Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History, edited by Darrin M. McMahon and Samuel Moyn

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Out today, January 14h.

Table of Contents

(Source: OUP)

Introduction: Interim Intellectual History, Darrin M. McMahon and Samuel Moyn

1. The Return of the History of Ideas?, Darrin M. McMahon

2. Contextualism and Criticism in the History of Ideas, Peter E. Gordon

3. Does Intellectual History Exist in France?: The Chronicle of a Renaissance Foretold, Antoine Lilti

4. On Conceptual History, Jan-Werner Müller

5. Scandalous Relations: Supplementing Intellectual and Cultural History, Judith Surkis

6. Imaginary Intellectual History, Samuel Moyn

7. Has the History of the Disciplines Had Its Day?, Suzanne Marchand

8. Cosmologies Materialized: History of Science and History of Ideas, John Tresch

9. Decentering Sex: Reflections on Freud, Foucault, and Subjectivity in Intellectual History, Tracie Matysik

10. Can we see ideas? On Evocation, Experience, and Empathy, Marci Shore

11. The Space of Intellect and the Intellect of Space, John Randolph

12. The International Turn in Intellectual History, David Armitage

13. Global Intellectual History and the Indian Political, Shruti Kapila

14. Intellectual History and the Interdisciplinary Ideal, Warren Breckman

The Holocaust and Historical Methodology, edited by Dan Stone

Contents

Introduction: The Holocaust and Historical Methodology
Dan Stone

PART I: MEMORY AND CULTURE IN THE THIRD REICH

Chapter 1. A World Without Jews: Interpreting the Holocaust
Alon Confino

Chapter 2. Holocaust Historiography and Cultural History
Dan Stone

Chapter 3. The Invisible Crime: Nazi Politics of Memory and Postwar Representations of the Holocaust
Dirk Rupnow

Chapter 4. The History of the Jews in the Ghettos: A Cultural Perspective
Amos Goldberg

Chapter 5. National Socialism, Holocaust and Ecology
Boaz Neumann

PART II: TESTIMONY AND COMMEMORATION

Chapter 6. Bearing Witness: Theological Roots of a New Secular Morality
Samuel Moyn

Chapter 7. Transcending History? Methodological Problems in Holocaust Testimony
Zoë Waxman

Chapter 8. Studying the Holocaust: Is History Commemoration?
Doris L. Bergen

PART III: ANOTHER LOOK AT A CLASSIC OF HOLOCAUST HISTORIOGRAPHY

Chapter 9. An Integrated History of the Holocaust: Some Methodological Challenges
Saul Friedländer

Chapter 10. Truth and Circumstance: What (If Anything) Can Be Properly Said about the Holocaust?
Hayden White

Chapter 11. Modernist Holocaust Historiography: A Dialogue between Saul Friedländer and Hayden White
Wulf Kansteiner

PART IV: THE HOLOCAUST IN THE WORLD

Chapter 12. The Holocaust and European History
Donald Bloxham

Chapter 13. Fascism and the Holocaust
Federico Finchelstein

Chapter 14. The Holocaust and World History: Raphael Lemkin and Comparative Methodology
A. Dirk Moses

Click here to see The Holocaust and Historical Methodology at Amazon.

The Legacy of Vico in Modern Cultural History, by Joseph Mali

The Legacy of Vico in
Modern Cultural History

Description (from Amazon.com):

"In this highly original study Joseph Mali explores how four attentive and inventive readers of Giambattista Vico's New Science (1744) - the French historian Jules Michelet (1798-1874), the Irish writer James Joyce (1882-1941), the German literary scholar Erich Auerbach (1892-1957) and the English philosopher Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) - came to find in Vico's work the inspiration for their own modern theories (or, in the case of Joyce, stories) of human life and history. Mali's reconstruction of the specific biographical and historical occasions in which these influential men of letters encountered Vico reveals how their initial impressions and interpretations of his theory of history were decisive both for their intellectual development and their major achievements in literature and thought. This new interpretation of the legacy of Vico's New Science is essential reading for all those engaged in the history of ideas and modern cultural history".

