Once upon a time the Annales school was everywhere. Its founders, Marc Bloch and his close colleague Lucien Febvre, launched the trailblazing journal Annales d’histoire économique et sociale, which served to overturn 19th-century positivist and narrative history. A historiographical movement that shifted the historian’s focus from traditional political narratives to long-term social-economic and cultural structures, the Annales school pioneered what it immodestly named total history. With its brilliant followers and occasionally less brilliant epigones, the Annalistes sought to turn history towards the lives of ordinary people.
Nicholas Mulder’s first piece for The Ideas Letter examines a new intellectual biography of Bloch, whom the French recently installed in their Pantheon, 82 years after the historian was murdered by the Nazis. Cornell-based, Mulder has worked on European and international history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and is the author of an award-winning book The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War. He is also about to release his second book, a door-stopping global history of expropriation; as the fortunate recipient of an early galley, I can attest it will be nothing short of field-shaping.
William Davies returns to The Ideas Letter to make the case that today’s “literacy crisis” shouldn’t be reduced to smartphone overuse or LLM slop. Its deeper cause is a decades-long transformation in which reading and writing have been redefined as measurable skills for completing tasks rather than practices of meaning-making. (No small role has been played by the philanthropic-industrial complex, which in its wisdom has demanded that all interventions show impact and be, at some level, quantifiable. Some of the finest academics of our time, whether Amartya Sen or Craig Calhoun, have warned of the dangers of such bean-counting practices.) But Davies is no nostalgist or Luddite eager to reinstate some version of a pre-digital humanism. Instead, following Leif Weatherby (whom we’ve published in issues 41, 57, and 66), he defends the freedom to make unexpected and even mistaken uses of language. The real alternative is not harder reading or more rigorous assessment, but a renewed space for experimentation and, yes, poetic expression.
Adrian Pabst has spent several years reflecting on that assemblage of voices called the postliberals. For The Ideas Letter, he argues that postliberalism is not a single authoritarian ideology—or, more grimly, an inexorable step toward fascism—but a contested field containing multitudes: power-seeking integralists alongside pluralist thinkers seeking to renew community and the common good. In Gramsci’s terms, he sees us living in an interregnum in which liberalism has lost its hegemony, but no successor order has yet consolidated. Deploying Gramsci’s distinction between a rapid war of movement to seize state power and a long game war of position over culture and ideas, Pabst frames contemporary politics as a struggle over what should replace the post-1989 liberal-neoliberal consensus.
Our curated section kicks off with a review of a new book on nationalism by Siniša Malešević: Nationalism as a Way of Life. John Hall, in the journal Thesis Eleven, examines this latest intellectual intervention into the well-trodden field of nationalism studies, and finds that Malešević has something new to say. It’s timely: the recrudescence of ethnonationalism, especially in Europe, can’t be explained only by the Gellner, Hobsbawm, Anderson texts of yore, valuable as they are. Times are different, and when the facts change…
We follow this with Yochai Benkler, perhaps best known for his now-classic 2006 book The Wealth of Networks. Benkler argues that law is not a neutral set of rules standing above capitalism, but a core institution of capitalism (cf. the work of Katharina Pistor). Law helps create the market dependencies and ideological legitimacy that make capitalist society possible. Only a social-democratic project, he concludes, with democratic control over productive resources, can prevent the US from sliding into an ethnonationalist competitive authoritarianism. Fighting words!
Our musical selection for our 74th issue is a Bob Dylan chestnut sung auf Deutsch by the inimitable Marlene Dietrich. She recorded it in 1964, a year after the folk anthem was released. It’s taken from vinyl, so appreciate the scratches and the un-repressed analog highs and lows. Die Antwort mein Freund…
—Leonard Benardo, vice president at the Open Society Foundations
Total Historian
Nicholas Mulder
The Ideas Letter
Essay
Reviewing Peter Schöttler’s new intellectual biography of Marc Bloch, co-founder of the Annales school, Mulder revisits Bloch’s ambitious vision for the study of history. Bloch rejected the discipline’s traditional focus on great men and political events, instead advocating for an interdisciplinary, comparative approach that brought together economic structures, political institutions, collective beliefs, and everyday life to explain how societies change. Anglophone historians have embraced his attention to ordinary people and their experiences, but Mulder argues that the discipline’s increasing specialization has come at the expense of the broader structural explanations and sweeping historical syntheses that Bloch considered essential to understanding the past.
