Power, resistance, liberation, and the question of how people should live together — from nonviolent revolution to anarchist theory, from the Oval Office to the commune.
The Political Science Department is the Universitas Scholarium’s faculty of power, order, and resistance — the study of how people are governed and how they might govern themselves. Its scope holds political theory, international relations, comparative institutions, and the traditions of civil resistance and liberation. The faculty are arranged by these wings. The political-theory wing reaches across the canon of thought about the state, authority, and freedom, including a substantial body of anti-authoritarian and anarchist thinkers — from Max Stirner to the contemporary theorists of autonomy. The international-relations and strategic-theory wing studies war, diplomacy, and the order among states; the comparative wing examines how institutions differ across societies; and the wing on civil resistance and transformation holds the theorists and practitioners of nonviolent change. Each is an AI simulacrum that reasons in its progenitor’s political tradition, and the department is built to hold genuinely opposed views in productive tension.
Politics practised rather than theorised — the campaign, the negotiation, the prison term and the plane crash. Nine of these fourteen hold a Nobel Peace Prize, and the subsection is the closest thing the academy has to a history of how a conflict is actually ended.
Nonviolent Resistance · Indigenous Strategy · Climate
The Māori settlement of Parihaka practised nonviolent resistance to colonial land confiscation decades before Gandhi. When armed colonial troops arrived in 1881, the people of Parihaka met them with singing children and offerings of food. The settlement was destroyed. The principle survived.
Can help you study: Indigenous resistance, nonviolent strategy before Gandhi, colonial land politics, and the relationship between environmental and political sovereignty.
→ Converse with Parihaka Climate Voices
Nonviolence · Satyagraha · Civil Resistance
Satyagraha — truth-force, soul-force — as a method of political resistance that transforms both the oppressed and the oppressor. Gandhi developed nonviolent civil disobedience from a personal ethic into a mass political technology, first in South Africa and then in the Indian independence movement. The method requires more courage than violence, not less.
Can help you study: Nonviolent resistance, civil disobedience, the ethics of political action, Indian independence, and the relationship between personal discipline and political transformation.
→ Converse with Mohandas Gandhi
Presidential Leadership · Military-Industrial Complex · Cold War
Supreme Commander of Allied forces in Europe, then thirty-fourth President. Eisenhower’s farewell address warning about the military-industrial complex remains the most prescient statement any American president has made about the structural dangers of permanent war readiness. A soldier who understood the politics of war better than most politicians.
Can help you study: Cold War strategy, presidential leadership, civil-military relations, the military-industrial complex, and the politics of alliance management.
→ Converse with Dwight D. Eisenhower
Liberation · Reconciliation · Democratic Transition
Twenty-seven years in prison, then the presidency of a democratic South Africa. Mandela’s genius was not the struggle — many struggled — but the transition: the decision that reconciliation was more important than retribution, that the new South Africa had to include everyone who was willing to live in it. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was the institutional form of that decision.
Can help you study: Democratic transition, reconciliation, political imprisonment, liberation movements, and the architecture of post-conflict societies.
→ Converse with Nelson Mandela
Civil Rights · Nonviolent Resistance · Moral Leadership
The moral leader of the American civil rights movement. King synthesised Gandhi’s nonviolent method with the prophetic tradition of the Black church and the natural law tradition of Western philosophy. The Montgomery bus boycott, the Birmingham campaign, the March on Washington — each was a precisely designed confrontation between injustice and conscience.
Can help you study: Civil rights history, nonviolent resistance, moral leadership, the relationship between law and justice, and political rhetoric.
→ Converse with Martin Luther King Jr
Reverence for Life · Philosophy of civilisation · Tropical medicine
Ethics is nothing other than reverence for life: a man is ethical only when life as such is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as that of his fellow men. He arrived at it from four directions at once — theology and the quest for the historical Jesus, philosophy of civilisation, the Bach interpretation, and tropical medicine at Lambaréné — and treated the convergence as the point. His own statement of method is the shortest available: he made his life his argument.
Can help you study: Reverence for life as an ethical first principle, and the objections to it. The historical Jesus and eschatology in early twentieth-century theology. Bach as an interpreter’s problem. Integrating thought and action rather than alternating between them. And the hard case — an ethic that will not rank one life above another still has to act.
→ Converse with Albert Schweitzer Simulacrum
Nuclear physics · Human rights · Intellectual freedom · Dissent
I am not a professional politician, and maybe that is why I am always tormented by questions of expediency and of the final result of my actions — only moral criteria combined with an impartiality of thought can serve as a compass. He built thermonuclear weapons at Arzamas-16 for eighteen years and then turned the same reasoning on the political questions, which is the whole of the topology: a physicist’s habits applied where they are least welcome. The 1975 prize was awarded while he was barred from collecting it, and internal exile in Gorky followed in 1980.
Can help you study: Applying the reasoning of one discipline to the moral questions of another, and where that transfers badly. Nuclear weapons policy from someone who built them. Dissent under a state that can reach you. And the specific difficulty he named — judging an action by its final result when the result is not knowable.
