Napoleon Won

Napoleon Won

Napoleon built the institutions of the modern state—especially the military. This was best analyzed by Napoleon's enemy Clausewitz, who studied war on the opposite side of the battlefield. Napoleon's armies were defeated, but his system and his spirit are still with us.

Ideology Is Conspicuous Consumption

Thorstein Veblen tells us how elites display their superiority by showing off their cultivated taste and skill, which in turn displays their economic power, and ultimately their capacity for violence. Veblen was very upset by this. But you don’t have to be. 0:00 - Intro 4:40 - The structural purpose of leisure 14:05 - The macroeconomics of respectability: Conspicuous leisure and vicarious leisure 21:38 - What are the naturally honorable leisure activities? 27:16 - How today’s leisure class was created 36:30 - The new counterculture’s opportunity 40:48 - Downward social mobility and the spurious leisure class 42:50 - The inevitability of hierarchy and the failure of egalitarian experiments 50:06 - How do we channel conspicuous leisure to prosocial purposes again?

Your Life is a Hypothesis

The Earth has become small -- and the Last Man lives the longest.In 1885, Nietzsche foresaw mankind's transformation into a being who cares only for safety and contentment -- the final step before he gives up his higher nature. Jonathan Wallis joins Wolf Tivy to help us understand the Last Man.0:00 — Intro0:32 — The greatest threat is not disorder but the Last Man3:39 — Radical potential is always recuperated, domesticated, defanged16:46 — Cults reenact the logic of modernity23:45 — You have to live the hypothesis37:20 — Civilization is the ability to pass the crown51:34 — There is no soul-atom; you are an intersection of forces

Machiavelli's Virtue

Machiavelli saw that Christianity had made Italy weak, servile, and prey to criminal men. His answer: ground politics in "what is", not imagined republics — and dare great men to act on it. The consequences founded the modern world. Duncan Umphrey joins us to discuss the Machiavelli's virtue.

The Machine Gun Killed Democracy

Ben Landau-Taylor discusses Carroll Quigley's thesis on how weapons systems shape political order—how military technology determines whether a society ends up democratic, authoritarian, or something else entirely.