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Journal of the History of Ideas @jhideas.bsky.social · 6h

For the Blog, Alexander Aerts interviews Isabel Jacobs and Jacob Saliba about their edited volume, "Authority, History, and Political Theology" (Bloomsbury, 2026), which documents the relationship between philosopher Alexandre Kojève and theologian Gaston Fessard. @jacobsaliba.bsky.social

web.sas.upenn.edu

Kojève and Fessard on Political Theology: An Interview with Isabel Jacobs and Jacob Saliba

Alexander Aerts interviews Isabel Jacobs and Jacob Saliba about their edited volume, "Authority, History, and Political Theology," which documents the relationship between philosopher Alexandre Kojève...

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Journal of the History of Ideas @jhideas.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Beneath every historical concept of technology lies a different concept of the hand, writes Rae Bruml Norton in the JHI Blog’s technology forum. When we hear claims that technology has become separate from the craft of the hand, we must ask just which "hand" is being discussed.

jhiblog.org

Concepts of Hand and Technology

Rather than conceiving of humans and machines through their opposition, we must track their conceptual relationship to a third term: the hand....

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Journal of the History of Ideas @jhideas.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

For the In Theory podcast, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Benoît Loiseau about his new work, "The Death of the Clinic: Radical Experiments in the Art of Medicine," which offers a formally inventive history of five radical attempts to reimagine the institution of the clinic in the 20th century.

jhiblog.org

The Death of the Clinic: Disha Karnad Jani Interviews Benoît Loiseau

Disha Karnad Jani interviews Benoît Loiseau about his new work, "The Death of the Clinic: Radical Experiments in the Art of Medicine" (2026), which offers a formally inventive history of five radical ...

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Journal of the History of Ideas @jhideas.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

For Part II of our retrospective on "Specters of Mother India," we present an interview with Mrinalini Sinha. In the late 1920s, Indian feminists found a brief opening for collective political agency as women. Why did this opening emerge—and then get foreclosed? @dukepress.bsky.social

web.sas.upenn.edu

Universal Rights and the Specters of Indian Feminism, Part II: An Interview with Mrinalini Sinha

In the late 1920s, Indian feminists found a brief opening for collective political agency as women. Why did this opening emerge—and then get foreclosed?...

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Journal of the History of Ideas @jhideas.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Opening the JHI Blog’s technology forum, Kapp Singer critiques the history of science’s late-twentieth-century fixation on “living technologies.” Instead of historicizing the standpoint of the ascendant biotech industry, Singer argues, many historians inadvertently reproduced it.

web.sas.upenn.edu

Organisms as Technologies in the History of Science

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Journal of the History of Ideas @jhideas.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

In an interview for the JHI Blog, Nathan Schlanger discusses his book, "The Invention of Technology: An Intellectual History with André Leroi-Gourhan," which charts how Leroi-Gourhan helped make the study of techniques central to the many fields with which he engaged. @universitypress.cambridge.org

web.sas.upenn.edu

André Leroi-Gourhan’s Technological Sequences: An Interview with Nathan Schlanger

Nathan Schlanger discusses his book, "The Invention of Technology: An Intellectual History with André Leroi-Gourhan," which charts how Leroi-Gourhan helped make the study of techniques central to the ...

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Journal of the History of Ideas @jhideas.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

The JHI Blog's newsletter is a great way to stay in the loop about updates and new scholarship from the blog and journal. Here's the latest installment, with information about the upcoming symposium, links to many un-paywalled journal articles, and so much more.

mailchi.mp

JHI Blog Newsletter: September 2026

Catch up on new scholarship from the Blog & the Journal

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Journal of the History of Ideas @jhideas.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

The latest issue of the journal includes an article by İlker Aytürk and Anıl Kahvecioğlu: "The Second Life of the Constitution of Medina: On the Possibility of a Liberal Islam in Turkey in the 1990s." Read it here: muse.jhu.edu/article/997085 @ilkerayturk.bsky.social

A quote from the article: "Although the Turkish debate on the Constitution of Medina was largely confined to Turkey, with minor ripple effects elsewhere, it nevertheless represented a faith-based, non-Western rejoinder to a largely Western conversation on multiculturalism."

