Eric Brandom
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ebrandom.bsky.social
Eric Brandom
@ebrandom.bsky.social
13K followers 3.4K following 13K posts
Intellectual history, here decontextualized. Especially modern France, history of political thought, and socialism. And Kansas, because that's where I live "als Gelehrter, der durch Schriften zum eigentlichen Publikum, nämlich der Welt, spricht."
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ebrandom.bsky.social
The first line of this final paragraph is of course famous, but the heroic assumption of paradox and moral catastrophe, continuing in the face of "the crumbling of all hopes," this is the real core of the thing.
Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards. It takes both passion and perspective. Certainly all historical experience confirms the truth—that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible. But to do that a man must be a leader, and not only a leader but a hero as well, in a very sober sense of the word. And even those who are neither leaders nor heroes must arm themselves with that steadfastness of heart which can brave even the crumbling of all hopes. This is necessary right now, or else men will not be able to attain even that which is possible today. Only he has the calling for politics who is sure that he shall not crumble when the world from his point of view is too stupid or too base for what he wants to offer. Only he who in the face of all this can say ‘In spite of all!’ has the calling for politics.
January 10, 2026 at 6:38 PM
ebrandom.bsky.social
Pleased to get to teach Modern France & Empire this coming semester. Here is a list of readings/weeks, lots of which will need to be cut. Also I want a week about the 80s-today. Maybe from Françoise Gaspard's *Small City*? Would love to hear about new scholarship I should teach. 🗃️
Week #1 -- After the Revolution Lewis, Mary D. “A Commercial (Neo) Colony?” Age of Revolutions June 20, 2022. Saint-Simon, Henri de. “Letter to an American" (1817) and “Parable” (1819) Duras, Claire de Ourika (1823) Week #2 – Algeria & July Monarchy Tocqueville, Alexis de. Bevin trans. Democracy in America (selections) Sessions, Jennifer, By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria (2014), selections. Week #3 The Second Republic Tocqueville, Recollections (selections) Joan Scott, Chapter 3 on Jeanne Deroin from Only Paradoxes to Offer. Week #4 End of the Second Republic Karl Marx, from 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon Beecher, Writers and Revolution: Intellectuals and the French Revolution of 1848. 2021. (selections) Week #5 – Second Empire Peter McPhee "The Transformation of Urban France, 1852-1880" from A Social History of France, 2004. Joseph W. Peterson, “Honor, Excrement, Ethnography” The Journal of Modern History 93 (March 2021): 34–67. Week #6 The Commune Eichner, Surmounting the Barricades -- chapters 2 & 3, plus conclusion Paris Under Siege, from the Goncourt Journal. Becker trans. & Beik ed (pp 220-267 Week #7 – Third Republic I Clement, “The Christ in the Cabaret” Cultural and Social History 2020 https://doi.org/10.1080/14780038.2020.1742038 Bouvier, Jeanne "My Memoires" from Traugott ed. The French Worker Renan, “What is a Nation?” Anténor Firmin, Equality of Human Races (selections) Week #8 – Third Republic II Offen, Karen. “Depopulation, Nationalism, and Feminism in Fin-de-Siècle France [PDF]” The American Historical Review 89, no. 3 (1984): 648–76. https://doi.org/10.2307/1856120. Conklin, Alice L. “Colonialism and Human Rights, A Contradiction in Terms? The Case of France and West Africa, 1895-1914.” The American Historical Review 103, no. 2 (1998): 419–42. https://doi.org/10.2307/2649774. Barres, Maurice. “The Nancy Declaration” (1898) Durkheim, Emile. "Individualism and the Intellectuals" (1898) Sorel, Georges. "Apology for Violence" [1908] Week #9 - WWI Boucheron ed, France in the World pp 657-688 Stovall, "The Color Line Behind the Line" AHR 1998 Joseph, "Black Women, Citizenship, and Separation Allowances" French History 2021. Week #10 Popkin, A History of Modern France chapters 26-27 Bloch, Strange defeat, chapter 3 Simone Weil, “Letter to Georges Bernanos” & “What is a Jew? (letter to the interior ministry)” Week #11 Virgili, Fabrice. Shorn Women (2000), chapters 1, 4, 8, and conclusion. Joseph-Gabriel, Annette. “Eugénie Éboué-Tell and Jane Vialle: Refiguring Power in the French Union.” Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire. Illinois, 2020. Week #12 – Algerian war Mon, Nov 7 Chabal, Emile. France chapter 3 Fanon, from Toward the African Revolution, selections; Letter of resignation, 1956; from Wretched of the Earth, selections Panchasi, "An Atomic 'Adventure' in Empire" Jadaliyya To read alongside, this piece of journalism. Week #13 – 1968 and after Barthes, Roland. selections from Mythologies. Seidman, Imaginary Revolution (selections) Popkin, chapter 33 Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" [1970]
January 8, 2026 at 5:36 PM
ebrandom.bsky.social
Red hardback book. "Debs: His life writings and speeches." Across the bottom is a mountain landscape in white with a golden sun rising (one assumes, not setting)
January 8, 2026 at 12:18 AM
ebrandom.bsky.social
Here is the table Durkheim gives of all the forms of society, according to Montesquieu. The footnote says that, really, this should also include distinct peoples united in some sort of federation.
