What kinds of tools do we need to make big decisions, and why aren't our universities training us to make them? Are universities doing students a disservice by occupying them with myriads of boxes to tick? Are students right to prefer money to meaning?

Madison Program alumni Ben and Jenna Storey discuss the philosophy of making choices and of restlessness, and critique the way universities treat those topics.

Ben and Jenna are senior fellows at the American Enterprise Institute in the Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies department, where they focus on political philosophy, classical schools, and higher education. Previously, they directed the Toqueville Program at Furman University in South Carolina. They are the authors of Why We Are Restless.

In 2015, the anonymous leak of the Panama Papers brought to light millions of financial and legal documents exposing how the superrich hide their money using complex webs of offshore vehicles. Spiderweb Capitalism: How Global Elites Exploit Frontier Markets (Princeton UP, 2022) takes you inside this shadow economy, uncovering the mechanics behind the invisible, mundane networks of lawyers, accountants, company secretaries, and fixers who facilitate the illicit movement of wealth across borders and around the globe.

Kimberly Kay Hoang traveled more than 350,000 miles and conducted hundreds of in-depth interviews with private wealth managers, fund managers, entrepreneurs, C-suite executives, bankers, auditors, and other financial professionals. She traces the flow of capital from offshore funds in places like the Cayman Islands, Samoa, and Panama to special-purpose vehicles and holding companies in Singapore and Hong Kong, and how it finds its way into risky markets onshore in Vietnam and Myanmar. Hoang reveals the strategies behind spiderweb capitalism and examines the moral dilemmas of making money in legal, financial, and political gray zones.

Dazzlingly written, Spiderweb Capitalism sheds critical light on how global elites capitalize on risky frontier markets, and deepens our understanding of the paradoxical ways in which global economic growth is sustained through states where the line separating the legal from the corrupt is not always clear.

Formless, mutable, transparent: the element of water posed major challenges for the visual artists of the Renaissance. To the engineers of the era, water represented a force that could be harnessed for human industry but was equally possessed of formidable destructive power. For Leonardo da Vinci, water was an enduring fascination, appearing in myriad forms throughout his work. In Watermarks, Leslie Geddes explores the extraordinary range of Leonardo’s interest in water and shows how artworks by him and his peers contributed to hydraulic engineering and the construction of large river and canal systems.

In this interview, Allison Leigh talks to Leslie Geddes about transforming your dissertation into a book, how one tackles a body of scholarly literature as immense as that on Leonardo, and whether or not the famous Salvator Mundi was indeed painted by Leonardo. Their conversation ranges from what it is like to examine the artist’s Renaissance drawings in person to the power of comparisons within art historical writing and research.

Allison Leigh is Associate Professor of Art History and the SLEMCO/LEQSF Regents Endowed Professor in Art & Architecture at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her research explores masculinity in European and Russian art of the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries.

The Cynics were ancient Greek philosophers who stood athwart the flood of society's material excess, unexamined conventions, and even norms of politeness and thundered "No!" Diogenes, the most famous Cynic, wasn't shy about literally extending his middle finger to the world, expressing mock surprise that "most people go crazy over a finger." When asked why he was called Diogenes the Dog, he replied "because I fawn on those who give, I bark at those who don't, and I bite scoundrels." How to Say No: An Ancient Guide to the Art of Cynicism (Princeton UP, 2022) is a delightful collection of brief ancient writings about Cynicism that captures all the outrageousness, wit, and wisdom of its remarkable cast of characters--from Diogenes in the fourth century BCE to the column-stander Symeon Stylites in late antiquity.

With their "less is more" approach to life, the Cynics speak urgently to our world of climate change, economic uncertainty, and psychic malaise. Although the Cynics weren't writers, their memorable utterances and behavior were recorded by their admirers and detractors, and M. D. Usher offers fresh new translations of appealing selections from this body of writing--ranging from street sermons and repartee to biography and snapshots of Cynics in action.

