https://www.rl-allen.com/contact daily 0.75 2022-08-29 https://www.rl-allen.com/work daily 1.0 2025-05-19 https://www.rl-allen.com/work/teaching-k3pgl monthly 0.5 2025-02-22 https://www.rl-allen.com/work/publications-7wdtb monthly 0.5 2021-10-15 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6169a9836aac2c68d108e89c/1634318817274-MVO7RCH3CZ2Q4791KDIN/CampanMirande.JPG Home - Publications - Publications Books Adventures in the Archaic: Primitivism, Degrowth, and the French Social Sciences, 1945–1975. Forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press in January 2026. Research Articles “Resurrecting the Archaic: Symbols and Recurrence in Henri Lefebvre’s Revolutionary Romanticism,” Modern Intellectual History 18, no. 2 (2021): 474–496. Additional Publications Review of Michael C. Behrent, Becoming Foucault: The Poitiers Years, in History: Reviews of New Books 52, no. 5 (2024): 97–99. Review of Henri Ellenberger and Emmanuel Delille, Ethno-psychiatrie, in History of Psychiatry 29, no. 4 (2018): 499–501. https://www.rl-allen.com/work/about-tt6ww monthly 0.5 2021-10-18 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6169a9836aac2c68d108e89c/1634317373781-ZBXOVB9ZGCEJN9B6VFF7/5fb6d473-9241-4078-bcb7-0865fc4854ac_rw_1200.jpg Home - About - About I am a historian of European ideas, intellectuals, and culture in the twentieth century. I’m particularly interested in primitivism, comparative cultural criticism, and the history of the social sciences. I am currently an Assistant Instructional Professor in the Social Sciences Collegiate Division at the University of Chicago. At the University of Chicago, I teach courses in the history of social and political thought from the seventeenth century onward. I received my Ph.D. in History from the University of Illinois in 2021. Prior to my time at Illinois, I lectured in the History and Religious Studies Departments at California State University, Los Angeles. I came to study the French social sciences through a love of travel. Anthropology, sociology, and prehistory took me to the same islands, countrysides, and caves I had spent the first decade of my adult life exploring. A native of Southern California, I taught high school history and literature in Pasadena for nine years. I dedicated each of these summers to traveling abroad and visiting remote regions in Europe, Asia, and Central and South America. CV https://www.rl-allen.com/work/research-7lg6j monthly 0.5 2025-02-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6169a9836aac2c68d108e89c/0ba4b804-3313-45e7-9608-b26e8dcfa679/Cervids_painted_on_cave_wall_and_Caervids%2C_bovids_and_horses_Wellcome_M0010910.jpg Home - Research - Research My research illuminates where intellectuals, social scientists, and so-called primitive cultures converge to uncover archaic solutions to modern problems. I gravitate toward examples of cultural and ecological stewardship in prehistoric, provincial, and postcolonial societies. A first expression of my ideas appeared in “Resurrecting the Archaic,” a 2021 article for the journal Modern Intellectual History which won the Joseph Ward Swain Publication Prize. My book, Adventures in the Archaic: Primitivism, Degrowth, and the French Social Sciences, 1945–1975, will be published by the University of Chicago Press in January 2026. The title, Adventures in the Archaic, has two meanings. One meaning is the effect of the archaic on four distinguished intellectuals in the French social sciences. This unique framing leads to a wide-ranging exploration into such subjects as sacrifice, survivals, shamanism, and cyclical notions of time. The other meaning is my own adventure in the life and work of four remarkable primitivistic reformers. After traveling where they did and after a decade traveling in their words, I reexamine the principles and merits of primitivism, a much-maligned intellectual tradition. In four interlocking chapters, I develop the connections between the lay prehistorian Georges Bataille, the ethnopsychiatrist Georges Devereux, the historian of religion Mircea Eliade, and the rural sociologist Henri Lefebvre. In the process, I reveal the times and places as well as the how and why of what I call “postwar primitivism.” Between 1945 and 1975, the postwar primitivists took the very old seriously; they saw in it a vital link to the past and a living bridge to a more sustainable future. Their hearts ached at the destruction of the deep past, so they dragged their feet, took risks, and resisted the new-fangled forces of the Great Acceleration. Out of so much modernization and cultural disintegration, I argue, a peculiar kind of primitivism was born. Drawing upon a vast array of primary and secondary sources, Adventures in the Archaic focuses on the points where primitivism and degrowth imperatives intersect. The book asks us to look at primitivism anew, to see it not as a dangerous dead end but as a solid stepping-stone off our current course of unabated growth.