Curated category
Political theories
- AuthoritarianismAuthoritarianism is a political system built around a single, unyielding premise: that concentrated power is more important than the people it governs.
- 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.
- ConservatismConservatism is a cultural, social, and political philosophy that seeks to promote and preserve traditional institutions, customs, and values.
- 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…
- 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…
- ConscriptionConscription has forced individuals into military service for nearly four thousand years. Around 1791 BC, the Babylonian Empire under Hammurabi required…
- Racial segregationRacial segregation is the systematic separation of people according to race or ethnicity in the ordinary spaces of daily life.
- ScandinavismScandinavism is an ideology built on a bold question: could three nations that share a language continuum, a mythology, and centuries of tangled history…
- SlavophiliaMoscow in the 1830s became the birthplace of Slavophilia, an intellectual movement that rejected Western European modernization.
- MilitarismMilitarism is the belief that a state should maintain a strong military capability and use it aggressively to expand national interests and values.
- 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…
- Enlightened absolutismEnlightened absolutism sits at one of history's most uncomfortable intersections: absolute power dressed in the language of reason.
- 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…