Jonathon Catlin

The Berkeley School: Critical Theory, Political Economy, and the Future of Intellectual History by Jonathon Catlin This essay is part of a JHI Blog forum: “The Return of Political Economy in Intellectual History.”

European intellectual history? In this economy? Here is @joncatlin.bsky.social's excellent treatment of what has been happening in (I would say, to) European intellectual history, particularly in what my teacher Martin Jay would insist is not his "school." www.jhiblog.org/2026/02/16/t...

The Berkeley School: Critical Theory, Political Economy, and the Future of Intellectual History by Jonathon Catlin This essay is part of a JHI Blog forum: “The Return of Political Economy in Intellectual History.”

In the forum on political economy, Jonathon Catlin asks what a public debate about the Frankfurt School's legacy among prominent former students of Martin Jay—the "Berkeley School"—tells us about the future relationship between political economy and intellectual history.
@joncatlin.bsky.social

Cautionary tales

As I am always saying…

I’m in! 🎀

This Holocaust Remembrance Day, what is it that must we remember? "The fact that the culture of remembrance has succeeded in placing the supposed concern for Jewish life in the service of an anti-immigrant agenda completes the logic of German rehabilitation initiated in the early 1980s."

Hayek’s Bastards: Disha Karnad Jani Interviews Quinn Slobodian by Disha Karnad Jani  On this episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Quinn Slobodian about his latest book, Hayek’s Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right (Zone Bo...

Today on the podcast, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Quinn Slobodian on his latest book, “Hayek's Bastards." From Murray Rothbard to Javier Milei, Slobodian looks to "Hayek's bastards" to show the ties between neoliberalism and today's Far Right. @quinnslobodian.com

web.sas.upenn.edu/jhiblog/2026...

“Spread a Rainbow Over His Disastrous Set of Sun”: The Comedy of Colonial Enlightenment by Arielle Xena Alterwaite This essay is part of a JHI Blog forum, "The Return of Political Economy in Intellectual History."

In this latest addition to the JHI Blog’s Forum on political economy, Arielle Xena Alterwaite turns to C.L.R. James’s classic reading of Moby-Dick to reflect not solely on the substance of intellectual history and political economy, but also on the various styles in which this history can be told.

Opinion | State Terror Has Arrived

M. Gessen, gift link: The soviet secret police too "were ruled by quotas... Fundamentally, the terror was random. That is, in fact, how state terror works. The randomness is the difference between a regime based on terror and a regime that is plainly repressive"

Save the date for this webinar event next week including our @freieuniversitaet.bsky.social colleague Jannis Grimm alongside esteemed colleagues Dirk Moses Matthias Goldmann, Christine Binzel, Amos Goldberg, Raz Segal, and Aurelia Kalisky.
www.deutsche-juristinnen-voelkerrecht.org/seminar-nie-...

Dirk Moses: "Never Again" After Gaza

Latest episode of Nullpunkt is out now - on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts.

This week’s guest: @dirkmoses.bsky.social

Historians Have a Duty to Condemn Scholasticide in Gaza An overwhelming majority of American Historical Association members voted earlier this month to condemn scholasticide in Gaza. AHA leaders overruled members to block the measure, opting for cowardice ...

For @jacobinmag.bsky.social, Barry Trachtenberg criticizizes the moral abdication of @historians.org re. Palestine. Its leaders' decision to twice veto resolutions condemning scholasticide in Gaza "is not merely disappointing. It is antidemocratic and morally evasive."
jacobin.com/2026/01/hist...

The End of Antisemitism: How the Fight Against Hate Became a Weapon of Repression | Contending Modernities By insisting that Israel deserved special treatment because of Jewish suffering the Israeli state and its supporters reinforced and exploited the very logic of antisemitism they claimed to oppose.

I hope all Jews and anyone who cares about us will read this excellent article by Jewish historian Barry Trachtenberg on "The End of Antisemitism: How the Fight Against Hate Became a Weapon of Repression"

contendingmodernities.nd.edu/global-curre...

I'm going to thread some of my highlights.

CBS Airs ‘60 Minutes’ Segment On Deported Migrants That Was ‘Spiked’ Last Month After the segment was pulled last month, its correspondent told colleagues in an internal email that this decision by editor-in-chief Bari Weiss was a “political one”.

