The Journal of the History of Ideas Blog

Category Think Piece

Evolution Made Easy: Henry Balfour, Pitt Rivers, and the Evolution of Art

by guest contributor Laurel Waycott In 1893, Henry Balfour, curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, UK, conducted an experiment. He traced a drawing of a snail crawling over a twig, and passed it to another person, whom he… Continue Reading →

Revolutions Are Never On Time

by contributing editor Disha Karnad Jani In Enzo Traverso’s Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory, timing is everything. The author moves seamlessly between such subjects as Goodbye Lenin, Gustave Courbet’s The Trout, Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire, and the apparently missed connection… Continue Reading →

Towards an Intellectual History of Modern Poverty

by guest contributor Tejas Parasher   In Chapter 3 of The History Manifesto, David Armitage and Jo Guldi support historians’ increasing willingness to engage with topics generally left to economists. Whereas the almost total dominance of game-theoretic modelling in economics… Continue Reading →

The Other Samuel Johnson: African-American Labor in the Vicinity of the Early U.S. Book Trade

by guest contributor John Garcia Much of the pleasure of studying the economics of book publishing comes from the various minor personages who appear and disappear before the historian’s gaze. Sometimes patterns emerge from these fragmented discoveries, perhaps not enough… Continue Reading →

“Towards a Great Pluralism”: Quentin Skinner at Ertegun House

by contributing editor Spencer J. Weinreich Quentin Skinner is a name to conjure with. A founder of the Cambridge School of the history of political thought. Former Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge. The author of seminal… Continue Reading →

French Liberals and the Capacity for Citizenship

by guest contributor Gianna Englert 2017 has done a lot for the history of ideas. “Post-truth” politics, tyranny, nationalism, and the nature of executive power have pushed us to make sense of the present by appealing to the past. The… Continue Reading →

“A Reform Which Has Stifled All Other Reforms:” Islam in the Nineteenth Century American Black Press

by guest contributor Daniel Joslyn In recent years, a number of political movements have sought to forge a connection between black Americans and Middle-Eastern Arabs, particularly in relation to the oppression of the Palestinian people in Israel and Palestine and the… Continue Reading →

The Revival of Harper’s Weekly, 1974-1976

 by Erin McGuirl The story of the revival of Harper’s Weekly, a magazine published from 1857 to 1916 and then 1974 to 1976, begins with William (Willie) Morris. As Editor-in-Chief of the Monthly from 1967 to 1971, Morris changed the… Continue Reading →

High Fidelity: Jean Starobinski’s Critical Hermeneutics

by guest contributor Emelyn Lih The work of Swiss literary critic, hermeneut, and historian of ideas Jean Starobinski can be characterized by its dedication to depth and diversity: diversity of periods explored (from Montaigne to Baudelaire to Claude Simon, to… Continue Reading →

Socialism and Power: Axel Honneth in Paris

by guest contributor Jacob Hamburger When asked about his political orientation, for many years Axel Honneth would reply almost automatically, “I think I’m a socialist.” Yet as he recounted recently at Columbia University’s global center in Paris, each time he… Continue Reading →

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