This is a table, in Latin, from a book published in 1892. The formatting is all messed up, but here are the words: Sócietates Monarchia. Respublica.. Tyrannis (1). Aristocratia. Democratia. Quae definitam summi imperii constitutionem habent. Sine definita summi imperii Barbaricae gentes. constitutione. Ferae gentes.
January 6, 2026 at 6:03 PM
ebrandom.bsky.social
Delighted by this histories of reading in library book. This is a 1965 edition of a translation (by Ralph Manheim) into English of Durkheim's *Latin* thesis on Montesquieu. It has annotations in at least two languages.
text, with an annotation in the margin "Monty not a conflict theorist" text with a Chinese (?) character written in pencil above the word "Emulation" large block of text, every bit underlines, a number of brackets in there, with (again Chinese?) characters written to the side in two places.
January 6, 2026 at 4:34 PM
ebrandom.bsky.social
"But somehow I grew merry again"
these things are not without their meanings. But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope. It needs scarcely to be told, with what feelings, on the eve of a Nantucket voyage, I regarded those marble tablets, and by the murky light of that darkened, doleful day read the fate of the whalemen who had gone before me. Yes, Ishmael, the same fate may be thine. But somehow I grew merry again. Delightful inducements to embark, fine chance for promo-tion, it seems-aye, a stove boat will make me an immortal by brevet. Yes, there is death in this business of whaling-a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees² of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me. And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.
January 3, 2026 at 7:34 PM
ebrandom.bsky.social
But lots of other excellent and well done displays. Here for instance is some KKK paraphernalia. It's got a ribbon and seal, very official.
A crinkled document, mainly printed with an elaborate purple ribbon and seals. Women of the ku klux klan. Some names are filled in.
January 3, 2026 at 6:22 PM
ebrandom.bsky.social
Finally got to the new Kansas Historical Society Museum. Some good things there. Including these classics, a sword owned by John Brown and one of the pikes he had made and stockpiled for Harper's Ferry.
A saber in a museum case. Caption tells us it's a German replica of a Napoleonic design, brought by Brown from Ohio to Kansas A pike in a museum case. In the background is a racist caricature from a newspaper of Brown trying to give such a pike to a black person (enslaved, presumably)
January 3, 2026 at 6:19 PM
ebrandom.bsky.social
Mass held in St. Louis cathedral for the 1903 centenary of the Louisiana 'transfer' www.loc.gov/pictures/res...
B&W photograph of the inside of a church, from second level. many flags and lots of people.
January 2, 2026 at 1:53 AM
ebrandom.bsky.social
!!!
color photograph of a woman's head in profile, trees out of focus in the background. a chickadee grasps her chin, considering the seed that we now see she holds between her teeth.
January 1, 2026 at 8:33 PM
ebrandom.bsky.social
Hair goals www.kansasmemory.gov/item/199
B&W photo portrait of James Lane, first US Senator from Kansas. Oval, damaged image. Also his hair is, to say the least, unkempt
January 1, 2026 at 7:47 PM
ebrandom.bsky.social
Ok have only just started it, but this is a fun book
Cover of Shannon Chakraborty's Adventures of Amina Al-Shiraf. A ship with triangular sails being attacked by something with tentacles.
December 25, 2025 at 1:13 AM
ebrandom.bsky.social
And here is Hadrian speaking about his own attempts to invoke the ghosts of his beloved dead.
il m’importe peu que les fantômes évoqués par moi viennent des limbes de ma mémoire ou de ceux d’un autre monde. Mon âme, si j’en possède une, est faite de la même substance que les spectres ; ce corps aux mains enflées, aux ongles livides, cette triste masse à demi dissoute, cette outre de maux, de désirs et de songes, n’est guère plus solide ou plus consistant qu’une ombre. Je ne diffère des morts que par la faculté de suffoquer quelques moments de plus ; leur existence en un sens me paraît plus assurée que la mienne. Antinoüs et Plotine sont au moins aussi réels que moi.
December 21, 2025 at 5:30 PM
ebrandom.bsky.social
Here it actually is
Le sorcier qui se taillade le pouce au moment d’évoquer les ombres sait qu’elles n’obéiront à son appel que parce qu’elles lapent son propre sang. Il sait aussi, ou devrait savoir, que les voix qui lui parlent sont plus sages et plus dignes d’attention que ses propres cris.
December 21, 2025 at 4:37 PM
ebrandom.bsky.social
Spruce tip IPA about to be poured down the sink
December 21, 2025 at 3:38 AM
ebrandom.bsky.social
Confused iconography to go with confused ideology. gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/b...
bookplate/glyph included at the front of the french Revue socialiste starting in 1910. Loosely sketched b&w. in the background is a sun, radiant, but also it's a face, with hair, eyebrows, and so on. there's a mason's angle, also a balance on which there is a hammer outweighing a quill. in the background are books.
