Curated playlist
Theorists on Western civilization
- VoltaireFrench writer, historian, and philosopher (1694–1778)
- George OrwellGeorge Orwell did not exist on any birth certificate. The man behind the name was Eric Arthur Blair, born on the 25th of June 1903 in Motihari, in the Bengal Presidency of British India. He chose his pen name late, in a letter to his agent…
- Johann Wolfgang von GoetheOn the 13th of October 1806, Napoleon's army poured into Weimar, and the least disciplined of the French soldiers, the so-called spoon guards, broke into the home of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. They drank his wine, made a great uproar, and…
- 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…
- Martin HeideggerMartin Heidegger was born on the 26th of September 1889 in rural Meßkirch, Baden, the son of a village church sexton. He died in his sleep in Freiburg on the 26th of May 1976, and was buried two days later in his birthplace, beside his…
- Victor HugoVictor Hugo died on the 22nd of May 1885, at 50 Avenue Victor Hugo in Paris. He was 83 years old, and he died of pneumonia. More than two million people joined his funeral procession from the Arc de Triomphe to the Panthéon, the largest…
- 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…
- 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…
- Jean-Luc GodardJean-Luc Godard once said: "A film consists of a beginning, a middle and an end, though not necessarily in that order." That line, delivered with the offhand certainty of someone who had spent decades dismantling the very idea of…
- 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,…
- Claude Lévi-StraussClaude Lévi-Strauss died on the 30th of October 2009, at the age of 100, and for four days the world did not know. When French President Nicolas Sarkozy finally spoke, he called Lévi-Strauss "one of the greatest ethnologists of all time."…
- 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…
- Yuval Noah HarariYuval Noah Harari taught himself to read at age three. That detail alone tells you something about the man who would go on to write one of the best-selling history books of the twenty-first century. Born in 1976 and raised in Haifa, he was…
- David AttenboroughDavid Attenborough turned 100 years old on the 8th of May 2026, and the Royal Albert Hall filled with singers, filmmakers, composers, and royalty to mark the occasion. King Charles III sent a birthday card. William, Prince of Wales,…
- Edward GibbonIt was on the night of the 27th of June 1787, between eleven and midnight, that Edward Gibbon wrote the last lines of his life's great work in a summer-house in his garden. He felt joy at recovering his freedom. Then a sober melancholy…
- Victor Davis HansonVictor Davis Hanson grew up on a farm outside Selma, California, in the San Joaquin Valley, on land his family had worked since the 1870s. That is not a minor biographical footnote. It is the thread that runs through almost everything he…
- Michel WeberMichel Weber, born in 1963, arrived at philosophy by way of applied economics. He began at Saint-Louis University in Brussels, earning a degree in commercial engineering in 1986, before crossing the city's intellectual landscape to the…