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Leo Strauss’s final seminar on Thomas Hobbes, representing the culmination of more than four decades of close engagement.

Leo Strauss spent more than four decades studying the work of Thomas Hobbes. In Strauss’s distinctive genealogy of political thought, Hobbes emerges as a decisive counterpoint, not only to the Ancients, but also to Strauss’s own project. Strauss saw Hobbes as both the founder of modern natural rights and the modern esoteric writer par excellence.

Strauss’s final seminar on Hobbes from 1964 is the culmination of his engagement with Hobbes’s corpus and contains the richest account of Strauss’s final insight into the nerve of Hobbes’s thought, linking human consciousness to power and passion. The seminar reflects on the tension between Hobbes’s scientific and political frameworks, Hobbes’s emphasis on rights over duties, Hobbes’s atheism, and Hobbes’s attention to causal thinking as the core capacity that sets humans apart from other animals. It also includes Strauss’s most sustained exchange with the Marxist political theorist, C. B. Macpherson. Their rival interpretations of why the state of nature takes the form of a war of all against all led Strauss to reconsider his earlier writings on Hobbes, including those parts that pertain to other thinkers, such as Aristotle, Locke, and Spinoza.

With an introductory essay by Karl Dahlquist that traces the evolution of Strauss’s thinking on Hobbes and frames Strauss’s dialogue with Macpherson, this 1964 seminar on Hobbes is a vital contribution to political thought and intellectual history.

A transcript of Leo Strauss’s key seminars on Plato’s Protagoras.
 
This book offers a transcript of Strauss’s seminar on Plato’s Protagoras taught at the University of Chicago in the spring quarter of 1965, edited and introduced by renowned scholar Robert C. Bartlett. These lectures have several important features. Unlike his published writings, they are less dense and more conversational.  Additionally, while Strauss regarded himself as a Platonist and published some work on Plato, he published little on individual dialogues. In these lectures Strauss treats many of the great Platonic and Straussian themes: the difference between the Socratic political science or art and the Sophistic political science or art of Protagoras; the character and teachability of virtue, its relation to knowledge, and the relations among the virtues, courage, justice, moderation, and wisdom; the good and the pleasant; frankness and concealment; the role of myth; and the relation between freedom of thought and freedom of speech.
 
In these lectures, Strauss examines Protagoras and the sophists, providing a detailed discussion of Protagoras as it relates to Plato’s other dialogues and the work of modern thinkers. This book should be of special interest to students both of Plato and of Strauss.

Any presentation of political philosophy in the 20th century is radically incomplete without Leo Strauss. The appearance of this collection is particularly important given the relentless but shifting interest in his influence and thought in recent years. Lenzner and Minkov contend that in order to evaluate Strauss’s achievement properly, one must do so chiefly with reference to the works by which Strauss sought to establish his legacy–i.e., those he chose to submit for the consideration of future readers.

The most complete record of Strauss's thought includes his books together with his other published and unpublished writings and lectures. The achievement of this volume is to present in one collection every piece Strauss chose to publish in English that he did not himself include in a collection or a book. The material is arranged chronologically so as to avoid undue categorization by the editors.

 Among the highlights of these works published between 1937 and 1972 are striking formulations not to be found in his books on the relationship between philosophy and society, which is perhaps the most prominent theme in Strauss’s corpus taken as a whole; rare ‘personal’ statements that shed light on his self-understanding as a philosopher; his first writing devoted solely to a classical thinker (“The Spirit of Sparta or the Taste of Xenophon”); his first piece devoted to Plato, “On a New Interpretation of Plato’s Political Philosophy,” his most searching engagement with Jean-Jacques Rousseau; his first treatment of the thought of Niccolò Machiavelli and a wonderful, later treatment of Machiavelli’s relation to ancient writers; and a critical review of a book on Xenophon’s Hellenica.

This complete collection of Strauss’s scattered work in English is invaluable for those interested in the political philosopher, to be sure. But it is also an important contribution to the field in general as well as the history of philosophy.


