The latest issue of the JHI includes an article by Nathaniel Mull: "John Locke’s Early Tolerationism: A Critique of the Conversion Narrative": muse.jhu.edu/pub/56/artic...

Disha Karnad Jani interviews Esmat Elhalaby about his book, "Parting Gifts of Empire: Palestine and India at the Dawn of Decolonization." Their conversation charts the relationship between Arab and Indian intellectuals during the era of decolonization. @esmat.bsky.social @ucpress.bsky.social

The new issue of the JHI includes an article by Micha Lazarus, "The B’rith of Tragedy: Jewish Roots of a Stolen Genre in Early Modern Europe": muse.jhu.edu/pub/56/artic...

In the forum on political economy, Jonathon Catlin asks what a public debate about the Frankfurt School's legacy among prominent former students of Martin Jay—the "Berkeley School"—tells us about the future relationship between political economy and intellectual history. @joncatlin.bsky.social

The new issue of the JHI includes articles by Micha Lazarus, Nathaniel Mull, Simon Brown, Matilde Cazzola, Shaivya Mishra, Caio Fernandes Barbosa, and Naomi Sussman. Happy reading! @pennpress.bsky.social

Tomi Onabanjo interviews Jeanne-Marie Jackson about “The Letter of the Law in J. E. Casely Hayford’s West Africa,” her new book on the pan-Africanist and the relationship between ideas of the law, textuality, and comportment in colonial-era Ghana. @jmja.bsky.social @princetonupress.bsky.social

Today on the JHI Blog, Bhadrajee Hewage follows the nineteenth-century rise and fall of the “Ceylonese Buddha,” an English bookseller’s theory of the Buddha’s Sri Lankan origins—revealing a broader effort to naturalize history through geography by fixing living traditions to verifiable sites.

Jackson Herndon interviews Michael Lazarus about his book "Absolute Ethical Life." They discuss Marx's Aristotelian-Hegelian ethics, Arendt's and MacIntyre's concepts of the ethical, and the enduring significance of "species-being" to Marx. @michaellazarus.bsky.social @stanfordpress.bsky.social

For the forum on political economy, Lars Cornelissen answers Samuel Moyn’s call to conceptualize the social side of ideology by turning to Stuart Hall’s idea of ideology as “practical reason,” examining the material networks that led neoliberalism further rightward. @lcornelissen.bsky.social

On this episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Ahmad Shokr about his book, "Harvests of Liberation," which examines the history of Egyptian decolonization through one of the nation’s most valuable commodities: cotton. @stanfordpress.bsky.social

In this latest addition to the JHI Blog’s Forum on political economy, Arielle Xena Alterwaite turns to C.L.R. James’s classic reading of Moby-Dick to reflect not solely on the substance of intellectual history and political economy, but also on the various styles in which this history can be told.

Today on the podcast, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Quinn Slobodian on his latest book, “Hayek's Bastards." From Murray Rothbard to Javier Milei, Slobodian looks to "Hayek's bastards" to show the ties between neoliberalism and today's Far Right. @quinnslobodian.com web.sas.upenn.edu/jhiblog/2026...

In an essay for the JHI Blog’s forum on political economy, Mattia Steardo examines the obscurity of thinkers from the Spanish Empire in historians' discussions of early political economy—particularly those thinkers’ alternative, normative conceptualizations of labor.

For the JHI Blog, Rose Facchini interviews Andrea Bagnato about his new book, Terra Infecta: Disease and the Italian Landscape (Mack, 2025), which shows how sanitation and its metaphors were central to Italy’s internal colonialism and persist today. @rosefacchini.bsky.social

In an essay in the JHI Blog’s forum on political economy, Facundo Rocca discusses the relationship between modern rationalizations of unjust labor, ecological destruction, and the rise of the Caribbean slave trade. web.sas.upenn.edu/jhiblog/2026...

Today on the blog, Kai Mora examines how gender and race figured into the literary and visual landscape of nineteenth-century France and the role of this discourse in both the French conquest of Algeria and, later, in the Algerian War of Independence.

For the JHI Blog's Forum on political economy, Véronique Mickisch critiques the continued association of "Marxism in practice” with the First Five-Year Plan in the Soviet Union and raises the need to recover the work of Marxist thinkers violently suppressed during the Stalinist purges of the 1930s.

This selection of essays and interviews reflects the wide range of scholarship published on the blog in 2025.

In an essay in the JHI Blog’s forum on political economy, Nate Holdren elaborates three levels of analytical abstraction at which intellectual historians invoke the term "political economy," turning our attention to the way that capitalism structurally conditions ignorance of the social totality.

In a new piece for the JHI Forum on political economy, Alec Israeli reflects on recent debates on the method and stakes of "high" versus "low" intellectual histories, arguing for a neo-materialist approach that nuances those discursive boundaries. web.sas.upenn.edu/jhiblog/2025...

In the JHI forum on political economy, David Vertty considers the intersection between intellectual history and political economy as developed in and around Latin America, focusing on avenues of future research and methodological lessons from their historical, geographic, and conceptual interplay.

In a new piece for the JHI forum on political economy, Federico D’Onofrio discusses the rise of a class of "agricultural economists" as part of a broader trend intersecting with and going beyond "rural modernism" in twentieth-century Europe. @fdonoff.bsky.social

What was the Mau Mau Uprising? In today's essay, Christian Alvarado reconsiders this conflict in 20th-century Kenya through the lens of conspiracy and traces what this narrative rendering (the "Mau Mau conspiracy") reveals about colonialism and anti-communism in the past and our post-truth present.

In a new piece for the JHI Forum on political economy, Lotte Liste critically situates Reinhart Koselleck's concept of the Sattelzeit with Adam Smith's philosophy of history. @lottelist.bsky.social

Today on the blog Carolina Iribarren interviews Julien Stout about his new book, "L’auteur retrouvé," which challenges established assumptions about vernacular authorship in medieval French literature but also invites us to reconsider narratives of modernity, subjectivity, and individualism.

Part II of this interview about Federico Marcon’s new book covers its relation to the recent “Fascism Debate," debts to Frankfurt School critical theory and other forms of historical semantics, impact on the conceptual historian's craft, and more. @joncatlin.bsky.social @uchicagopress.bsky.social

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

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...

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.

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.

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.

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

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."

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.

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...

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. @princetonupress.bsky.social

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...

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 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...

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. @uchicagopress.bsky.social @samfranz.bsky.social

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...

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.

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! @princetonupress.bsky.social

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

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...

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.

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...

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

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...

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.