Month: December 2025

by Amartyajyoti Basu The story of modern capitalism is often told through the lens of the factory whistle and the punch clock – symbols of progress and industrial modernity. Yet, in colonial Calcutta, between 1920 and 1960, these symbols represented something far more sinister: a system of exploitation that used time itself as an instrument…

by Veronica Lazăr Intellectual history’s recent global turn signaled the need for both an epistemic renewal of the field and its strong repoliticization. Global intellectual history is at least partially a result of the critical forces that, for decades, had denounced the blatant Eurocentrism of hegemonic Western systems of knowledge. The global turn strives to…

by Jonathon Catlin This is Part II of Jonathon Catlin’s interview with Federico Marcon about his latest book, Fascism: History of a Word (University of Chicago Press, 2025). Following their discussion in Part I about the semantic origins and transformations of the term, Marcon’s semiotics-inspired methodology, and the importance of examining this concept on a…

By Carolina Iribarren It was not terribly recently (1967) that Roland Barthes’s field-shaking essay “La mort de l’auteur” (“The Death of the Author”) first appeared. In it, Barthes argued that, in the late nineteenth century, the “empire” of the author—that “modern” figure peddled by “classical criticism” and bolstered by the rise of individualism, positivism, and…

by Lotte List “The expression ‘Sattelzeit,’” Reinhart Koselleck once quipped, “is obviously a trick concept [Kunstbegriff] which I used to get money!” (195). Nevertheless, since then, the notion of a “saddle period” in European history from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries has gained popularity as a methodological concept. It has spilled over from intellectual…

by Christian Alvarado        The Mau Mau conspiracy will fail. There is no doubt about that. It started too soon and was on too small a scale. The forces on the side of law and order are being constantly strengthened in numbers and by training. But it is not enough to crush the Mau Mau: How…

by Federico D’Onofrio In 1920, the agricultural economist and Social-Revolutionary politician, Aleksandr Chayanov published, under the pseudonym Ivan Kremnev, The Journey of My Brother Aleksei into the Land of Peasant Utopia. In this science fiction novella, the protagonist falls asleep in Bolshevik Moscow in 1921, later awakening in the fictionally iconic year of 1984. He…

by David Vertty Though the return of political economy in historical studies is now widely acknowledged, intellectual historians have only begun to assess one of its most promising fields of inquiry: the central role that Latin America has played in building innovative approaches for both of those disciplines. Whether as a point of encounter for…

by Alec Israeli In the debate between Samuel Moyn and Peter Gordon in Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History on “contextualism” in the history of ideas, there are a few key points of convergence: they each reject notions both of ideas’ absolute transcendence of material conditions and ideas’ absolute debt to material conditions. For both, that…