See at Amazon: The Legacy of Vico in Modern Cultural History.

A Lover's Quarrel With the Past: Romance, Representation, Reading, by Ranjan Ghosh

A Lover's Quarrel With the Past

Description from Amazon: "Although not a professional historian, the author raises several issues pertinent to the state of history today.Qualifying the non-historian; as anable interventionist in historical studies, the author explores the relationship between history and theory within the current epistemological configurations and re-figurations. He asks how history transcends the obsessive linguistic turn, which has been hegemonizing literary/discourse analysis, and focuses greater attention on historical experience and where history stands in relation to our understanding of ethics, religion, and the current state of global politics that underlines the manipulation and abuse of history".

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Presence: Philosophy, History, and Cultural Theory for the Twenty-First Century, edited by Ranjan Ghosh and Ethan Kleinberg

Presence: Philosophy, History,
and Cultural Theory for
the Twenty-First Century

Book description (from Amazon.com):

The philosophy of “presence” seeks to challenge current understandings of meaning and understanding. One can trace its origins back to Vico, Dilthey, and Heidegger, though its more immediate exponents include Jean-Luc Nancy, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, and such contemporary philosophers of history as Frank Ankersmit and Eelco Runia. The theoretical paradigm of presence conveys how the past is literally with us in the present in significant and material ways: Things we cannot touch nonetheless touch us. This makes presence a post-linguistic or post-discursive theory that challenges current understandings of “meaning” and “interpretation.” Presence provides an overview of the concept and surveys both its weaknesses and its possible uses.

In this book, Ethan Kleinberg and Ranjan Ghosh bring together an interdisciplinary group of contributors to explore the possibilities and limitations of presence from a variety of perspectives—history, sociology, literature, cultural theory, media studies, photography, memory, and political theory. The book features critical engagements with the presence paradigm within intellectual history, literary criticism, and the philosophy of history. In three original case studies, presence illuminates the relationships among photography, the past, memory, and the Other. What these diverse but overlapping essays have in common is a shared commitment to investigate the attempt to reconnect meaning with something “real” and to push the paradigm of presence beyond its current uses. The volume is thus an important intervention in the most fundamental debates within the humanities today.

Contributors: Bill Ashcroft, University of New South Wales; Mark Bevir, University of California, Berkeley; Susan A. Crane, University of Arizona; Ranjan Ghosh, University of North Bengal; Suman Gupta, Open University Ethan Kleinberg, Wesleyan University; John Michael, University of Rochester; Vincent P. Pecora, University of Utah; Roger I. Simon.

Click here to buy Presence: Philosophy, History, and Cultural Theory for the Twenty-First Century.

Intellectual History Review, Vol. 23, No. 4, 2013

Articles 

Regius and Gassendi on the Human Soul
Vlad Alexandrescu

An Eighteenth-Century Skeptical Attack on Rational Theology and Positive Religion: ‘Christianity Not Founded on Argument’ by Henry Dodwell the Younger
Diego Lucci

Shipwrecks and Survivals: Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century Latin America
Eduardo Posada-Carbó & Iván Jaksić

Heidegger, Von Humboldt and the Idea of the University
Mark Sinclair

‘A Flower Is Your Brother!’: Holism, Nature, and the (Non-ironic) Enchantment of Modernity
Frank Zelko

William of Ockham’s Mind/Body Dualism and Its transmission to Early Modern Thinkers
Charis Charalampous

The Sovereign Subject and Its Heterogeneous Other: Beauvoir’s Use and Critique of Bataille/Hegel
Henry Martyn Lloyd

Reviews 

From Oikonomia to Political Economy: Constructing Economic Knowledge from the Renaissance to the Scientific Revolution
Felicity Green

The Aristotelian Tradition and the Rise of British Empiricism. Logic and Epistemology in the British Isles (1570–1689)
Sarah Hutton

Decartes-agonistes: Physico-mathematics, method and corpuscular-mechanism, 1618-1633
John Henry

Correspondence of John Wallis (1616–1703), volume III (October 1668–1671)
Noel Malcolm

Mandeville and Hume: Anatomists of Civil Society
Iain McDaniel

Inventing the Market: Smith, Hegel and Political Theory
Craig Smith

The Identity of the History of Science and Medicine
Neil Tarrant

Finding Oneself in the Other
Colin Kidd

Click here to access this issue.