“History never disappeared; but historians ceased to be the main purveyors of it, as others outcompeted them in the marketplace of story-telling about the world. Fifty years after Jean-François Lyotard diagnosed the postmodern condition as a state in which people had ceased to believe old metanarratives about God, reason, progress, and history, it has turned out that modern society cannot do without them. Making sense of the big picture is a necessity of social life. The problem is that as the historical profession became less interested in the provision of structural, synthetic accounts of how our world came to be, others less equipped to do so filled the gap. Today our world abounds in the mantras of technocratic discourse, the cant of pundits, the fearmongering of internet fora, and the nursery tales spun by populism. But these alternative stories lack the things that make history such a potent and sophisticated domain of knowledge: its appreciation for the interplay between chance and structure, the pervasiveness of interconnections, the irony of unintended consequences, and its interest in other places and eras, which requires the study of foreign languages and qualitative as well as quantitative data.”
The Right Words in the Right Order
Notes on the Literacy Crisis
William Davies
The Ideas Letter
Essay
The crisis of literacy and the humanities predates smartphones and AI, argues Davies, who traces its origins to a transformation in how society understands language and learning. From the 1980s onward, neoliberal education reforms promoted what scholars call “learnification,” shifting the emphasis from teaching and intellectual development to measurable learning outcomes and practical skills. Davies connects this shift to a longer intellectual history beginning in the 1940s, when information theory and cognitive science began treating communication as the processing and transmission of information, independently of human intention or meaning, while structuralist thinkers similarly approached culture as a system of signs to be decoded.
“Placed in this longer intellectual history, the present crisis appears like a failure to grapple with much slower and deeper transformations in the status of text in society. The current panic surrounding screens and AI may be rooted in the tangible harms these pose to the intellectual development of children and students. But where this panic generates romantic ideals of the humanities as a form of ‘craft work’, it obscures what literacy, reading and communication have actually meant for the vast majority of people. Whether they intend to or not, the most impassioned defenders of the humanities often sound like they want to return not only to a pre-2022, or even pre-2010, world, but to one before the mid-twentieth century, before the drift to post-humanism began.”
The Varieties of Postliberalism
Adrian Pabst
The Ideas Letter
Essay
With the rise of JD Vance, postliberalism has gained influence, but it’s not monochromatic. According to Pabst, it encompasses competing visions of what should replace the declining liberal consensus. Responding to portrayals of Catholic postliberalism as inherently authoritarian or even fascist, he distinguishes between those who favor concentrating political power in the hands of a strong executive and those who seek to preserve liberal freedoms. Drawing on Catholic social thought and the postwar synthesis of Christian democracy and social democracy, Pabst makes the case for a pluralist postliberalism that grounds individual rights in reciprocal obligations, strong civic institutions, and a shared conception of the common good.
“Liberalism is no longer the hegemonic or even dominant framework it was after 1989, but so far postliberalism has not become the successor ideology. What we face instead are wars of position between progressives and populists but also among postliberals between Catholic integralists and pluralists.”
Nationalism as a Way of Life
John Hall
Thesis Eleven
Essay
Nationalism is more than a political ideology, argues sociologist Siniša Malešević in his new book Nationalism as a Way of Life: it has become a way of life that shapes how people understand themselves and their place in the world. Reviewing the book, Hall examines Malešević’s account of how modern states have cultivated national identities through their expanding organizational power, shared ideologies, and everyday social interactions, drawing on examples ranging from around the world. Hall praises the book as major contribution to nationalism studies, while questioning whether it gives sufficient weight to the role of nationalist movements in the collapse of empires and to the persistence of imperial identities in contemporary politics.
“The claim of the book is straightforward and powerful: the nation-state is the political form of modernity, a way of life that has become utterly dominant in the modern history of the world—either achieved or, in many cases, still desired. The book explains how and why this is so, concentrating on the means that allow our modern subjectivities to be maintained. He distances himself in the opening chapter from leading approaches in the field: structural claims are seen as lacking accounts of the long process by which the structures themselves were created, whilst those that center on agency fail to realize that they project a finished sense of identity on to the past where it did not exist.”
A Social Theory of Law in Capitalism
Yochai Benkler
Law and Political Economy Project
Blog Post
According to Benkler, capitalism is not defined by simply private ownership and markets, but by the dependence of households, businesses, and governments on market exchange to survive and operate. This dependence puts relentless pressure on firms to innovate and increase productivity, but also to escape competition by accumulating power over workers, consumers, and rivals. Benkler proposes a social theory of law that treats legal institutions as central to the creation and distribution of economic power, arguing that meaningful reform requires reducing people’s dependence on markets for basic necessities and expanding democratic control over the resources and institutions that organize production.
“Law in capitalism is distinct from other institutional sources in two ways. First, it provides the fundamental frame within which modern market society conceives of social relations: exchanges among juridically free and equal individuals. Second, it is more amenable to direct intentional design than social norms or customs, and hence, offers the clearest institutional terrain to target for organized conflict over the structure and distribution of power in social relations. Whether and how victories in legal conflict stick as a structure of social relations, however, can never be a function of law alone. It depends on how legal design interacts with other dimensions of institutional and material context over time, and on how easy it is for the losing side to evade or innovate around it (technologically or institutionally).”