  

  The Muslims Who Inspired Spinoza, Locke and Defoe

  by Mustafa Akyol

  "In this age of anxiety, anger and contestations between the West and the Islamic world, many epoch-shaping stories of intellectual exchanges between our cultures are often forgotten."

• 
• SOURCE: Public Seminar
  4/8/2021
  

  Why Weimar is an Imperfect Mirror

  by Helmut Smith

  Peter Gay's "Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider" became a key text for understanding the Weimar era as an allegory for understanding political conflict when it was published in 1968. But his psychoanalytical approach can be an impediment to understanding the historical specificity of the era. 

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• SOURCE: The Bulwark
  3/24/2021
  

  The Future of Conservatism?

  by Charlie Sykes

  "The Bulwark" columnist compares a recent task force for conservatism convened by former Governor Scott Walker to the legacy of the movement and finds it sorely lacking. 

• 
• 2/28/2021
  

  A Ghost of Galileo in the English Civil War

  by John Heilbron

  An obscure English painting containing an image of Galileo's "Dialogues" launches a deep consideration of the political and intellectual stakes of free inquiry during the English Civil War.

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• SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education
  2/1/2021
  

  Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule’s Technocratic Despotism

  by Jason Blakely

  "Far from being morally and rationally superior, technocracy may be a significant contributor to our inability to properly deliberate upon our political problems."

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• SOURCE: Public Books
  1/25/2021
  

  J. M. Keynes and the Visible Hands

  by Kent Puckett

  John Maynard Keynes's disgust at the outcome of the peace negotiations at the end of the Great War led him to write a scathing and influential book about the economic impact of the Treaty of Versailles. Unfortunately, the account, which overstated the economic devastation imposed on Germany, fueled Hitler's propaganda and made the rest of Europe unable to perceive the threat of German rearmament. 

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• SOURCE: Public Books
  1/18/2021
  

  When Black Humanity is Denied

  by Edna Bonhomme

  Enlightenment institutions – the prison, science, and asylums – are organized through binaries that draw boundaries between people who are and are not able to exercise freedom. Black artistic work supports Black freedom by challenging those boundaries. 

• 
• SOURCE: Harvard Magazine
  12/16/2020
  

  The American Exception: How Faith Shapes Economic and Social Policy

  by Benjamin M. Friedman

  Historian Benjamin Friedman's new book examines the importance of changing religious ideas in American Protestantism as influences on the development of social and economic policy. Part of the concluding chapter is excerpted here. 

• 
• SOURCE: Boston Review
  12/15/2020
  

  Caste Does Not Explain Race

  by Charisse Burden-Stelly

  A reviewer takes Isabel Wilkerson's book "Caste" to task for failure to examine the connections between racism and economic exploitation. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Economist
  12/11/2020
  

  An Inspiring History of the Enlightenment

  A new book focuses on the generation of the body of Enlightenment thought through debate and dispute which foreshadows many of today's debates about the merits of universal humanism and liberal democracy. 

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  11/12/2020
  

  Newton’s Daunting Masterpiece had a Surprisingly Wide Audience, Historians Find

  Two historians of science have traced the ownership and sharing of Sir Isaac Newton's first edition of "Principia" to conclude that the book was more widely read and influential among Enlightenment thinkers than previously believed. 

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Post
  10/1/2020
  

  The Most Essential Books of the Trump Era are Barely About Trump at All

  Most of the wave of political books on the Trump administration fixate on the President's personality or disregard for norms and niceties instead of evaluating the structural factors that made his presidency possible. 

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• SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education
  9/1/2020
  

  New Black Intellectual Histories

  Brandon Byrd argues that researching the African American intellectual tradition requires methodological flexibility and innovation to understand how Black thinkers have worked to produce ideas while being excluded from the spaces where intellectual work has typically been done. 

• 
• SOURCE: USA Today
  6/21/2020
  

  Prize-Winning Historian Robert D. Richardson, Who Wrote About American Thinkers, Dies At Age 86

  The biographer and intellectual historian was the winner of the Bancroft Prize in 2007 for William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism.

• 
• SOURCE: The American Prospect
  5/18/2020
  

  Keynes and the Good Life

  by Jeffrey Sachs

  Keynes did not give us a checklist of dos and don’ts other than general ones: Don’t waste human talents and physical resources through wanton unemployment, avoidable wars, or breakdowns of social and trade relations.