https://repository.digital.georgetown.edu/handle/10822/1100010

The life and death of Anacharsis Cloots weigh on my mind as representative of the tensions between "universal" and "national" ideals in the history of the left from the French Revolution onwards.

Although "internationalism" might seem one way of resolving these tensions, only a sanguine superficiality can find in this more than a partial solution.

Image: Anacharsis Cloots -- Edme Quenedey (1756-1830), dessinateur et graveur -- Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Estampes et photographie, RESERVE QB-370 (45)-FT 4 -- Public domain -- Wikimedia Commons.

#AnacharsisCloots #History #PoliticalThought #FrenchRevolution #Cosmopolitanism #Republicanism #Nationalism #LeftWingThought #IntellectualHistory #Internationalism #18thCenturyHistory #France

Thinking aloud on a work in progress:

John Dewey needs to be rescued from both his fans and his foes.

If one thinks of philosophy as not separated by unbridgeable gaps from either the natural sciences nor the study of society and its needs, then one is an heir to Dewey.

Paradoxically, his writings constitute not just a source but an obstacle for the best understanding of his thought.

He wrote too much; his collected works fill 76 volumes. Navigating such a plenitude of writings is a challenge in itself. Worse, navigating his notoriously turgid prose makes reading Dewey less like a voyage of discovery than a punishment march. The contrast with the stylish wit of fellow pragmatist William James or the rigorous elegance of his contemporary Bertrand Russell is painful.

Still, engage with Dewey one must if one is to understand both the problems, possibilities, and legacy of US progressive thought in the first half of the 20th century.

More to follow on this topic over the coming months.

Image: John Dewey -- Деветьяров Руслан -- https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ -- Wikimedia Commons

#JohnDewey #USHistory #Philosophy #IntellectualHistory #Progressivism #Pragmatism

https://literaryreview.co.uk/pass-the-cherries

I'd like to read this, as it would help me better understand how Thatcherism poisoned the culture of the UK.

Unlike the reviewer, I do think that a switch in dons' priorities from royal commissions and the BBC to spinning out companies and podcasting signifies not just a change but a decline. That "the continued investment of at least some dons in political life" is illustrated by the involvement of Cambridge authoritarian right theologian James Orr in Reform UK shows how steep this decline has been.

#UKCulture #History #IntellectualHistory #Universities #Oxbridge #ColinKidd #TwilightOfTheDons

📖 Beitrag 1 im 📙 "Canon and Censorship in Islamic Intellectual History" (De Gruyter Brill): die programmatische Hinführung "Canon and Censorship in Islamic Intellectual History: Introduction" (A. Dziri, B. Dziri & M. Gharaibeh).

🔓 https://tinyurl.com/mrxp34uy

#Canon, #Censorship, #Authority, #Islam, #IntellectualHistory

🆕📙 "Canon and Censorship in Islamic Intellectual History"

Herausgegeben von Amir Dziri (Université de Fribourg), Bacem Dziri & Mohammad Gharaibeh bei De Gruyter Brill.

🔓 https://tinyurl.com/mrxp34uy

#Canon, #Censorhip, #Authority, #Islam, #IntellectualHistory

What have been the greatest intellectual achievements?

https://www.thinkingcomplete.com/2017/09/what-have-been-greatest-intellectual.html

#HackerNews #greatestachievements #intellectualhistory #knowledgeinnovation #thoughtleadership #criticalthinking

Book Club: Yuval Noah Harari’s Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

https://boffosocko.com/2026/03/08/book-club-yuval-noah-hararis-nexus-a-brief-history-of-information-networks-from-the-stone-age-to-ai/

👉🎯"Intellectual history has long suffered from a materialist deficit. The discipline, as Samuel Moyn argues, is in sore need of “a theory of ideology” that conceptualizes ideas as not merely intellectual but also material forces. Absent an awareness of the social dimension of ideas, Moyn contends, intellectual history risks sliding into idealism, substituting a theory of discursive context for what should be one of social relations.

In Moyn’s work, intellectual history stands accused of operating on an “implausible” theory of historical agency and change. It imagines ideas to arise at the point where historical context meets writerly intention but, in doing so, fails to acknowledge that both history and intention are themselves socially and materially conditioned. This leaves it generally ill equipped to confront the role ideas play in perpetuating and justifying material inequalities or relations of dominance.

We are seeing the effects of this analytical deficit today. As we bear witness to far-reaching shifts in not only the political economy but the intellectual life of advanced capitalist societies, our capacity to interpret how we got here appears pallid and incomplete." 🎯👈

https://www.jhiblog.org/2026/02/02/stuart-hall-ideology-and-neoliberalisms-reactionary-drift/

#Neoliberalism #Ideology #Idealism #Materialism #PoliticalEconomy #IntellectualHistory