A Small Town Near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust, by Mary Fulbrook

"The Silesian town of Bedzin lies a mere twenty-five miles from Auschwitz; through the linked ghettos of Bedzin and its neighbouring town, some 85,000 Jews passed on their way to slave labour or the gas chambers. 

The principal civilian administrator of Bedzin, Udo Klausa, was a happily married family man. He was also responsible for implementing Nazi policies towards the Jews in his area - inhumane processes that were the precursors of genocide. Yet he later claimed, like so many other Germans after the war, that he had 'known nothing about it'; and that he had personally tried to save a Jew before he himself managed to leave for military service. A Small Town Near Auschwitz re-creates Udo Klausa's story. Using a wealth of personal letters, memoirs, testimonies, interviews and other sources, Mary Fulbrook pieces together his role in the unfolding stigmatization and degradation of the Jews under his authoritiy, as well as the heroic attempts at resistance on the part of some of his victims. She also gives us a fascinating insight into the inner conflicts of a Nazi functionary who, throughout, considered himself a 'decent' man. And she explores the conflicting memories and evasions of his life after the war. 

But the book is much more than a portrayal of an individual man. Udo Klausa's case is so important because it is in many ways so typical. Behind Klausa's story is the larger story of how countless local functionaries across the Third Reich facilitated the murderous plans of a relatively small number among the Nazi elite - and of how those plans could never have been realized, on the same scale, without the diligent cooperation of these generally very ordinary administrators. As Fulbrook shows, men like Klausa 'knew' and yet mostly suppressed this knowledge, performing their day jobs without apparent recognition of their own role in the system, or any sense of personal wrongdoing or remorse - either before or after 1945. 

This account is no ordinary historical reconstruction. For Fulbrook did not discover Udo Klausa amongst the archives. She has known the Klausa family all her life. She had no inkling of her subject's true role in the Third Reich until a few years ago, a discovery that led directly to this inescapably personal professional history."

Source: Amazon

Also, read the article at The Guardian: Historian uncovers her family link to secret Nazi's role in the Holocaust

Finally, you can see the videos:








Click here to buy A Small Town Near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust.

Breaking up Time: Negotiating the Borders Between Present, Past and Future, edited by Chris Lorenz and Berber Bevernage

"Thirteen expert historians and philosophers address basic questions on historical time and on the distinctions between past, present and future. Their contributions are organised around four themes: the relation between time and modernity; the issue of ruptures in time and the influence of catastrophic events such as revolutions and wars on temporal distinctions; the philosophical analysis of historical time and temporal distinctions; and the construction of time outside Europe through processes of colonialism, imperialism, and globalisation."

Source: Amazon

See the table of contents here.
Click here to buy Breaking up Time: Negotiating the Borders Between Present, Past and Future.

Companions to Michael Oakeshott

  

Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present, by Andrew Shryock and Daniel Lord Smail

Book description from Amazon:

Humans have always been interested in their origins, but historians have been reluctant to write about the long stretches of time before the invention of writing. In fact, the deep past was left out of most historical writing almost as soon as it was discovered. This breakthrough book, as important for readers interested in the present as in the past,brings science into history to offer a dazzling new vision of humanity across time. Team-written by leading experts in a variety of fields, it maps events, cultures, and eras across millions of years to present a new scale for understanding the human body, energy and ecosystems, language, food, kinship, migration, and more. Combining cutting-edge social and evolutionary theory with the latest discoveries about human genes, brains, and material culture, Deep History invites scholars and general readers alike to explore the dynamic of connectedness that spans all of human history.
With Timothy Earle, Gillian Feeley-Harnik, Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Clive Gamble, April McMahon, John C. Mitani, Hendrik Poinar, Mary C. Stiner, and Thomas R. Trautmann.

