New Books in Critical Theory

Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) was one of the foremost European
intellectuals of the twentieth century. He published hundreds of
articles on modern history and culture, and his books became canonical
works and bestsellers on both sides of the Atlantic. His crystal-clear
writing, vast erudition, and ability to make his Marxist analysis
digestible to a wide audience brought him worldwide renown. Yet Hobsbawm
was no academic hermit. Through his globetrotting journalism, he was
embedded in an extraordinary web of politicians, activists, and fellow
intellectuals across Europe, South Asia, and the Americas, including
Manmohan Singh, Che Guevara, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Fernand Braudel,
E. P. Thompson, Arno Mayer, and Salvador Allende.

In The Age of Hobsbawm: The Life of a Revolutionary Historian (Harvard University Press, 2026), Emile Chabal
traces the origins of Hobsbawm’s ideas and most famous writings by
exploring his scholarly foundations, delving deep into the archives to
uncover hidden links and unexpected conversations that shaped his
pathbreaking work. Going well beyond the Ages series of modern
history books for which Hobsbawm is best known, Chabal offers the first
substantial interpretation of Hobsbawm’s entire body of writing. Indeed,
The Age of Hobsbawm is also a trove of unique insights into
the generations of Marxist writers with whom Hobsbawm was in
conversation—authors whose work continues to shape political debates
globally.
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What do we talk about when we talk about Europe? Is it defined by geography? Or is it politics, or shared culture? In Europe: A New History (Allen Lane, 2026),
award-winning historian Roderick Beaton tells the story of Europe as
never before—as the history of an idea, and a collective identity.

Since
its dramatic birth in ancient Greece, 'Europe' has been defined, and
redefined, by its people. Through this powerful lens, and with the
narrative drive and scope of a novelist, Beaton deftly surveys Europe’s
major historical developments: the rise and fall of Rome; the explosion
of Christianity; the intellectual ferment of the Renaissance and the
Enlightenment; the arrival of Europeans in the Americas; the violent
upheavals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and the
uncertainties of the present. Throughout, original sources allow the
voices of the past, from Tacitus to Thatcher, to speak for themselves.

Grappling with the multilayered identities that have always come with being European, Europe places the Europe of today in a long arc of history stretching back more than 2,500 years.

Roderick Beaton
is Emeritus Koraes Professor of Modern Greek and Byzantine History,
Language and Literature at King's College London and Chair of Trustees
of the British School at Athens, an institute of advanced research. He
is a four-time winner of the Runciman Award, for his books An Introduction to Modern Greek Literature, George Seferis: Waiting for the Angel: A Biography, Byron's War: Romantic Rebellion, Greek Revolution, and Greece: Biography of a Modern Nation, published by Penguin in 2019. He is also the author of The Greeks: A Global History.
He is a Fellow of the British Academy, Commander of the Order of Honour
of the Hellenic Republic, and an honorary citizen of Greece. He was
knighted in 2025.

Morteza Hajizadeh
is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New
Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory;
Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies;
18th
and 19th Century British Literature. 
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Americans are more isolated, polarized, and depressed than ever in recent memory, and yet many citizens share a deep desire for community and friendship across political lines and in new creative ways. How may we bridge that gap? To help answer that most pressing question, in Episode 2 of Season 6, I have as our guest the philosopher, essayist, and author, Ian Marcus Corbin.

A graduate of Yale Divinity School and Boston College, Mr. Corbin is a senior fellow at Capita, the program director of Harvard University’s Public Culture Project, and the author of To Arrive Where We Started (2026). Drawing on his book, we discuss the human longing for belonging as the way to deal with our modern crisis of loneliness.

We begin with Corbin’s journey from a teenage Christian punk rocker raised by hippies-turned-Pentecostals into an Ivy League philosopher working at the intersection of neurobiology and culture, and along the way, we also discuss texts from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets to Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday, Plato’s Symposium, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, and Karp Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, not to mention figures like Black Elk and Roger Scruton, as well as Corbin’s personal friendship with Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy.

Hosted by Ryan Shinkel, Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. The transcript for this interview is available on the JMP substack page, “Madison’s Footnotes.”

Chapter Headings:

1 | 00:00 Introduction and Meet Ian Marcus Corbin2 | 10:48 Loneliness and the Limits of Liberalism3 | 19:48 Soul and the Science of Belonging4 | 29:00 Cognitive Metabolism and World Decay5 | 42:30 Diotima and Zosima6 | 48:32 Corbin's friendship with Sen. Chris Murphy
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Ganja
is the popular name in Hindustani, Bengali, and other South Asian
languages for intoxicating substances produced from the plant species
Cannabis sativa L. Starting in the eighteenth century, British India's
colonial administrators sought ways to systematically tax and govern how
ganja circulated from the farms of peasant families in rural Bengal to pipes, plates, and cups elsewhere in the subcontinent.

Ganja Matters: Empire and the Pursuits of Cannabis in British India
(University of California Press, 2026) is an open-access book that
follows the perpetual incongruity between regulatory efforts to pursue
the plant through botanical observation, colonial reportage, and excise
statistics and the leisurely, devotional, and creative ganja pursuits
among people. Dr. Utathya Chattopadhyaya offers a social history of
ganja in a multispecies framework that reveals how the cannabis plant
co-constituted histories of empire, gender, subalternity, and labor
under British rule. Against the weight of the criminalization and
"drug-ness" of cannabis, Dr. Chattopadhyaya puts the multidirectional
and polysemic history of ganja as plant matter at the center of
analysis.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book
focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty
negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative
analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find
Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. 
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A series of questions have been sparked by the indigenous urgency of
the moment: What does it mean to live through a world coming undone? How
do people carry on amid rupture, loss, and grief? Decolonial Endurance: Lisu Worldmaking Against Chinese Settler Colonialism (Stanford University Press, 2026) explores
these questions through the turbulent lives of Indigenous Lisu
subsistence farmers in China’s Eastern Himalayas, bordering Myanmar and
Tibet.

Like many of China’s Indigenous borderlands, this
mountainous region has long borne the force of encroaching Chinese state
power. Since the 1980s, the Chinese state has been compelling the Lisu
to give up their subsistence lifeways, move into urban settlements, and
send their children to government boarding schools. In exchange for the
so-called gifts of development—healthcare, income, and education—they
suffer environmental and social catastrophes such as mass landslides,
strange new illnesses, and toxic food.

Drawing on over a decade
of engagement with the Lisu, Ting Hui Lau takes readers into the world
of ex-shamans, heart-pained mothers, restless spirits, and demon-mad
migrants as they grapple with the fallout from state development, which
Lau argues is the latest phase in a centuries-long project of settler
colonialism along China's Southwest frontier. At once a portrayal of
loss and an ethnography of hope, Lau chronicles Lisu worldmaking amid
this destruction, centering their quiet resistance through everyday acts
of communal caretaking. In a time of escalating geopolitical and
ecological crisis, this book calls for a new decolonial politics rooted
in the transformative power of endurance.

Ting Hui Lau (email
address: lau.th@nus.edu.sg) is Assistant Professor of Sociology and
Anthropology at the National University of Singapore. She studies
sociocultural, psychological, and medical anthropology, development and
environmental change, Indigeneity and colonialism, and the borderland
areas of East and Southeast Asia.

Yadong Li is an
anthropologist-in-training. He is a PhD candidate of Socio-cultural
Anthropology at Tulane University. More details about his scholarship
and research interests can be found here.
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