Curated playlist
Philosophers of economics
- Thomas AquinasItalian Dominican theologian and philosopher (1225–1274)
- Jean-Jacques RousseauJean-Jacques Rousseau came into the world barely breathing. "I was born almost dying, they had little hope of saving me," he later wrote of his arrival in the Republic of Geneva on the 28th of June 1712. Nine days later his mother was dead…
- Karl MarxOn the 14th of March 1883, at a quarter to three in the afternoon, Friedrich Engels left Karl Marx alone in his armchair for scarcely two minutes. When he returned, he found his lifelong friend peacefully gone to sleep, but forever. The…
- 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…
- Adam SmithAdam Smith took Charles Townshend on a tour of a tanning factory, and while discussing free trade, he walked straight into a huge tanning pit. Others had to help him climb back out. This was a man who once put bread and butter into a…
- 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,…
- John Stuart MillJohn Stuart Mill was reading Greek at the age of three. By eight he had worked through Aesop's Fables, Xenophon's Anabasis, the whole of Herodotus, and six dialogues of Plato. This was not an accident. His father, James Mill, set out with…
- Friedrich EngelsFriedrich Engels was born on the 28th of November 1820 in Barmen, a Prussian industrial town his contemporaries called the "German Manchester". He would spend his adult life moving between factory offices, revolutionary barricades,…
- Max WeberMax Weber died on the 14th of June 1920 in Munich, of pneumonia, almost certainly contracted during the post-war Spanish flu pandemic. He was fifty-six years old, and he had not finished his book. The manuscript that became Economy and…
- Mikhail BakuninMikhail Bakunin spent three years chained in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg, alone in a cell, with no certainty he would ever leave alive. He had already been sentenced to death. He had already been extradited once and tried…
- Ibn KhaldunIn the year 1400, an elderly scholar was lowered by ropes over the wall of a besieged city to meet the man who had surrounded it. The city was Damascus. The conqueror was Timur, the Mongol leader who had founded the Timurid Empire. The…
- Alexander HerzenAlexander Herzen was born in Moscow in 1812, just weeks before Napoleon's armies marched into the city. His very name was invented by his father, a rich Russian landowner named Ivan Yakovlev, who derived it from the German word Herz,…