Folke Leander: The Philosophy of Paul Elmer More

The Ethical Basis of Life and Letters

Edited with Introductions by Eric Adler and Claes G. Ryn

University of Missouri Press, 2026 (forthcoming)

Amazon.com

Publisher’s Description:

Folke Leander (1910-1981) was a prolific and internationally known Swedish philosopher. He is best known in the United States as an explicator of the New Humanism, an informal movement of literary and cultural criticism founded by Paul Elmer More (1864-1937) and Irving Babbitt (1865-1933). 

Leander’s manuscript for The Philosophy of Paul Elmer More was completed in the early 1970s, but because of the academic environment at the time and the book’s special philosophical focus, Leander was unable to find a publisher. Since then, the work existed only as a typescript, a copy of which he left with Claes G. Ryn, his former student and collaborator, in the hope that one day in more favorable intellectual circumstances it might be published. 

Leander is rare among the scholars of the New Humanism for his first-rate philosophical training, depth of insight, and clarity of expression. In The Philosophy of Paul Elmer More he grapples carefully and precisely with the most fundamental tenets of the New Humanism. Although very supportive of the movement, Leander provides essential critiques of its contentions – and even improves upon some of them in crucial respects. In a series of concise, limpid chapters, he explains and assesses such fundamental – but often hazily understood – Humanist concepts as the “inner check,” “naturalism,” and “the higher will.” The result is a book essential for anyone who wants to understand the New Humanism.

About the Author and the Editors:

Folke Leander (1910-1981) was an internationally recognized Swedish philosopher whose thought ranged widely from moral philosophy and aesthetics to epistemology and whose scholarship focused on such subjects as the New Humanism, John Dewey, and Benedetto Croce.

Eric Adler is Professor of Classical Studies and Chair of the Department of Classics at the University of Maryland. His scholarship focuses on the history of the humanities, Roman historiography, and the history of classical studies. In addition to many scholarly articles, Adler has written three monographs: Valorizing the Barbarians: Enemy Speeches in Roman Historiography (University of Texas Press, 2011); Classics, the Culture Wars, and Beyond (University of Michigan Press, 2016); and The Battle of the Classics: How a Nineteenth-Century Debate Can Save the Humanities Today (Oxford University Press, 2020). Deeply interested in the New Humanist movement, he is also the editor of Humanistic Letters: The Irving Babbitt – Paul Elmer More Correspondence (University of Missouri Press, 2023).

Claes G. Ryn is Emeritus Professor of Politics and Distinguished Senior Scholar and Founding Director Emeritus of the Center for the Study of Statesmanship at the Catholic University of America, where he Chaired his department. His scholarship focuses on ethics and politics, politics and culture, the history of Western political thought, and epistemology. His many books include Democracy and the Ethical Life (The Catholic University of American Press, 1990), America the Virtuous (Routledge, 2003), A Common Human Ground (University of Missouri Press, 2003), and, most recently, The Failure of American Conservatism and the Road Not Taken (Republic Book Publishers, 2023). In 2012 he was named Honorary Professor at Beijing Normal University. He served as president of the Philadelphia Society, Chairman and co-founder of the National Humanities Institute, and President and co-founder of the Academy of Philosophy and Letters.

JOB’s Comment:

Paul Elmer More

Jean Gerson

Viktig kännare av den mystiska (eller mystika) teologins tradition, som under sin tid som kansler för Parisuniversitetet konsoliderade det av Dionysios Areopagita lanserade begreppets användning och formaliserade traditionen som en akademisk disciplin skild från den rationellt-spekulativa skolastiken.

Om amerikansk systemkollaps

Eller åtminstone Macgregors tolkning av några just nu mer framträdande tendenser till en sådan:

“Hegemony is over not only outside but within the US, too. The decline is irreversible, says my guest today Colonel Douglas Macgregor. We talk about Russia’s next moves in Ukraine, the risk of wider NATO escalation, U.S. support for foreign wars, and why America’s base network and war spending may be unsustainable. Macgregor argues the U.S. is losing control, the economy is the real pressure point, and a major pullback from overseas is coming.”

