Podcast Summary:

New Books Network – Duncan Kelly, "Worlds of Wartime: The First World War and the Reconstruction of Modern Politics" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Release Date: January 19, 2026
Host: Ryan Tripp
Guest: Duncan Kelly, Professor of Politics, University of Cambridge

Overview

This episode of the New Books Network delves into Duncan Kelly’s monumental new book, Worlds of Wartime: The First World War and the Reconstruction of Modern Politics. Kelly and host Ryan Tripp explore how World War I fundamentally reshaped modern political, economic, and intellectual landscapes across the globe. The conversation moves briskly from intellectual history and modernist politics to debates on sovereignty, socialism, colonialism, democracy, and the tangled legacies that connect the war’s aftermath to our political present.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Genesis and Scope of the Book

• Modernist Intellectual History: Kelly’s project originates from a desire to write a modernist intellectual history of WWI, one that seriously integrates the history of political and economic thought with the more traditionally recognized literary and artistic responses to the war.

  • "I wanted to try and write what I thought of as a modernist intellectual history of the First World War... to trace the relationship between the First World War and the way it kind of fixed into place a way of understanding politics and economics..." – Kelly [03:52]

• Bridging Past and Present: The book is designed to both situate ideas in their time and to draw contemporary relevance, particularly by examining why present-day politics often feels so constrained by inherited frameworks.

2. The World Crisis and the ‘Kant Wars’

• Élie Halévy's Lectures: The French philosopher’s 1929 lectures serve as an anchor for Kelly’s approach—underscoring that the “world crisis” of 1914-1918 is both intellectual and structural, driven by national self-determination, revolution, and disequilibrium.

  • "He begins by outlining a sort of structure of how to understand the World War as a world crisis..." – Kelly [05:54]

• The ‘Kant Wars’: In France, philosophical schisms over Kant's legacy—between proponents of perpetual peace and reactionary Catholic anti-Kantianism—represented broader propaganda wars about the essence of the conflict (state worship vs. republican peace).

3. Ireland’s Machiavellian Moment & The Failure of International Socialism

• Republicanism and Citizen Militias: The Irish revolutionary period is framed as a “Machiavellian moment,” where citizen militias stand against imperial standing armies—a radical renewal of republican founding myths.
• James Connolly and Labor: The discussion of Connolly connects the failure of international socialism (e.g. German Social Democrats supporting war credits) to the need for labor-oriented republican revolution.
  • "The war is a signal failure of international socialism..." – Kelly [18:07]

4. Young Movements: Young Asia, Young Turks, & Young Germany

• Critique of Empire and Civilization: "Youth" politics in Asia and the Ottoman Empire deploy the rhetoric of newness and futurism to oppose ‘old’ (imperial, European) corruption, while simultaneously reclaiming ancient civilizational legacies (e.g., Sarkar’s “young Asian futurism”).
  • "They need a new old world. But the old world is the ancientness... So these new old worlds are designed to be, they're designed to make the so called old world look new and...the new new world also really, really old." – Kelly [25:56]

5. Debates on Marxism, the Labor Theory of Value, and Marginalism

• Edward Bernstein and Revisionism: The episode traces the intellectual challenge to the Marxist labor theory of value, emphasizing Bernstein’s preference for evolutionary social movements over inevitable collapse, and referencing critics who argued for the subjectivity and diversity of value (marginal utility).
  • "Bernstein is interesting as an embodiment of this, of someone who's in the middle trying to suggest that a politics that just follows pure theory... will not understand the empirical diversity of politics in the present..." – Kelly [33:25]

6. Open vs. Closed Worlds

• Geopolitics after 1918: Drawing on John Maynard Keynes and Frederick Turner, Kelly discusses the perception that the world, once 'open' to imperial expansion, had become ‘closed’, leading to new forms of imperialism—financial, extractive, and economic.
• Anti-Imperial Counters: Anti-colonial thinkers reframed "openness" as a challenge to imperial control, using federation, nationalism, and diasporic politics as tools for reopening global opportunities.
  • "You want to say that empire was the thing that closed down possibilities..." – Kelly [41:47]

7. Neoliberalism and Debates over Economic Planning

• Origins of Neoliberalism: Kelly summarizes the varied intellectual currents leading to neoliberalism (Lippmann, Hayek, Mises, Weber), especially focusing on early 20th-century critiques of socialist planning versus advocates for a “natural” market order. He calls attention to how the “market vs. politics” dichotomy was always itself deeply political.
  • "There was nothing natural about capitalism in the first place. And the war had shown that many other forms of both market and non market-based forms of allocation were both possible and indeed necessary..." – Kelly [45:37]

8. Woodrow Wilson, Race, and Federalism

• Liberal Internationalism and Racial Exclusion: Wilson’s vision for a new world order (the 14 Points, self-determination) is critiqued as fundamentally exclusionary and racialized—pointed out by critics like M.N. Roy and W.E.B. Du Bois.
  • "Wilson's conception of both domestic US Federal politics and then international order is... deeply racialized..." – Kelly [49:18]

9. German Democracy and Sovereignty Post-War

• Ideas of 1914 and National Organizing: The notion that German democracy followed a distinct path, rooted in organization rather than French-style revolutionary rupture, is contested by Weber and Troeltsch. They argue that modern democratic states (French, British, German, etc.) share more than divides them—mass bureaucracy, elections, and economic integration.

