Tag Archives: Viewings

Regular activity

Roundup, mid 2025

Teaching: Considering a different De Pizan text to adopt next semester (The Book of the Body Politic? The Book of Peace?). Other potential changes to the reading list: new tragedy (Ajax?), new Platonic dialogues, new passage selection for Augustine, a substitute for Rabelais (Erasmus? Bruni’s Laudatio?). Also thinking about changes to the organization of class time (e.g., beginning the week with a quick text survey) and of assignments (e.g., structuring take-home writing prompts with several micro-questions).

Research:

  • History of political thought: Reading for the second chapter in the project (Filippo Buonarroti): praxis over doctrine; coordination of underground activities; role of Brussels under the Dutch kings as a center of radical politics in the Biedermeier era; political experiences peaking early; Oneglia; transnational revolutionary myths; risky bookselling; Freemasonry; the importance of Corsica (the long shadow of Jean-Jacques); land reform and the Gracchi; a talented musician; the democratic Left against federalism in 1830s Italy; communism and natural law; the importance of revolutionary dictatorship. In other news, found a potential venue for presenting the Alfieri research (chap. 1): the BIAPT conference in Edinburgh, January 2026 (https://www.associationforpoliticalthought.ac.uk/conference/apt-2025-2-2/).
  • Tech and politics: New paper project on governmental legitimacy and surveillance, to be presented at the MANCEPT conference in Manchester (early September) in a panel on democratic deconsolidation and non-ideal theory.

Interesting books:

  • Adami, Christoph. The Evolution of Biological Information: How Evolution Creates Complexity, from Viruses to Brains. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024.
  • Anderson, Perry. Disputing Disaster: A Sextet on the Great War. London: Verso, 2024.
  • Applbaum, Arthur Isak. Legitimacy: The Right to Rule in a Wanton World. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard university press, 2019.
  • Beneš, Jakub S. The Last Peasant War: Violence and Revolution in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025.
  • Beonio-Brocchieri, Maria Teresa. Introduzione a Abelardo. I Filosofi. Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1974.
  • Bobrycki, Shane. The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages. Collective Behavior in Europe and the Mediterranean, c. 500 – c. 1000. USA: Princeton University Press, 2024.
  • Bradlow, Benjamin H. Urban Power: Democracy and Inequality in São Paulo and Johannesburg. Princeton Studies in Global and Comparative Sociology. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024.
  • Braunthal, Julius. History of the International, Volume II: 1914-1943. Translated by John Clark. New York: Praeger, 1967.
  • Cacioppo, Stephanie, and John T. Cacioppo. Introduction to Social Neuroscience. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University press, 2020.
  • Callanan, John. Man-Devil: The Mind and Times of Bernard Mandeville, the Wickedest Man in Europe. Princeton Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2025.
  • Cantimori, Delio. Utopisti e riformatori italiani. Edited by Lucio Biasiori and Francesco Torchiani. Saggi. Storia e scienze sociali. Roma: Donzelli editore, 2021.
  • Cennevitz, Martin. Verrà il giorno: le origini del primo maggio. Translated by Vincenzo Papa. Milano: Elèuthera, 2025.
  • Champlin, Edward. Tiberius and His Age: Myth, Sex, Luxury, and Power. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2024.
  • Christiano, Thomas. The Constitution of Equality: Democratic Authority and Its Limits. Oxford: Oxford university press, 2008.
  • Cunningham, Fiona S. Under the Nuclear Shadow: China’s Information-Age Weapons in International Security. Princeton Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2025.
  • Daum, Andreas W. Alexander von Humboldt: A Concise Biography. Translated by Robert Savage. Princeton Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2024.
  • Davis, Richard H. Religions of Early India: A Cultural History. Princeton Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2024.
  • Davis, Robert C. The War of the Fists: Popular Culture and Public Violence in Late Renaissance Venice. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
  • Deibert, Ronald J. Chasing Shadows: Cyber Espionage, Subversion, and the Global Fight for Democracy. Toronto, Ontario: Simon & Schuster, 2025.
  • Diggins, John Patrick. The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority. Chicago London: University of Chicago press, 1994.
  • DISCO Network, Disco. Technoskepticism: Between Possibility and Refusal. 1st ed. Sensing Media: Aesthetics, Philosophy, and Cultures of Media Series. Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2025.
  • Douady, Stéphane, Jacques Dumais, Christophe Golé, and Nancy Pick. Do Plants Know Math? Unwinding the Story of Plant Spirals, from Leonardo Da Vinci to Now. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2024.
  • Dourish, Paul. The Stuff of Bits: An Essay on the Materialities of Information. Cambridge, [Massachusetts]: The MIT Press, 2017.
  • Fitzpatrick, Sheila. On Stalin’s Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.
  • Frey, Sylvia R. Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionnary Age. Princeton (N.J.): Princeton university press, 1991.
  • Goldin, Claudia Dale. Career & Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey toward Equity. Princeton: Princeton university press, 2023.
  • Graeber, David. Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World…: Essays. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024.
  • Graham, A. C. Later Mohist Logic, Ethics, and Science. Hong Kong : London: Chinese University Press, Chinese University of Hong Kong ; School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1978.
  • Halvorson, Hans. How Logic Works: A User’s Guide. 1st ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020.
  • Hancox, Dan. Multitudes: How Crowds Made the Modern World. London ; New York: Verso, 2024.
  • Haskel, Jonathan, and Stian Westlake. Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy. Princeton : Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2022.
  • Hesk, Jon. Sophocles: Ajax. Bristol Classical Press Companions to Greek and Roman Tragedy. London: Bristol Classical Press, 2012.
  • Howes, Hetta. Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife: The Extraordinary Lives of Medieval Women. Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2025.
  • Jubb, Robert. Unjust Authority: Justice, Liberal Democracy and Political Rule. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024.
  • Kaufman, Arnold S. The Radical Liberal: New Man in American Politics. [1st ed.]. New York: Atherton Press, 1968.
  • Kauṭilya. King, Governance, and Law in Ancient India: Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra: A New Annotated Translation. Translated by Patrick Olivelle. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
  • Keane, Webb. Animals, Robots, Gods: Adventures in the Moral Imagination. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2025.
  • Kim, David D. Arendt’s Solidarity: Anti-Semitism and Racism in the Atlantic World. Cultural Memory in the Present. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2024.
  • Koerner, Joseph Leo. Art in a State of Siege. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025.
  • Kohl, James, and John Litt. Urban guerilla warfare in Latin America. Cambridge, Mass London: MIT press, 1974.
  • Kotsonis, Yanni. The Greek Revolution and the Violent Birth of Nationalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025.
  • Lamb, Michael. A Commonwealth of Hope: Augustine’s Political Thought. Princeton Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2022.
  • Rosanvallon, Pierre. Le siècle du populisme: histoire, théorie, critique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2020.
  • Levy, Jonathan. The Real Economy: History and Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025.
  • Lynch, Michael P. True to Life: Why Truth Matters. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2004.
  • McQuillan, Dan. Resisting AI: An Anti-Fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence. Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2022.
  • Merriman, John M., ed. Consciousness and Class Experience in Nineteenth-Century Europe. New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1979.
  • Mindell, David P. The Network of Life: A New View of Evolution. Princeton Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2024.
  • Morrison, Robert G. Merchants of Knowledge: Intellectual Exchange in the Ottoman Empire and Renaissance Europe. Stanford Ottoman World Series. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2025.
  • O’Brien, M. E., and Eman Abdelhadi. Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072. Brooklyn, NY: Common Notions, 2022.
  • Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Penguin Books, 2014.
  • Reid, Richard. The African Revolution: A History of the Long Nineteenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025.
  • Schroeder, Paul W. Stealing Horses to Great Applause: The Origins of the First World War Reconsidered. London New York: Verso, 2025.
  • Seymour, Richard. Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization. London ; New York: Verso, 2024.
  • Stanley-Becker, Isaac. Europe without Borders: A History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025.
  • Stewart, Ian B. The Celts: A Modern History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025.
  • Storm, Eric. Nationalism: A World History. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2024.
  • Tambiah, Stanley Jeyaraja. Leveling Crowds: Ethnonationalist Conflicts and Collective Violence in South Asia. Comparative Studies in Religion and Society 10. Berkeley: University of California press, 1996.
  • Ullmann, Walter. Medieval Foundations of Renaissance Humanism. London: P. Elek, 1977.
  • Walter, Alissa. Contested City: Citizen Advocacy and Survival in Modern Baghdad. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2025.
  • Wawro, Gregory J., and Ira Katznelson. Time Counts: Quantitative Analysis for Historical Social Science. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022.
  • Wen, Xin. The King’s Road: Diplomacy and the Remaking of the Silk Road. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023.
  • Wright, Andrea. Unruly Labor: A History of Oil in the Arabian Sea. Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2024.
  • Yurchak, Alexei. Everything Was Forever, until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. In-Formation Series. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.