 

Scholarship and performance combine to show how drag can be a blueprint for critique, care, teaching, and worldmaking. 
 
Lessons in Drag brings to life a vibrant and thought-provoking dialogue between scholar Kareem Khubchandani and his drag persona LaWhore Vagistan. Beginning with an intimate interview, the book unfolds in alternating chapters where the two exchange insights, stories, and critiques. Khubchandani delves into the lessons LaWhore’s drag practice offers about academia—shaping his approaches to research, teaching, and writing—while Vagistan reveals how Khubchandani’s scholarship influences her performances, inspiring her understanding of fashion, music, divas, and aunties. Together, their reflections and conversations weave a compelling tapestry of drag’s instructive power. Witty, bold, and deeply personal, Lessons in Drag is both an invitation to explore drag as a practice and a celebration of its transformative potential.

Comprehensive and learned translation of these texts affords insight into Abelard's thinking over a much longer sweep of time and offers snapshots of the great twelfth-century philosopher and theologian in a variety of contexts.

In her Letters on Natural Philosophy, published originally in Krakow in 1584, Camilla Erculiani proposed her new theory of the natural causes of the universal flood in the biblical book of Genesis. Erculiani weaves together her understanding of Aristotelian, Platonic, Galenic, and astrological traditions and combines them with her own observations of the world as seen from her apothecary shop in sixteenth-century Padua. This publication brought Erculiani to the attention of the Inquisition, which accused her of heresy, silencing her for centuries.

 This edition presents the first full English translation of Erculiani’s book and other relevant texts, bringing to light the cultural context and scientific thought of this unique natural philosopher.

Exploring the relationship between phenomenology and religion in Levinas’s writings

The philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas affirms both the urgency of peace and the fact that peace is never finally assured. This tension is a question of responsibility and of the ethical relation in which that responsibility is grounded. Jeffrey Bloechl pursues this prophetic dimension of Levinas’s philosophy—his commitment to phenomenology and to a philosophy of religion—to make the case for the mutual reinforcement and intelligibility of these two threads.

Levinas on the Primacy of the Ethical traces the emergence of Levinas’s early thought in relation to modern political philosophy, his revision of Martin Heidegger’s existential phenomenology, the consolidation of his mature position, his important differences with Freudian psychoanalysis, the turn from metaphysics to language in his later philosophy, and his complex relationship with Christian theology. Starting with an exposition of how positive notions of religious transcendence are already present in some of Levinas’s early phenomenological texts, Bloechl then stakes the reverse claim: that Levinas’s conception of God is dependent on his existential phenomenology. Proceeding chronologically, but with frequent nods to later developments, this book builds toward the ultimate assertion that Levinas offers us a phenomenology of event and of relation without appeal to any foundation, ground, or causal principle. Only in this way is Levinas able to generate an argument—and not merely an exhortation—for the primacy of the ethical as he conceives it.

The liberal arts university has been in decline since well before the virtualization of campus life, increasingly inviting public skepticism about its viability as an institution of personal, civ­ic, and professional growth. New technologies that might have brought people together have instead frustrated the university’s capacity to foster thoughtful citizenship among tomorrow’s lead­ers and exacerbated socioeconomic inequalities that are poison­ing America’s civic culture.

With Liberal Education and Citizenship in a Free Society, a collec­tion of 19 original essays, editors Justin Dyer and Constantine Vassiliou present the work of a diverse group of scholars to assess the value of a liberal arts education in the face of market, technological, cultural, and political forces shaping higher learning today.
 

A compelling call to transform isolation into solidarity and turn shared action into lasting change

Liberation Is Other People offers a bold and timely exploration of how we confront the immense, interconnected challenges of our time. It begins with the truth that many of the crises we face—climate collapse, war, systemic inequality—are human-made and therefore humanly transformable. Yet such “wicked problems” cannot be solved by individuals alone. Every attempt to repair exposes how deeply our lives are entangled across histories of power, privilege, and vulnerability.

