Angus Burgin
· Associate ProfessorVerifiedJohns Hopkins University · History
Active 2009–2023
About
Angus Burgin is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University. He holds a PhD from Harvard University and his research interests encompass 20th-century United States history, political history, intellectual history, and the history of capitalism. Burgin's work spans American and transnational intellectual history, the history of technology, and the history of moral and political economy since the 1930s. He is currently completing a book on the intellectual history of the internet. Burgin has authored 'The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression,' which explores the transformation of market advocacy over the middle decades of the twentieth century and has received the Merle Curti Award and the Joseph Spengler Prize. He is an executive editor of the series 'Intellectual History of the Modern Age' with the University of Pennsylvania Press and serves on the editorial board of 'Modern Intellectual History.' Burgin helped found the Center for Economy and Society at Johns Hopkins and is the founding director of the undergraduate major in Moral and Political Economy. He has been recognized for his teaching and mentoring, receiving the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences Graduate Teaching and Mentoring Award in 2019. His teaching includes courses on intellectual history, capitalism, and American thought, and he has contributed to various edited volumes and media discussions related to his research.
Research topics
- Political Science
- Computer Science
- Law
- Sociology
- Economics
- Literature
- Neoclassical economics
- Religious studies
- Aesthetics
- Epistemology
- Archaeology
- History
- Library science
- Philosophy
- Economic geography
- Art
- Political economy
Selected publications
Louis Menand. <i>The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War</i>.
The American Historical Review · 2023-02-03
article1st authorCorrespondingJournal Article Louis Menand. The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War. Get access Louis Menand. The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021. Pp. xiv, 857. Cloth $35.00. Angus Burgin Angus Burgin Johns Hopkins University, USA Email: burgin@jhu.edu https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4430-5466 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 128, Issue 1, March 2023, Pages 542–543, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhad131 Published: 31 March 2023
Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2023-04-24
paratextOpen accessThe Handbook on Governmentality discusses the development of an interdisciplinary field of research, focusing on Michel Foucault’s post-foundationalist concept of governmentality and the ways it has been used to write genealogies of modern states, the governance of societal problems and the governance of the self.
Dissent · 2023 · 1 citations
1st authorCorresponding- Sociology
- Political Science
- Sociology
Abstract: In Crack-Up Capitalism Quinn Slobodian turns his attention to the past half-century, explaining how market advocates pioneered a different approach to restricting the state: the special economic zone.
The Crisis of Truth in the Age of Trump
Princeton University Press eBooks · 2022-04-12
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingUniversity of Pennsylvania Press eBooks · 2022-08-10
book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorrespondingThe Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity
Journal of American History · 2022
1st authorCorresponding- Political Science
- Philosophy
- Literature
“The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” Eugene McCarraher cites these words from the English poet and Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins in an epigraph for The Enchantments of Mammon and then invokes them again a dozen times over the course of nearly seven hundred pages. For McCarraher, illuminating this forgotten grandeur requires more ardor than subtlety. Popular reviews have described the scope of his opus as “capacious,” “monumental,” “majestic,” “immense”—but above all else it is instilled with an extraordinary energy emanating from his conviction regarding the inherent sacral needs and capacities of humankind. McCarraher's focus on the persistence of the sacral leads him to frame the book as a grand argument with Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905). The transition to capitalism, McCarraher argues, should not be seen as a process of secularization: capitalism is itself a regime of enchantment, and in its workings we can find endless manifestations of “a longing for divinity” (p. 4). The book then unfolds as an extended reading of the sacral aspects of capitalist modernity, wherein management theory provides dogma, engineers act as priests, brands become icons, advertisements inscribe commandments, material goods serve as sacraments, slogans function as chants, and skyscrapers rise like cathedrals.
Politics and Economies: The Age of Entrepreneurship
2022-01-01
other1st authorCorrespondingA prior version of this essay was published as “The Reinvention of Entrepreneurship,” in American Labyrinth: Intellectual History for Complicated Times (Cornell University Press). I would like to thank Nic Johnson for research assistance; the Kauffman Foundation for research support; and colleagues
4 The Crisis of Truth in the Age of Trump
Princeton University Press eBooks · 2022-03-30
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingHope and Scorn: Eggheads, Experts, and Elites in American Politics
Political Science Quarterly · 2021 · 16 citations
1st authorCorresponding- Political Science
- Political Science
- Library science
The Journal of Modern History · 2019-05-08
article1st authorCorresponding
Frequent coauthors
- 36 shared
Julia Ott
Columbia University
- 36 shared
Philip Scranton
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
- 36 shared
Stanley Resor
Harvard University Press
- 36 shared
Stephen Mihm
- 36 shared
Sven Beckert
Harvard University
- 36 shared
Naomi R. Lamoreaux
- 36 shared
Scott P. Marler
University of Memphis
- 36 shared
Elizabeth Tandy Shermer
Labs
Education
- 2009
PhD, History
Harvard University
- 2002
BA, History and Literature
Harvard University
Awards & honors
- Merle Curti Award from the Organization of American Historia…
- Joseph Spengler Prize from the History of Economics Society
- Krieger School of Arts and Sciences Graduate Teaching and Me…
- Butler Prize for the best first-year graduate paper
- Kouguell Prize for the best undergraduate thesis in the depa…
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