Interesting events/visits: Juvarra buildings in Turin; Alfieri’s native home in Asti.

Rabbit holes: German rearmament, deficit spending, and the leadership cadres of the SPD; outsourcing of public coercion and patrimonialization of the State; organized crime and grassroots social control; the West as a historical political category; the cultural history of violence as organizing principle; queuing as a structuring of the urban space; Garibaldi; symbolic communication in the High Middle Ages; Roger Bacon on heresiarchs and fascinatio.

Sundry: Experimenting with decentralized alternatives to collaborative word processors/file-sharing.

Regular activity

Roundup, Winter doldrums 2025

Interesting books:

  • Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward: 2000-1887, 1888.
  • Beneš, Jakub S. Workers and Nationalism: Czech and German Social Democracy in Habsburg Austria, 1890-1918. Oxford: Oxford university press, 2017.
  • Benvenuto, Beppe. Giuseppe Prezzolini. Il divano 208. Palermo: Sellerio, 2003.
  • Blouin, Andrée. My Country, Africa: Autobiography of the Black Pasionaria. Edited by Jean Mackellar. New York: Verso Books, 2025.
  • Borowski, Audrey. Leibniz in His World: The Making of a Savant. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024.
  • Gaus, Gerald F., and John Thrasher. Philosophy, Politics, and Economics: An Introduction. Revised edition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021.
  • Hui, Andrew. The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025.
  • Katz, Victor J., and Clemency Montelle, eds. Sourcebook in the Mathematics of Ancient Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024.
  • Koyré, Alexandre. Réflexions sur le mensonge. 4e éd. Paris: Éditions Allia, 2016.
  • Kristeller, Paul Oskar. Eight Philosophers of the Italian Renaissance. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966.
  • ———. Renaissance Thought and Its Sources. Edited by Michael Mooney. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979.
  • ———. The Classics and Renaissance Thought. Martin Classical Lectures. Cambridge: Published for Oberlin College by Harvard University Press, 1955.
  • O’Flaherty, Liam. The Informer, 1925.
  • Paul, Zakir. Disarming Intelligence: Proust, Valéry, and Modern French Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024.
  • Toscano, Fabio. The Secret Formula: How a Mathematical Duel Inflamed Renaissance Italy and Uncovered the Cubic Equation. Translated by Arturo Sangalli. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020.
  • Volić, Ismar. Making Democracy Count: How Mathematics Improves Voting, Electoral Maps, and Representation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024.
  • Volodine, Antoine. Terminus radieux: roman. Paris: Seuil, 2014.

Rabbit holes: other victims of religious intolerance in the 16th-17th centuries (e.g. Cardano, Vanini, Sarpi).

Regular activity

Roundup, Summer and Fall 2024

Teaching: selecting new authors & reading for the Fall iteration of the course (Aristophanes, Tacitus, More, Montaigne); creation of extra-credit option (AI-powered illustration project); study of the monumental complex of Santa Maria Novella for class site visit; analysis of Casa Buonarroti for class site visit (relation with Spini’s Michelangelo politico); exploration of texts for next semester (Christine de Pizan’s Livre de la cité des Dames); ideas for future assessment: scaffolding written assignments, presentations as ongoing debates between two sides with scorekeeping and competition.

Research:

  • History of political thought: overall project: “Escaping the embrace of institutional politics in the long 19th century” (working title); anarchism; draft article on Piedmontese poet and playwright Vittorio Alfieri (1749-1803): libertine, libertarian, liberal; autobiography and literary sources; his political thought, esp. in the treatises and the comedies; servitude & freedom; classical republicanism; psychological dimension; freedom of the Moderns; rel’n w/ Machiavelli; neoclassicism; his contemporaries and posthumous fame; Pietro Verri (the Diario militare: classism, antimilitarism, proto-national consciousness); Parini (Dialogo sopra la nobiltà); Dialogues des morts as an 18th-century literary model; Alfieri’s strange afterlife as a Risorgimento icon (Foscolo’s role); Idéologues; Buonarroti (Franco Della Peruta’s intro to the Scritti Politici), Babeuvism & secret societies (anti-industrialism; importance of virtú; theory of revolutionary dictatorship; his communism accused of being ‘monkish’ by early Risorgimento patriots; Mazzini claimed he was gretto per quanto coerente; Blanqui was a disciple); Melchiorre Gioia (Pietro Themelly’s intro to the Riflessioni sulla Rivoluzione): compromising with the strong man (Napoleon) to save the social progress of the revolution in Italy; Guglielmo Pepe and his key book on insurrectionalism, L’Italia militare e la guerra di sollevazione (1836).
  • Tech and politics: main project: chapter on “Trust and Institutions” for a Handbook of Disinformation; importance of social trust; social cooperation and the existence of the public sphere; evidence: reputation budgets; low trust & suboptimal outcomes; psychological micro-foundations and aggregate levels of analysis: group beliefs and trustworthiness of corporate bodies; authoritativeness in the information ecosystem; methodological problems for trust as a concept in social theory; measurement; change in trust easier to define than trust itself (dynamics of loss of trust/trust-building); historical shift in prevalent justifications for trust (deference -> solidarity -> strategic interaction); institutions and interpersonal trust; link with liberalism of fear.

