Why Nations Still Fight
By Richard Ned Lebow (Cambridge University Press)
Recommended by EDINA PALEVIQ
As we find ourselves in an era of unexpected geopolitical friction, the title of Richard Ned Lebow’s latest work, Why Nations Still Fight, feels less like an academic inquiry and more like a weary, collective sigh. It is the question that sits at the kitchen table, far removed from the jargon of political science departments, asked by people who were once told that global trade and digital connection would make the bayonet obsolete. Lebow’s central argument is disarmingly straightforward: Modern theories often assume that states go to war because leaders calculate that fighting will bring security, power, or material advantage, but he suggests that this explanation, while influential, is incomplete. Nations do not fight only for territory or strategic gain; they also often fight for recognition, status, honor, or to avoid humiliation. These motivations, rooted in identity and political psychology, can be just as powerful as military or economic interests.
Through a broad historical approach, Lebow roots his argument in the ancient world, pointing to the Peloponnesian War as a primary example of a situation in which the fear of losing standing pushed enemies—Athens and Sparta—toward catastrophe. This focus on gaining prestige carried over into eighteenth-century Europe, where monarchs viewed war as a necessary stage for the performance of glory. Lebow also argues that it is an obsession with national credibility—a nation’s reputation for being tough—that fueled both World War I and the Cold War, which he explains as driven by the need to protect a position of strength rather than by the expectation of strategic gain. In effect, the risk of seeming weak overtook the risk incurred in war. Ultimately, the author challenges the contemporary definition of rational behavior. He proves that the pursuit of respect and the fear of humiliation are not ancient relics in geopolitics. The book demonstrates that nations seek to protect their reputation as a logical and powerful goal that must be taken into account to better understand conflict.
When Fitness Went Global: The Rise of Physical Culture in the Nineteenth Century
By Conor Heffernan (Bloomsbury Academic)
Recommended by HÉLÈNE B. DUCROS
First and foremost, what Conor Heffernan shares in his latest book, When Fitness Went Global: The Rise of Physical Culture in the Nineteenth Century, is his utmost enthusiasm for fitness, as well as an impassioned plea for scholars to spend more time examining physical culture as a site of macro- and micro-geohistories that can reveal much about how individuals inhabit the world and institutions shape societies. Inspired by George Mosse’s The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (1998) and his demonstration that it is in the nineteenth century that emerged national idealized body types, in particular male and white, Heffernan focuses on the global diffusion and adoption of various physical fitness cultures across the globe to explain their influence on how individuals have come to relate to their bodies and use them as a mode of self-expression. The author further shows how the globalization of fitness methods resulted in a homogenized transformation of bodies in the long nineteenth century running from the French Revolution (1789) to the beginning of WWI (1914). During that time, physical culture rested on a variety of activities, from weight-lifting to club-swinging, and entailed different purposes—physical transformation, age-combating, health, and more—but for Heffernan, what is key is that these exercise regimens borrowed from elsewhere were purposive and practiced mostly as leisure (as opposed to physical activities derived from hard labor), although also sometimes imposed from above.
The nineteenth century features as a central actor in the book. It is presented as a specific period of radical societal change, as physical cultures and their associated practices, while preserved in localized and national contexts, became globalized (or rather “glocalized”), in great part under the impulsion of rapidly expanding commercial flows. Heffernan pursues two main inquiries: he questions the context that enabled this globalization and the reasons behind it but also the impact the global diffusion of a common vision of idealized bodies had on the production of one “global body,” for example through the formalization and professionalization of physical education and training methods, sometimes state-mandated, as in the case of military or student trainees. His explanation of the development of a global understanding of what it meant to be fit in the nineteenth century and what a fit body should look and feel like at the time advances that the spreading of fitness ideals and physical cultures across borders finds its roots in industrialization, commerce, European colonialism, the advent of popular print media, and new educational and training approaches. In demonstrating that many cultures in the nineteenth century had an interest in healthy, fit, and strong bodies and were preoccupied with ways of transforming, molding, and sculpting bodies, he documents the social significance of body-altering behaviors, as well as how these were translated (or failed to be) in different socio-economic environments. When fitness entered global markets and global consumption flows and the “fitness entrepreneur” emerged, physical culture traits were adopted and adapted outside their respective cultures of origin—for example yoga, jujutsu, judo, or club-swinging—hollowed out of their original meanings, as they acquired novel and decontextualized significance and status. The book is a welcome opportunity to reflect on the ubiquitous presence of physical culture in modern society on all continents and its palpable homogenization. From health clubs with global reach (Anytime Fitness, Planet Fitness) to worldwide exercise franchises (Les Mills, Zumba), international professional certification organizations, or globally recognized fitness clothing brands and music providers, the globalization of fitness cultures has accelerated in the twenty-first century, with incessant back-and-forths between West and East, North and South. For any reader who enjoys working out, this book constitutes a wealth of information to understand the why, how, and what for of physical fitness in the modern era. For historians and sociologists, it establishes a method for studying the stretching and flexing (pun intended) of ideas and ideals about the body and the hierarchies and power structures that have operated in the development of prototype bodies and embodied experiences of the world. Scholars in social medicine, fat studies, public health, and marketing will undoubtedly also find this well-researched and original book fascinating.
Zero Point
By Slavoj Žižek (Bloomsbury Academic)
Recommended by NICHOLAS OSTRUM
Readers of Slavoj Žižek will find familiar themes and arguments in his most recent collection of essays, Zero Point. The title itself is borrowed from Lenin, a recurring intellectual figure for the author, who proposed revolution projects sometimes needed to start over from the beginning and pursue a different path forward to achieve their ultimate objectives. For Žižek, the new “zero point” is whence the world, but especially Europe, needs to start anew to contend the ongoing collapse of the postwar liberal order. For Žižek the solution is an updated (and maybe completely overhauled) Enlightenment-rooted communism. That said, one need not embrace that specific prognosis to find value in these essays.
Indeed, there is much to latch onto, be it the examination of the techno-feudalist colonization and corruption of the public sphere in “Heroes of the Metaverse” or the discussion of the tensions between liberalism’s internal contradictions, America’s lingering universalist pretenses (which have further lost global appeal lately), and China’s rise in “Death Cramps.” The most compelling part of this collection, however, is “When is the Right Time to Speak?” Here, Žižek presents a selection of almost diaristic dispatches he wrote surrounding a scandal sparked by his appearance at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2023. The speech he delivered there dealt with the horrors of Hamas’s October 7 massacre of Israeli civilians just two weeks prior and of Israel’s retaliatory bombardment of Gaza, which had just begun. As is any good Žižek writing, this section is challenging. His descriptions of war crimes and the plights of everyday Gazans are deeply disturbing. His deployment of thinkers ranging from Robespierre to Lacan and Foucault to Groucho Marx (plus many, many others) takes the reader down various rabbit-holes that eventually give new and nuanced insights into the complicated convergence of the Israeli-Hamas War, the Russo-Ukrainian War, antisemitism, ethnic cleansing, and the shifting geopolitical blocs of the new international order. At the same time, these writings show Žižek at his most personally reflective. This book is not terribly hopeful. But, as the author reminds the reader, “The first step towards hope is to fully admit our desperate predicament in all its dimensions.” (94) And it is that full admission of the desperation of the current moment that marks a “zero point” whence Europe and the world can start again.
