#history of ideas

Book Reviews

Five Ideas Books in 2025

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.

6.01.2026

Book Reviews

Five Ideas Books in 2023 (Plus Another Five) – by Ferenc Laczó

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’s new book offers a wide-ranging and beautifully crafted intellectual [...]

21.12.2023