New Books in Critical Theory

American democracy is in a period of crisis, so it seems natural to look back to its origins. So here in Episode 10 of Season 5, I interview Professor Josiah Ober.

Having previously taught at Princeton University, Ober is a professor of political science, classics, and philosophy at Stanford University, the Director of the Stanford Civics Initiative, as well as a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. The author of many books, including Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens (1989), The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece (2015), and Civic Bargain (2023), co-written with Brook Manville, he was previously a Madison’s Notes guest in Season 3.

Drawing on his 2015 book, we discuss the history of ancient Greece and the political legacy of its classical period. Our conversation ranges from the Bronze Age Collapse and the age of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey to the rise of the Greek city-state and decline of democratic Athens.

We discuss contingencies of the Peloponnesian war, the cases for and against Alcibiades, whether the polity flourished under Macedonian and Roman empires, the relationship of philosophy to civics, was Socrates guilty and how much did Plato invent about him, in what way the god Hermes symbolized Greek trade in the Mediterranean, if James Madison truly understood ancient history, and lastly Ober’s work with the growing civics programs in American higher education.

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 our new Substack page, “Madison’s Footnotes.”
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Fundamental to Islamic thought is the idea that there is a way that human beings simply are, by nature or creation. This concept is called fiṭra. In The Politics of Islamic Ethics: Hierarchy and Human Nature in the Philosophical Tradition (Cambridge UP, 2025), rooting her investigation in two central passages in the Qur’an and hadith literature, where it is asserted that God created human beings in a certain way, the author moves beyond discussion of the usual figures who have commented on those texts to look instead at a group of classical Islamic philosophers rarely discussed in conjunction with ethical matters. Tracing the development of fiṭra through this overlooked strand of medieval thinking, von Doetinchem de Rande uses fiṭra as an entrée to wider topics in Islamic ethics. She shows that the notion of fiṭra articulated by al-Fārābī, Ibn Bājja, Ibn Ṭufayl, and Ibn Rushd highlights important issues about organizational hierarchies of human nature. This, she argues, has major implications for contemporary political and legal debates.

Raissa von Doetinchem de Rande is Assistant Professor of Religious Ethics and Islamic Studies at the University of Chicago.

Host Yaseen Christian Andrewsen is a DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford, specialising in Islamic intellectual history in West Africa focusing on issues in Sufism, theology, renewal, and authority. Yaseen is a co-host for the New Books in Islamic Studies podcast. He can be reached by email at: christian.andrewsen@pmb.ox.ac.uk
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Curtis Dozier's The White Pedestal: How White Nationalists Use Ancient Greece and Rome to Justify Hate
(Yale University Press, 2026) explores how white nationalist thought
leaders use ancient Greece and Rome to claim historical precedent for
their violent and oppressive politics.It is difficult to ignore the resurgence of white nationalist
movements in the United States, many of which employ symbols and slogans
from Greco-Roman antiquity. A long-established neo-Nazi website
incorporates an image of the Parthenon into its logo, and rioters wore
Spartan helmets in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
These juxtapositions may appear incongruous to people who associate the
ancient world with enlightened political ideals and sophisticated
philosophical inquiry. But, as Dozier points out in this
thought-provoking book, it’s hard to imagine a historical period better
suited to rhetorical use by white nationalists. Indeed, some of the most
widely admired voices from ancient literature and philosophy endorsed
ideas that modern white supremacists promote, and the social and
political realities of the ancient world provide models for political
systems that white supremacists would like to establish today.

Part
introduction to contemporary white nationalist thought, part
exploration of ancient racism and xenophobia, and part intellectual
history of the political entanglements of academic study of the past,
this book reveals that contemporary white nationalist intellectuals know
much more about history than many people assume—and they deploy this
knowledge with disturbing success.

Curtis Dozier is associate professor of Greek and Roman studies at
Vassar College. He is the director of the internationally recognized
website Pharos: Doing Justice to the Classics, which documents appropriations of Greco-Roman antiquity by hate groups. He lives in Poughkeepsie, NY.

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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An exploration of the concept of cultivation, as conducted on both
the land and the body, which expands our understanding of it as
practice, aesthetic, and ideology.

In Cultivated: Plants, Hair, and the Aesthetic of Control (Yale University Press, 2026),
Jeffrey Hoelle traces the imprint of cultivation across the naturally
growing covers of the land and body—plants and hair. The book builds
from research in the agricultural fields and cattle pastures at the edge
of the Amazon rainforest to domestic landscapes and hair salons and
shops in the frontier cities of Brazil and beyond. In spaces where the
tangled forest once stood, clean pastures and ordered rows of crops now
sit on properties with geometric edges. From rural spaces to immaculate
lawns and cemeteries in the city, the imprint leads to the body, where
hair, like plant growth, is cut, trimmed, and otherwise managed.
Seemingly separate domains of agriculture, landscaping, and personal
grooming are governed by a similar aesthetic of control.

This unique pairing of land and body expands our understanding of
cultivation as a practice and as an ideology that operates in frontier
Amazonia—but also closer to home, influencing how we conceptualize and
interpret the covers that grow on and around us, and our imagined
relations with nature in the future. Hoelle argues that we must
understand this system of thought and the overlooked role it plays in
environmental destruction and social inequality.

Jeffrey Hoelle is Professor of Anthropology at the University of
California, Santa Barbara. His research explores the social, cultural,
and political-economic dimensions of environmental transformation and
deforestation in frontier Amazonia. He is the author of Rainforest Cowboys: The Rise of Ranching and Cattle Culture in Western Amazonia (UT Press, 2015)

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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What does it mean for theory to be considered as a species of not just literature but world literature? Theory as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2025), edited by Jeffrey De Leo, offers a wide range of accounts of how the “worlding” of literature both problematizes the national categorizing of theory (e.g., French theory), and brings new meanings and challenges to the coming together of theory and literature. In sum, it presents theory as world literature as a viable alternative to more commonplace approaches to theory.Under such an approach to theory, what it means to be an African, American, or Asian “theorist” – let alone a French, German, or Spanish one – in the new millennium is as complicated (or simple) as what means to be “African,” “American,” or “Asian.” “Worlded” literature is not considered here as only the world literature of nations and nationalities. Rather, it is also the worlded literature of individuals crossing borders, mixing stories, and speaking in dialect. So too is it the worlded literature of the multinational corporate publishing industry wherein success in the global market is a major determinate of aesthetic and literary value.Offering accounts of what it means to consider theory as world literature, the authors in this pioneering collection explore the ways in which we might regard theory as connected and reconnected through global literary networks of increasing complexity and precarity. By approaching theory from this perspective, Theory as World Literature demonstrates how and why theory is more worldly now than ever.
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