Europas roll i en multipolär värld

Europaparlamentsledamoten Fernand Kartheiser från luxemburgiska Alternativa Demokratiska Reformpartiet arrangerade den 5:e maj ännu ett evenemang i Bryssel med Jeffrey Sachs som huvudtalare. Närvarande var bl.a. diplomatiska representanter för Ryssland, Bjelorusland och Iran, vilket gjorde det nödvändigt att förlägga evenemanget till en lokal 400 meter utanför parlamentet…

“What role should Europe play in a rapidly changing world order? How should we navigate growing geopolitical tensions, the war in Ukraine, shifting global alliances, energy security, economic competitiveness, and the future of diplomacy? Recently, I had the honour of hosting Professor Jeffrey Sachs in Brussels for an in-depth conference on Europe’s place in an increasingly multipolar world. Professor Sachs – one of the world’s most renowned economists and geopolitical analysts – shared his perspective on the major strategic challenges facing Europe today, including foreign policy, ongoing conflicts, transatlantic relations, and the need for a coherent long-term vision for our continent.”

Pankaj Mishra: The World After Gaza

A History

Penguin Press, 2025

Amazon.com

Publisher’s Description:

“Courageous and bracing, learned and ethical, rigorous and mind-expanding.” – Naomi Klein

“This profoundly important and urgent book finds Mishra, one of our most intellectually astute and courageous writers, at the peak of his powers.” – Hisham Matar

“A triumphant work of empathy in a polarizing conflict.” – Anand Giridharadas

Named a Best Book of the Month by TIME • Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2025 by The Guardian, Bustle, Foreign Policy, and Literary Hub

From one of our foremost public intellectuals, an essential reckoning with the war in Gaza that reframes our understanding of the ongoing conflict, its historical roots, and the fractured global response

The postwar global order was in many ways shaped in response to the Holocaust. That event became the benchmark for atrocity, and, in the Western imagination, the paradigmatic genocide. Its memory orients so much of our thinking, and crucially, forms the basic justification for Israel’s right first to establish itself and then to defend itself. But in many parts of the world, ravaged by other conflicts and experiences of mass slaughter, the Holocaust’s singularity is not always taken for granted, even when its hideous atrocity is. Outside of the West, Pankaj Mishra argues, the dominant story of the twentieth century is that of decolonization.

The World After Gaza takes the current war, and the polarized reaction to it, as the starting point for a broad reevaluation of two competing narratives of the last century: the Global North’s triumphant account of victory over totalitarianism and the spread of liberal capitalism, and the Global South’s hopeful vision of racial equality and freedom from colonial rule. At a moment when the world’s balance of power is shifting, and the Global North no longer commands ultimate authority, it is critically important that we understand how and why the two halves of the world are failing to talk to each other.

As old touchstones and landmarks crumble, only a new history with a sharply different emphasis can reorient us to the world and worldviews now emerging into the light. In this concise, powerful, and pointed treatise, Mishra reckons with the fundamental questions posed by our present crisis – about whether some lives matter more than others, how identity is constructed, and what the role of the nation-state ought to be. The World After Gaza is an indispensable moral guide to our past, present, and future.

Reviews:

“Stimulating and brilliantly researched . . . no incendiary polemic, but rather a sober and extensively documented treatise on the discursive history that has given rise to the current situation.” 

The Irish Times

“Mishra’s book is a triumphant work of empathy in a polarizing conflict. It gives voice and extends sympathy and probes the innermost fears and aspirations of both parties in the conflict – and shows how fine the line is between humanity and its opposite.”

Anand Giridharadas, The.Ink

“The World After Gaza is a book of magnitude and grace. Mishra’s skills as a novelist enable him to provide vivid portraits of men and women struggling (and sometimes failing) to rail against the injustices of their eras. In doing so, we find not only a lament for what has gone wrong, a warning against the complicity that convenience can give rise to and an elegy for the world order that we are at risk of losing, but also a guide as to what we can be, each of us, individually.”

Markaz Review

“Mishra, who has employed his crystalline prose in novels and nonfiction alike, methodically unpacks the ‘extensive moral breakdown’ that preceded what he describes as ‘the blithe slaughter of innocents in Gaza.’ . . . At heart, this is an exhaustively sourced plea for historical literacy that opens up what Mishra calls ‘a broader vista of human fraternity and solidarity’ and recognizes that across the globe, people victimized by ‘historical mass crimes of genocide, slavery and racist imperialism’ wonder why ‘their own holocausts . . . have not been much regarded in history.’ . . . A clear-eyed look at the Holocaust as justification for Israel’s wars.”