  • "They're trying to dethrone the thought that there's been an aberrant path to German modernity..." – Kelly [55:48]

• Carl Schmitt and the Rhineland Occupation: Schmitt's existential theory of sovereignty is contrasted with international legal arguments about occupation and partial sovereignty, raising questions about law’s power to “fix” politics.

  • "When legalistic arguments about politics begin to have primacy..." – Kelly [63:58]

10. Russian Conjunctures: Kondratiev Cycles and Land Socialization

• Nikolai Kondratiev: Kelly tracks Kondratiev’s effort to use cycles and conjunctures to understand Russia’s crises and transitions—arguing that understanding long economic waves is essential for effective revolutionary and post-revolutionary policy.
  • "If you can understand war and revolution and structural disequilibrium... in the context of longer run periods or cycles of the rise and decline, or periods of prosperity and decline..." – Kelly [68:45]

11. Keynes and Malthus in European Reconstruction

• Aggregate Demand and Economic Models: Kelly discusses why Keynes drew on Malthus—finding in him a style of “problem-space” analysis focused on population, subsistence, and aggregate demand that influenced his own theorizing about unemployment and self-sufficiency.
  • "He becomes more interested in the style of Malthus' arguments than their content..." – Kelly [77:26]

Notable Quotes

• On Methodology:
  "I wanted to try and write... an intellectual history of the First World War... as a framework that could take you from the past back into the present." – Kelly [03:52]

• On National Self-Determination:
  "...the inevitable drive towards populist sovereignty and the inevitable desire for national self determination is a driving force for war..." – Kelly [07:12]

• On the Failure of Socialism:
  "The war is a signal failure of international socialism, but forms of national socialist and republican reconstruction might be able to, as it were, save the day." – Kelly [18:07]

• On 'Young' Movements:
  "...radical new forms of politics can be redescribed as young because they're future oriented, they're dynamic, they're anti imperial, but they're also ancient." – Kelly [25:56]

• On Economic Theories:
  "The irony... is that just as Marxism is being sort of dethroned intellectually... it's at its most expansive and successful as a political program and project." – Kelly [37:25]

• On Empire’s Closure:
  "Empire was the thing that closed down possibilities. And you want to reopen a world that's free for a different kind of political or economic relationship." – Kelly [41:47]

• On Wilson and Race:
  "Wilson's conception of both domestic US Federal politics and then international order is... deeply racialized..." – Kelly [49:18]

Timestamps for Key Segments

| Segment | Topic | Timestamp | |---------|---------------------------|----------| | Book Genesis & Modernist History | [02:36] – [04:56] | | Halévy & The World Crisis | [05:24] – [13:27] | | Ireland’s Machiavellian Moment & Socialism | [13:44] – [21:21] | | Young Movements | [21:38] – [28:10] | | Marxian Labor Theory & Marginalism | [28:36] – [38:36] | | Open vs. Closed Worlds | [38:46] – [43:27] | | Neoliberalism & Economic Planning | [44:00] – [48:21] | | Wilson, Federalism, and Race | [48:33] – [53:05] | | German Democracy & Schmitt | [53:18] – [66:28] | | Kondratiev & Russian Cycles | [67:56] – [76:33] | | Keynes and Malthus | [76:56] – [80:37] | | Closing & Forthcoming Work | [80:47] – [83:43] |

Memorable Moments

• The Irony of Marxism’s Political Success amid Theoretical Crisis
  The discussion juxtaposes the simultaneous theoretical discrediting of Marxism (by marginalists and revisionists) with its surge in real-world revolutionary influence. [37:25]

• Connecting Legalism and Realism (Carl Schmitt & Plebiscites):
  Kelly charts the collision between legalistic and existentialist frameworks in post-1918 Germany, notably Schmidt’s claim that occupation rendered Germany “the equivalent of a colony within Europe.” [60:23]

• Wilson's Racial Politics Unmasked:
  Kelly takes a critical approach, discussing Wilson’s support for the color line and exclusionary aspects of his postwar vision. [48:33 – 53:05]

• Economic Cycles and Revolution (Kondratiev):
  Unpacking the connection of long economic cycles to strategies for socialization and revolution, especially in the Russian context. [68:45]

Kelly’s Current and Future Research

• General history of political thought 1848–1914: For students, bridging his current work and previous research.
• The Anthropocene and wartime rhetoric: Examining why climate politics borrow so heavily from the language of war.
• Art history’s influence on political language: Tracing the roots of political and economic concepts to art historical lexicons like abstraction, representation, and interpretation. [80:47 – 83:43]

Final Thoughts

This episode provides a sweeping, intellectually rich tour of how the First World War rearranged not only states and societies but also the entire vocabulary and architecture of modern politics and political thinking. Kelly’s nuanced approach deftly links debates about labor value, sovereignty, race, and empire with global intellectual trends—offering listeners both deep context and contemporary resonance.