Curated playlist
Political theories
- AuthoritarianismAuthoritarianism is a political system built around a single, unyielding premise: that concentrated power is more important than the people it governs. Political scientist Juan Linz spent years trying to pin down what makes these regimes…
- TotalitarianismTotalitarianism is a word that began as an insult, became a battle cry, and ended up contested by the very scholars who once wielded it most confidently. When Benito Mussolini declared "Everything within the state, nothing outside the…
- ConservatismConservatism is a cultural, social, and political philosophy that seeks to promote and preserve traditional institutions, customs, and values. In 1818, during the Bourbon Restoration in France, François-René de Chateaubriand gave the term…
- Absolute monarchyAbsolute monarchy is a form of government in which a single ruler holds political power with no constitutions, legislatures, or other checks standing in the way. For most of recorded history, this was not the exception but the rule. Kings…
- ImperialismImperialism is the maintaining and extending of power over foreign nations, and its name traces back to a single Latin word, imperium, meaning to command, to be sovereign, or to rule. The word was coined in the 19th century to describe…
- ConscriptionConscription has forced individuals into military service for nearly four thousand years. Around 1791 BC, the Babylonian Empire under Hammurabi required eligible subjects to serve in the royal army during wartime and provide state labor…
- Racial segregationRacial segregation is the systematic separation of people according to race or ethnicity in the ordinary spaces of daily life. It touches eating, drinking, schooling, worship, travel, shopping, and where a person can legally make a home.…
- ScandinavismScandinavism is an ideology built on a bold question: could three nations that share a language continuum, a mythology, and centuries of tangled history become something more unified? The movement that asked this question was born in the…
- SlavophiliaSome of the men who founded Slavophilia changed what they wore to make a point. They adopted pre-Petrine dress, the traditional robes of a Russia that had existed before Peter the Great remade the empire on Western lines. This was not…
- MilitarismMilitarism is the belief that a state should maintain a strong military capability and use it aggressively to expand national interests and values. At its most extreme, it tips into something more: the glorification of soldiers, the…
- RevanchismRevanchism takes its name from the French word for revenge. Born in the wreckage of the Franco-Prussian War in the 1870s, it describes something older and more persistent than any single defeat: the political conviction that lost territory…
- Enlightened absolutismEnlightened absolutism sits at one of history's most uncomfortable intersections: absolute power dressed in the language of reason. In the 18th century, across courts from Berlin to St. Petersburg to Madrid, monarchs began citing the…
- Domino theoryIn 1945, the Soviet Union brought most of the countries of eastern Europe and Central Europe into its influence as part of the post-World War II new settlement. This shift prompted Winston Churchill to declare in a speech at Westminster…