Rejecting the idea that personal virtue or guilt can solve the world’s problems, Alexis Shotwell offers a philosophy and practice of collective freedom through collective struggle. Drawing on thinkers such as Angela Davis and Ursula K. Le Guin, she argues that freedom is not the power to act alone but the capacity to shape the world with others. Through sustained engagement with climate politics, white settler responsibility, and the reimagining of sexuality and gender, Liberation Is Other People shows how embracing complicity and acknowledging that none of us stand outside the systems we wish to change can open new possibilities for solidarity and transformation.

Rather than a call to purity or perfection, Liberation Is Other People is a vision of politics as a shared, necessarily imperfect process of creation. Shotwell builds a compelling case that solidarity can be a source of joy, inspiration, and political power. In this age of division and isolation, Shotwell insists that our greatest possibility lies not in fixing the world by our individual selves but in remaking it—together.

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Liberty and Law examines a previously underappreciated theme in legal history - the idea of permissive natural law. The idea is mentioned only peripherally, if at all, in modern histories of natural law. Yet it engaged the attention of jurists, philosophers, and theologians over a long period and formed an integral part of their teachings. This ensured that natural law was not conceived of as merely a set of commands and prohibitions that restricted human conduct, but also as affirming a realm of human freedom, understood as both freedom from subjection and freedom of choice. Freedom can be used in many ways, and throughout the whole period from 1100 to 1800 the idea of permissive natural law was deployed for various purposes in response to different problems that arose. It was frequently invoked to explain the origin of private property and the beginnings of civil government.

Liberalism was not only the first modern ideology, it was also the first secular movement to have an international presence. The scholarly articles in this collection, skillfully edited by Iván Zoltán Dénes, examine liberal ideas and movements from Scotland to the Ottoman Empire. The volume seeks to uncover and analyze various relationships between liberalisms and nationalisms, national identities and modernity concepts, nations and empires, nation-states and nationalities, traditions and modernities, images of the self and the others, modernization strategies and identity creations. This volume provides an important historical analysis that is essential toward understanding the questions and motivations of liberalism in the European Union today. This is, therefore, a timely contribution to both historiography and contemporary politics.

François Furet needs little introduction. Widely considered one of the leading historians of the French Revolution, he was a maverick for his time, shining a critical light on the entrenched Marxist interpretations that prevailed during the mid-twentieth century. Shortly after his death in 1997, the New York Review of Books called him “one of the most influential men in contemporary France.” Lies, Passions, and Illusions is a fitting capstone to this celebrated author’s oeuvre: a late-career conversation with philosopher Paul Ricoeur on the twentieth century writ large, a century of violence and turmoil, of unprecedented wealth and progress, in which history advanced, for better or worse, in quantum leaps.
           
This conversation would be, sadly, Furet’s last—he died while Ricoeur was completing his edits. Ricoeur did not want to publish his half without Furet’s approval, so what remains is Furet’s alone, an astonishingly cohesive meditation on the political passions of the twentieth century. With strokes at once broad and incisive, he examines the many different trajectories that nations of the West have followed over the past hundred years. It is a dialogue with history as it happened but also as a form of thought. It is a dialogue with his critics, with himself, and with those major thinkers—from Tocqueville to Hannah Arendt—whose ideas have shaped our understanding of the tragic dramas and upheavals of the modern era. It is a testament to the crucial role of the historian, a reflection on how history is made and lived, and how the imagination is a catalyst for political change. Whether new to Furet or deeply familiar with his work, readers will find thought-provoking assessments on every page, a deeply moving look back at one of the most tumultuous periods of history and how we might learn and look forward from it. 

The seventh in our series of Derrida's seminars, Life Death provides interdisciplinary reflections on the relationship of life and death—now in paperback.

One of Jacques Derrida’s most provocative works, Life Death deconstructs a deeply rooted dichotomy of Western thought: life and death. In rethinking the relationship between life and death, Derrida undertakes a multi-disciplinary analysis of a range of topics across philosophy, linguistics, and the life sciences. Derrida gave this seminar over fourteen sessions between 1975 and 1976 at the École normale supérieure in Paris to prepare students for the agrégation, a notoriously competitive exam. The theme for the exam that year was “Life and Death,” but Derrida made a critical modification to the title by dropping the coordinating conjunction. The resulting title of Life Death poses a philosophical question about the close relationship between life and death. Through close readings of Freudian psychoanalysis, the philosophy of Nietzsche and Heidegger, French geneticist François Jacob, and epistemologist Georges Canguilhem, Derrida argues that death must be considered neither as the opposite of life nor as the truth or fulfillment of it, but rather as that which both limits life and makes it possible. Derrida thus not only questions traditional understandings of the relationship between life and death but also ultimately develops a new way of thinking about what he calls “life death.”

In Life-Destroying Diagrams, Eugenie Brinkema brings the insights of her radical formalism to bear on supremely risky terrain: the ethical extremes of horror and love. Through close readings of works of film, literature, and philosophy, she explores how diagrams, grids, charts, lists, abecedaria, toroids, tempos, patterns, colors, negative space, lengths, increments, and thresholds attest to formal logics of torture and cruelty, violence and finitude, friendship and eros, debt and care. Beginning with a wholesale rethinking of the affect of horror, orienting it away from entrenched models of feeling toward impersonal schemes and structures, Brinkema moves outward to consider the relation between objects and affects, humiliation and metaphysics, genre and the general, bodily destruction and aesthetic generation, geometry and scenography, hatred and value, love and measurement, and, ultimately, the tensions, hazards, and speculative promise of formalism itself. Replete with etymological meditations, performative typography, and lyrical digressions, Life-Destroying Diagrams is at once a model of reading without guarantee and a series of generative experiments in the writing of aesthetic theory.

Fr. Maurice Ashley Agbaw-Ebai, a native of Cameroon, has written a fresh, exciting new study of the lifelong engagement of Josef Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, with the German Enlightenment and its contemporary manifestations and heirs. Contemporary European disdain for organized religion and the rise in secularism on that continent has deep roots in the German Enlightenment. To understand contemporary Europe, one must return to this crucial epoch in its history, to those who shaped the European mind of this era, and to a study of the ideas they espoused and propagated. These ideas, for good or for ill, have taken hold in other parts of the modern world, being incarnated in many minds and institutions in contemporary society and threatening to enthrone a disfigured rationality without faith or a sense of Transcendence.

Ratzinger’s extraordinary and sympathetic understanding of the sources of contemporary secularism equipped him to appreciate the gains of the Enlightenment, while still being a fierce critic of the losses humanity has suffered when reason falsely excludes faith. Fr. Agbaw-Ebai’s account reveals Ratzinger, in relation to his various interlocutors, to be the truly “enlightened” one because he demonstrates a truly balanced understanding of the human mind. To be truly rational one must be able to hold to faith and reason both, reason informed by faith in Jesus Christ.

A particular merit of this book is Agbaw-Ebai’s presentation of Ratzinger’s treatment of the  German Enlightenment’s greatest contributors: Kant, Nietzche, Hegel and Habermas, among others. In the postscript George Weigel characterizes what this study accomplishes in the larger framework of scholarship. “[Ratzinger’s] position remains too often misunderstood, and sometimes deliberately misinterpreted, throughout the whole Church. And to misunderstand, or misinterpret, Ratzinger is to misunderstand or misinterpret both the modern history of theology and the Second Vatican Council.” Agbaw-Ebai masterfully positions Ratzinger correctly in the history of ideas, and exhibits why Ratzinger will be remembered as one of its main players. Pure rationalists and true believers are equally indebted to him.

The full extent of Plutarch’s moral educational program remains largely understudied, at least in those aspects pertaining to women and the gendered other. As a result, scholarship on his views on women have differed significantly in their conclusions, with some scholars suggesting that he is overwhelmingly positive towards women and marriage and perhaps even a “precursor to feminism,”  and others arguing that he was rather negative on the issue. Like a Captive Bird: Gender and Virtue in Plutarch is an examination of these educational methods employed in Plutarch’s work to regulate the expression of gender identity in women and men. In six chapters, author Lunette Warren analyzes Plutarch’s ideas about women and gender in Moralia and Lives. The book examines the divergences between real and ideal, the aims and methods of moral philosophy and psychagogic practice as they relate to identity formation, and Plutarch’s theoretical philosophy and metaphysics. 

Warren argues that gender is a flexible mode of being that expresses a relation between body and soul, and that gender and virtue are inextricably entwined. Plutarch’s expression of gender is also an expression of a moral condition that signifies relationships of power, Warren claims, especially power relationships between the husband and wife. Uncovered in these texts is evidence of a redistribution of power, which allows some women to dominate other women and, in rare cases, men too. Like a Captive Bird offers a unique and fresh interpretation of Plutarch’s metaphysics which centers gender as one of the organizational principles of nature. It is aimed at scholars of Plutarch, ancient philosophy, and ancient gender studies, especially those who are interested in feminist studies of antiquity.

This book examines some of the salient historiographical and conceptual issues that animate current scholarly debates about the nature of the medieval contribution to modern Western political ideas

2026 PROSE Award in Architecture & Urban Planning, Association of American Publishers (AAP) 
2026 Book Prize Shortlist, Modernist Studies Association (MSA) 

The forgotten history of the occult foundations of the early twentieth-century global city.

War, revolution, genocide, rebellion, slump. The economic and political turmoil of the early twentieth century seemed destined to rip asunder the ties that bound colonizers and the colonized to one another. The upheaval represented an opportunity, and not just to nationalists who imagined new homelands or to socialists who dreamed of international brotherhood. For modernists in the orbit of various occultisms, the crisis of empire also represented an opportunity to reveal humanity’s fundamental unity and common fate.

Lineages of the Global City recounts a continuous, if also contentious, transnational exchange among modernists and occultists across the Americas, Europe, South Asia, and Australia between 1905 and 1949. At stake were the feelings and affect of a new global subject who would perceive themselves as belonging to humanity as a unified whole, and the urban environment that would foster their subjectivity. The interventions in this debate, which drew in the period’s most renowned modernists, took the form of a succession of plans for cities, suburbs, and communes, as well as experiments in building, drawing, printmaking, filmmaking, and writing. Weaving together postcolonial, feminist, and Marxist insight on subject formation, Shiben Banerji advances a new way of understanding modernist urban space as the design of subjective effects.

This volume presents significant developments in the field of Montague Grammar and outlines its past and future contributions to philosophy and linguistics. The contents are as follows:

Introduction by Steven Davis and Marianne Mithun

Emmon Bach, "Montague Grammar and Classical Transformational Grammar"

Barbara H. Partee, "Constraining Transformational Montague Grammar: A Framework and a Fragment"

James D. McCawley, "Helpful Hints to the Ordinary Working Montague Grammarian"

Terence Parsons, "Type Theory and Ordinary Language"

David R. Dowty, "Dative 'Movement' and Thomason's Extensions of Montague Grammar"

Muffy E. A. Siegel, "Measure Adjectives in Montague Grammar"

Michael Bennett, "Mass Nouns and Mass Terms in Montague Grammar"

Jeroen Groenendijk and Martin Stokhof, "Infinitives and Context in Montague Grammar"

James Waldo, "A PTQ Semantics for Sortal Incorrectness"

Le titre est, bien entendu, inspiré par Althusser (“Lire Le Capital”) – mais de façon polémique. Par “lire Marx” j'entends lire Marx et non pas Engels, Mao, Gramsci, Lukács, Marcuse, Althusser et ainsi de suite. En d'autres termes : le but de ce cours est, avant tout, de délibérément désintriquer la pensée de Marx de la pensée marxiste. Une polémique avec certains marxistes sera ainsi menée en sous-main, par des allusions ponctuelles. Un tel programme véhicule trois implications majeures : Qu'il y a effectivement une différence de pensée entre Marx et le marxisme. Ce premier point sera établi à travers une lecture philosophique de Marx : l'hypothèse étant que ce qui se trouve de plus original dans Marx, ce n'est ni sa pensée politique, ni sa pensée sociologique ou économique, mais bien sa charpente philosophique. Cette charpente philosophique détermine et situe ses autres théories. La seconde implication, c'est qu'un clivage entre Marx et les marxistes existe comme tel, qu'il peut être défini par certaines caractéristiques générales, et que ces caractéristiques générales différent de la pensée originale de Marx ou la restreignent. Il s'agit là d'un sujet passablement complexe, voire compliqué ; mais on peut résumer ce clivage en disant que le marxisme

a surtout retenu de Marx les éléments utiles à l'action politique dans une situation donnée, urgente. Une théorie de la “praxis révolutionnaire” a donc pris la place de la philosophie. La troisième implication est la précompréhension qui préside à l'approche du texte. Un texte est quelque chose d'imprimé : il représente comme tel un objet clos, constitué, fini. Mais nous n'en obtiendrons de réponses décisives que si nous le soumettons à des questions décisives. Et la question décisive que soulèvent les marxistes, c'est l'urgence d'une situation révolutionnaire (qu'elle existe de fait ou doive être réalisée). Leur question est donc généralement homothétique à celle de Lénine : “Que faire ?” C'est la question de ceux qu'Althusser appelle les “intellectuels militants” (pour Marx 24), et qui participent directement aux luttes de la classe ouvrière. Une telle “ lecture” de Marx est stratégique. Or, je tiens que la lecture stratégique ne peut que rester aveugle, de par sa nature même, au questionnement philosophique. Notre précompréhension des textes de Marx n'a, par conséquent, rien de stratégique ; elle est bien plutôt qu'ils proposent une réponse à la plus ancienne question de la philosophie occidentale : ti to on, savoir : qu'est-ce que l'être ? ou : qu'est-ce que la réalité, ainsi que son corollaire : qu'est-ce que la vérité ? Donc : Marx versus marxisme ; le concept de “praxis” comme étant le concept différenciant Marx du marxisme ; une double théorie des textes. Développons plus avant ces trois points

In Listening in the Afterlife of Data, David Cecchetto theorizes sound, communication, and data by analyzing them in the contexts of the practical workings of specific technologies, situations, and artworks. In a time he calls the afterlife of data—the cultural context in which data’s hegemony persists even in the absence of any belief in its validity—Cecchetto shows how data is repositioned as the latest in a long line of concepts that are at once constitutive of communication and suggestive of its limits. Cecchetto points to the failures and excesses of communication by focusing on the power of listening—whether through wearable technology, internet-based artwork, or the ways in which computers process sound—to pragmatically comprehend the representational excesses that data produces. Writing at a cultural moment in which data has never been more ubiquitous or less convincing, Cecchetto elucidates the paradoxes that are constitutive of computation and communication more broadly, demonstrating that data is never quite what it seems.

Critical studies of the graphic novel have often employed methodologies taken from film theory and art criticism. Yet, as graphic novels from Maus to Watchmen have entered the literary canon, perhaps the time has come to develop theories for interpreting and evaluating graphic novels that are drawn from classic models of literary theory and criticism. 
 
Using the methodology of Georg Lukács and his detailed defense of literary realism as a socially embedded practice, Litcomix tackles difficult questions about reading graphic novels as literature. What critical standards should we use to measure the quality of a graphic novel? How does the genre contribute to our understanding of ourselves and the world? What qualities distinguish it from other forms of literature? 
 
LitComix hones its theoretical approach through case studies taken from across the diverse world of comics, from Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s groundbreaking manga to the Hernandez Brothers’ influential alt-comix. Whether looking at graphic novel adaptations of Proust or considering how Jack Kirby’s use of intertextuality makes him the Balzac of comics, this study offers fresh perspectives on how we might appreciate graphic novels as literature.