by Gray Black Mid-summer’s musk had been made corpulent by the immense humidity of the previous rains. I, too, felt heavy. With June’s hot breath on the back of my neck, I wandered towards the woods. The afternoon’s storm had proved atmospheric for some avocational reading. Needing something a bit more meliorist, I selected an article about LEAL, an animal rights organization fighting for the protection of an incriminated bear. Contextually, the bear—denominated “JJ4”—is a member of a bear family deracinated from their Slovenian biome by the EU-funded program, Life Ursus, to repopulate the woo ..read more

by Faridah Zaman When the Grand National Assembly of Turkey deposed Sultan-Caliph Mehmed VI in 1922, they deposed the last figure to hold the dual office of Sultan-Caliph of the Ottoman Empire, a vast multi-ethnic and multi-confessional empire that had, at its greatest extent, stretched from North Africa through southern and eastern Europe, to the Middle East. The spiritual authority of the Caliph, nominally head of the global (Sunni) Muslim community, stretched even further. Mehmed VI’s deposition was followed by the abolition of the office of the sultanate. In his place, a purely spiritual c ..read more

by Manar Ellethy “I’m inspired by mostly women. Maybe because of my grandmother, and my mother, and the women in my life. Who is that said, ‘I’ve known rivers,’ well, I’ve known women?” ― Amina Baraka In the summer of 1968, Amina Baraka, a poet, artist, activist, and community organizer in Newark, New Jersey, joined forces with her husband, Amiri Baraka, to create a short documentary film titled The New Ark. While The New Ark ostensibly presents a patriarchal narrative, a closer look reveals a story of Black nationalist women working hard to break that narrative from within. Doing so required ..read more

by Martina Garategaray During the seventies and the eighties of the past century, Social Democracy, born and brewed in Europe, went beyond frontiers and settled in Latin America. As Bernd Rother and Fernando Pedrosa have argued, there was a mutual interest in these connections. On one hand, in the context of the Cold War and the bipolar world, Europe showed interest in what was happening in Latin America and the Caribbean with their struggle for democracy and human rights. Besides, the United States foreign policy towards Cuba and Vietnam, the support to the putsch against Allende in Chile, an ..read more

by Facundo Rocca The destruction of the communatés des métiers, the corporations which for centuries organized the work, life and exchange of trades in the kingdom of France, was undoubtedly a turning point in modern European history. Their dismantlement, which was first unsuccessfully attempted by Louis XVI’s minister Turgot in 1776, was a key element in the abolition of the feudal order during the French Revolution, and was later reinforced with the application of the Le Chapelier law in 1791, which fully banned any association or gathering in the workplace. The end of corporations seemingly ..read more

by Alexander Collin Benjamin Woodford is an assistant professor at Thompson Rivers University. He researches literature and political thought focusing on early modern England. He defended his PhD dissertation, “Institutions, Theology, and the Language of Freedom in the Poetry and Prose of John Milton,” in 2018. He is also the author of numerous articles, as well as the book Perceptions of a Monarchy without a King: Reactions to Oliver Cromwell’s Power (McGill-Queens UP, 2013). He spoke with Alexander Collin about his recent JHI article “The right we have to our owne bodies, goods, and libertie ..read more

by Nilab Saeedi Professor Christopher Markiewicz‘s comprehensive study The Crisis of Kingship in Late Medieval Islam, published in 2019, focuses on the life and experiences of Idrīs-i Bidlīsī (d. 926/1520), a Persian scholar and chancellor who served in both the Aqqoyunlu and Ottoman courts. A significant contribution to our understanding of the late medieval period, the study goes beyond a mere examination of Bidlīsī’s personal history. Instead, Markiewicz skillfully weaves a tapestry of various political concepts and ideas that preoccupied Islamic statesmen and intellectuals of the fifteenth ..read more

by David Scott In this essay, the renowned Jamaican-born anthropologist David Scott reflects on his unexpected journey to incorporating aspects of Reinhart Koselleck’s theory of history into his influential studies of anticolonial revolutions in the Caribbean and their enduring aftermaths. It was commissioned by and simultaneously published on the conceptual history blog Komposita, which was initiated on the occasion of Koselleck’s centennial. It follows previous cross-published posts by Sébastien Tremblay, Jonathon Catlin, and Disha Karnad Jani. —Jonathon Catlin 1. I ..read more

by Shal Marriott Samuel Moyn is the Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University, whose work focuses on twentieth century European moral and political theory. His most recent book is Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (Yale 2023) which emerged out of his 2022 Carlyle Lectures at the University of Oxford, entitled “The Cold War and the Canon of Liberalism.” His previous books include Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War (FSG 2021), Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (Harvard 2018), and The Last U ..read more

by John D. Abromeit In their recent commentaries on the centenary of the founding of the Institute for Social Research, Chris O’Kane and William Scheuerman both criticize what they see as a one-sided dominance of philosophy and political theory in the development of the Frankfurt School since Jürgen Habermas “reconstructed” Critical Theory in order to place it on firmer normative foundations. Both O’Kane and Scheuerman argue that Critical Theory can regain its lost bearings by returning to political economy, which played a central role at the Institute at least until 1940, and well after that ..read more