You can also see the abstract of the review written by Fredrik Albritton Jonsson to the forthcoming edition of History and Theory by clicking here.

Click here to buy Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present.

The British Aesthetic Tradition: From Shaftesbury to Wittgenstein, by Timothy M. Costelloe

Book description from Amazon:

The British Aesthetic Tradition: From Shaftesbury to Wittgenstein is the first single volume to offer readers a comprehensive and systematic history of aesthetics in Britain and the United States from its inception in the early eighteenth century to major developments in the late twentieth century. The book consists of an introduction and eight chapters, and is divided into three parts. The first part, The Age of Taste, covers the eighteenth-century approaches of internal sense theorists, imagination theorists, and associationists. The second, The Age of Romanticism, takes readers from debates over the picturesque through British Romanticism to late Victorian criticism. The third, The Age of Analysis, covers early twentieth-century theories of Formalism and Expressionism to conclude with Wittgenstein and a number of views inspired by his thought.

"Costelloe's fine book splendidly refutes the alleged 'dreariness' of aesthetics. Uniquely, it welds the reflections of both artists and philosophers into a single continuous narrative, incorporating figures as diverse as Wordsworth and Wittgenstein." 
- Gordon Graham, Princeton Theological Seminary

"Timothy Costelloe's The British Aesthetic Tradition does what no other book I can think of does with respect to the history of aesthetics: it constructs a plausible and reliable context for reading works by Shaftesbury or Kames, say, alongside works by Frank Sibley or Ludwig Wittgenstein - Although the book is aware of a wider tradition outside the borders of Anglophone writing on the arts, it turns out that Costelloe's close focus on the British tradition yields considerable rewards - This book is set to become standard reading for courses on aesthetics." 
- Peter de Bolla, University of Cambridge

"The British Aesthetic Tradition by Timothy Costelloe is an important new study of the development of the discipline of aesthetics in the English-speaking world, forging connections hitherto unacknowledged, such as the relation between the eighteenth-century philosophers of taste and the Romantics - Tracing the story of aesthetics through Wittgenstein, Costelloe has constructed a narrative that will be admired and debated for decades - A singular achievement." 

- Noel Carroll, The Graduate Center, City University of New York

Click here to buy The British Aesthetic Tradition: From Shaftesbury to Wittgenstein.

Nietzsche's Philosophy of History, by Anthony K. Jensen

Book description from Amazon:

Nietzsche, the so-called herald of the 'philosophy of the future', nevertheless dealt with the past on nearly every page of his writing. Not only was he concerned with how past values, cultural practices, and institutions influence the present - he was plainly aware that any attempt to understand that influence encounters many meta-historical problems. This comprehensive and lucid exposition of the development of Nietzsche's philosophy of history explores how Nietzsche thought about history and historiography throughout his life and how it affected his most fundamental ideas. Discussion of the whole span of Nietzsche's writings, from his earliest publications as a classical philologist to his later genealogical and autobiographical projects, is interwoven with careful analysis of his own forms of writing history, the nineteenth-century paradigms which he critiqued, and the twentieth-century views which he anticipated. The book will be of much interest to scholars of Nietzsche and of nineteenth-century philosophy.

Click here to buy Nietzsche's Philosophy of History.

See also Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen's American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas.

History, Heritage & Tradition in Contemporary British Politics, by Emily Robinson

Book description from Amazon:

History, heritage and tradition in contemporary British politics explores the use of the past in modern British politics. It examines party political perspectives on British history and the historical process and also looks at the ways in which memory is instituted within the parties in practice, through archives, written histories and commemorations. It focuses in particular on a number of explicit negotiations over historical narratives: the creation of the National Curriculum for History, Conservative attempts to re-assess their historical role in 1997, the assertion of a 'lost' social democratic tradition by the SDP and New Labour and the collapse of the Communist Party of Great Britain's narrative memory in 1988-91. These episodes are examined as a process of negotiation between grassroots members and party leaders in which understandings of the past determined the options for the future. This book fuses scholarship on British political parties' collective memory, historical theory and heritage studies. It traces the decline of ideologically distinct approaches to history and argues that although the political past is no longer seen to make demands on the present- either of conservative duty or radical obligation- this is in line with wider social attitudes which see the past as an affirmation of the present, rather than as a legacy which can be honoured or betrayed. It shows how history, heritage and tradition are used to present parliamentary politics as intrinsically 'historic' and suggests that the disappearance of active political pasts leaves contemporary politicians unable to speak of radically different futures.

