Why Americans hate government

When Ronald Reagan said in 1981 “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” he was tapping into a long history of American suspicion of government.
UCLA political science professor Brian Walker has a theory about where that suspicion came from. He lays out his ideas in the Oct. 10 lecture (download [...]

Treasure trove of courses at UCSD

University of California San Diego is offering a record 63 courses available for free download on its podcast website this quarter, enough to fill your mp3 player for months to come. But carpe diem, seize the day. Most of these riches will only stay on the website until the end of the quarter (roughly mid-December), [...]

Justice course from Harvard

You’ve probably seen the Socratic method at work in the give-and-take of a small classroom. The teacher asks provocative questions and then synthesizes the responses into new insights. It’s a great way to learn and think about complicated problems.
But can this method worked in a large lecture hall with thousands of students? Harvard political philosopher [...]

It’s time to grab summer courses at UCSD

It’s time to check out the UCSD podcast website again, and quickly grab any courses that tickle your fancy, before UCSD erases them.
There are 12 courses from the recently ended Summer Session I, and Summer Session II is underway, with 8 courses.
I especially recommend Victor Magagna’s courses, East Asian Political Thought (feed) and Politics and [...]

The ‘Game of Life’ and the 1960s Counterculture

I lived through the late 1960s as a student at UC Berkeley, the epicenter of the counterculture and radical chic. And yet somehow I missed the grand intellectual underpinnings of hippie-dom and the Summer of Love. (The people I knew who championed “People’s Park” and wore dashikis were mainly the lazy kids who’d rather [...]

Machiavelli: not such a bad guy

For almost 500 years Niccolò Machiavelli and his treatise, The Prince, have gotten some pretty bad press. In the popular imagination, Machiavelli is synonymous with the amoral, ruthless pursuit of power.
But seen up close, The Prince is actually much more nuanced and interesting than its popular caricature would suggest. That’s the main take-home lesson of [...]

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: enemy of liberty

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the tormented genius whose ideas helped inspire the French Revolution, loved liberty above all else. Yet Rousseau’s work has justified some of the worst tyrants in history from Napoleon to Hitler and Stalin. So argues Isaiah Berlin, the 20th-century philosopher and historian of ideas in his 1952 lecture, Freedom and its Betrayal: Jean-Jacques [...]

Happy Birthday Isaiah Berlin

In celebration of the 100th anniversary of Isaiah Berlin’s birth, Oxford University has posted four of the famous philosopher’s broadcast lectures on the web. Entitled Isaiah Berlin Centenary (iTunes, feed), the lectures date from the 1950s, when Berlin was reknowned as a historian of ideas and as an eloquent foe of totalitarianism.
For more on Berlin [...]

Pondering a leap of faith

If you’ve been following UC Berkeley Professor Ron Hendel’s excellent course The Bible in Western Culture (feed), you know that he’s been looking at understandings of the Bible, beginning in ancient times and moving through the Middle Ages into modernity. In the last couple of weeks we watched as Enlightenment thinkers like Spinoza and Herder [...]

Enlightenment, Romanticism, Revolution/1660-1848

Undergraduates in UC San Diego’s Revelle College take a 5-course sequence called Humanities (website), which covers the greatest literary, artistic and philophical hits in Western Civ, from the ancient Greeks to the modern day.
This quarter web diy scholars can listen in on the podcast of Humanities 4: Enlightenment, Romanticism, Revolution/1660-1848 (website, feed) taught by Eric [...]