December 18, 2025 at 7:48 PM
ebrandom.bsky.social
Look at the whiskers on this syndicalist!
B&w studio headshot of a man from 1890s. He wears a suit and tie, pinz-nez glasses, and has white a wide moustache
December 16, 2025 at 3:18 AM
ebrandom.bsky.social
My short review of George Steinmetz' *Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought* is out in *The History Teacher*
The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought: French Sociology and the Overseas Empire, by George Steinmetz. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023. 576 pages. $45.00, cloth. “Colonial policy may be the area in which the adage ‘knowledge is power’ is best confirmed” (97). This observation about the institutions within which power and knowledge become difficult to distinguish from one another comes not from Michel Foucault, but rather the Durkheimian theorist of the gift, Marcel Mauss. George Steinmetz’ Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought is an enormously rich and erudite book whose central argument is that the experience of colonialism, and in particular the struggle to do objective scientific work within it, is an essential element of some of the most useful and enduring monuments of French thought in the 20th century. Pierre Bourdieu is the central figure in the book, which seeks to be an example of the kind of reflexive social science he championed – Steinmetz describes his own method as “the historical socioanalysis of social science” (349) – and also, necessarily, to explain at least partly the conditions within which it was possible to formulate Bourdieu’s ideas. Bourdieu is the main hero of the book, but there are many others as well, and I do not believe any reader will fail to encounter a surprising new figure, text, or connection. Many, for instance, will be surprised not only that Frantz Fanon taught sociology for a year in Tunisia, but also the degree to which his writing can be seen as “a kind of climax” of all “the different strands of sociological, ethnological, and psychological writing on the colonies that had accumulated since the late 1930s” (122). Steinmetz has here produced a tour de force intellectual history of French sociology. The central historical narrative offered here is straightforward. French sociology was from its establishment as a profession deeply imbricated in French Empire. Durkheim himself did not write very much…
December 10, 2025 at 6:46 PM
ebrandom.bsky.social
Here's a dragon and a mean guy about to hit him in the head
detail of an illustration from an illuminated manuscript. a woman in a red dress stands to the left, to the right and down is a dragon, in the center and top is a knight on a horse, standing sort of in the ocean.
December 10, 2025 at 4:04 AM
ebrandom.bsky.social
"Mossed Opportunity" -- I'll allow it
Paint chip. Green. It's called "mossed opportunity"
December 7, 2025 at 10:46 PM
ebrandom.bsky.social
Let us put it this way: an object created by the human spirit and intellect, which means a significant object, is "significant" in that it points beyond itself, is an expression and exponent of a more universal spirit and intellect, of a whole world of feelings and ideas that have found a more or less perfect image of themselves in that object-by which the degree of its significance is then measured. Moreover, love for such an object is itself equally "significant." It says something about the person who feels it, it defines his relationship to the universe, to the world represented by the created object and, whether consciously or unconsciously, loved along with it.
December 7, 2025 at 3:40 AM
ebrandom.bsky.social
When the Red Army arrived, they found several piles of ash in front of the building, documented by the army photographers in black-and-white photos. In these images, the remains of hundreds of people look like mountains of construction waste, piled into neat cones. They took pictures of the inside of the gas chamber, set up to look like a shower room, and the facility for shooting prisoners in the back of the neck, which looked like a doctor’s examination room, complete with a measuring stick that had a hole in it to shoot through. Perhaps the strangest thing, though, were the well-fed Angora rabbits, with their thick, white fur, hopping around the camp. The SS men raised the rabbits in a building right next door, using their thick fur to line the greatcoats they wore while standing guard in the icy cold of winter. The building is now completely derelict. The roof has collapsed, and the walls are overgrown. A birch tree is growing in the ruins. It will soon be taller than the chimney.
December 7, 2025 at 1:13 AM
ebrandom.bsky.social
I'm especially partial to Liz Everton's article on masculinity and caricature during the Dreyfus Affair
newspaper cartoon. truth is attempting to emerge from the well to chastise mankind, but there's a lid on the well loaded down with military paraphernalia. two men, one in uniform, look on in surprise. another cartoon. in the foreground is a seated and unhappy looking fashionable lady, with more in the background. there is also in the background a crowd of men talking with each other, ignoring the ladies -- hence the unhappiness.
December 6, 2025 at 8:15 PM
ebrandom.bsky.social
Don't worry, he barked at the jogger we met and also the other dog.
Small black and brown dachshund on a trail, lots of brown grass. He's approaching the camera. Purposefully.
December 5, 2025 at 7:19 PM
ebrandom.bsky.social
Statue of Liberty, detail: face. c 1885.
www.jstor.org/stable/commu...
black and white photograph of the statue of liberty's face -- but it's on the ground in a wooden frame, not attached to the rest of the statue.
December 1, 2025 at 2:59 AM