→ Converse with Andrei Sakharov Simulacrum
Ostpolitik · Cold War Diplomacy · Acknowledging Reality
You cannot change a reality you refuse to acknowledge. Recognising the status quo is not accepting it — it is the necessary first step toward transforming it: Wandel durch Annäherung, change through rapprochement. That is Ostpolitik in one sentence, and the 1971 prize was given for it. The Kniefall at the Warsaw Ghetto memorial in 1970 was unscripted and belongs to the same logic: an acknowledgement made first, so that something else becomes possible afterwards.
Can help you study: Ostpolitik and the argument that recognition precedes change. Practical idealism — conceding a fact without conceding the principle. Negotiating with a state whose legitimacy you dispute. And the political use of an acknowledgement that costs the person making it.
→ Converse with Willy Brandt Simulacrum
Mediation · UN Peacekeeping · Armistice Negotiation
No problem of human relations is ever insoluble — but that is an axiom of method, not a prediction of outcome. You exhaust every honourable recourse; you do not assume success and you refuse to assume failure. He mediated the 1949 Armistice Agreements and took the 1950 Peace Prize for it, the first Black laureate, and the durable part of the work is structural rather than personal: peacekeeping as an institution, designed so that mediation does not depend on the mediator.
Can help you study: Mediation as a method with rules rather than a talent. Structural peacebuilding and the design of peacekeeping. Holding a negotiating position when neither side wants the outcome. And the distinction between an axiom that governs how you work and a claim about how things will turn out.
→ Converse with Ralph Bunche Simulacrum
Jane AddamsNobel Peace Prize, 1931
Settlement Practice · Social Ethics · Moral Substitutes for War
You do not abolish an evil by commanding men to cease from it. You abolish it by finding the activity vigorous enough to drain the impulse that fed it — and you can only find that activity by living among the people in whom it is already, obscurely, at work. Hull House was that method as a building: not charity delivered to a district but residence within it, and out of the residence came industrial legislation, juvenile courts, municipal reform and a democratic theory built from the bottom. The 1931 Peace Prize came sixteen years after the Woman’s Peace Party, and after a long period of public vilification for opposing the war.
Can help you study: The settlement method — why living among the people you would help changes what you can learn. Substituting an activity for a prohibition. Democracy as social rather than merely political. Industrial and immigration legislation drawn from case knowledge. And the cost of holding a pacifist position while a war is popular.
→ Converse with Jane Addams Simulacrum
War as Institution · Arbitration · The Novel as Instrument
Everything follows from one reclassification. War is not a law of history and not a fact of human nature: it is an institution — legally recognised, deliberately maintained, expensively equipped — and institutions are abolished. Duelling was abolished. Die Waffen nieder! (1889) put the argument in a novel because a novel reaches readers a pamphlet cannot, and she then spent twenty-five years building the machinery to match: journals, congresses, and the case for international arbitration. She was the first woman to take the Peace Prize, in 1905, and she had persuaded Nobel to create it.
Can help you study: Reclassifying a phenomenon as an institution rather than a condition, and what that licenses. The novel used as a political instrument, with its risks. International arbitration and the design of the institutions meant to replace war. And the long organisational work behind a prize that is usually remembered as a gesture.
→ Converse with Bertha von Suttner Simulacrum
Futility of Conquest · Collective Security · The Public Mind
Norman Angell is the only person to have received the Peace Prize for writing a book. The Great Illusion (1909, enlarged through 1913) sold over two million copies in twenty-five languages and argued that military conquest can no longer transfer wealth, because annexing a territory annexes the population who own it. He is almost universally remembered for a claim he never made — that war had become impossible — and he spent fifty years, beginning with the preface of October 1913, patiently distinguishing that prophecy from the audit he actually offered: that war is futile, even when completely victorious. He sat as a Labour member for Bradford North, was knighted in 1931, and delivered his Nobel lecture, Peace and the Public Mind, in Oslo in June 1935.
Can help you study: Can help you with: The political economy of conquest and empire, the case for and against collective security, how to state an opponent’s argument at full strength before answering it, public opinion as a cause of war, and what it is to hold a position for fifty years against the wrong refutation.
→ Converse with Norman Angell Simulacrum
Witness as Method · Humanitarian Law · Aid Societies in Peacetime · The Particular Against the Aggregate
Henry Dunant (1828–1910) was a Geneva businessman who arrived at Solferino on 24 June 1859 with a carriage and a white suit and no commission from anyone, and stopped. What he wrote three years later, Un Souvenir de Solférino, is not a memoir but an instrument. It descends deliberately from the order of battle — three hundred thousand men, a line ten miles long — to a single corporal named Mazuet with an address in Lyons, because Dunant had discovered on that field the exact mechanism by which suffering stops being visible, and wrote a book built to defeat it. Then, at the hinge of the book, he asks his reader’s own objection back at them and answers it with a proposal: aid societies in every country, permanent, trained in peacetime, recognised by commanding officers, and protected by a treaty signed before the next war begins. The Geneva Convention followed in 1864. He was bankrupt by 1867 and was found thirty years later in a home for old men at Heiden, and in 1901 he was given the first Nobel Peace Prize, divided with Frédéric Passy.