Interesting books:

  • Anderson, Perry. The H-Word: The Peripeteia of Hegemony. London New York, NY: Verso, 2017.
  • Aretino, Pietro. Operette politiche e satiriche. 2 vols. Edizione nazionale delle opere di Pietro Aretino, VI. Roma: Salerno, 2012.
  • Bessis, David. Mathematica: une aventure au cœur de nous-mêmes. Paris: Points, 2023.
  • Brunello, Piero. Storie di anarchici e di spie: polizia e politica Nell’Italia liberale. Roma: Donzelli, 2009.
  • Chabod, Federico. Storia della politica estera italiana: dal 1870 al 1896. Biblioteca universale Laterza 317. Roma Bari: Ed. Laterza, 1990.
  • Cheung, Caroline. Dolia: The Containers That Made Rome an Empire of Wine. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024.
  • Chittka, Lars. The Mind of a Bee. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022.
  • Del Boca, Angelo. Gli italiani in Africa Orientale – 1. Dall’Unità alla marcia su Roma. Milano: Mondadori, 2014.
  • Ervin, Lorenzo Kom’boa. Anarchism and the Black Revolution: The Definitive Edition. Black Critique. London: Pluto Press, 2021.
  • Federman, Rachel, and Etel Adnan. Writing a Chrysanthemum: The Drawings of Rick Barton. New York: The Morgan Library & Museum : DelMonico Books·D.A.P, 2022.
  • Finley, M. I. Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology. New York: Penguin Books, 1983.
  • Gassendi, Pierre. Vie et moeurs d’Épicure. Translated by Sylvie Taussig. Collection Textes philosophiques. Paris: Éd. Alive, 2001.
  • Godwin, William. An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
  • Goldthwaite, Richard A. The Building of Renaissance Florence: An Economic and Social History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.
  • Grotius, Hugo. The Free Sea. Edited by David Armitage. Translated by Richard Hakluyt. Natural Law and Enlightenment Classics. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004.
  • Guicciardini, Francesco. Antimachiavelli. Edited by Gian Franco Berardi. Universale idee 118. Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1984.
  • Haines-Eitzen, Kim. Sonorous Desert: What Deep Listening Taught Early Christian Monks-and What It Can Teach Us. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022.
  • John of Salisbury. Policraticus: Of the Frivolities of Courtiers and the Footprints of Philosophers. Translated by Cary J. Nederman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
  • Laursen, Eric. The Operating System: An Anarchist Theory of the Modern State. Chico: AK Press, 2021.
  • Mackintosh, James. Vindiciae Gallicae and Other Writings. Edited by Donald Winch. Indianapolis: Liberty fund, 2006.
  • Malm, Andreas. White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism. London ; New York: Verso, 2021.
  • Olschki, Daniele. Gioverà Ricordare | Meminisse Iuvabit. Particelle Elementari. Firenze: Leo S. Olschki editore, 2024.
  • Saitō, Kōhei. Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism. Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 2022.
  • Valori, Niccolò. Vita di Lorenzo il Magnifico. Edited by Angela Dillon Bussi. L’Italia 12. Palermo: Sellerio, 1992.
  • Videen, Hana. The Deorhord: An Old English Bestiary. London: Profile Books, 2023.
  • Vivanti, Corrado. Lotta politica e pace religiosa in Francia fra Cinque e Seicento. Reprints Einaudi 17. Torino: Einaudi, 1974.
  • Williams, Raymond. Modern Tragedy. London: Hogarth Press, 1992.
  • Zakaras, Alex. The Roots of American Individualism: Political Myth in the Age of Jackson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022.

