By Adrian Matus
In 2025, our book coverage aimed to explain the long historical processes behind today’s anxieties: environmental breakdown, wars, revolutions and democratic backsliding. These books revisit settled historical narratives and brought into sight systemic invisibilities. They show how crises rarely arrive unannounced. Instead, they accumulate quietly, sustained by myths and convenient misunderstandings.
Marcus Alexander Gadson, Sedition: How America’s Constitutional Order Emerged from Violent Crisis (NYU Press, 2025)
The dominant story of the American constitution-making is one of compromise and peace. In Sedition, Marcus Alexander Gadson dismantles this comforting myth. He shows how violence, coercion and elite manipulation were central to resolving pivotal crises. Conservative elites used bribery or voter frauds to influence constitutional outcomes. The relevance extends beyond historical analysis and provides fresh perspectives on contemporary political debates in the US. As Neil Gandhi wrote for Review of Democracy, “this is a compelling and insightful read, with a detailed exploration of the corrupt, violent and manipulative constitutional processes of the period. The underlying question of who constitutes ‘the people’ persists today, as do some of the methods of contestation, with important repercussions for the shape of modern democratic institutions.”
Victoria Harms, The Making of Dissidents: Hungary’s Democratic Opposition and its Western Friends, 1973-1998 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024)
Victoria Harms’ latest book, The Making of Dissidents, is essential for anyone who seeks to have a fresh perspective on the dissident movements in East-Central Europe. Instead of treating dissidents as domestic heroes, she reconstructs the complex networks of intellectual exchanges and material support that connected Hungarian opposition figures with Western Europe and the United States. These networks were often fragile, as funding shortages and institutional precarity played a central role. By using a fascinating set of primary sources, Victoria Harms offers a fresh perspective on the emergence of dissident networks, the ideological congruences and distinctions that in the 1990s shaped the different political discourse. You can check here our book presentation with Victoria Harms and two discussants, Kacper Szulecki (Research Professor at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs) and Szabolcs László (Research Fellow, Institute of History, HUN-REN Research Center for the Humanities ).
Dan Edelstein, The Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea from Thucydides to Lenin (Princeton University Press, 2025)
Revolution is often treated as a self-evident political concept. Dan Edelstein aptly argues in his latest book The Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea from Thucydides to Lenin that the meaning of the revolution has never been fixed. Instead, his option is to trace this idea across two millennia of political thought. As he mentioned in our podcast, “the revolutions always activated a certain number of brief narratives in people’s minds” and “political actors re-interpreted revolutions through inherited scripts”. By tracing the conceptual distinction between stasis and metabolē through Roman, medieval, and Renaissance thought, he recovers the overlooked role of Polybius in shaping the constitutional imagination of early modern Europe. By situating revolutions in a longue durée conceptual history, Edelstein challenges us to see them not as sudden breaks, but as episodes in an evolving, centuries-long dialogue between inherited political imaginaries and the real events.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dream Count (Knopf, New York, 2025)
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s latest novel, Dream Count, provides new angles about coping mechanisms during the COVID-19 pandemic. The fiction focuses on four voices: Chiamaka, a Nigerian writer who battles insomnia and writer’s block, her friend Zikora, a lawyer who navigates single motherhood; her cousin, Omegolor, who works in finance and is a columnist, and Chiamaka’s housekeeper, Kadiatou, vilified by the media after surviving a sexual assault. As Manuel Torres wrote for the Review of Democracy, one of Dream Count’s greatest strenghts lies in “its ability to convey the global pandemic through the intimate textures of language and memory (…). Her use of oral stylistics, repetition, accumulation, and echo roots the text in African literary traditions while keeping it accessible to a broader readership.”
Amelia Bonea and Irina Nastasă-Matei (eds.), Negotiating in/visibility: Women, science, engineering and medicine in the twentieth century (Manchester University Press, 2025)
How can women be so deeply involved in shaping science, engineering and medicine, yet remain absent from the narratives about scientific progress? The volume Negotiating in/visibility attempts to answer this paradox. For the authors, the concept of invisibility does not mean lack of participation, but it is a historically produced condition. As the editors Irina Năstasă-Matei and Amelia Bonea mentioned in our event dedicated to this book, throughout the 20th century, women actively contributed to the STEM fields, yet historiography systematically obscured their work. The greatest achievement of this book is that it draws on multiple case studies from Europe, the Americas and Asia, revealing how visibility in science was shaped by intersecting factors such as gender, class, race, political regimes, and institutional hierarchies.
Taken together, these books refuse to explain in simple terms the conditions that lead the world of 2025. Whether examining constitutions, dissident networks, revolutions or history of science, they expose the fragile epistemological scaffolding of our world.
