David Stasavage on Early Democracy and its De...

The paradox of dictatorship is that dictatorships do well when they do not have a genuine dictator.Minxin PeiIn this episode of Democracy Paradox, Justin Kempf speaks with China scholar Minxin Pei about his book The Broken China Dream: How Reform Revived Totalitarianism and his a ...  Show more

Traditional programmatic parties serve as a critical guardrail for democracy. Erica FrantzIn this episode, Justin Kempf speaks with Erica Frantz about her book The Origins of Elected Strongmen and the rise of personalist leaders in democracies. Frantz explains how leader-dominate ...  Show more

Is Trump’s presidential reign turning the US into an oligarchy? Or did the US fall into oligarchic rule many years ago? In episode 127 of Overthink, David and Ellie dive into what an oligarchy looks like, the dangers of a country’s power being in the hands of the wealthy few, ...

About the series: This is a critical year for the future of democracy. Half the world's population will go to the polls in 2024, at a time when citizens in America and across the globe are losing faith in democratic institutions. We often view the rollback of ...

Curtis Yarvin, also known by the pen name Mencius Moldbug, is an American blogger. He is known, along with philosopher Nick Land, for founding the anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic philosophical movement known as the Dark Enlightenment or neoreactionary movement (NRx). He argu ...  Show more

Why does a podcast about capitalism want to talk about science?

Modern capitalism and science have evolved together since the Enlightenment. Advances in ship building and navigation enabled the Age of Discovery, which opened up new trade routes and markets to European me ...