Click here to buy History, Heritage and Tradition in Contemporary British Politics.

The Undivided Past: Humanity Beyond Our Differences, by David Cannadine

Book description from Amazon:

From one of our most acclaimed historians, a wise and provocative call to re-examine the way we look at the past: not merely as the story of incessant conflict between groups but also of human solidarity throughout the ages.

Investigating the six most salient categories of human identity, difference, and confrontation—religion, nation, class, gender, race, and civilization—David Cannadine questions just how determinative each of them has really been. For while each has motivated people dramatically at particular moments, they have rarely been as pervasive, as divisive, or as important as is suggested by such simplified polarities as “us versus them,” “black versus white,” or “the clash of civilizations.” For most of recorded time, these identities have been more fluid and these differences less unbridgeable than political leaders, media commentators—and some historians—would have us believe. Throughout history, in fact, fruitful conversations have continually taken place across these allegedly impermeable boundaries of identity: the world, as Cannadine shows, has never been simply and starkly divided between any two adversarial solidarities but always an interplay of overlapping constituencies.

Yet our public discourse is polarized more than ever around the same simplistic divisions, and Manichean narrative has become the default mode to explain everything that is happening in the world today. With wide-ranging erudition, David Cannadine compellingly argues against the pervasive and pernicious idea that conflict is the inevitable state of human affairs. The Undivided Past is an urgently needed work of history, one that is also about the present—and the future.

Watch on Youtube: "Common Humanity: Making 'us vs. them' history"



Click here to buy The Undivided Past: Humanity Beyond Our Differences.

Inventing the Enemy: Essays, by Umberto Eco

Book description from Amazon:

Inventing the Enemy covers a wide range of topics on which Eco has written and lectured over the past ten years: from a disquisition on the theme that runs through his recent novel The Prague Cemetery — every country needs an enemy, and if it doesn’t have one, must invent it — to a discussion of ideas that have inspired his earlier novels (and in the process he takes us on an exploration of lost islands, mythical realms, and the medieval world); from indignant reviews of James Joyce’s Ulysses by fascist journalists of the 1920s and 1930s, to an examination of Saint Thomas Aquinas’s notions about the soul of an unborn child, to censorship and violence and WikiLeaks.

These are essays full of passion, curiosity, and obsession by one of the world’s most esteemed scholars and critically acclaimed, best-selling novelists.

Click here to buy Inventing the Enemy.

Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, Volume 17, Issue 3, 2013

Editorial
Alun Munslow

The talking witness documentary: remembrance and the politics of truth
Louise Spence & Aslı Kotaman Avcı

Is Sid Meier's Civilization history?
Adam Chapman

Questions on the history of ideas and its neighbours
Allan Megill & Xupeng Zhang

Embodied histories. Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujică's Videograms of a Revolution and Ovidiu Bose Pas¸tina's Timis¸oara—December 1989 and the uses of the independent camera
Constantin Parvulescu

The content and form of ‘conventional’ historical biography
José Miguel Sardica

Towards a new definition of history
Alexander Lyon Macfie

Creating a ‘falsely objectified tradition’: the face of art or history, myth, money, and name. A review-essay of Pacific Standard Time. Los Angeles Art 1945–1980
Sande Cohen

Click here to access the volume.