Interesting events/visits: Steinbeck’s family home in Salinas, CA (June); gave a presentation on AI and higher ed at NYU Florence’s Community of Practice faculty meeting (September); Marvin Trachtenberg’s lecture in The Pazzi Chapel of Santa Croce in Florence (October); the Musei Capitolini in the Palazzo dei Conservatori (Rome) & Ian Bostridge performing Schubert in the Aula del Rettorato at the University of Rome La Sapienza, in front of a Fascist-era fresco by Sironi (November); Geremek room-naming event at EUI (December).

Rabbit holes: Golden Age of Piracy in the Caribbean; Alciato; Leopardi’s Zibaldone; Von Aubel’s Theorem; Renaissance representations of St. Matthew in Rome; Justus Lipsius and neo-stoicism (ure, seca!); Thomas Hodgskin as a Biedermeier era thinker; satire as literary genre; Kropotkin’s (1899) distinction of three strands of non-Marxian socialism in the 19th century: Saint Simonism (-> statist emphasis, social democracy), Fourierism (-> anarchism), Owenism (-> trade unionism, cooperation, municipal socialism); historical development of tragedy vs. comedy as literary genres in modern society; good editions of Petrarch and Poliziano; Donato Giannotti, Coluccio Salutati (humanist politics); contemporaneity in comparative literature (Montaigne, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Bruno…); Gabriel Naudé (not just a Reason of State theorist!); French utopianism (Sévarambes); clerics: Charron to Raynal (where are the modern editions?!); Bayle; Gassendi & the rehabilitation of Epicureanism; Fénelon; La Bruyère & Fontenelle; portaits of Pico della Mirandola (the Cosimo Rosselli frescos in S. Ambrogio in Florence: Pico with Marsilio Ficino & Agnolo Poliziano); Menabrea: general, politician, diplomat— CS pioneer; Seneca’s Letters to Lucilius; clay ‘Yixing’ teapots.

Sundry: new laptop (August); new glasses (December); overhaul of the website (December).

Information and the public sphere

Excess skepticism and the media trust deficit

An interesting presentation at the MISDOOM 2022 conference earlier this week: Sacha Altay (Oxford) on the effectiveness of interventions against misinformation [pre-print here].

Altay lays out some established facts in the academic literature that at times get lost in the policy debate. The main one is that explicit disinformation, i.e. unreliable news such as that generated on propaganda websites that run coordinated influence operations, represents a minuscule segment of everyday people’s media consumption; however, the public has been induced to be indiscriminately skeptical of all news, and therefore doubts the validity even of bona fide information.

Thus, it would appear that a policy intervention aimed at explaining the verification techniques employed by professional journalists to vet reliable information should be more effective, all else being equal, than one that exposes the workings of purposeful disinformation. On the other hand, as Altay recognizes, misinformation is, at heart, a mere symptom of a deeper polarization, an attitude of political antagonism in search of content to validate it. But while such active seeking of misinformation may be fringe, spontaneous, and not particularly dangerous for democracy, generalized excess skepticism and the ensuing media trust deficit are much more serious wins for the enemies of open public discourse.

Trustworthiness

Limits of trustbuilding as policy objective

Yesterday, I attended a virtual event hosted by CIGI and ISPI entitled “Digital Technologies: Building Global Trust”. Some interesting points raised by the panel: the focus on datafication as the central aspect of the digital transformation, and the consequent need to concentrate on the norms, institutions, and emerging professions surrounding the practice of data (re-)use [Stefaan Verhulst, GovLab]; the importance of underlying human connections and behaviors as necessary trust markers [Andrew Wyckoff, OECD]; the distinction between content, data, competition, and physical infrastructure as flashpoints for trust in the technology sphere [Heidi Tworek, UBC]. Also, I learned about the OECD AI Principles (2019), which I had not run across before.

While the breadth of different sectoral interests and use-cases considered by the panel was significant, the framework for analysis (actionable policy solutions to boost trust) ended up being rather limiting. For instance, communal distrust of dominant narratives was considered only from the perspective of deficits of inclusivity (on the part of the authorities) or of digital literacy (on the part of the distrusters). Technical, policy fixes can be a reductive lens through which to see the problem of lack of trust: such an approach misses both the fundamental compulsion to trust that typically underlies the debate, and also the performative effects sought by public manifestations of distrust.