One Host Theory

Great roundtable review on After Kant in @HDiplo - with contributions from M. C. Behrent, A. Jainchill & Eva Piirimäe & a reply by M. Sonenscher Sonenscher: “Events begin and end, but ideas have fuzzier or more porous boundaries.” issforum.org/roundtables/... @thecambridgeschool.bsky.social

In my forthcoming but so far only half written book…!

Cambridge methodology primer: “One of my aims in writing about the long debate over how to think about the concept of civil liberty was to ask whether those who eventually lost the battle may nevertheless have won the argument. To change the metaphor, I have been in quest of buried treasure.”

This looks fascinating. Thanks @tomaashby.bsky.social

First episode with Richard Whatmore: “Can intellectual history save liberty?” @roots-and-branches.bsky.social @thecambridgeschool.bsky.social podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/r...

New review of Michael Sonenscher’s Capitalism contains this absolute gem (That the review is by an economist makes the claim even more farcical) www.independent.org/tir/2025-sum...

Thanks Cayce! Full text also available here: openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/items/e67128...

A new ideas podcast is coming! @roots-and-branches.bsky.social

Thoughtful and moving from Chelsea Wallis

For what it’s worth, I still think one of the best studies of the late Alasdair MacIntyre & his thought is this 2005 intellectual biography by Emile Perreau-Saussine (now translated into English) undpress.nd.edu/978026820325... @mattpolprof.bsky.social @thecambridgeschool.bsky.social

Today!

Didn’t quite expect this - but Richard Whatmore’s reply includes an usually candid discussion of Istvan Hont, post-colonial studies and neo-Marxist historiographies @thecambridgeschool.bsky.social doi.org/10.1080/0191...

Link to my talk next week at the Stanford Green library: "Before Durkheim: Early French Social Science and the Politics of Progress" events.stanford.edu/event/thomas... @stanfordulibraries.bsky.social

Post-print and free to read copy of my review of The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism (2025) by Matthew McManus @mattpolprof.bsky.social www.academia.edu/128955801/Th...

Hello California 👋

Here is a link to a free copy of the review (for the first 50 users): www.tandfonline.com/eprint/D2QRN... FYI @mattpolprof.bsky.social

Appreciate this thoughtful review of "The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism" by @thomaslalevee.bsky.social. Appreciate being called a "generous and conscientious" scholar. pbs.twimg.com/media/Goxj5Z...

My review of The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism is out in Global Intellectual History - with some thoughts at the end on what a more contextual approach might bring to our understanding of this political tradition doi.org/10.1080/2380... @mattpolprof.bsky.social @global-ih.bsky.social

Nice to see Suffrage, Capital, and Welfare: Conditional Citizenship in Historical Perspective online and open access. @fia-c-s.bsky.social and Ragnheiður Kristjánsdóttir are model academics who organised a generative workshop from which these papers emerged: link.springer.com/book/10.1007... 🗃️

Short extract from my recent review of Enlightenment Biopolitics #Frenchhistory

#Frenchhistory #FrHistory 🗃️

Just published - my review of “Enlightenment Biopolitics: A History of Race, Eugenics, and the Making of Citizens” by William Max Nelson doi.org/10.1080/1749...

Timeless

“Simply put, I’m doing this because it’s the right thing to do. And if I do win, then we all win through having a representative in Parliament who actually has the integrity to stand against injustice, who represents the public and not the powerful.”

Meet Rana, a 23-year-old in Gaza battling a rare illness and the horrors of genocide. She dreams of eating without pain, but Israel's genocidal campaign has left her and 26,000 others without access to life-saving treatment. mondoweiss.net/2024/11/figh...

If you have any money to spare this Christmas, please consider donating to the many, many people in desperate need of help in Gaza. A self updating list of fundraising campaigns can be found here: gazafunds.com

Folks, you need to read this essay #AcademicSky #skystorians. @rmesch.bsky.social, one of my fave writers (& past coauthor) writes about the TERRIBLE MENTOR she survived - & with great humanity calls for such power trips to END. It's 🔥💔💌 throughout. "What Do We Do With Monstrous Mentors?"

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This entire discourse feels like gaslighting. Yes antisemitism exists on the left and appears to have spiked since Oct 7. But anti-Arab and anti-Islamic prejudice ALSO EXIST and are major contributing factors to an ONGOING CAMPAIGN OF MASS MURDER. Why is 99% of media concern aimed at the former?

Grotesque analogy masquerading as intelligent commentary - in a review by none other than the esteemed & impartial Niall Ferguson www.the-tls.co.uk/history/war-...

A brilliant work on French revolutionary universalism & its legacies: “Tracing the Revolution's long-term legacy, she suggests that while it spread concepts of equality and liberation throughout the world, its ideals also helped to justify colonialism and conquest.” @drsepinwall.bsky.social

An incredible study in historical erasure & retrieval

A great trove of interviews - Michael Foot, EP Thompson, Tony Benn, Isaac Kramnick, Sean Wilentz, Carolyn Forché, Benjamin Barber

I will never understand Thanksgiving

Disciplinary hubris!

Reposting this in light of a mystifyingly ever growing stream of followers

I put together a new starter pack of people who do work on the history of socialism. Encompasses different aspects, tendencies, and eras, including recent years. Let me know if you have suggestions or would like to be added yourself.

“In treating context in terms of perpetually disintegrating conceptual oppositions whose “forgetting” makes new political thought possible, Sonenscher allows room for a series of passive-aggressive asides at the expense of Cambridge school contextual historiography.”

“By turns panoramic and intricate, telescopic and kaleidoscopic, massive and yet full of lightning twists and switches, [Michael Sonenscher’s After Kant] is a book that dazzles as much as it informs.”

Ian Hunter reviews Mike Sonenscher’s After Kant: “This anti-contextual method is responsible for the rich mosaic of intellectual fragments that the reader encounters in this engaging book.” @histandtheojrnl.bsky.social @thecambridgeschool.bsky.social @dsj2110.bsky.social

An illuminating agenda-setting intervention: “The aim of this article is to set out a research agenda centered on the many descriptions and evaluations of the nature and powers of the imagination that have been made in Europe and the Americas over the past quarter-millennium.”

Latest article by Michael Sonenscher "The Age of Melancholy: The Imagination in the History of Modern Political Thought" doi.org/10.1086/733430 @thecambridgeschool.bsky.social @dsj2110.bsky.social

The tragedy, even in this story: “Ahmed Damoo, Mazyouna’s father, has been left alone in Gaza, with no prospect of being reunited with his surviving family members.” www.theguardian.com/global-devel...

It is a daily struggle for survival under the Israeli-imposed siege on Gaza. Families are surviving on scraps of bread and contaminated canned food, and my children dream of a simple chicken meal. In a land once full of life, only ashes remain.

My critical review of Alexandre Lefebvre’s Liberalism as a Way of Life 📖 TLDR: In a world rife with injustice, inequality and violence, Lefebvre’s book risks producing better liberals, but worse politics. theconversation.com/liberal-soci... #Politics #Liberalism #PoliticalTheory

Free Palestine

People's rush to delete their Twitter/X accounts totally makes sense. But from a historical POV, it's a shame to see that space being emptied of important content displaying resistance to the bad stuff in the world (incl. what's pushed people away from there and over here). Silencing the archive...