After the segment was pulled last month, its correspondent told colleagues in an internal email that this decision by editor-in-chief Bari Weiss was a “political one”.

Has a Nazi theorist’s vision of a world divided into 'great spaces' found a new advocate in Trump? | Brendan Simms Carl Schmitt wanted empires that dominated the small countries in their orbits. But the US president’s chaotic actions are not that strategic, says Brendan Simms, director of the Centre for Geopolitic...

“It is sometimes said that Schmitt’s Großraum inspired Hitler, but in fact Hitler had called for a ‘German Monroe doctrine’ as far back as 1923, more than 15 years earlier.” Also: “Trump is not a fascist but a narcissist.” - Brendan Simms for @theguardian.com
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

While the US was defunding universities, China was synthesizing food from the air! Zhejiang University, which now tops Harvard in research output, only broke into the top 100 universities in 2017. Truly a meteoric rise. The 21st century does not belong to the U.S.
www.nytimes.com/2026/01/15/u...

How Reason Cultivated Abstraction: The Plantation Roots of Economic Modernity by Facundo Rocca This think piece is part of a JHI Blog forum: “The Return of Political Economy in Intellectual History.”

In an essay in the JHI Blog’s forum on political economy, Facundo Rocca discusses the relationship between modern rationalizations of unjust labor, ecological destruction, and the rise of the Caribbean slave trade.

web.sas.upenn.edu/jhiblog/2026...

Predawn fire reduces parts of Mississippi's largest synagogue to charred ruins - Mississippi Today A fire heavily damaged Jackson’s only synagogue before dawn Saturday – the same house of worship that was firebombed by the Ku Klux Klan in 1967 because the rabbi had been an advocate for civil rights...

Mississippi’s largest synagogue was set on fire before dawn Saturday. Fire department ruled it arson, and a suspect has been arrested.
It is the same synagogue that the Ku Klux Klan bombed in 1967 because the rabbi supported civil rights. mississippitoday.org/2026/01/10/f...

“We could take the oil facilities, you know, put troops in there. We could kill leaders of the regime. Presumably, you could do another raid or you could use drone strikes and you could kill some of them. There’s a lot more things we could do.”

– regular conversation in the New York Times.

These photos from New Year's Eve 1989 in Berlin, two months after the wall came down, capture the fashion of wearing Palestinian keffiyehs on parts of the German left in the '70s and '80s. A forgotten history, and perhaps also the origins of the Antideutsch critique? Source: The Berliner Magazine

Elad Lapidot in @blnreview.bsky.social: If "war is collective deconstruction" of conflictual worldviews, the moral catastrophe in Gaza marks a breakdown of conceptual foundations akin to other turning points in intellectual history.
blnreview.de/en/ausgaben/...

Three Meanings of Political Economy: Reflections on Intellectual History, Marxism, and Capitalism’s Unthought by Nate Holdren This think piece is part of a JHI Blog forum, “The Return of Political Economy in Intellectual History.”

In an essay in the JHI Blog’s forum on political economy, Nate Holdren elaborates three levels of analytical abstraction at which intellectual historians invoke the term "political economy," turning our attention to the way that capitalism structurally conditions ignorance of the social totality.

From the NYT today, 2 charts on the brokenness of American politics:

Thrilled to see this out!

This from a thinker "whose universalism today reaches its limits at the rights of Palestinians in Gaza, which are apparently subordinate to the 'special protection' Germany must afford to the state of Israel."

In which Habermas "regards the Frankfurt School tradition as 'more alive' in the US than in Germany."

Do I start my nephew’s teen existential crisis off early by giving him this for Christmas?

Is Holocaust Memory Over? – the Diasporist How the German political and media classes have hollowed out the lessons of history

In @thediasporist.bsky.social, @dirkmoses.bsky.social asks whether Holocaust memory has run its course: "If anyone has killed belief in Holocaust memory, it is Western political classes whose misuse of it to justify an undeniable evil have destroyed its currency."
thediasporist.de/is-holocaust...

Senator Bernie Sanders will administer the oath of office to New York City’s Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani during his public swearing-in ceremony at City Hall on January 1. trib.al/ylTzosO