Complete with introductions to the volume and each selection as well as the original Greek and Latin on facing pages, this lively book demonstrates why the Cynics still retain their power to surprise us and make us laugh--and to make us think and question how we live.

The Vietnamese victory over the French forces at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, which ended almost a century of French colonial rule in Indochina, is one of the most famous events in the history of anticolonialism. How were the Vietnamese communists able to achieve this remarkable victory over a much more powerful colonial force? This is the question Chris Goscha seeks to answer in his new book, The Road to Dien Bien Phu: A History of the First War for Vietnam (Princeton UP, 2022). In doing so, Goscha re-enters the vexed debate about the relative importance of nationalism and communism in Vietnam’s struggle against foreign powers. And he puts forward a compelling argument about the importance of “war communism” to the Vietnamese victory over the French.

Chris Goscha is Professor of History and International Relations at the University of Quebec at Montreal, Canada, and a prize-winning author of works on the modern history of Vietnam.

Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: [email protected].

Today’s guest is Jenny Mann, who has a new book titled The Trials of Orpheus: Poetry, Science, and the Early Modern Sublime (Princeton University Press, 2021). Jenny is Professor in both New York University’s English Department and the Gallatin School, and her work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation and the Folger Shakespeare Library. She is the author of the previous monograph, Outlaw Rhetoric: Figuring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare’s England (Cornell University Press, 2012) and is the co-editor with Debapriya Sarkar of a special issue of Philological Quarterly on “Imagining Scientific Forms.” Additionally, Jenny works in collaboration with the Public Shakespeare Initiative at the Public Theater in New York.

John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He holds a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies.

How did superpower competition and the cold war affect writers in the decolonizing world? In The Aesthetic Cold War: Decolonization and Global Literature (Princeton UP, 2022), Peter Kalliney explores the various ways that rival states used cultural diplomacy and the political police to influence writers. In response, many writers from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean—such as Chinua Achebe, Mulk Raj Anand, Eileen Chang, C.L.R. James, Alex La Guma, Doris Lessing, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and Wole Soyinka—carved out a vibrant conceptual space of aesthetic nonalignment, imagining a different and freer future for their work.

Kalliney looks at how the United States and the Soviet Union, in an effort to court writers, funded international conferences, arts centers, book and magazine publishing, literary prizes, and radio programming. International spy networks, however, subjected these same writers to surveillance and intimidation by tracking their movements, tapping their phones, reading their mail, and censoring or banning their work. Writers from the global south also suffered travel restrictions, deportations, imprisonment, and even death at the hands of government agents. Although conventional wisdom suggests that cold war pressures stunted the development of postcolonial literature, Kalliney’s extensive archival research shows that evenly balanced superpower competition allowed savvy writers to accept patronage without pledging loyalty to specific political blocs. Likewise, writers exploited rivalries and the emerging discourse of human rights to contest the attentions of the political police.

A revisionist account of superpower involvement in literature, The Aesthetic Cold War considers how politics shaped literary production in the twentieth century.

In 1346, a catastrophic plague beset Europe and its neighbours. The Black Death was a human tragedy that abruptly halved entire populations and caused untold suffering, but it also brought about a cultural and economic renewal on a scale never before witnessed. The World the Plague Made is a panoramic history of how the bubonic plague revolutionized labour, trade, and technology and set the stage for Europe’s global expansion.

In The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe (Princeton University Press, 2022) Dr. James Belich takes readers across centuries and continents to shed new light on one of history’s greatest paradoxes. Why did Europe’s dramatic rise begin in the wake of the Black Death? Belich shows how the plague doubled the per capita endowment of everything even as it decimated the population. Many more people had disposable incomes. Demand grew for silks, sugar, spices, furs, gold, and slaves. Europe expanded to satisfy that demand—and the plague provided the means. Labour scarcity drove more use of waterpower, wind power, and gunpowder. Technologies like water-powered blast furnaces, heavily gunned galleons, and musketry were fast-tracked by plague. A new “crew culture” of “disposable males” emerged to man the guns and galleons.