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Journal of the History of Ideas @jhideas.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

The latest issue of the journal includes an article by Piotr Kuligowski and Bartłomiej Błesznowski: "Beyond the Revolutionary Motto? Three Polish Accounts of Fraternity in the Long Nineteenth Century." Read it here on Project MUSE: muse.jhu.edu/pub/56/artic... @pkuligowski.bsky.social

A quote from the article: "In a society lacking a modern discourse of political sovereignty and national cohesion (Polish territory had been split into three parts, each under the imperial rule of a different neighboring power), fraternity was a central ideal of popular movements demanding national liberation."

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Journal of the History of Ideas @jhideas.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

The new issue of the journal includes an article by Matteo Favaretti Camposampiero, "'Natural Wonders Are Greater than Miracles': Christian Wolff on Supernatural Events." Read it here: muse.jhu.edu/pub/56/artic...

A quote from the article: "Against the naive picture that would rank the supernatural higher than the natural, Wolff expressly sided with the defenders of the superiority of nature."

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Journal of the History of Ideas @jhideas.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Unglid Paul interviews Doyle D. Calhoun, Alioune B. Fall, and Cheikh Thiam about Léopold Sédar Senghor, Négritude, and the respective challenges of translating the man and the idea in their recent work, “The Essential Senghor: African Philosophy and Black Aesthetics.” @dukepress.bsky.social

web.sas.upenn.edu

Reintroducing Senghor: An Interview with Doyle D. Calhoun, Alioune B. Fall, and Cheikh Thiam

by Unglid Paul

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Journal of the History of Ideas @jhideas.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

The new issue of the journal includes an article by Joshua Freed: "Mixing Labour and Mixed Property: The Law of Locke's Original Appropriation." Read it here: muse.jhu.edu/pub/56/artic...

A quote from the article: "Locke's account of property acquisition [by labour mixing] is one of accession and specification and . . . his vocabulary of 'mixing,' 'joining,' and 'annexing' is not a metaphor in need of repair, but a legal language consistent with a long tradition of writing about mixed substances, mixed properties, and new forms of property."

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Journal of the History of Ideas @jhideas.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Registration is now open for the 2026 Graduate Student Symposium, “Prophecy, Prediction, and the Politics of Futurity” to be held on Saturday, October 17, 2026, from 11:00 am – 4:00 pm Eastern on Zoom.

web.sas.upenn.edu

Registration Now Open for “Prophecy, Prediction, and the Politics of Futurity,” the JHI Blog Graduate Student Syposium

This year's symposium will be held on Saturday, October 17 (on Zoom). Register now!

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Journal of the History of Ideas @jhideas.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

The new issue of the journal includes an article by Markku Peltonen: "'Free Democracy' and 'Restricted Democracy' in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation." Read it here: muse.jhu.edu/pub/56/artic...

A quote from the article: "The prevailing assumption that the meaning and valence of democracy were fundamentally altered only in the late eighteenth century is no longer tenable. Democracy's meaning was both thoroughly explored and substantially altered in the seventeenth century. The contention that democracy could be both free and restricted bespeaks the important changes and developments for the concept of 'democracy.'"

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Journal of the History of Ideas @jhideas.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

For the Blog, Mrinalini Sisodia Wadhwa interviews Joanna Stalnaker about her newest book, "The Rest Is Silence: Enlightenment Philosophers Facing Death" (2025). @yalepress.bsky.social

web.sas.upenn.edu

Death and Enlightenment: An Interview with Joanna Stalnaker

by Mrinalini Sisodia Wadhwa

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Journal of the History of Ideas @jhideas.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

The new issue of the journal includes an article by Iain McDaniel, "Democracy, Caesarism, and Kulturgeschichte: Georg Friedrich Kolb Contra Mommsen and Hellwald." Read it here on Project MUSE, with no paywall for the next few weeks: muse.jhu.edu/pub/56/artic... @iainmcdaniel.bsky.social

A quote from the article: "Why are claims about progress so central to political justifications of Caesarism?"

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Journal of the History of Ideas @jhideas.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

In an interview with Rex Butler on the Blog, Ian Hunter discusses his new book, The Kantian Religion (2026). Hunter understands Kantian philosophy as an ascetic practice of self-transformation, and he explores its ongoing rivalry with humanist historiography. @princetonupress.bsky.social

web.sas.upenn.edu

Spiritual Exercises in Kantian Philosophy: An Interview with Ian Hunter

by Rex Butler

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Journal of the History of Ideas @jhideas.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

The new issue of the journal includes an article by Roslyn Dubler: "Juliet Mitchell, French Structuralism, and the Subject of Feminism in 1970s Britain." Read it here on Project MUSE, with no paywall for the next few weeks: muse.jhu.edu/pub/56/artic...

