Ideas editors and podcasters have been invited to a continuous feast in 2023: the year has offered an unusual number of original publications of the highest caliber.
Natasha Wheatley’s The Life and Death of States: Central Europe and the Transformation of Modern Sovereignty, the Vienna-based discussion of which we were proud to co-organize; Sam Moyn’s Liberalism Against Itself. Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times that substantially critiques the dominant form Western liberalism has taken; Danielle Allen’s exciting proposal of a power-sharing liberalism; George Steinmetz’s major monograph on the colonial origins of modern social thought in France; or Adam Shatz’s collection of essays on the radical imagination have all been evident highlights.
Here comes an all too selective list of five recommendations from RevDem Ideas of books that deserve to be more widely read and discussed.
- Darrin M. McMahon. Equality. The History of an Elusive Idea. New York: Basic Books, 2023.
Darrin M. McMahon’s new book offers a wide-ranging and beautifully crafted intellectual history of a resilient but also rather elusive idea on the long term. Through its careful interpretation of eleven major ways human equality has been imagined across the ages, the book delivers fascinating insights into the various uses, including inegalitarian ones, of equality. Ultimately, this favorite Ideas book of 2023 shows just how ambivalent humans tend to be about equality and points to the rich resources we possess to reinvent this crucial idea in an age of growing inequality in Western democracies.
- Melvin L. Rogers. The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023.
Melvin L. Rogers’s new monograph is a finely crafted and inspiring book on the normative visions of some of the most intricate African American thinkers. In an age when the canons of political thought are being critically reexamined and made more inclusive, this book is an essential resource to learn about what makes African American reflections on democracy and freedom rather distinctive – and how they could fruitfully reshape mainstream conversations.
- Tara Zahra. Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars. New York: W.W. Norton, 2023.
Tara Zahra’s new book paints an impressive panorama of a surprisingly little understood subject: the University of Chicago-based historian studies the various forms anti-globalism took in the early twentieth century, how they evolved across the decades, and the impacts they had. For those interested in a deeply learned and original treatment of this timely historical subject, Against the World is likely to prove an ideal choice.
- Ben Judah. This is Europe. The Way We Live Now. London: Picador, 2023.
This is Europe explores the lives of a carefully selected cross-section of our diverse societies through a polyphonic narrative that reflects crucial developments from climate change to migration, from war and trauma to changes in rural life, from new-old issues of class to the transformations wrought by digitization. Ben Judah paints a propulsive portrait of our turbulent times and – as discussed here at the Review of Democracy with the author – suggests a new model of how to depict a continent where practically everybody travels and shares pictures, and where master narrators will therefore unavoidably appear pretentious and redundant.
- Martin Schulze Wessel, Der Fluch des Imperiums. Die Ukraine, Polen und der Irrweg in der Russischen Geschichte. (The Curse of the Imperium. Ukraine, Poland, and the False Path in Russian History.) Munich: C.H. Beck, 2023.
Martin Schulze Wessel’s new monograph in the German language is a learned history of the Russian–Ukrainian–Polish triangle which provides an urgent interpretation of Russian imperial ideas and projects. As the book explains, imperialism is a subject that historically connected and now clearly divides Russia from Europe. Schulze Wessel also shows the remarkable parallels and dissects the complex interactions between “the Polish question” and “the Ukrainian question,” and critiques what he aptly calls the secondary imperialism of many Germans – which recently still manifested in the continued prioritization of relations with Russia at the price of overriding the justified concerns of Central and Eastern European allies. If there is one book on Central and Eastern European history from 2023 that Western audiences in particular could greatly benefit from reading, this might well be it.