Can help you study: The origins of humanitarian law and the Geneva Convention; witness as a method rather than a genre; why the founding observation of the Red Cross was a logistics diagnosis and not a moral one; impartiality in medical care and how it actually propagates; how a book is engineered to produce an institution; and the objection printed in the front of his own book — that to make war survivable may be to make it easier to begin.
→ Converse with Henry Dunant
Public Opinion · Stereotypes · The Phantom Public · Manufacturing Consent
The man who named the problem of modern democracy: citizens cannot know the world directly. They act on “pictures in their heads” — stereotypes, which Lippmann named and analysed in Public Opinion (1922). The gap between the real environment and the pseudo-environment is where democracy fails, and where propaganda succeeds.
Can help you study: Media theory, propaganda, public opinion, the epistemology of democracy, stereotypes, and the structural limits of democratic citizenship.
→ Converse with Walter Lippmann
Political Theory
The foundational thinkers of political philosophy — sovereignty, justice, power, and the social contract.
The Prince · Discourses · Virtù · Fortuna · Republican Realism
Not the caricature. Machiavelli wrote The Prince as a handbook for new rulers in unstable states, but his deeper commitment was to the republic — the Discourses on Livy is the longer, more considered work. The question is not whether to use power but whether to use it well, and what “well” means when the stakes are the survival of a political community.
Can help you study: Political realism, republican theory, the uses of power, statecraft, the relationship between morality and political necessity.
→ Converse with Machiavelli
The Social Contract · General Will · Sovereignty · Natural Freedom
Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. Rousseau’s Social Contract asked how political authority could be legitimate — how obedience to law could be compatible with freedom. His answer: the general will, the common interest that emerges when citizens deliberate as a body rather than as a collection of private interests.
Can help you study: Social contract theory, popular sovereignty, the general will, democratic legitimacy, inequality, and the tension between individual freedom and collective authority.
→ Converse with Rousseau
Reflections on the Revolution · Prescription · Organic Society · Reform Not Revolution
The founder of modern conservatism. Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) argued that abstract reason imposed on a living society destroys more than it creates. Change must come from within the tradition. Prejudice — the inherited wisdom of generations — is not ignorance but knowledge that has forgotten its reasons.
Can help you study: Conservative political thought, the critique of revolution, tradition and reform, organic society, and the limits of rationalist politics.
→ Converse with Burke
Class Struggle · State Theory · Political Revolution · Dictatorship of the Proletariat
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Marx’s political theory holds that the state is not a neutral arbiter but the executive committee of the ruling class, and that genuine emancipation requires not reform but the transformation of the economic base on which political structures rest.
Can help you study: Class analysis, state theory, revolution, ideology, the relationship between economic structure and political power, and the critique of liberal democracy.
→ Converse with Marx
Political Action · The Human Condition · Totalitarianism · The Banality of Evil
The thinker who made sense of totalitarianism without reducing it to madness or evil. Arendt showed that the most dangerous political condition is not tyranny but the destruction of the capacity for political action itself — the reduction of citizens to isolated, superfluous individuals incapable of acting together. The banality of evil: Eichmann was not a monster but a bureaucrat who stopped thinking.
Can help you study: Totalitarianism, political action, the public realm, the banality of evil, revolution, authority, and the relationship between thinking and moral responsibility.
→ Converse with Hannah Arendt
Decolonization · Violence and Liberation · Black Skin White Masks · Colonial Psychopathology
Psychiatrist, revolutionary, theorist of decolonization. Fanon argued that colonialism is not merely an economic or political system but a comprehensive psychopathology that deforms both coloniser and colonised. The Wretched of the Earth holds that decolonization is always violent because the colonial system is violence — the question is not whether to use force but how to emerge from it as a new humanity.
Can help you study: Decolonization, revolutionary theory, the psychology of oppression, race and identity, and the relationship between violence and liberation.
→ Converse with Frantz Fanon
The Great Transformation · Double Movement · Embeddedness · Fictitious Commodities
Polanyi showed that the self-regulating market is not a natural phenomenon but a deliberate political construction — and one that, left unchecked, destroys the social fabric it depends on. The “double movement”: society protects itself against the market through counter-movements (labour law, welfare, regulation), which the market then attacks as interference.
Can help you study: Economic history, the politics of markets, embeddedness, fictitious commodities, the welfare state, and the relationship between economy and society.
→ Converse with Karl Polanyi
Agonistic Democracy · The Political vs Politics · Hegemony · Radical Democracy
Based on the published writings of Chantal Mouffe. Agonistic pluralism: the aim of democratic politics is not consensus but the transformation of antagonism (enemy vs enemy) into agonism (adversary vs adversary). Conflict is not a threat to democracy but its condition. The fantasy of a politics without conflict produces not peace but depoliticisation — and depoliticisation produces populism.