A quote from the article: "Recasting the 'turn' from women to gender to the 'pursuit of a comprehensive theory of women's oppression,' shifting from the presumed failures of 1970s feminisms to their goals, therefore opens a new way to explain the development of modern feminist thought."

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Journal of the History of Ideas @jhideas.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

In this essay for the JHI Blog, Soumyadeep Guha traces the history of the cooperative in India during the formation of the “global countryside” and how the cooperative offered a compelling reconciliation of the tenets of a market-based society with the moral-based ideas of community.

web.sas.upenn.edu

The Cooperative Question, Then and Now

by Soumyadeep Guha

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Journal of the History of Ideas @jhideas.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

A new issue of the journal is now available, with articles by Markku Peltonen, Joshua Freed, Matteo Favaretti Camposampiero, Iain McDaniel, Piotr Kuligowski and Bartłomiej Błesznowski, Roslyn Dubler, and İlker Aytürk and Anıl Kahvecioğlu.

web.sas.upenn.edu

JHI 87.3 Now Available!

The new issue of the journal is now available to read on Project MUSE.

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Journal of the History of Ideas @jhideas.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

What might it mean to defamiliarize the concept of "the peasant"? On this episode of In Theory, Navyug Gill addresses this question, among others, while speaking with Disha Karnad Jani about his book "Labors of Division: Global Capitalism and the Emergence of the Peasant in Colonial Panjab."

web.sas.upenn.edu

Labors of Division: Disha Karnad Jani Interviews Navyug Gill

by Disha Karnad Jani

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Journal of the History of Ideas @jhideas.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

As Alexander Aerts writes for the blog, it was Russo-French philosopher Koyré who first conceptualized the end of history, using it to ask questions about what imparts meaning to human time. His student and friend, Kojève, went on to equate the end of history with the end of politics.

web.sas.upenn.edu

Alexandre Koyré and the Beginning of the End of History

by Alexander Aerts

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Journal of the History of Ideas @jhideas.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

For Summer 2026 Reading Recommendations, we asked members of the JHI community to suggest texts related to intellectual history, broadly conceived. Responses spanned ecology and animality, the material life of texts, Asian feminisms, and the concepts of work, excess, and accountability.

web.sas.upenn.edu

What We’re Reading: Summer 2026

By the JHI Community

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Journal of the History of Ideas @jhideas.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

On the Blog, Christian Jacobs recovers a forgotten type of “Europeanization” in the early 1980s that expanded rather than stabilized European identities: the intercultural Moussem festivals organized by Moroccan workers’ organizations. @christianjacobs.bsky.social

web.sas.upenn.edu

“European and immigrant cultures”: The Moussem Festival Series in the 1980s

by Christian Jacobs

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Journal of the History of Ideas @jhideas.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

In this essay for the JHI Blog, Mayaki Kimba uses his experience conducting research on Réunionnais and French Antillean activists in the early 1970s as an opportunity to reflect on how one might write a history of political thought based on the adversarial archives of the security state.

web.sas.upenn.edu

Ideas Under Lock and Key: Political Thought in Police Archives

by Mayaki Kimba

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Journal of the History of Ideas @jhideas.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

Disha Karnad Jani interviews Tony Wood about his latest book, "Radical Sovereignty: Debating Race, Nation, and Empire in Interwar Latin America," and his examination of ideas about race, empire, and sovereignty among the Latin American Left in the interwar years. @princetonupress.bsky.social

web.sas.upenn.edu

Radical Sovereignty: Disha Karnad Jani Interviews Tony Wood

by Disha Karnad Jani

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Journal of the History of Ideas @jhideas.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

The April issue of the journal includes an article by Lea Cantor and Jonathan Egid: "An Ethiopian Lucretius? Giusto da Urbino and the Origins of the Ḥatäta Zärʾa Yaʿɘqob Controversy." Read it here: muse.jhu.edu/pub/56/artic... @leamundi.bsky.social

A quote from the article: "These new discoveries are the earliest evidence of suspicions of a Giusto da Urbino authorship. Remarkably, they arose in 1857-58, just under sixty years before the commonly stated date of 1916 when Conti Rossini first raised his doubts."

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Journal of the History of Ideas @jhideas.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

In an essay for the blog, Nicolás Ignacio Rojas writes that the status of semi-autonomous “vassals,” which was accorded by Spain to Chile's Indigenous Mapuche in 18th- and 19th-century treaties, challenges received dichotomies between sovereignty and subjugation. web.sas.upenn.edu/jhiblog/2026...

web.sas.upenn.edu

Negotiated Vassalage on the Chilean Frontier

by Nicolás Ignacio Rojas

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Journal of the History of Ideas @jhideas.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

For the blog, Rose Facchini interviewed Roger Chartier about his book Won in Translation: Textual Mobility in Early Modern Europe (2022), which traces the travels of early-modern texts across linguistic and cultural borders, and his current research. @rosefacchini.bsky.social @pennpress.bsky.social

web.sas.upenn.edu

Elusive Movements of the Printed Word: An Interview with Roger Chartier

by Rose Facchini

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Journal of the History of Ideas @jhideas.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

The latest issue of the journal includes an article by Hannah Anderson: "The Useful Caribbean: Settlers’ Botany and Plantation Cultures," available to read here: muse.jhu.edu/pub/56/artic...

A quote from the article: "Settlers' classifications emerging from lived experience forged the plantation system in the English colonies of Barbados and Jamaica by synthesizing British, African, and Indigenous knowledge and fusing it with the materialities of tropical biota."

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Journal of the History of Ideas @jhideas.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

There are twelve days left to submit a proposal to the JHI’s fall graduate symposium. You can find the call and recommended reading here: www.jhiblog.org/2026/05/07/j...

A poster advertising the JHI Graduate Symposium, 2026: "Prophecy, Prediction, and the Politics of Futurity." Proposals due June 22.

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Journal of the History of Ideas @jhideas.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

The latest issue of the journal includes an article by Matti Leprêtre: "Paracelsus’s Doctrine of Signatures Reconsidered." Read it here: muse.jhu.edu/pub/56/artic...

A quote from the article: "Paracelsus's introduction of neologisms and seemingly novel concepts partly created his own epistemological breaks, making ideas that were common in medieval and ancient medicine—like the localization of disease or the specific action of remedies—appear entirely innovative."

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Journal of the History of Ideas @jhideas.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

In an essay for the blog, Chris O'Kane presents the latest edition of Marx’s Capital as yet another attempt by translators to crystallize a particular political interpretation of Marx—this time, the novel synthesis misapprehended as a straightforward “Marx revival.”

web.sas.upenn.edu

Towards a Critical Materialist Analysis of Capital’s Translations

by Chris O'Kane

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Journal of the History of Ideas @jhideas.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

Paola Zichi's article "Race, Redemption, and Reform: The Interplay of Eugenics, Antisemitism, and Feminist Anti Trafficking Efforts in Early Twentieth-Century Italy" is the final piece in the JHI's cluster of articles on "Race: Histories of an Idea." Read it here: muse.jhu.edu/pub/56/artic...

A quote from the article: "Early twentieth-century Italian feminist campaigns against the 'white slave trade' and prostitution fused positivist racial science, Jewish philanthropy, and abolitionist feminism, tying protection to surveillance. . . . This Italian experience exemplifies a broader
European entanglement between gendered emancipation and the governance of deviance, and . . . recognizing this genealogy enables a more critical engagement with the assumptions that still shape humanitarian interventions, victim-centred reforms, and feminist approaches to social justice today."

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Journal of the History of Ideas @jhideas.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

In this JHI Blog interview, Leslie James discusses her latest book, “The Moving Word,” and how it reframes the relationship between newspapers and decolonization in Anglophone West Africa and the Caribbean. @harvardpress.bsky.social

web.sas.upenn.edu

Moving Words, Shifting Visions: An Interview with Leslie James

by Tomi Onabanjo

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Journal of the History of Ideas @jhideas.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

The new issue of the JHI includes a cluster of articles on "Race: Histories of Idea." Shruti Balaji's contribution is "'The African Problem Is a World Problem': (Dis)locating Race in Late Colonial Indian Intellectual Thought." Read it here: muse.jhu.edu/pub/56/artic... @shrutibalaji.bsky.social

A quote from the article: "The (dis)location of elite Indian thought on "race" . . . presents an unstable relationship between questions of universal racial justice and anticolonial struggles in the years prior to India's independence. . . . Kamaladevi's and Naidu's thinking on Afro-Asian solidarities reveals how Indian intellectual thought on race traversed idealized notions of racial solidarities alongside hierarchical and paternalistic attitudes toward Africans under colonial rule."