Identity, Aesthetics, and Sound in the Fin de Siècle: Redesigning Perception, by Dariusz Gafijczuk

Book description from Amazon.com:

This book is an analytic and historical portrait of the volatile decades at the beginning of the 20th century. Engaging with avant-garde art and thought, and concentrating on two of the most controversial and still culturally relevant personalities of Viennese modernism - Sigmund Freud and Arnold Schoenberg - it tells the story of a cultural experiment of unprecedented proportions, an experiment that attempted to redesign the senses and the concept of individual identity. The book describes the shape of this identity through its mutually overlapping artistic and intellectual dimensions, as it explores the relationship between psychoanalysis and music.

You can also read Gafijczuk's interesting piece at the most recent edition of History and Theory, Dwelling Within: The Inhabited Ruins of History. The text is also available at his page at the International Network for Theory of History.

Click here to buy Identity, Aesthetics, and Sound in the Fin de Siècle: Redesigning Perception.

After 1945: Latency as Origin of the Present, by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht

Book description from Amazon:

What is it the legacy that humankind has been living with since 1945? We were once convinced that time was the agent of change. But in the past decade or two, our experience of time has been transformed. Technology preserves and inundates us with the past, and we perceive our future as a set of converging and threatening inevitabilities: nuclear annihilation, global warming, overpopulation. Overwhelmed by these horizons, we live in an ever broadening present. In identifying the prevailing mood of the post-World War II decade as that of "latency," Gumbrecht returns to the era when this change in the pace and structure of time emerged and shows how it shaped the trajectory of his own postwar generation.

Those born after 1945, and especially those born in Germany, would have liked nothing more than to put the catastrophic events and explosions of the past behind them, but that possibility remained foreclosed or just out of reach. World literatures and cultures of the postwar years reveal this to have been a broadly shared predicament: they hint at promises unfulfilled and obsess over dishonesty and bad faith; they transmit the sensation of confinement and the inability to advance.

After 1945 belies its theme of entrapment. Gumbrecht has never been limited by narrow disciplinary boundaries, and his latest inquiry is both far-ranging and experimental. It combines autobiography with German history and world-historical analysis, offering insightful reflections on Samuel Beckett and Paul Celan, detailed exegesis of the thought of Martin Heidegger and Jean Paul Sartre, and surprising reflections on cultural phenomena ranging from Edith Piaf to the Kinsey Report. This personal and philosophical take on the last century is of immediate relevance to our identity today.

Click here to watch "After 1945: About the emergence of a new relation to time".

Click here to buy After 1945: Latency as Origin of the Present.

Writing History in the Age of Biomedicine, by Roger Cooter with Claudia Stein

Book description from Amazon.com:

A collection of ten essays paired with substantial prefaces, this book chronicles and contextualizes Roger Cooter’s contributions to the history of medicine. Through an analysis of his own work, Cooter critically examines the politics of conceptual and methodological shifts in historiography. In particular, he examines the “double bind” of postmodernism and biological or neurological modeling that, together, threaten academic history. To counteract this trend, suggests Cooter, historians must begin actively locating themselves in the problems they consider.

The essays and commentaries constitute a kind of contour map of history’s recent trends and trajectories—its points of passage to the present—and lead both to a critical account of the discipline’s historiography and to an examination of the role of intellectual frameworks and epistemic virtues in the writing of history.

Click here to buy Writing History in the Age of Biomedicine.

Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Contrast and the Prestige of English Studies, by Ted Underwood

Book description from SUP's website:

In the mid-nineteenth century, the study of English literature began to be divided into courses that surveyed discrete "periods." Since that time, scholars' definitions of literature and their rationales for teaching it have changed radically. But the periodized structure of the curriculum has remained oddly unshaken, as if the exercise of contrasting one literary period with another has an importance that transcends the content of any individual course.

Why Literary Periods Mattered explains how historical contrast became central to literary study, and why it remained institutionally central in spite of critical controversy about literature itself. Organizing literary history around contrast rather than causal continuity helped literature departments separate themselves from departments of history. But critics' long reliance on a rhetoric of contrasted movements and fateful turns has produced important blind spots in the discipline. In the twenty-first century, Underwood argues, literary study may need digital technology in particular to develop new methods of reasoning about gradual, continuous change.

Click here to buy Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Contrast and the Prestige of English Studies.