Can help you study: Democratic theory, the critique of liberal consensus, hegemony, radical democracy, populism, and the relationship between conflict and political order.
→ Converse with Mouffean Agonistic Pluralism
Capability Approach · Development as Freedom · Social Choice · Identity and Violence
Based on the published writings of Amartya Sen. Development is not GDP growth. Development is the expansion of real freedoms that people have reason to value — the capability to be nourished, to be educated, to participate in political life. Sen showed that famines are not caused by food shortages but by failures of entitlement: people starve because they lack the legal or economic means to acquire food that exists.
Can help you study: The capability approach, development economics, social choice theory, famines, identity, and the measurement of human wellbeing.
→ Converse with Senian Capabilities
A Theory of Justice · The Veil of Ignorance · The Difference Principle · Public Reason
The most important political philosopher of the twentieth century. Rawls asked: what principles of justice would rational people choose if they did not know what position they would occupy in society? Behind this “veil of ignorance,” they would choose equal basic liberties and arrange inequalities so that they benefit the least advantaged members of society.
Can help you study: Justice, the social contract, distributive justice, the veil of ignorance, public reason, political liberalism, and the foundations of democratic society.
→ Converse with Rawls
Situationist International · Revolution of Everyday Life · Radical Subjectivity · Anti-Work
A simulacrum abstracted from a published body of situationist writing. Its single operation is the reversal of perspective: the world is upside-down, with life transformed into work, desire channelled into consumption and creativity captured as labour — and you reverse it by returning to pleasure the energies that work and constraint have taken. It is the everyday-life half of situationism, set beside Debord’s analysis of the spectacle, and it is written as an incitement rather than a treatise.
Can help you study: The revolution of everyday life and the reversal of perspective. Situationism and its two halves. Pleasure treated as a political category rather than a private one. And the question the position invites — whether a critique addressed to daily conduct can reach the structures it blames.
→ Converse with Vaneigemian Situationist Simulacrum
Abolition of Work · Post-Left Anarchism · Ludic Revolution · Anti-Compulsory Production
A simulacrum abstracted from a published body of anti-work writing, and it means the thesis literally: no one should ever work. Not stop doing things — stop compulsory production, on the argument that work is the source of nearly all misery and that a world designed around it will keep producing that misery whatever else is reformed. The alternative offered is ludic: activity chosen, playful and unpaid, which is why the position is an abolition rather than a demand for better conditions.
Can help you study: The abolition of work as an argument rather than a slogan. Compulsion distinguished from activity. Play as the proposed replacement for labour, and what that would require. And the standard objections — who does the necessary work, and whether necessity is as large as it looks.
→ Converse with Blackian Ludic Abolition Simulacrum
International Relations & Strategic Theory
War, peace, power, and the structure of the international system.
On War · Friction · The Fog of War · War as Continuation of Policy
War is the continuation of policy by other means — but war has its own grammar. Clausewitz’s On War remains the foundational text of strategic theory because it refuses to simplify: war is shaped by the trinity of violence and passion (the people), chance and probability (the commander), and rational calculation (the government). Friction — the gap between plan and execution — is not an accident but a structural feature.
Can help you study: Strategic theory, the nature of war, friction, the fog of war, civil-military relations, and the relationship between war and politics.
→ Converse with Clausewitz
The Strategy of Conflict · Focal Points · Credible Commitment · Nuclear Deterrence
Most conflict situations are bargaining situations. Schelling showed that strategic interaction is not about brute force but about communication, commitment, and the manipulation of expectations. The ability to burn your bridges — to make a credible commitment — is a source of power, not weakness. His work on nuclear deterrence, focal points, and the strategy of conflict earned the Nobel Prize in Economics.
Can help you study: Game theory, deterrence, bargaining, focal points, credible commitment, arms control, and the strategy of conflict.
→ Converse with Thomas Schelling
Structural Realism · Anarchy · Balance of Power · Neorealism
In anarchy, there is no government above governments. States must rely on self-help. Waltz’s Theory of International Politics argued that the structure of the international system — not the intentions of leaders or the character of states — determines outcomes. The balance of power is not a policy but a systemic tendency.
Can help you study: International relations theory, structural realism, anarchy, the balance of power, and why international politics produces recurring patterns regardless of who is in charge.
→ Converse with Kenneth Waltz
The Clash of Civilizations · Political Order · Civil-Military Relations
The fundamental source of conflict in the new world will be cultural, not ideological or economic. Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” thesis remains controversial precisely because it captures something real about how identity shapes conflict — even if the civilizational boundaries he drew are contested. His earlier work on political order in changing societies is arguably more important and less debated.
Can help you study: Civilizational conflict, political order, modernisation, civil-military relations, democratic transitions, and American identity.
→ Converse with Samuel Huntington
After Hegemony · Liberal Institutionalism · International Regimes · Cooperation Under Anarchy · Reciprocity
A simulacrum abstracted from a published body of international-relations theory. It concedes the realist premise and denies the realist conclusion: the world is anarchic, and anarchy does not make cooperation impossible. States cooperate not because they are altruistic but because institutions lower the cost of it — providing information, reducing uncertainty, making defection visible and reputations expensive. The disagreement with realism is therefore about mechanism rather than about human nature.
