By Alexandra Kardos
In 2025, we read and discussed a remarkable range of books on democracy and the history of ideas, which makes selecting just a handful no easy task. The five titles below are a snapshot of the works we covered in the History of Ideas section at RevDem over the past year. They share a common ambition: to reopen settled stories about democracy, political thought, and crisis by recovering neglected traditions, reframing canonical figures, and widening the conceptual and geographical horizons of our disciplines. Rather than offering neat solutions, each invites us to rethink what democracy and politics have been, and what they still might become.
Tejas Parasher, Radical Democracy in Modern Indian Political Thought
Parasher’s book reconstructs a strikingly underappreciated counter-tradition in twentieth-century political thought. Between the 1910s and the 1970s, a diverse group of Indian anti-colonial thinkers developed a participatory and federalist vision of popular sovereignty that challenged the prevailing liberal model of representative democracy. Treating parliaments and the centralised nation-state as structurally prone to corruption and elite capture, these thinkers imagined forms of democratic self-rule grounded in decentralisation and active popular participation. Focusing on figures such as Dadabhai Naoroji, M. K. Gandhi, M. N. Roy, and others, Parasher highlights that studying “paths not taken” at the end of empire invite a rethinking of what democracy can mean today.
Listen to our discussion with Tejas Parasher to learn more about these alternative visions in Indian political thought.
Bruno Leipold, Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought
InCitizen Marx , Leipold argues that Marx’s core ideas were deeply shaped by a continuous engagement with republicanism, particularly the conception of freedom as non-domination. Based on close readings of canonical texts and lesser-known works, the book traces Marx’s intellectual development from early political struggles to his reflections on the Paris Commune. In doing so, Leipold shows how republican concerns about arbitrary power were transformed into an analysis of domination embedded in property relations, market structures, and constitutional design. He also demonstrates that Marx viewed democratic political institutions as essential to overcoming the social unfreedom and domination of capitalism.
For more on this topic, check out a discussion of the book with Bruno Leipold, Geneviève Rousselière and Nicholas Vrousalis that RevDem hosted this year.
Patricia Owens, Erased: A History of International Thought Without Men
Owens’s Erased offers a powerful intervention into the history and self-understanding of international relations as a discipline. By recovering a hidden canon of women thinkers whose work fundamentally shaped British international thought, Owens demonstrates how gendered and racialised practices of exclusion systematically marginalised their contributions and distorted the field’s theoretical foundations. Through detailed reconstructions of figures such as Margery Perham, Merze Tate, Eileen Power, and Susan Strange, the book shows how women’s intellectual labour was central to debates about empire, international order, and global politics, even as it was later written out of official disciplinary histories.
Listen to our podcast with Patricia Owen and learn more about how intellectual erasure can impoverish an entire fields of knowledge.
Leigh Jenco, Paulina Ochoa Espejo & Murad Idris, Political Theory: A Global and Comparative Introduction
This textbook is best read not simply as an introduction but as a call to rethink how we teach political theory itself. Jenco, Ochoa Espejo, and Idris decentre Europe by systematically placing canonical Western texts in conversation with political traditions from across the world and across historical periods. Rather than organising the field around a familiar canon, they structure the book thematically, using issues such as political action, ritual, equality and hierarchy among others as sites of comparative inquiry. Drawing on a wide range of sources, the book demonstrates how comparative reading can profoundly shape our conceptual and methodological approach to studying and teaching ideas about politics.
Check out our podcast with Leigh Jenco and Paulina Ochoa Espejo and explore the field of global and comparative political theory.
Balázs Trencsényi, Intellectuals and the Crisis of Politics in the Interwar Period and Beyond: A Transnational History
Trencsényi offers a sweeping transnational re-narration of modern European intellectual history through the lens of “crisis”, understood not only as an analytical category but as a powerful tool of political mobilisation. Focusing on the interwar period and its aftermath, the book traces how intellectuals across different national and ideological contexts used crisis diagnoses to interpret the collapse of liberal democracy, parliamentary politics, and social order. By mapping the shifting meanings and political functions of crisis discourse, the book provides a historically grounded account of why the language of crisis is so enduring and politically consequential up until today.
To learn more about this topic, listen to our discussion with Balázs Trencsényi on how crisis discourses evolved during the interwar period and beyond.
Taken together, these books show that political thought is richer, more contested, and more globally entangled than standard narratives suggest. By recovering forgotten democratic experiments, reinterpreting canonical figures, exposing disciplinary erasures, reshaping pedagogy, and historicising crisis discourse, they challenge us to think differently about democracy and politics. In this light, democracy is not a settled inheritance, but an ongoing, fragile, and imaginative project.
