Duncan Kelly, "Worlds of Wartime: The First World War and the Reconstruction of Modern Politics" (Oxford UP, 2025)

·1 hr 26 min·5 clips

Duncan Kelly explains why he wrote an intellectual history of WWI focused on political thought, not just art and literature.

The episode features an interview with Duncan Kelly, a professor at the University of Cambridge, about his 2025 book from Oxford University Press. Kelly explains he started the project a decade ago to write a modernist intellectual history of the First World War, emphasizing political and economic thought over art and literature. He begins with Élie Lévy's 1929 Rhodes Lectures, which framed the war as an inevitable world crisis driven by nationalism and revolution. Kelly then delves into the Irish revolutionary period, describing it as a Machiavellian moment where citizen militias opposed imperial standing armies, with figures like James Connolly linking republicanism to socialist labor. The discussion moves to young movements like Young Asia and Young Turks, which used youth as a trope to critique European imperialism and envision new, ancient-modern futures. Kelly addresses intellectual debates, such as Edward Bernstein's revisionist socialism that rejected Marx's labor theory of value in favor of ethical Kantianism, contrasting with marginalist economists. He explores geopolitical concepts like the open versus closed world, where imperialism shifted from territorial expansion to financial extraction. The interview touches on Woodrow Wilson's racialized federalism, critiqued by M.N. Roy and W.E.B. Du Bois, and German debates about democracy paths involving Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch. Kelly also covers Carl Schmitt's views on sovereignty during the Rhineland occupation and Nikolai Kondratiev's economic cycles in revolutionary Russia. The episode concludes with Kelly's future projects on political thought from 1848-1914, climate politics, and the aesthetic origins of political language.

As heard by us

A careful argument linking labor theory, Bernstein, the First World War, and the aesthetic roots of modern political language.

Duncan Kelly's New Books Network appearance makes a strong case for politics as a problem of value, tracing the line from labor theory and the marginalist critique to the argument that modern politics has aesthetic roots as well.

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Why you'd press play

You want value theory, political economy, and art history to share the same table without shouting.

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