Can help you study: Neoliberal institutionalism and its argument with structural realism. Regimes and international institutions as cost-reducers. Complex interdependence. And the question to press — what institutions do when the information they provide is precisely what a state wishes to conceal.
→ Converse with Keohanean Institutional Cooperation Simulacrum
Soft Power · Smart Power · Liberal International Order · The Future of Power · Interdependence
A simulacrum abstracted from the published work of a living scholar who has had no part in it. Power is getting others to do what they would not otherwise do; hard power does it by coercion and payment, and soft power by attraction — when others want what you want, because of what you are seen to be rather than what you can inflict. Smart power is the argument that neither alone is a strategy. The concept has been widely adopted and widely emptied, and the file is alert to that.
Can help you study: Soft power and smart power, stated precisely enough to be criticised. Attraction as a mechanism of influence and its limits. Complex interdependence. And the difficulty the concept creates for itself — how one would measure it, and what follows if one cannot.
→ Converse with Nyean Soft Power Simulacrum
Offensive Realism · Security Competition · Hegemony · The Tragedy of Great Power Politics
Based on the published writings of John Mearsheimer. Great powers are trapped in a security competition from which there is no escape. Because states can never be certain of each other’s intentions, rational great powers maximise their share of world power — the best guarantee of survival is hegemony. The tragedy: even status-quo powers are driven to offensive behaviour by the structure of the system.
Can help you study: Great power politics, security competition, offensive realism, NATO expansion, the rise of China, and structural theories of international conflict.
→ Converse with Mearsheimerian Offensive Realism
Social Theory of International Politics · Anarchy Is What States Make of It · Identity · Norms
Based on the published writings of Alexander Wendt. Anarchy is what states make of it. The international system has no fixed logic — its character depends on the shared ideas, norms, and identities that states construct through their interactions. Enemies can become friends, and friends can become enemies, because the social structure of international politics is made, not given.
Can help you study: Constructivism, the role of ideas in international politics, identity formation, norms, and why anarchy does not necessarily produce conflict.
→ Converse with Wendtian Constructivism
Comparative Politics & Institutions
Democracy, authoritarianism, institutional development, and the routes to political modernity.
Democracy in America · Tyranny of the Majority · Civil Society · Aristocratic Liberalism
A French aristocrat who travelled to America and understood its democracy better than the Americans did. Tocqueville saw that democracy’s greatest danger was not tyranny from above but conformism from within — the tyranny of the majority, the soft despotism of a state that manages every detail of citizens’ lives while leaving them technically free.
Can help you study: Democracy, the tyranny of the majority, civil society, voluntary associations, individualism, and the structural conditions of freedom.
→ Converse with Tocqueville
Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy · Agrarian Revolution · Routes to Modernity · No Bourgeoisie No Democracy
The political form a society takes depends on how it manages the transition from an agrarian to a modern economy, and the variable that decides it is what happens to the landed upper class — its relationship to the commercial bourgeoisie and to the peasantry. Three routes follow: bourgeois revolution to democracy, revolution from above to fascism, and peasant revolution to communism. It is comparative historical sociology with an argument in it, and its most quoted line is the one that concedes the cost: no bourgeois, no democracy.
Can help you study: The three routes to the modern world, and the class configurations behind them. Comparative historical method — what a small number of well-chosen cases can establish. Agrarian transition as the hinge of political development. And the objections from those who think the cases were chosen to fit.
→ Converse with Barrington Moore Simulacrum
Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes · Presidentialism vs Parliamentarism · Democratic Breakdown · Regime Types
Not all non-democracies are the same, and treating them as one category loses the thing worth knowing. Totalitarianism eliminates all autonomy — no private sphere, total ideology, total mobilisation. Authoritarianism permits limited pluralism: the church exists, business exists, the military exists, but political competition does not. From that typology comes the second body of work, on how democracies break down — and the argument that presidentialism is structurally more fragile than parliamentarism.
Can help you study: Regime typology and why the distinctions do analytic work. The breakdown of democratic regimes. The case against presidentialism. Semi-loyal oppositions and how a democracy is lost by its defenders as much as by its enemies.
→ Converse with Juan Linz Simulacrum
Why Nations Fail · Extractive vs Inclusive Institutions · The Narrow Corridor
Based on the published writings of Daron Acemoglu. Nations fail because their institutions are extractive — designed to concentrate power and wealth in the hands of a narrow elite. Nations succeed when their institutions are inclusive — when they distribute power broadly, protect property rights, and create incentives for innovation. Geography, culture, and ignorance are not the answer. Institutions are.
Can help you study: Why some countries are rich and others poor, institutional economics, the relationship between political and economic institutions, and the narrow corridor between state capacity and societal mobilisation.
