Episodios

  • Baijayanti Roy, "The Nazi Study of India and Indian Anti-Colonialism" (Oxford UP, 2024)

    Baijayanti Roy, "The Nazi Study of India and Indian Anti-Colonialism" (Oxford UP, 2024)
    Jan 1 2026
    The Nazi Study of India and Indian Anti-Colonialism (2024) is the first detailed and critical study of the intellectual and political connections that existed between some German scholars specializing on India, non-academic ‘India experts,’ Indian anti-colonialists and various organs of the Nazi state published by the Oxford University Press. It explores the ways in which different knowledge discourses pertaining to India, particularly its colonization and the anti-colonial movement, were used by these individuals for a number of German organisations to fulfil the demands of Nazi politics. This monograph also inspects the links between the knowledge providers and embodiments of National Socialist politics like the Nazi party and its affiliates. In this study, Baijayanti Roy aims to ascertain whether such political engagements were actually more rewarding for the scholars than their 'practical services' to the state in the form of strategic deployment of their knowledge of India. The Nazi Study of India and Indian Anti-Colonialism offers case studies of four organisations which incorporated such complicated entanglements of knowledge and power: the India Institute of the Deutsche Akademie in Munich, the Special Department India of the German Foreign Ministry, the Seminar for Oriental languages and its successor institutions at the University of Berlin, and the Indian Legion of the German Army. The knowledge networks underlying these organisations were dominated by German Indologists, but non-specialist knowledge providers, both German and Indian were also included. The Nazi regime expected all scholars and intellectuals to engage in Kulturpolitik (cultural politics), which entailed propagating the glories of the 'Reich' and its supreme leader as well as collecting 'politically valuable' knowledge within and outside Germany. For the four organizations concerned, this meant conducting pro-German and from around 1938, anti-British propaganda aimed at Indians. Loosely following an analogy provided by Herbert Mehrtens in the context of natural sciences, this monograph posits that there were ‘patterns of collaboration’ between the knowledge providers and the representatives of the Nazi regime. At the core of these 'patterns' was, to borrow Mitchell Ash’s theory, an exchange of resources and capital in which scholars and experts offered their knowledge of Indian languages, history and culture to authorities like the Foreign Ministry, the SS and the Army. In return, they received increased professional opportunities, financial remuneration or in some cases, increased power and influence. Deep Acharya is a PhD student and a George L. Mosse fellow of Modern European Cultural History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison working on the history of fatherhood in 20th century Germany. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history
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    47 m
  • Amit Varshizky, "The Metaphysics of Race: Science and Faith in the Nazi Worldview" (Taylor & Francis, 2024)

    Amit Varshizky, "The Metaphysics of Race: Science and Faith in the Nazi Worldview" (Taylor & Francis, 2024)
    Dec 31 2025
    The Metaphysics of Race seeks to reframe debates on the conflicting scientific and spiritual traditions that underpinned the Nazi worldview, showing how despite the multitude of tensions and rivals among its adherents, it provided a coherent conceptual grid and possessed its own philosophical consistency. Drawing on a large variety of works, the volume offers insights into the intellectual climate that allowed the radical ideology of National Socialism to take hold. It examines the emergence of nuanced conceptions of race in interwar Germany and the pursuit of a new ethical and existential fulcrum in biology. Accordingly, the volume calls for a re-examination of the place of genetics in Nazi racial thought, drawing attention to the multi-register voices within the framework of interwar racial theory. Varshizky explores the ways in which these ideas provided new justifications for the Nazi revolutionary enterprise and blurred the distinction between fact and value, knowledge and faith, the secular and the sacred, and how they allowed Nazi thinkers to bounce across these epistemological divisions. This volume will be of interest to scholars of Nazi Germany and World War II, intellectual and cultural history, the history of science, and the philosophy of religion. Amit Varshizky is an Israeli-born, Berlin-based historian, novelist, and essayist. He holds a PhD from the School of Historical Studies at Tel Aviv University and has lectured at academic institutions in both Israel and Germany. His research focuses on the history of racism and antisemitism in modern Europe, the intellectual and cultural history of Nazism, German Romanticism, the philosophy of science, and theories of religion, myth, and secularism. His articles and reviews on these subjects have appeared in leading peer-reviewed journals. His book The Metaphysics of Race: Science and Faith in the Nazi Worldview (Open University of Israel and Yad Vashem, 2021) was awarded the Goldberg Prize of the Open University of Israel for Best Research Book (2019) and the Bartal Am VeOlam Prize of the Israel Historical Society for Outstanding Book of the Year (2022). An English version of the book was published by Routledge in 2024. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history
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    1 h y 8 m
  • Martin Jay, "Immanent Critiques: The Frankfurt School under Pressure" (Verso, 2023)