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Journal of the History of Ideas @jhideas.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

For the In Theory podcast, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Samuel Rutherford about his book “Teaching Gender: The British University and the Rise of Heterosexuality, 1860–1939,” which explores how English and Scottish universities constructed gender and sexuality in early 20th-century Britain.

web.sas.upenn.edu

Teaching Gender: Disha Karnad Jani Interviews Samuel Rutherford

by Disha Karnad Jani

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Journal of the History of Ideas @jhideas.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

The new issue of the JHI includes a cluster of articles: "Race: Histories of an Idea." Ian Stewart's contribution, "Pan-Celticism and Racial Thought at the Fin de Siècle" is available to read here: muse.jhu.edu/pub/56/artic...

A quote from the article: "Some of those identifying as belonging to the Celtic race...sought likewise to use race as a constructive idea for promoting their political and cultural goals...Studying the Pan-Celtic movement in light of the better-known Pan-African movement emerging at the time reveals how different peoples interpreted and responded to their place in a racialized world."

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Journal of the History of Ideas @jhideas.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

On the blog, Jack Crosswaite argues that John Rawls’s influential theory of political liberalism relies on a secularized Whig history of the seventeenth-century Puritan liberty of conscience. As a result, Rawls cannot ground citizens’ commitment to his liberalism.

web.sas.upenn.edu

John Rawls’s Conscientious Historical Fable

by Jack Crosswaite

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Journal of the History of Ideas @jhideas.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

The new issue of the journal features a cluster of articles on “Race: Histories of an Idea.” Read Meleisa Ono-George’s contribution, "'In me you see the Almighty’s wondrous Power': Amelia Newsham, Race, and Black Women’s Intellectual History in Georgian Britain": muse.jhu.edu/pub/56/artic...

A quote from the article: "Only by taking seriously the words of marginalized Black women and other historical actors, even if they are brief or fragmented, and the possibilities of what these might reveal will we begin to witness the ways socially and historically marginalized people attempted to intervene and engage with contemporary intellectual and political debates."

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Journal of the History of Ideas @jhideas.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

Vishal Verma interviews Luna Sabastian about her recent book, “Fascism in India: Race, Caste, and Hindutva,” which traces the emergence of Hindu nationalism—with its corresponding ideas of religion, race, and caste—to "the global fascist moment" of the interwar years. @harvardpress.bsky.social

web.sas.upenn.edu

A Fascism of “Violent Absorption”: An Interview with Luna Sabastian

by Vishal Verma

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Journal of the History of Ideas @jhideas.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

The primary editors of the JHI Blog have prepared an extensive bibliography on "Prophecy, Prediction, and the Politics of Futurity," the theme of the upcoming JHI Graduate Symposium (see our open call for proposals).

jhiblog.org

Reading List: Prophecy, Prediction, and the Politics of Futurity

by Zac Endter, Tomi Onabanjo, and Mrinalini Sisodia Wadhwa

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Journal of the History of Ideas @jhideas.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

In an interview for the blog, Natasha Piano reflects on her new book, Democratic Elitism, which argues that American political science came to equate "pure democracy" with competitive elections by misreading the Italian School of Elitism. @harvardpress.bsky.social

web.sas.upenn.edu

Democracy and Government Under Elitism: An Interview with Natasha Piano

by Matias X. Gonzalez

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Journal of the History of Ideas @jhideas.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

The new issue of the journal includes articles by Matti Leprêtre, Hannah Anderson, and Lea Cantor & Jonathan Egid, and a cluster on "Race: Histories of an Idea" organized by Sarah C. Dunstan and Ian Stewart, with contributions by Meleisa Ono-George, Ian Stewart, Shruti Balaji, and Paola Zichi.

jhiblog.org

JHI 87.2 Now Available!

The new issue of the journal is now available to read on Project MUSE.

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