→ Converse with Acemogluan Institutions
The End of History · Political Order and Decay · State Building · Identity
Based on the published writings of Francis Fukuyama. “The End of History” was not about the end of events but the end of the ideological contest: liberal democracy had no remaining systemic rival. His later work on political order examined why some states develop effective, accountable institutions and others decay into patrimonialism — a question that proved more durable than the triumphalism.
Can help you study: Political development, state building, political decay, identity politics, the end of history thesis, and the institutional foundations of liberal democracy.
→ Converse with Fukuyamian Political Order
Public Choice · Constitutional Economics · Rent-Seeking · Calculus of Consent · Nobel Economics 1986
Economics assumes people are self-interested in markets — so why assume they become public-spirited on entering politics? The politician is a self-interested agent, the bureaucrat is a self-interested agent, and so is the voter. Public choice is that assumption applied consistently, and constitutional economics is what follows from it: if you cannot change the incentives of the players, change the rules of the game, and choose those rules behind a veil where you do not know which player you will be.
Can help you study: Public choice theory and politics without romance. Constitutional economics — rules chosen at a different level from decisions. Rent-seeking and the logic of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs. And the criticism to weigh — whether the model explains politics or merely redescribes it.
→ Converse with James Buchanan Simulacrum
Polyarchy · Who Governs? · Pluralism · Democratic Theory
Who governs? Dahl asked this question of New Haven, Connecticut, and found that power was dispersed among competing groups rather than concentrated in a single elite. His concept of polyarchy — rule by many, as distinct from ideal democracy — remains the standard framework for analysing real democratic systems.
Can help you study: Democratic theory, pluralism, the distribution of power, polyarchy, and the gap between democratic ideals and democratic practice.
→ Converse with Robert Dahl
Governing the Commons · Polycentric Governance · CPR Management · Nobel Economics 2009
Hardin was wrong. The commons are not inevitably tragic. Ostrom spent decades documenting communities around the world that successfully governed shared resources — fisheries, forests, irrigation systems — without privatisation and without the state, using institutional arrangements that economists had not thought to look for. The first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics.
Can help you study: Commons governance, institutional analysis, polycentric governance, collective action, and why communities can solve problems that neither markets nor states can.
→ Converse with Elinor Ostrom
Electoral Systems · FPTP · PR · STV · Mixed Systems · Gerrymandering · Duverger's Law · District Magnitude
A constructed instrument rather than an extracted mind, built from the comparative literature on electoral systems. Its governing claim is that there is no perfect system: every one is a trade-off between proportionality, accountability, stability and simplicity, and improving any of them costs one of the others. What it does is name the trade-off a given design is making, usually before its advocates have noticed they were making it.
Can help you study: Comparing electoral systems by the trade-offs they accept rather than by which is best. Duverger’s law and its exceptions. Thresholds, district magnitude and the mechanics of proportionality. And designing a system for a specific political problem — which requires saying what the problem is first.
→ Converse with Electoral Engineering Practitioner Simulacrum
Patterns of Democracy · Consensus vs Majoritarian · Consociationalism · Power-Sharing · Electoral Systems
A simulacrum abstracted from a published body of comparative political theory. There are two models of democracy and the difference is not cosmetic. Majoritarian: the majority rules, the winner takes all, the opposition waits — Westminster. Consensus: power is shared, coalitions govern, minorities are included and veto points protect them — Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium. The consequence is that constitutional design is a choice about who is protected from whom, and it is made before anyone knows who will lose.
Can help you study: Majoritarian against consensus democracy, and the trade-offs each accepts. Consociationalism in deeply divided societies. Veto points and minority protection. And the empirical question — whether consensus systems actually govern better, and what better would mean.
→ Converse with Lijphartian Consensus Democracy Simulacrum
Anarchism & Radical Theory
Seventeen minds that agree on almost nothing except the target. Individualist egoism, insurrectionary anarchism, post-anarchism, the temporary autonomous zone and the abolition of work — and the internal quarrels here are sharper than the quarrel with the state.
Egoism · The Unique One · Critique of Ideology
The philosopher who out-radicalised everyone. Stirner’s The Ego and Its Own (1844) demolished every “fixed idea” — God, State, Humanity, Society, Morality — as a “spook” that the individual subordinates themselves to. What remains is the Unique One: not an essence but an emptiness that cannot be captured by any concept, including “anarchism.” Marx spent hundreds of pages trying to refute him. The refutation was unconvincing.
Can help you study: Egoism, the critique of ideology, the limits of political philosophy, and Stirner’s influence on anarchism, existentialism, and post-structuralism.
→ Converse with Max Stirner
Russian Individualist Anarchism · Mystical Anarchism · Ego
Russian individualist anarchist philosopher. Borovoy developed a synthesis of anarchism and philosophy of personality that was unique in the Russian context — neither Kropotkin’s collectivism nor Bakunin’s insurrectionism but a sustained meditation on the relationship between individual freedom and social life.
Can help you study: Russian anarchism, individualist anarchist philosophy, the concept of personality in political theory, and anarchist approaches to law.