    Martin Jay, "Immanent Critiques: The Frankfurt School under Pressure" (Verso, 2023)
    Dec 30 2025
    The Frankfurt School’s own legacy is best preserved by exercising an immanent critique of its premises and the conclusions to which they often led. By distinguishing between what is still and what is no longer alive in Critical Theory, Immanent Critiques: The Frankfurt School Under Pressure (Verso, 2023) seeks to demonstrate its continuing relevance in the 21st century. Fifty years after the appearance of The Dialectical Imagination, his pioneering history of the Frankfurt School, Martin Jay reflects on what may be living and dead in its legacy. Rather than treating it with filial piety as a fortress to be defended, he takes seriously its anti-systematic impulse and sensitivity to changing historical circumstances. Honoring the Frankfurt School's practice of immanent critique, he puts critical pressure on a number of its own ideas by probing their contradictory impulses. Among them are the pathologization of political deviance through stigmatizing "authoritarian personalities," the undefended theological premises of Walter Benjamin's work, and the ambivalence of its members' analyses of anti-Semitism and Zionism. Additional questions are asked about other time-honored Marxist themes: the meaning of alienation, the alleged damages of abstraction, and the advocacy of a politics based on a singular notion of the truth. Rather, however, than allowing these questions to snowball into an unwarranted repudiation of the Frankfurt School legacy as a whole, the essay collection also acknowledges a number of its still potent arguments. They explore its neglected, but now timely analysis of "racket society," Adorno's dialectical reading of aesthetic sublimation, and the unexpected implications of Benjamin's focus on the corpse for political theory. Jay shows that it is a still evolving theoretical tradition which offers resources for the understanding of–and perhaps even practical betterment–of our increasingly troubled world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history
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    1 h y 22 m
  • Scott A. Mitchell, "The Making of American Buddhism" (Oxford UP, 2023)

    Scott A. Mitchell, "The Making of American Buddhism" (Oxford UP, 2023)
    Dec 30 2025
    Scott A. Mitchell is the Dean of Students and Faculty Affairs and holds the Yoshitaka Tamai Professorial Chair at the Institute of Buddhist Studies in Berkeley. He teaches and writes about Buddhism in the West, Pure Land Buddhism, and Buddhist modernism. As of 2010, there were approximately 3-4 million Buddhists in the United States, and that figure is expected to grow significantly. Beyond the numbers, the influence of Buddhism can be felt throughout the culture, with many more people practicing meditation, for example, than claiming Buddhist identity. A century ago, this would have been unthinkable. So how did Buddhism come to claim such a significant place in the American cultural landscape? The Making of American Buddhism (Oxford UP, 2023) offers an answer, showing how in the years on either side of World War II second-generation Japanese American Buddhists laid claim to an American identity inclusive of their religious identity. In the process they-and their allies-created a place for Buddhism in America. These sons and daughters of Japanese immigrants-known as “Nisei,” Japanese for “second-generation”-clustered around the Berkeley Bussei, a magazine published from 1939 to 1960. In the pages of the Bussei and elsewhere, these Nisei Buddhists argued that Buddhism was both what made them good Americans and what they had to contribute to America-a rational and scientific religion of peace. The Making of American Buddhism also details the behind-the-scenes labor that made Buddhist modernism possible. The Bussei was one among many projects that were embedded within Japanese American Buddhist communities and connected to national and transnational networks that shaped and allowed for the spread of modernist Buddhist ideas. In creating communities, publishing magazines, and hosting scholarly conventions and translation projects, Nisei Buddhists built the religious infrastructure that allowed the later Buddhist modernists, Beat poets, and white converts who are often credited with popularizing Buddhism to flourish. Nisei activists didn't invent American Buddhism, but they made it possible. Dr. Victoria Montrose is an Assistant Professor of Religion and Asian Studies at Furman University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history
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    59 m
  • Philippe Huneman, "Why?: The Philosophy Behind the Question" (Stanford UP, 2023)

    Philippe Huneman, "Why?: The Philosophy Behind the Question" (Stanford UP, 2023)
    Dec 29 2025
    Why did triceratops have horns? Why did World War I occur? Why does Romeo love Juliet? And, most importantly, why ask why? In Why?: The Philosophy Behind the Question (Stanford UP, 2023), philosopher Philippe Huneman describes the different meanings of "why," and how those meanings can, and should (or should not), be conflated. As Huneman outlines, there are three basic meanings of why: the cause of an event, the reason of a belief, and the reason why I do what I do (the purpose). Each of these meanings, in turn, impacts how we approach knowledge in a wide array of disciplines: science, history, psychology, and metaphysics. Exhibiting a rare combination of conversational ease and intellectual rigor, Huneman teases out the hidden dimensions of questions as seemingly simple as "Why did Mickey Mouse open the refrigerator?" or as seemingly unanswerable as "Why am I me?" In doing so, he provides an extraordinary tour of canonical and contemporary philosophical thought, from Plato and Aristotle, through Descartes and Spinoza, to Elizabeth Anscombe and Ruth Millikan, and beyond. Of course, no proper reckoning with the question "why?" can afford not to acknowledge its limits, which are the limits, and the ends, of reason itself. Huneman thus concludes with a provocative elaboration of what Kant called the "natural need for metaphysics," the unallayed instinct we have to ask the question even when we know there can be no unequivocal answer. Philippe Huneman is Research Director at the Institut d'Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques, CNRS/ Université Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne and the author of several books in French and English, including Philosophical Sketches of Death in Biology: An Historical and Analytic Investigation (2022). Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history
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    1 h y 26 m
  • Lisa Silverman, "The Postwar Antisemite: Culture and Complicity After the Holocaust" (Oxford UP, 2025)

