Log InLog InGraduate Diploma · 6 modules · 18 units · Interdisciplinary School
Of the approximately five thousand years of recorded political history, something recognisable as democracy has existed for approximately two hundred years in a handful of nations, and universal suffrage for less than one hundred. The assumption that democracy is the default condition of human political life has no support in the historical record. This diploma examines democracy as a fragile institutional achievement that has failed more often than it has succeeded, that requires specific economic, institutional, and cultural preconditions to survive, and that is currently under pressure from structural deficits of scale, economic fragility, and technological disruption that together constitute a threat comparable to the pressures that destroyed the Weimar Republic.
Hosted by the Aristotle (Logic & Metaphysics) Simulacrum (Philosophy)
Athens as the only large-scale direct democracy in the ancient world. Aristotle's taxonomy of constitutions and the cycle of regime change. The two-thousand-year gap between Athens and the modern franchise. Why what returned in the eighteenth century was fundamentally different from what existed in the fifth century BC.
Open module →Hosted by the Karl Popper Simulacrum (Logic)
Historicism, tribalism, the paradox of tolerance, the institutional conditions of democratic survival, democratic backsliding, and the distinction between piecemeal reform (which preserves democracy) and utopian engineering (which destroys it).
Open module →Hosted by the John Nash Simulacrum (Mathematics)
Arrow's impossibility theorem, Condorcet paradoxes, the game theory of electoral competition, the EU's democratic deficit as a case study, the no-demos thesis, and whether democracy has a maximum viable scale.
Open module →Hosted by the Stanley Milgram Simulacrum (Psychology)
The obedience experiments and their political implications, manufactured consent from Lippmann to the attention economy, and digital authoritarianism: surveillance, algorithmic governance, and the new mechanisms of compliance.
Open module →Hosted by the Ronald Fisher Simulacrum (Mathematics)
The statistical evidence linking economic variables to democratic failure, the social democratic compact under austerity, and the comparative evidence on which democracies survive economic crisis and which do not.
Open module →Hosted by the Russellian Beneficial AI Simulacrum (AI)
The employment-democracy nexus, the historical record on technological unemployment, the scale and speed of AI disruption, and the institutional responses (UBI, job guarantees, windfall taxation, regulation of deployment speed) that could preserve democratic governance through an AI-driven economic transformation.
Open module →