→ Converse with Alexei Borovoy
Anarchist Fiction · Labour · Mystery · Adventure
The most mysterious novelist of the twentieth century — probably Ret Marut, a German anarchist who fled to Mexico. His novels — The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Death Ship, The Rebellion of the Hanged — are about labour, exploitation, and the violence of poverty. He refused all identification. The work is what matters, not the author. He appears in both the Literature and Politics departments because his fiction is inseparable from his politics.
Can help you study: Anarchist fiction, labour politics, the exploitation of workers, Mexican revolutionary history, anonymous authorship, and the argument that political fiction is most powerful when it does not announce itself as political.
→ Converse with B. Traven
Anarchist Education · Community · Compulsory Miseducation
Anarchist, educator, social critic, novelist, poet, psychotherapist. Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd (1960) argued that American society had made it impossible for young people to grow up with purpose or dignity. Compulsory Miseducation extended the attack to the school system itself. He wanted communities, not institutions.
Can help you study: Anarchist approaches to education, community organising, the critique of institutional schooling, and the relationship between social structure and human development.
→ Converse with Paul Goodman
Against Civilisation · Leviathan · Anarchist History
Czech-born American anarchist whose Against His-Story, Against Leviathan! (1983) reread the entire history of civilisation as the history of the state-machine — Leviathan — devouring the communities it feeds on. Perlman drew on anthropology, history, and personal experience of resistance to argue that civilisation itself, not just capitalism, is the enemy of free human life.
Can help you study: Anti-civilisation theory, the critique of progress, anarchist historiography, the Detroit printing co-op, and the argument that the state is an organism, not an institution.
→ Converse with Fredy Perlman
Temporary Autonomous Zones · Poetic Terrorism · Ontological Anarchism
Peter Lamborn Wilson, writing as Hakim Bey. TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone (1991) proposed that revolution in the traditional sense is impossible and unnecessary — what matters is the creation of temporary spaces where hierarchical control is absent and life is lived with intensity. The TAZ appears, flourishes, and vanishes before the state can crush it.
Can help you study: Temporary autonomous zones, ontological anarchism, pirate utopias, Sufism and anarchism, and the argument that the insurrection is already happening.
→ Converse with Hakim Bey
Egoist Anarchism · Individualism · Anti-Morality
Contemporary egoist anarchist writing under a pseudonym. Landstreicher translates and extends the individualist anarchist tradition of Stirner, Novatore, and the Italian insurrectionists. His writing in Willful Disobedience insists that anarchism must be grounded in the individual’s own desire for freedom, not in moral obligation or social duty.
Can help you study: Egoist anarchism, individualist anarchist theory, the critique of moralism in anarchism, and the tension between individual desire and collective struggle.
→ Converse with Wolfi Landstreicher
Anarcho-Primitivism · Wild Subjectivity · Anti-Civilisation
Pseudonymous writer associated with the anti-civilisation and green anarchist currents. Feral Faun’s essays — collected in Feral Revolution — argue for the recovery of wild subjectivity against the domestication imposed by civilisation. The writing is lyrical, confrontational, and deliberately positioned outside academic discourse.
Can help you study: Anti-civilisation theory, primitivism, wild subjectivity, the critique of domestication, and poetic approaches to anarchist thought.
→ Converse with Feral Faun
Stirnerite Egoism · Unique One · Post-Left Anarchy
Contemporary Stirnerite thinker who has developed and extended Max Stirner’s egoism into a systematic post-left anarchist position. Sir Einzige argues that anarchism must abandon its leftist attachments — to equality, to the working class, to moral obligation — and ground itself entirely in the Unique One’s ownness: the irreducible sovereignty of the individual over all abstractions.
Can help you study: Stirnerite egoism, post-left anarchism, the critique of leftism within anarchism, ownness, and the contemporary development of individualist anarchist theory.
→ Converse with Sir Einzige
Aragorn!20th–21st century
Green Anarchism · Anti-Civilisation · North American Anarchism
Publisher, editor, podcaster, and provocateur at the centre of North American post-left and anti-civilisation anarchism for two decades. Aragorn! ran Little Black Cart press and The Anarchist Library, hosted the Anarchy Radio podcast, and organised the annual BASTARD conference. He was the infrastructure of a milieu — the person who made sure the texts circulated and the conversations happened.
Can help you study: North American anarchism, anti-civilisation theory, anarchist publishing and infrastructure, and the social ecology of radical milieus.
→ Converse with Aragorn!
Individualist Anarchism · Liberty Journal · Mutual Banking · Equal Freedom · Stirner in America
Injustice does not come from markets: it comes from monopolies, and the state creates and enforces four of them — money, land, tariff and patent. Abolish those and competition does the rest. Mutual banking replaces the money monopoly, occupancy-and-use replaces the land monopoly, and what remains is a market without the privileges that made it predatory. He published Liberty for twenty-seven years, translated Proudhon and Stirner into the American argument, and lost his press and his library in a fire in 1908.
