Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2025 -

Revival of interest in civic republicanism, such as in Joseph Fishkin and William Forbath's The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution (2022), has been accompanied by works tracing the influence of republicanism on 19th-century socialism, such as Alex Gourevitch's From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth (CH, Jun'15, 52-5591). In Marx's Inferno (2016), William Clare Roberts uncovered the pervasiveness of republican themes, especially freedom as non-domination, in Marx's thought. Leipold (London School of Economics) advances this scholarship with a richly detailed and meticulously argued intellectual archaeology of both congruities and divergences between Marx's socialism and his republican contemporaries. Though advocating collectivizing rather than universalizing productive property, Marx nonetheless concurred with radical republican ideas for democratizing politics in a socialist republic. Leipold's comprehensive and convincing tour de force surveys not only Marx's thought but also various strands of leftist thinking in 19th-century Europe, including neglected republicanism. Offering novel insights for seasoned Marx scholars while remaining accessible to undergraduates because of its clear prose and superb organization, this impressive academic achievement transcends the academy. Its historical research also contains vital implications for the future of democratic theory and practice in troubled times.Summing Up: Essential. General readers through faculty; professionals.

Nelson (history, Univ. of Toronto) convincingly argues for a nonbinary evaluation of Enlightenment and its strain of biopolitics. He defines biopolitics as attempts to mold individuals and corporate bodies using ideas of organization, vitalism, "relational holism," malleability, habit, inheritability, and selective breeding. He spotlights mid-18th-century ancien regime France through the Revolution, including French colonies. Among the actors covered are Locke, Quesnay, Voltaire, Maupertius, Buffon, Rousseau, Diderot, Daubenton, Bory, Kant, Maudave, Poncet de la Grave, Vandermonde, Nicolas-Edme Restif, Robinet, Roussel, Condorcet, Sieyes, Gregoire, Mirabeau, Saint-Mery, Hilliard d'Auberteuil, Destutt de Tracy, Cabanis, and Maine de Biran. Incorporating archives into his rich textual/contextual analysis, Nelson examines the Enlightenment's biopolitical foundations, eugenic ideas and experiments, colonial racial engineering proposals, biopolitical exclusion, biopolitics during the Revolution, and biopolitical influence extending to the present. Nelson presents Enlightenment biopolitics as historically revolutionary and consequential. He acknowledges its worthy educational aims, its plans to create an engaged citizenry, and its improvement of individual and corporate living. Yet, he underscores paradoxical strains of preconceived/privileged standards, hubris, misuses of malleable equality, and rights violations that fostered racism, sexism, and exclusion. Indeed, Dickens's iconic description of the French Revolution apparently suits the Enlightenment. An outstanding study on human complexity.Summing Up: Essential. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; professionals.

Liberty as Independence continues Quentin Skinner's field-defining scholarship in the history of political thought. This is an important book and in some ways Skinner's most personal. Extending the analysis he began in Liberty before Liberalism (1998) and Hobbes and Republican Liberty (2008), Skinner (emer., Queen Mary Univ., England) explores why the view of liberty in Anglo-American discourse shifted from meaning that one is an independent agent, "not subject to the exercise of arbitrary power" (p. 1), to an understanding that liberty consists solely in "non-interference, in absence of restraint" (p. 276). Skinner adeptly moves from post-1688 texts that conceptualize Britain as free from tyranny, with liberty enshrined in an unwritten constitution, to the challenges wrought by the American and French revolutions of the late 18th century. Skinner then illustrates the relevance of this historical difference in conceptions of liberty to contemporary politics, and concludes by explaining his belief that the first view of liberty yields "a morally preferable account of the relationship between government and the governed" (p. 277). Like each of his past works, Liberty as Independence is required reading for all students and scholars of politics, the history of ideas, and political discourse.Summing Up: Essential. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.

Christman (Pennsylvania State Univ.) offers a concept of freedom appropriate to "nonideal" theory, inherited not from elite Enlightenment thinkers but from the liberatory efforts of those who inhabit unjust or poorly functioning states, including migrants, enslaved persons, and women or sexual minorities. He equates such freedom with social recognition of one's right to self-government and participation in collective practices that one judges to be meaningful, rather than, as for most liberals and neo-republicans, protection against obstacles to individual actions or guarantees of one's ability to carry them out. Significantly, Christman's pluralistic and anti-perfectionist approach disentangles freedom as a political value from related and more conceptually demanding values, such as personal moral excellence, epistemic freedom from ideological constraint, or the existence of democratic structures. Drawing on primary texts by enslaved persons and later Black scholars as well as classic Western thinkers, Christman considers debates over the nature of chattel enslavement, its purported analogy with capitalist oppression of "free" laborers, and the possible implications for incarceration and human trafficking. The book's analytical style and centering of abolitionist and feminist theories of oppression within mainstream conversations subtly shift the overall meaning of liberalism and make this a provocative text for upper-level courses in political philosophy or philosophy of law.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; professionals.