Edmund and Benjamin dig into Roman history, focusing on shifts in the legitimation stories as the republic becomes an empire. They discuss the evolution of the Platonic academy in the Roman period and spend some time with Stoicism.

https://www.patreon.com/politicaltheory101

Edmund and Benjamin explore rhetoric, drawing on a variety of Greek thinkers. The Greek theorists' attitudes to rhetoric stem from their attitudes to knowledge. Is the crowd wise? Can rhetoric share wisdom with the crowd? Or is rhetoric where wisdom comes to die?

https://www.patreon.com/politicaltheory101

Edmund and Benjamin compare and contrast Edmund Burke and Frantz Fanon. Both theorists were critical of commercial society, but adopted very different strategies for opposing it based on entirely different theories of change.

Edmund and Benjamin return from the winter vac to talk about what happens when markets are depoliticised.

Edmund and Benjamin discuss the many different origin stories of inequality, drawing on Catharine MacKinnon and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Edmund on power:

https://edmundjwilson.com/2019/11/01/on-power-tech-the-state-and-class/

Benjamin on Yang:

https://benjaminstudebaker.com/2019/08/14/andrew-yang-is-playing-hide-and-seek-with-the-left-press/

Raeffe Gibson joins Benjamin and Edmund to discuss the idea that states need to be unified around common values.

Edmund and Benjamin discuss the role of charismatic leaders in politics in the Roman Empire, interwar Germany, and more recently.

Benjamin and Edmund discuss the ancient zero-sum conception of liberty, attempts by later political theorists to universalise it, and some of the ways understandings of liberty have changed to accommodate that.

Draws most heavily on Aristotle's "Politics" and Constant's "The Liberty of the Ancients Compared With That of the Moderns" and "Adolphe".

Benjamin and Edmund discuss why both Hobbes and Plato think the state is necessary, comparing and contrasting the two along the way.

Benjamin Studebaker and Edmund Wilson welcome you to a new series about the history of political thought and some of the people who have contributed to it.