Kirkus

“In this urgent book, Mishra grapples with the inexplicable spectacle of stone-faced Western elites ignoring, and indeed justifying, the slaughter and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza. Mishra reflects on the supposedly universal consensus that emerged from the Holocaust, as well as his own early sympathies for Israel, as he expounds on the terrible toll of this passivity in the face of atrocity.”

Rashid Khalidi, author of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine

“Guided by a determination to find an exit from the loop of endlessly repeating atrocities, Mishra leads readers on a search for meaning in modern history’s most depraved episodes. This is a rare text: courageous and bracing, learned and ethical, rigorous and mind-expanding.” 

Naomi Klein, author of Doppelganger

“This profoundly important and urgent book finds Mishra, one of our most intellectually astute and courageous writers, at the peak of his powers. His outrage is hard to ignore. But at the center of this urgent book is a humane inquiry into what suffering can make us do, and he leaves us with the troubling question of what world will we find after Gaza.”

Hisham Matar, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Return and My Friends

“Mishra’s latest undertakes the difficult but important task of reconciling the contradictory stories of the Global North and the Global South. While the former has squandered the last of its alleged moral authority in support of neoliberal empire the latter urgently seeks liberation from the deadly and ongoing aftershocks of colonialism. Essential reading.” 

Literary Hub

“Pankaj Mishra is our globally leading public intellectual, and his coruscating and scintillating meditation on the ethical purchase of Holocaust memory as the Gaza war goes on is one of the indispensable documents of civilization in a barbaric time. With his alert conscience, impeccable learning, and meditative writing, Mishra chronicles how the very attempt to register the crimes of the past in a world of continuing hierarchy can transform into an alibi for the disasters of the present.”

Samuel Moyn, author of Liberalism Against Itself and Humane

“A brilliant book, as thoughtful, scholarly and subtle as it is brave and original, The World After Gaza does what great writing is meant to do: to remind us of what it is to be human, to help us feel another’s pain, to reach out and make connections across the trenches of race, color, and religion.”

William Dalrymple, author of The Golden Road

“Both a timeless and timely book, reading The World After Gaza feels like engaging in an ongoing conversation about the meaning of the Holocaust and colonialism with a good attentive friend.”

Eyal Weizman, author of Forensic Architecture

“An astute, humane, and necessary intervention, opening a path to the altered consciousness which has to be a consequence of Israel’s war on Gaza.”

Ahdaf Soueif, author of Cairo and The Map of Love

“With this utterly essential book, Pankaj Mishra has made a powerful contribution to the moral history of the world, bringing proportion and insight to a subject that is routinely lacking in both . . . The devastation of Gaza cannot be understood as a retaliatory act, but as a brutal extension of Israel’s renewed commitment to clearing lands that are not their own. Mishra’s book shows great understanding of the historical prejudice and violence that Jews themselves have suffered, and offers new clarity about how that trauma might have formed the current Israeli rhetoric . . . I can only say that fair-minded people and readers everywhere have a friend in this book, which sees without blinkers and speaks without fear. If books have a role today in the elucidation of justice, then I believe The World After Gaza will prove to be as crucial to our own times as James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time was to his.”

Andrew O’Hagan, author of Caledonian Road

“Pankaj Mishra remembers the future. The World After Gaza, with its elegant outrage and eloquent ache, will be the reference for those who judge our times tomorrow. Thanks to Mishra’s all-too-human work, the next generation will know we were not all in vain.”

Ece Temelkuran

“Mishra brings his humanism, moral clarity and deep, cosmopolitan erudition to the question of how survivors of a genocide built a society that is committing a genocide broadcast live on our smartphones. A towering intellectual achievement.”

Molly Crabapple, author of Drawing Blood and Brothers of the Gun (with Marwan Hisham)

“A book of passion, fury, and clarity. Mishra is one of the most important voices of our generation.” 

Peter Frankopan

“We all owe Pankaj Mishra a debt for crafting eloquent, urgent, and undeniable words from the horrors we are struggling to witness.” 

Afua Hirsch

About the Author:

Pankaj Mishra is the author of Age of Anger: A History of the Present, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia, and several other books of nonfiction and fiction. Mishra won the 2024 Weston International Award, as well as the 2014 Windham–Campbell Prize for nonfiction. He writes regularly for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, and The London Review of Books, among others.