Curated playlist
American political philosophers
- Kurt VonnegutKurt Vonnegut survived the firebombing of Dresden by hiding in a meat locker three stories underground, surrounded by hanging cadavers. "It was cool there," he said. "When we came up the city was gone... They burnt the whole damn town…
- Thomas JeffersonThomas Jefferson died on the 4th of July, 1826 , the same day as John Adams, on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Adams's last words, spoken without knowing Jefferson had already died a few hours earlier, were:…
- Ezra PoundEzra Weston Loomis Pound was born on the 30th of October 1885 in a two-story clapboard house in Hailey in the Idaho Territory. He would go on to become one of the defining voices in modernist literature, a tireless champion of writers like…
- Philip K. DickPhilip K. Dick died on the 2nd of March 1982, in a Santa Ana hospital, having never seen the film that would make his name famous. Blade Runner opened four months later. His daughter had to bury his ashes next to the grave of his twin…
- Noam ChomskyNoam Chomsky wrote his first article at the age of 10, absorbed by the fall of Barcelona and the destruction of the Spanish anarchosyndicalist movement. That detail carries a kind of compressed prophecy: here was a child in Philadelphia,…
- Milton FriedmanMilton Friedman died on the 16th of November 2006, and his last column ran in The Wall Street Journal the very next day. He was still a working economist at 94. That detail alone tells you something about the man. Born in Brooklyn on the…
- Ludwig von MisesLudwig von Mises was born on the 29th of September 1881 in Lemberg, then the capital of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria inside the Austro-Hungarian Empire. By the time he died on the 10th of October 1973, he had outlasted two world…
- W. E. B. Du BoisW. E. B. Du Bois died on the 27th of August 1963 in Accra, Ghana, at the age of 95. The very next day, hundreds of thousands of Americans gathered in Washington for the March on Washington. The man who had spent nearly a century fighting…
- James M. BuchananJames McGill Buchanan Jr. was born on the 3rd of October 1919 in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, in a farmhouse with no indoor plumbing and no electricity. The family had borrowed heavily to mechanize their farm, then lost nearly everything in…
- B. F. SkinnerB. F. Skinner died on the 18th of August 1990 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just ten days after receiving a lifetime achievement award from the American Psychological Association and delivering what amounted to a final lecture on his life's…
- George F. KennanGeorge Frost Kennan sent a telegram from Moscow on the 22nd of February, 1946, that would reshape American foreign policy for the rest of the twentieth century. It ran to 5,363 words. The Treasury Department had asked the State Department…
- Cornel WestCornel Ronald West was born on the 2nd of June 1953 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the same city where his grandfather Clifton L. West, Sr. served as pastor of the Tulsa Metropolitan Baptist Church. By the time West was a teenager in Sacramento,…
- Graham E. FullerGraham E. Fuller spent 27 years inside the American intelligence and diplomatic apparatus, rising to vice-chairman of the National Intelligence Council before his name became attached to one of the most controversial foreign-policy…
- James BurnhamJames Burnham was born in Chicago on the 22nd of November 1905, the son of an English railroad executive, and he died on the 28th of July 1987 in Kent, Connecticut, having spent the intervening decades confounding nearly every political…