    Lisa Silverman, "The Postwar Antisemite: Culture and Complicity After the Holocaust" (Oxford UP, 2025)
    Dec 28 2025
    In his influential Anti-Semite and Jew, French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre observed "If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him." In doing so he articulated the figure of an Antisemite responsible for imagining the Jew in a formulation that has lasted for decades. This figure became an indispensable trope in the period immediately after the war. It enabled Germans and Austrians to navigate a radically changed political and cultural landscape and reestablish lives upended by war by denying complicity in perpetuating antisemitic ideology. The deeply ingrained cultural practices that formed the basis for age-old prejudices against Jews persisted via coded references, taking new forms, and providing fertile ground for explicit eruptions. Decades before the Nazi persecution of the Jews would emerge as a master moral paradigm of evil in popular culture, the constructed Antisemite became part of a forceful narrative structure that allowed stereotypes about Jews to persist, even as explicit antisemitism became taboo. Lisa Silverman examines the crucial development and implications of the figural Antisemite in a range of trials, films, and texts during the first years after the end of the Second World War. She argues that, in their economically shattered, emotionally exhausted, and culturally impoverished postwar world, Austrians, Germans, and others used the Antisemite as a way to come to terms with their altered circumstances and to shape new national self-understandings. A readily recognizable and easily adaptable figure of evil, the Antisemite loomed large as a powerful and persistent trope in a wide range of artistic and cultural narratives. As a figure onto which to project or imagine as a source of the hatred of Jews, the Antisemite allowed audiences to avoid facing the implications of crimes committed by the Nazis and their accomplices and to deny the endurance of widespread and often coded antisemitic prejudices. In postwar Europe, where everyone looked to blame others for the murder and dispossession of the Jewish population, the authority to define the Antisemite as a receptacle for explicit Jew-hatred became a powerful force. As The Postwar Antisemite argues, antisemitism as a hidden code gained new force, packing stronger, more effective punches and affording its users more power. This era is critical to understanding ongoing struggles over the authority to set the parameters of antisemitism and the power and persistence of this hatred in society. Paul Lerner is Chair of the History Department at the University of Southern California where he directs the Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history
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    1 h y 9 m
  • Douglas Morris, "Legal Sabotage: Ernst Fraenkel in Hitler's Germany" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

    Douglas Morris, "Legal Sabotage: Ernst Fraenkel in Hitler's Germany" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
    Dec 25 2025
    During the mid-1930s, Germans opposed to Adolf Hitler had only a limited range of options available to them for resisting the Nazi regime. One of the most creative and successful challengers in this effort was Ernst Fraenkel, who as an attorney sought to use the law as a means of opposing Nazi oppression. In Legal Sabotage: Ernst Fraenkel in Hitler’s Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Douglas G. Morris describes the ways in which Frankel stood up to the Nazis and what understandings he drew from that experience. As a veteran of the First World War, Fraenkel survived the initial purge resulting from the implementation of measures designed to bar Jews from practicing law in the Third Reich. Though his legal practice suffered, Fraenkel persisted in defending people prosecuted by the Nazis, and enjoyed success in a number of cases. While the increased restrictions and growing reach of the police state ultimately forced Fraenkel to emigrate in 1938, his experiences as a lawyer played a major role in the development of the “dual state” theory of dictatorship, the only analysis of totalitarianism written from within Nazi Germany and the cornerstone of Fraenkel’s contributions to the field of political science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history
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    1 h y 4 m
  • Lin Hongxuan, "Ummah Yet Proletariat: Islam, Marxism, and the Making of the Indonesian Republic" (Oxford UP, 2023)

    Lin Hongxuan, "Ummah Yet Proletariat: Islam, Marxism, and the Making of the Indonesian Republic" (Oxford UP, 2023)
    Dec 25 2025
    In contemporary Indonesia the idea that Islam and Marxism are inherently incompatible has become deeply entrenched. However, as Lin Hongxuan's work Ummah Yet Proletariat: Islam, Marxism, and the Making of the Indonesian Republic (Oxford University Press, 2023) shows, the relationship between them in Indonesian history is deeply intertwined. Based on a wealth of Indonesian language sources, Lin traces over the half century between 1915 and 1965 how Islam and Marxism coexisted and converged in the Netherlands Indies and newly independent Indonesia. In addition to reframing Indonesian ideological history, the book also helpfully emphasises key actors’ engagement with broader intellectual currents to situate them in a global historical context. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history
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    47 m