Can help you study: The four monopolies as a diagnostic of where economic power actually originates. Mutual banking and occupancy-and-use land tenure. Individualist anarchism distinguished from both socialism and laissez-faire. And the charge his critics pressed — that a consistent egoist would not have stopped where he did.
→ Converse with Benjamin Tucker Simulacrum
Egoist Feminism · The Freewoman · The Egoist · Lingual Psychology · Individual Sovereignty
A mind that moves through positions rather than settling into one: suffragette, then editor of The Freewoman and The Egoist — where Joyce, Eliot, Pound and Wyndham Lewis were published — then a public debate with Tucker, then past anarchism altogether into what she called archism, and finally into a mystical cosmology in the 1920s. She was institutionalised in 1935 and lived another twenty-five years. The trajectory is the topology: each position is abandoned at the point where holding it would require accepting an authority.
Can help you study: Egoism carried past anarchism into archism, and what that move claims. The Freewoman and The Egoist as editorial projects and what modernism owed them. The Tucker debate. And the harder question the life poses — whether a philosophy of restless refusal can be inhabited.
→ Converse with Dora Marsden Simulacrum
Stirner Biography · Individualist Anarchism · The Anarchists · Homosexual Emancipation
Without him Stirner would be a footnote. The operation is recovery: trace every document, interview every survivor, find the grave, find the portrait, and write the biography that makes a deliberately buried thinker exist again — which is what he did for Max Stirner in 1898, forty years after everyone had stopped reading him. He also wrote propaganda novels for individualist anarchism and, under a pseudonym, the earliest sustained defence of same-sex love as a matter of individual liberty.
Can help you study: Intellectual recovery as a method — how a forgotten thinker is actually brought back. The Stirner biography and what it established. Individualist anarchism in its German form. And the use of fiction to carry an argument that could not be published as argument.
→ Converse with John Henry Mackay Simulacrum
Anarcho-Futurism · Nihilist Anarchism · Toward the Creative Nothing · Iconoclasm · Individual Rebellion
Everything that exists is a lie — the state, the church, the family, morality, law, democracy, socialism, communism, and anarchism-as-programme, all of them prisons in different materials. What remains is the creative nothing: destruction that is not a means to a future order but the condition of an individual life lived now. He was an Italian illegalist, shot dead by carabinieri in 1922 at thirty-two, and the poetry and the politics are not separable in him.
Can help you study: Illegalism and individualist anarchism at their most uncompromising. The creative nothing as a positive rather than a nihilistic term. Why he rejects anarchism as a programme while remaining an anarchist. And the objection that follows — whether a position that refuses all organisation can do anything but end as his did.
→ Converse with Renzo Novatore Simulacrum
Conscious Egoism · Minus One Journal · Archism vs Anarchism · Post-Anarchist Egoism
The sharpest internal critic the tradition has: Tucker’s ideological blinkers, he argued, prevented him from seeing that the logic of conscious egoism bursts the straitjacket of anarchism. The evidence he pressed was biographical — Tucker held interest-bearing annuities, and the egoist in him saw no problem while the anarchist should have. Editing Minus One and Ego across four decades, he made egoism a position that could be held without any anarchist commitments at all.
Can help you study: Conscious egoism separated from anarchism, and why the separation follows. The critique of Tucker. Stirner read strictly rather than as a proto-anarchist. And the test he applies to any position — find where its holder’s conduct and its logic diverge.
→ Converse with S.E. Parker Simulacrum
Armed Joy · Insurrectionary Anarchism · Affinity Groups · Destructive Critique · Direct Action
A simulacrum abstracted from a published body of insurrectionary anarchist writing. Its argument is against organisation rather than against the state: syndicates, federations and parties all reproduce hierarchy and all postpone action, and their vocabulary is always the same — not yet, the conditions are not right, we need more members, we need a programme. Against that it sets the joy of the act itself, the small autonomous group, and the refusal to wait for a future that the waiting is designed to defer.
Can help you study: Insurrectionary anarchism and the critique of formal organisation. Affinity groups and informal structure. Why the argument is with other anarchists more than with the state. And the objection to answer — what an act accomplishes if it is not a means to anything.
→ Converse with Bonannian Insurrection Simulacrum
Post-Anarchism · Lacan and Anarchism · Post-Structuralist Politics · Voluntary Servitude · Power After Foucault
A simulacrum abstracted from a published body of post-anarchist theory. Its target is not the state but the ground the classical anarchists stood on: Kropotkin’s naturally good human nature, Bakunin’s naturally harmonious society, Proudhon’s natural order behind the state. Those essences, it argues, are exactly the kind of foundation post-structuralism dismantled — which leaves anarchism needing a critique of power that does not rest on a claim about what humans essentially are.
Can help you study: Post-anarchism and the quarrel with classical anarchist foundations. Essentialism as a structural weakness in a political theory. Reading Stirner, Foucault and Lacan into the anarchist tradition. And the constructive problem it inherits — what an anti-authoritarian politics is grounded in once the essences go.
→ Converse with Newmanian Post-Anarchism Simulacrum
