Curated playlist

American political philosophers

Kurt VonnegutKurt Vonnegut survived the bombing of Dresden by hiding in an underground meat locker.
Thomas JeffersonThomas Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
Alexander HamiltonAlexander Hamilton was still a teenager in 1771 when the owner of Beekman and Cruger, an import-export firm on the island of Saint Croix, sailed away and left him running the place for five months. The young man had been born out of…
Ezra PoundEzra Pound cut T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land by about half. Eliot called the edits proof of Pound's critical genius.
Philip K. DickPhilip K. Dick died four months before Blade Runner opened. He never saw the film that made his name famous.
Noam ChomskyNoam Chomsky wrote his first article at age 10, about the fall of Barcelona.
Benjamin FranklinIn 1728, a 22-year-old printer named Benjamin Franklin sat down and wrote his own epitaph. He pictured his body as the cover of an old book, its contents torn out and its lettering and gilding stripped away. It would lie in the earth as…
Ralph Waldo EmersonRalph Waldo Emerson put a plain question to Henry David Thoreau in the fall of 1837. "Do you keep a journal?" he asked. The question became a lifelong inspiration for Thoreau. Emerson had his own answer to it. His journal was eventually…
Ayn RandWhen Ayn Rand died in New York City on the 6th of March 1982, her funeral included a six-foot floral arrangement shaped like a dollar sign. The tribute suited a woman who had turned self-interest into a moral code. She was born Alisa…
Milton FriedmanMilton Friedman argued the Federal Reserve let the money supply shrink by one-third between 1929 and 1933.
Ludwig von MisesNazi troops raided Ludwig von Mises's Vienna apartment and took his papers. He was already in Geneva.
W. E. B. Du BoisW. E. B. Du Bois died in Ghana the day before the March on Washington. He was 95 and had renounced his U.S. citizenship.
James M. BuchananEconomist James M. Buchanan argued that politicians act from self-interest like everyone else.
Hannah ArendtHannah Arendt's name is printed on journals, schools, scholarly prizes, humanitarian prizes, think-tanks and street signs. It also appears on stamps and monuments. She was born Johanna Arendt, and she grew into one of the most influential…
B. F. SkinnerB. F. Skinner proposed steering missiles with pigeons. The birds pecked at a screen showing the target.
George F. KennanGeorge Kennan spent decades disowning the Cold War policy he made famous. Containment, he said, was not military.
Robert ReichRobert Reich stands 4 feet 11 inches tall, and he has spent his working life arguing with people who hold far more power than he does. Born on the 24th of June 1946, he became an American lawyer, professor, author and political…
John RawlsJohn Rawls, an American philosopher, wrote a book of roughly 600 pages that protesters held up in front of government officials at Tiananmen Square in 1989. It was a dense academic treatise called A Theory of Justice. More than 300,000…
Cornel WestYale punished Cornel West for a protest arrest by canceling his 1987 spring leave. He then commuted to Paris to teach.
Graham E. FullerA 1985 CIA study by Graham E. Fuller was later cited in the Iran-Contra affair.
James BurnhamJames Burnham's 1941 book The Managerial Revolution helped inspire Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.
John DeweyJohn Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont, and over his lifetime he published more than 700 articles in 140 journals and roughly 40 books. In 1888, while still at the University of Michigan, he wrote a line that would organize all that…