Welcome to The Daily Scholar for June 22, 2026.

In today's issue:

In Foreign Policy, historian Robert Zaretsky argues that the death of Edgar Morin marks the extinction of the French intello, the generalist public intellectual who ranged freely across philosophy, science, journalism, and politics. Zaretsky traces the type from the Enlightenment philosophes and Zola's Dreyfus intervention through the postwar generation of Sartre and de Beauvoir and the televisual nouveaux philosophes. He ends with the worry that today's fragmented media landscape is hostile to that tradition and perhaps "to thought itself." The essay refuses simple elegy. It recalls that these same humanist intellectuals were often, as Raymond Aron put it, "merciless before the failings of democracies and indulgent to the greatest crimes." Morin himself was an exception. The French Communist Party expelled him in 1951 for protesting the Soviet show trials.

What makes Morin an apt symbol for the tradition's end is how little he resembled its official image. He was born Edgar Nahoum, the son of Jewish immigrants from Thessaloniki. He held no PhD. He took the name Morin as a Resistance pseudonym and became a lieutenant in the Free French Forces. He joined the CNRS in 1951 on the personal recommendations of two philosophers rather than through academic competition. For the next 75 years he published more than 100 books, including the six-volume La Méthode. He built his work around the idea of complex thought, the insistence that intricate and interrelated systems call for sustained dialogue rather than Cartesian decomposition. The man cast as the last guardian of an establishment tradition was himself a credentialless, self-fashioned outsider who outlived the entire social and media order that made his kind possible.

Sources: Foreign Policy, Le Monde, The New York Times.

Anton Jäger, a historian of political thought, has a new book from Verso called Hyperpolitics. Politics today runs on extreme mobilization while leaving little durable institutional residue. Jäger plots this across two axes. One measures the degree of political mobilization. The other measures the degree of civic institutionalization. He periodizes a shift from the mass politics of 1914 to 1989, through the technocratic post-politics of what he calls the "very long 1990s," through the anti-politics of the 2010s, to today's hyperpolitics. The 2020 protests were the largest in American history. They maintained no membership rolls and produced little lasting structure. On the other hand, the bureaucratic tedium of twentieth-century party and union life was the structural condition of its political effectiveness. High affect and low institutionalization produce little consequence.

Trey Taylor, reviewing the book in the Cleveland Review of Books, praises the framework's parsimony and its wealth of historical vignettes. Jäger's implicit hope for a return to parties and unions understates those institutions' own history as stabilizers of the social order. Taylor cites the French Communist Party's complicity with de Gaulle, the SPD's Ebert-Groener pact, and the Italian Communists' suppression of the hot autumn militancy of the late 1960s. Drawing on Adorno and Horkheimer on union "rackets," he argues that the institutions which can channel mobilization also blunt the radical energies they claim to carry.

Sources: Cleveland Review of Books, Verso.

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Good reading this week.