Setting the rise of Western Europe in a global context, Belich demonstrates how the mighty empires of the Middle East and Russia also flourished after the plague, and how European expansion was deeply entangled with the Chinese and other peoples throughout the world.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

In 1831, at the age of twenty-five, Alexis de Tocqueville made his fateful journey to America, where he observed the thrilling reality of a functioning democracy. From that moment onward, the French aristocrat would dedicate his life as a writer and politician to ending despotism in his country and bringing it into a new age. In this authoritative and groundbreaking biography, leading Tocqueville expert Olivier Zunz tells the story of a radical thinker who, uniquely charged by the events of his time, both in America and France, used the world as a laboratory for his political ideas.

Placing Tocqueville's dedication to achieving a new kind of democracy at the center of his life and work, Zunz traces Tocqueville's evolution into a passionate student and practitioner of liberal politics across a trove of correspondence with intellectuals, politicians, constituents, family members, and friends. While taking seriously Tocqueville's attempts to apply the lessons of Democracy in America to French politics, Zunz shows that the United States, and not only France, remained central to Tocqueville's thought and actions throughout his life. In his final years, with France gripped by an authoritarian regime and America divided by slavery, Tocqueville feared that the democratic experiment might be failing. Yet his passion for democracy never weakened.

Giving equal attention to the French and American sources of Tocqueville's unique blend of political philosophy and political action, The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville (Princeton UP, 2022) offers the richest, most nuanced portrait yet of a man who, born between the worlds of aristocracy and democracy, fought tirelessly for the only system that he believed could provide both liberty and equality.

Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles.

As we emerge from a period of government-mandated lockdowns and as threats to free speech multiply, we would be wise to re-engage with the work of a seminal thinker on the subjects of liberty, freedom and nondomination. We can do so most effectively by reading Completely Free: The Moral and Political Vision of John Stuart Mill (Princeton UP, 2022) by John Peter DiIulio.

Mill (1806–73), for all his influence on fields such as philosophy and political theory, has detractors aplenty. Conservatives consider him lukewarm on religious liberty and even slightly hostile to religion generally and a proto-hippy in his partiality for ideas about experiments in living. For their part, progressives aren’t wild about Mill’s emphasis on virtue and personal character. Libertarians distrust Mill’s embrace of the state when employment of it, in Mill’s view, fosters social harmony and a feeling of security among the populace.

Crucially for our discussion today, all of Mill’s critics seem to agree that much of his thinking is hard to follow and that he will say something in an essay or book that very much conflicts with what he says elsewhere.

DiIulio’s book dissects the many critiques of Mill’s social and political thought and argues that Mill believed that society should aim for zero-tolerance of arbitrary power and strive for the promotion and preservation of individual freedom. Given recent debates over personal freedom and bodily sovereignty issues (such as mandatory mask wearing and vaccination and the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade), there could hardly be a more opportune moment to drill down into Mill’s writings on the various forms that domination can take (e.g., domination as infantilization, domination as uncertainty, domination as diminution).

Does Mill speak to us today or is he a relic of the Victorian age in all his earnestness and lofty thinking? DiIulio’s book is a strong argument for Mill’s relevance and continuing appeal. DiIulio writes: "Mill is dedicated above all to the idea that the chief and most significant solution to any of the ills that we face as human beings is the general cultivation of deep feeling and high aspiration."

We learn how Mill managed to free himself of the mechanistic aspects of Benthamite Utilitarianism in favor of a richer vision of human happiness that was friendlier to intellectual autonomy and love of the arts while simultaneously demanding of the individual the pursuit of virtue and good character.

Let’s hear what John Peter DiIulio has to say about the multifaceted Mr. Mill.

Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher.