Podcasts about Montesquieu

In this episode of The Classical Mind, we dive into a curated selection of The Federalist Papers, the seminal series of essays written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay to argue for the Constitution. Rather than tackling all 85 essays, we focus on a thematic collection (#s 1, 9-10, 15, 30, 39, 51, 62-63, 68, and 78) that highlights the philosophical and structural pillars of the American experiment in self-government.We begin with Hamilton's General Introduction (No. 1), then explore how the proposed union protects against internal strife and faction (Nos. 9–10), and why the Articles of Confederation were inadequate (No. 15). We examine the central role of federal taxation (No. 30), the plan's alignment with republican principles (No. 39), and the essential structure of checks and balances (No. 51).We also explore the three branches of government through Madison's defense of the Senate (Nos. 62–63), Hamilton's thoughts on presidential elections (No. 68), and his case for an independent judiciary (No. 78).Along the way, we consider the historical context: chaos under the Articles of Confederation, Enlightenment influences like Montesquieu, and why Democracy in America offers a fitting modern endnote. Join us as we revisit the founding debates that continue to shape the American constitutional imagination.Endnotes: -Hamilton -Junius: The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students by Allan Bloom -Wesley: Democracy in America by Alexis de TocquevilleOur next read will be Peter Pan. Get full access to The Classical Mind at www.theclassicalmind.com/subscribe

durée : 00:58:53 - Le Cours de l'histoire - par : Xavier Mauduit, Maïwenn Guiziou - Comment Montesquieu envisage-t-il les rapports entre États et quelles règles leur donne-t-il ? Dans quelle mesure le philosophe des Lumières peut-il être qualifié de précurseur de la géopolitique ? - réalisation : Thomas Beau, Sam Baquiast - invités : Hugo Toudic Docteur en philosophie, directeur adjoint de l'Institut international de recherche de l'Université de Chicago à Paris; Catherine Volpilhac-Auger Professeur émérite de littérature française à l'ENS de Lyon

"Ne pas s'ennuyer, et faire ce qui lui plaît", c'est le leitmotiv de Nicolas Vergne, Délégué Général du Cercle Montesquieu, invité de ce nouvel épisode de Voix d'Entrepreneur du Droit, au micro d'Audrey Déléris, Manager executive chez Fed Legal.Juriste de formation, passé par Nanterre, la Sorbonne, puis Assas en affaires publiques, Nicolas a passé près de 8 ans à la Mairie de Melun aux côtés de Louis Vogel, en tant que Directeur de cabinet. Depuis plus de deux ans, il pilote les activités du Cercle Montesquieu, réseau qui fédère aujourd'hui 643 directeurs juridiques autour des valeurs de solidarité, d'entraide et d'engagement.Dans cet épisode, on parle de droit comme outil de défense de l'entreprise, des enjeux du métier de directeur juridique, mais aussi d'affaires publiques, de musique, de piano, et d'écriture.Nicolas partage avec nous son goût pour la transmission, sa vision du droit, et l'importance de se réinventer sans cesse.Un échange inspirant, sincère et passionné !--Voici les références de ce podcast :Le profil de Nicolas VergneLe Cercle MontesquieuLouis VogelLe cabinet Vogel & Vogel« Les fossoyeurs », de Victor Castanet --Si vous avez aimé cet épisode et s'il vous a aidé, mettez des étoiles, des commentaires, et partagez-leRetrouvez toutes nos actualités sur LinkedIn.--Fed Group donne aussi de la voix ...- Aux soignants, dans notre podcast "Voix des soignants"- Aux recruteurs, dans notre podcast "Voix de recruteurs"--Qui sommes-nous ?Fed Legal, est un cabinet de recrutement et de chasse de têtes, dans le secteur juridique et fiscal. Notre équipe d'experts accompagnent les professionnels du droit en leur proposant des opportunités de carrière. Nos domaines de compétences sont les suivants : Fonctions support en cabinets d'avocats, directions juridiques, notariat, directions fiscales, conseils en propriété industrielle / ingénieurs brevets, collaborateurs et associés en cabinets d'avocats. Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Introdução - Módulo 02 No coração do cristianismo, e particularmente no ethos adventista, está a convicção de que a ordem não é uma imposição administrativa, mas um dom espiritual e profético. O Módulo 2 da série A Ordem e a Representação propõe uma leitura profunda e orgânica das estruturas de liderança da IASD a partir das lentes da filosofia política, da tradição patrística, da teologia da história e das críticas modernas à autoridade. Mais do que apenas discutir modelos de governo, este módulo busca iluminar o sentido teológico, simbólico e escatológico da ordem na vida comunitária e representativa da Igreja.

On Friday's Mark Levin Show, the framers of the Constitution did not grant courts, such as the International Court of Trade, the final authority on matters like tariffs, reserving that power for Congress. The Constitution gives Congress broad authority over taxation and spending, and through a 1977 emergency law, it delegated certain tariff powers to the president. Courts lack the constitutional basis to override such delegations. Historical records, including Madison's notes, the Federalist Papers, and state ratification debates, show the framers rejected giving courts supreme authority, like judicial review, to resolve separation-of-powers disputes. The framers of the Constitution, heavily influenced by Montesquieu, designed a government with a strict separation of powers to prevent tyranny, as Montesquieu warned that combining legislative, executive, or judicial powers in one entity leads to arbitrary rule and oppression. Congress should address this through legislation, not courts through litigation. Also, Sam Antar accused a Politico writer of "reputational laundering" for praising  New York AG Letitia James as a "Shadow Attorney General" in a Democratic shadow cabinet, while ignoring her federal criminal investigation for alleged mortgage fraud. Politico's omission of the DOJ referral shows the media bias, as James has targeted Trump, notably winning a $450M civil fraud case against him.  Later, the Wall Street Journal reports the decline of America's military-industrial capacity compared to China's rapid growth in the sector. The U.S. has allowed its defense manufacturing and supply chains to weaken due to underinvestment, outsourcing, and a focus on short-term efficiency over long-term resilience. This is frightening. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

(00:00) Intro (01:58) La magistratura USA riscatta l'onore dello stato di diritto: la partita dei dazi si riapre (19:12) Musk non è più Doge (29:29) Stellantis ha un nuovo CEO: avrà anche una nuova strategia? (44:38) La metastasi mafiosa nelle mappe della DIA Questo podcast e gli altri nostri contenuti sono gratuiti anche grazie a chi ci sostiene con Will Makers. Sostienici e accedi a contenuti esclusivi su willmedia.it/abbonati Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Marie-Ange de Montesquieu • 17h-18h (rediffusion à 20h30) Une heure d'enquête sur le sens des choses dans ce monde si complexe ! Et Dieu sait qu'il en faut des clés pour comprendre ce drôle de siècle qu'est le nôtre ! Une réaction sur l'émission ? Une question ? Écrivez-moi: marieange.demontesquieu@radionotredame.comHébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Marie-Ange de Montesquieu • 17h-18h (rediffusion à 20h30) Une heure d'enquête sur le sens des choses dans ce monde si complexe ! Et Dieu sait qu'il en faut des clés pour comprendre ce drôle de siècle qu'est le nôtre ! Une réaction sur l'émission ? Une question ? Écrivez-moi: marieange.demontesquieu@radionotredame.comHébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Marie-Ange de Montesquieu • 17h-18h (rediffusion à 20h30) Une heure d'enquête sur le sens des choses dans ce monde si complexe ! Et Dieu sait qu'il en faut des clés pour comprendre ce drôle de siècle qu'est le nôtre ! Une réaction sur l'émission ? Une question ? Écrivez-moi: marieange.demontesquieu@radionotredame.comHébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Marie-Ange de Montesquieu • 17h-18h (rediffusion à 20h30) Une heure d'enquête sur le sens des choses dans ce monde si complexe ! Et Dieu sait qu'il en faut des clés pour comprendre ce drôle de siècle qu'est le nôtre ! Une réaction sur l'émission ? Une question ? Écrivez-moi: marieange.demontesquieu@radionotredame.comHébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Marie-Ange de Montesquieu • 17h-18h (rediffusion à 20h30) Une heure d'enquête sur le sens des choses dans ce monde si complexe ! Et Dieu sait qu'il en faut des clés pour comprendre ce drôle de siècle qu'est le nôtre ! Une réaction sur l'émission ? Une question ? Écrivez-moi: marieange.demontesquieu@radionotredame.comHébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Le Siècle des Lumières, également connu sous le nom d'âge de la raison, Enlightenment en Angleterre ou Aufklärung en Allemagne, couvre largement le XVIIIe siècle. Imaginez cette époque fascinante où de nouvelles idées bouillonnent, où des philosophes audacieux redéfinissent la politique, la science, et même la société elle-même. Dans cet épisode, nous allons découvrir comment des esprits brillants comme Voltaire, Rousseau et Diderot ont utilisé la puissance de la plume pour défier les rois et les traditions, et comment leurs idées ont allumé la mèche de révolutions.#4eme #2nde #français #lettres #philosophie***T'as qui en Histoire ? * : le podcast qui te fait aimer l'HistoirePour rafraîchir ses connaissances, réviser le brevet, le bac, ses leçons, apprendre et découvrir des sujets d'Histoire (collège, lycée, université)***✉️ Contact: tasquienhistoire@gmail.com***Suivez le podcast sur les réseaux sociaux***Instagram : @tasquienhistoireThreads : @tasquienhistoireTwitter : @AsHistoire Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/TasQuiEnHistoire*** Credits Son ***France 2 / Les Aventures du jeune Voltaire - bande-annoncehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MH6mdswVhT8 @MusopenBach Concerto for 2 Harpsichords in C major, BWV 1061https://musopen.org/music/3505-concerto-for-2-harpsichords-in-c-major-bwv-1061/ Rameau: Les Indes galantes - BBC Proms 2013https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZtWNZ_U_f8 Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Marie-Ange de Montesquieu • 17h-18h (rediffusion à 20h30) Une heure d'enquête sur le sens des choses dans ce monde si complexe ! Et Dieu sait qu'il en faut des clés pour comprendre ce drôle de siècle qu'est le nôtre ! Une réaction sur l'émission ? Une question ? Écrivez-moi: marieange.demontesquieu@radionotredame.comHébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Marie-Ange de Montesquieu • 17h-18h (rediffusion à 20h30) Une heure d'enquête sur le sens des choses dans ce monde si complexe ! Et Dieu sait qu'il en faut des clés pour comprendre ce drôle de siècle qu'est le nôtre ! Une réaction sur l'émission ? Une question ? Écrivez-moi: marieange.demontesquieu@radionotredame.comHébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

In this enlightening episode of Consider the Constitution, host Dr. Katie Crawford Lackey sits down with Dr. Dennis Rasmussen, professor of political science at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. Their conversation explores the philosophical underpinnings that influenced the creation of the U.S. Constitution, particularly focusing on Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Montesquieu whose ideas shaped the framers' thinking.Dr. Rasmussen, author of "Fears of a Setting Sun," provides fascinating insights into how the founders – particularly Madison – navigated between theory and practical application when designing America's system of government. The discussion reveals surprising details about Madison's disappointment with certain aspects of the Constitution, the founders' evolving opinions about their creation, and the remarkable durability of America's founding document despite its imperfections. This episode offers listeners a deeper understanding of the intellectual foundations of American constitutional governance and reflects on what lessons we might draw from the founders' experiences as we face today's political challenges.

Marie-Ange de Montesquieu • 17h-18h (rediffusion à 20h30) Une heure d'enquête sur le sens des choses dans ce monde si complexe ! Et Dieu sait qu'il en faut des clés pour comprendre ce drôle de siècle qu'est le nôtre ! Une réaction sur l'émission ? Une question ? Écrivez-moi: marieange.demontesquieu@radionotredame.comHébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Marie-Ange de Montesquieu • 17h-18h (rediffusion à 20h30) Une heure d'enquête sur le sens des choses dans ce monde si complexe ! Et Dieu sait qu'il en faut des clés pour comprendre ce drôle de siècle qu'est le nôtre ! Une réaction sur l'émission ? Une question ? Écrivez-moi: marieange.demontesquieu@radionotredame.comHébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Marie-Ange de Montesquieu • 17h-18h (rediffusion à 20h30) Une heure d'enquête sur le sens des choses dans ce monde si complexe ! Et Dieu sait qu'il en faut des clés pour comprendre ce drôle de siècle qu'est le nôtre ! Une réaction sur l'émission ? Une question ? Écrivez-moi: marieange.demontesquieu@radionotredame.comHébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

On the fifty-eighth episode, Shane, Matthew, and Ben are joined by William B. Allen, Professor Emeritus of Political Philosophy at Michigan State University, to discuss Montesquieu's political philosophy and its influence on the American Founding and eighteenth-century British politics. We want to hear from you! Constitutionalistpod@gmail.com The Constitutionalist is proud to be sponsored by the Jack Miller Center for Teaching America's Founding Principles and History. For the last twenty years, JMC has been working to preserve and promote that tradition through a variety of programs at the college and K-12 levels. Through their American Political Tradition Project, JMC has partnered with more than 1,000 scholars at over 300 college campuses across the country, especially through their annual Summer Institutes for graduate students and recent PhDs. The Jack Miller Center is also working with thousands of K-12 educators across the country to help them better understand America's founding principles and history and teach them effectively, to better educate the next generation of citizens. JMC has provided thousands of hours of professional development for teachers all over the country, reaching millions of students with improved civic learning. If you care about American education and civic responsibility, you'll want to check out their work, which focuses on reorienting our institutions of learning around America's founding principles. To learn more or get involved, visit jackmillercenter.org. The Constitutionalist is a podcast cohosted by Professor Benjamin Kleinerman, the RW Morrison Professor of Political Science at Baylor University and Founder and Editor of The Constitutionalist Blog, Shane Leary, a graduate student at Baylor University, and Dr. Matthew K. Reising, a John and Daria Barry Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Princeton University. Each week, they discuss political news in light of its constitutional implications, and explore a unique constitutional topic, ranging from the thoughts and experiences of America's founders and statesmen, historical episodes, and the broader philosophic ideas that influence the American experiment in government.

Dans ce nouveau Reaction Shot consacré aux 100 premiers jours de la seconde administration Trump, Vincent Gabriel vous propose de passer en revue quelques faits saillants de la politique étrangère mise en oeuvre par le 47e président des USA. Vous souhaitez en apprendre davantage, nous rencontrer ou poser vos questions au Prof. Tanguy Struye de Swielande ? Rendez-vous ce mercredi 7 mai à Louvain-la-Neuve pour un enregistrement public dédié à la grande stratégique américaine sous Biden et Trump 2 (auditoire MONTESQUIEU 01 à 18h).Suivez le podcast ! Il est désormais sur X/Twitter : @20MPC_podcast & LinkedIn !   Générique : Léopold Corbion (15 Years of Reflection)Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Marie-Ange de Montesquieu • 17h-18h (rediffusion à 20h30) Une heure d'enquête sur le sens des choses dans ce monde si complexe ! Et Dieu sait qu'il en faut des clés pour comprendre ce drôle de siècle qu'est le nôtre ! Une réaction sur l'émission ? Une question ? Écrivez-moi: marieange.demontesquieu@radionotredame.comHébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Marie-Ange de Montesquieu • 17h-18h (rediffusion à 20h30) Une heure d'enquête sur le sens des choses dans ce monde si complexe ! Et Dieu sait qu'il en faut des clés pour comprendre ce drôle de siècle qu'est le nôtre ! Une réaction sur l'émission ? Une question ? Écrivez-moi: marieange.demontesquieu@radionotredame.comHébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

El vídeo analiza el gran apagón que afectó a toda la península ibérica, profundizando en sus causas técnicas (fallos múltiples y “N-1” superado) y explorando la idea de si se trata de un fenómeno energético fortuito o de un método para aumentar el control social mediante la dependencia a la electricidad. Se detallan conceptos clave como el “hueco de tensión”, la insuficiente interconexión de España (6 % vs. 15 % recomendado) y las posibles implicaciones políticas y filosóficas sobre nuestra libertad y autonomía en un mundo cada vez más vulnerable ante crisis energéticas. ​Conviértete en un seguidor de este podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/el-podcast-de-marc-vidal--5231699/support.

Marie-Ange de Montesquieu • 17h-18h (rediffusion à 20h30) Une heure d'enquête sur le sens des choses dans ce monde si complexe ! Et Dieu sait qu'il en faut des clés pour comprendre ce drôle de siècle qu'est le nôtre ! Une réaction sur l'émission ? Une question ? Écrivez-moi: marieange.demontesquieu@radionotredame.comHébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Marie-Ange de Montesquieu • 17h-18h (rediffusion à 20h30) Une heure d'enquête sur le sens des choses dans ce monde si complexe ! Et Dieu sait qu'il en faut des clés pour comprendre ce drôle de siècle qu'est le nôtre ! Une réaction sur l'émission ? Une question ? Écrivez-moi: marieange.demontesquieu@radionotredame.comHébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Marie-Ange de Montesquieu • 17h-18h (rediffusion à 20h30) Une heure d'enquête sur le sens des choses dans ce monde si complexe ! Et Dieu sait qu'il en faut des clés pour comprendre ce drôle de siècle qu'est le nôtre ! Une réaction sur l'émission ? Une question ? Écrivez-moi: marieange.demontesquieu@radionotredame.comHébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Marie-Ange de Montesquieu • 17h-18h (rediffusion à 20h30) Une heure d'enquête sur le sens des choses dans ce monde si complexe ! Et Dieu sait qu'il en faut des clés pour comprendre ce drôle de siècle qu'est le nôtre ! Une réaction sur l'émission ? Une question ? Écrivez-moi: marieange.demontesquieu@radionotredame.comHébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Marie-Ange de Montesquieu • 17h-18h (rediffusion à 20h30) Une heure d'enquête sur le sens des choses dans ce monde si complexe ! Et Dieu sait qu'il en faut des clés pour comprendre ce drôle de siècle qu'est le nôtre ! Une réaction sur l'émission ? Une question ? Écrivez-moi: marieange.demontesquieu@radionotredame.comHébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

So what, exactly, was “The Enlightenment”? According to the Princeton historian David A. Bell, it was an intellectual movement roughly spanning the early 18th century through to the French Revolution. In his Spring 2025 Liberties Quarterly piece “The Enlightenment, Then and Now”, Bell charts the Enlightenment as a complex intellectual movement centered in Paris but with hubs across Europe and America. He highlights key figures like Montesquieu, Voltaire, Kant, and Franklin, discussing their contributions to concepts of religious tolerance, free speech, and rationality. In our conversation, Bell addresses criticisms of the Enlightenment, including its complicated relationship with colonialism and slavery, while arguing that its principles of freedom and reason remain relevant today. 5 Key Takeaways* The Enlightenment emerged in the early 18th century (around 1720s) and was characterized by intellectual inquiry, skepticism toward religion, and a growing sense among thinkers that they were living in an "enlightened century."* While Paris was the central hub, the Enlightenment had multiple centers including Scotland, Germany, and America, with thinkers like Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, Hume, and Franklin contributing to its development.* The Enlightenment introduced the concept of "society" as a sphere of human existence separate from religion and politics, forming the basis of modern social sciences.* The movement had a complex relationship with colonialism and slavery - many Enlightenment thinkers criticized slavery, but some of their ideas about human progress were later used to justify imperialism.* According to Bell, rather than trying to "return to the Enlightenment," modern society should selectively adopt and adapt its valuable principles of free speech, religious tolerance, and education to create our "own Enlightenment."David Avrom Bell is a historian of early modern and modern Europe at Princeton University. His most recent book, published in 2020 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution. Described in the Journal of Modern History as an "instant classic," it is available in paperback from Picador, in French translation from Fayard, and in Italian translation from Viella. A study of how new forms of political charisma arose in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the book shows that charismatic authoritarianism is as modern a political form as liberal democracy, and shares many of the same origins. Based on exhaustive research in original sources, the book includes case studies of the careers of George Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte, Toussaint Louverture and Simon Bolivar. The book's Introduction can be read here. An online conversation about the book with Annette Gordon-Reed, hosted by the Cullman Center of the New York Public Library, can be viewed here. Links to material about the book, including reviews in The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, Harper's, The New Republic, The Nation, Le Monde, The Los Angeles Review of Books and other venues can be found here. Bell is also the author of six previous books. He has published academic articles in both English and French and contributes regularly to general interest publications on a variety of subjects, ranging from modern warfare, to contemporary French politics, to the impact of digital technology on learning and scholarship, and of course French history. A list of his publications from 2023 and 2024 can be found here. His Substack newsletter can be found here. His writings have been translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Hebrew, Swedish, Polish, Russian, German, Croatian, Italian, Turkish and Japanese. At the History Department at Princeton University, he holds the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Chair in the Era of North Atlantic Revolutions, and offers courses on early modern Europe, on military history, and on the early modern French empire. Previously, he spent fourteen years at Johns Hopkins University, including three as Dean of Faculty in its School of Arts and Sciences. From 2020 to 2024 he served as Director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a corresponding fellow of the British Academy. Bell's new project is a history of the Enlightenment. A preliminary article from the project was published in early 2022 by Modern Intellectual History. Another is now out in French History.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting the daily KEEN ON show, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy interview series. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children. FULL TRANSCRIPTAndrew Keen: Hello everybody, in these supposedly dark times, the E word comes up a lot, the Enlightenment. Are we at the end of the Enlightenment or the beginning? Was there even an Enlightenment? My guest today, David Bell, a professor of history, very distinguished professor of history at Princeton University, has an interesting piece in the spring issue of It is One of our, our favorite quarterlies here on Keen on America, Bell's piece is The Enlightenment Then and Now, and David is joining us from the home of the Enlightenment, perhaps Paris in France, where he's on sabbatical hard life. David being an academic these days, isn't it?David Bell: Very difficult. I'm having to suffer the Parisian bread and croissant. It's terrible.Andrew Keen: Yeah. Well, I won't keep you too long. Is Paris then, or France? Is it the home of the Enlightenment? I know there are many Enlightenments, the French, the Scottish, maybe even the English, perhaps even the American.David Bell: It's certainly one of the homes of the Enlightenment, and it's probably the closest that the Enlightened had to a center, absolutely. But as you say, there were Edinburgh, Glasgow, plenty of places in Germany, Philadelphia, all those places have good claims to being centers of the enlightenment as well.Andrew Keen: All the same David, is it like one of those sports games in California where everyone gets a medal?David Bell: Well, they're different metals, right, but I think certainly Paris is where everybody went. I mean, if you look at the figures from the German Enlightenment, from the Scottish Enlightenment from the American Enlightenment they all tended to congregate in Paris and the Parisians didn't tend to go anywhere else unless they were forced to. So that gives you a pretty good sense of where the most important center was.Andrew Keen: So David, before we get to specifics, map out for us, because everyone is perhaps as familiar or comfortable with the history of the Enlightenment, and certainly as you are. When did it happen? What years? And who are the leaders of this thing called the Enlightenment?David Bell: Well, that's a big question. And I'm afraid, of course, that if you ask 10 historians, you'll get 10 different answers.Andrew Keen: Well, I'm only asking you, so I only want one answer.David Bell: So I would say that the Enlightenment really gets going around the first couple of decades of the 18th century. And that's when people really start to think that they are actually living in what they start to call an Enlightenment century. There are a lot of reasons for this. They are seeing what we now call the scientific revolution. They're looking at the progress that has been made with that. They are experiencing the changes in the religious sphere, including the end of religious wars, coming with a great deal of skepticism about religion. They are living in a relative period of peace where they're able to speculate much more broadly and daringly than before. But it's really in those first couple of decades that they start thinking of themselves as living in an enlightened century. They start defining themselves as something that would later be called the enlightenment. So I would say that it's, really, really there between maybe the end of the 17th century and 1720s that it really gets started.Andrew Keen: So let's have some names, David, of philosophers, I guess. I mean, if those are the right words. I know that there was a term in French. There is a term called philosoph. Were they the founders, the leaders of the Enlightenment?David Bell: Well, there is a... Again, I don't want to descend into academic quibbling here, but there were lots of leaders. Let me give an example, though. So the year 1721 is a remarkable year. So in the year, 1721, two amazing events happened within a couple of months of each other. So in May, Montesquieu, one of the great philosophers by any definition, publishes his novel called Persian Letters. And this is an incredible novel. Still, I think one of greatest novels ever written, and it's very daring. It is the account, it is supposedly a an account written by two Persian travelers to Europe who are writing back to people in Isfahan about what they're seeing. And it is very critical of French society. It is very of religion. It is, as I said, very daring philosophically. It is a product in part of the increasing contact between Europe and the rest of the world that is also very central to the Enlightenment. So that novel comes out. So it's immediately, you know, the police try to suppress it. But they don't have much success because it's incredibly popular and Montesquieu doesn't suffer any particular problems because...Andrew Keen: And the French police have never been the most efficient police force in the world, have they?David Bell: Oh, they could be, but not in this case. And then two months later, after Montesquieu published this novel, there's a German philosopher much less well-known than Montesqiu, than Christian Bolz, who is a professor at the Universität Haller in Prussia, and he gives an oration in Latin, a very typical university oration for the time, about Chinese philosophy, in which he says that the Chinese have sort of proved to the world, particularly through the writings of Confucius and others, that you can have a virtuous society without religion. Obviously very controversial. Statement for the time it actually gets him fired from his job, he has to leave the Kingdom of Prussia within 48 hours on penalty of death, starts an enormous controversy. But here are two events, both of which involving non-European people, involving the way in which Europeans are starting to look out at the rest of the world and starting to imagine Europe as just one part of a larger humanity, and at the same time they are starting to speculate very daringly about whether you can have. You know, what it means to have a society, do you need to have religion in order to have morality in society? Do you need the proper, what kind of government do you need to to have virtuous conduct and a proper society? So all of these things get, you know, really crystallize, I think, around these two incidents as much as anything. So if I had to pick a single date for when the enlightenment starts, I'd probably pick that 1721.Andrew Keen: And when was, David, I thought you were going to tell me about the earthquake in Lisbon, when was that earthquake?David Bell: That earthquake comes quite a bit later. That comes, and now historians should be better with dates than I am. It's in the 1750s, I think it's the late 1750's. Again, this historian is proving he's getting a very bad grade for forgetting the exact date, but it's in 1750. So that's a different kind of event, which sparks off a great deal of commentary, because it's a terrible earthquake. It destroys most of the city of Lisbon, it destroys other cities throughout Portugal, and it leads a lot of the philosophy to philosophers at the time to be speculating very daringly again on whether there is any kind of real purpose to the universe and whether there's any kind divine purpose. Why would such a terrible thing happen? Why would God do such a thing to his followers? And certainly VoltaireAndrew Keen: Yeah, Votav, of course, comes to mind of questioning.David Bell: And Condit, Voltaire's novel Condit gives a very good description of the earthquake in Lisbon and uses that as a centerpiece. Voltair also read other things about the earthquake, a poem about Lisbon earthquake. But in Condit he gives a lasting, very scathing portrait of the Catholic Church in general and then of what happens in Portugal. And so the Lisbon Earthquake is certainly another one of the events, but it happens considerably later. Really in the middle of the end of life.Andrew Keen: So, David, you believe in this idea of the Enlightenment. I take your point that there are more than one Enlightenment in more than one center, but in broad historical terms, the 18th century could be defined at least in Western and Northern Europe as the period of the Enlightenment, would that be a fair generalization?David Bell: I think it's perfectly fair generalization. Of course, there are historians who say that it never happened. There's a conservative British historian, J.C.D. Clark, who published a book last summer, saying that the Enlightenment is a kind of myth, that there was a lot of intellectual activity in Europe, obviously, but that the idea that it formed a coherent Enlightenment was really invented in the 20th century by a bunch of progressive reformers who wanted to claim a kind of venerable and august pedigree for their own reform, liberal reform plans. I think that's an exaggeration. People in the 18th century defined very clearly what was going on, both people who were in favor of it and people who are against it. And while you can, if you look very closely at it, of course it gets a bit fuzzy. Of course it's gets, there's no single, you can't define a single enlightenment project or a single enlightened ideology. But then, I think people would be hard pressed to define any intellectual movement. You know, in perfect, incoherent terms. So the enlightenment is, you know by compared with almost any other intellectual movement certainly existed.Andrew Keen: In terms of a philosophy of the Enlightenment, the German thinker, Immanuel Kant, seems to be often, and when you describe him as the conscience or the brain or a mixture of the conscience and brain of the enlightenment, why is Kant and Kantian thinking so important in the development of the Enlightenment.David Bell: Well, that's a really interesting question. And one reason is because most of the Enlightenment was not very rigorously philosophical. A lot of the major figures of the enlightenment before Kant tended to be writing for a general public. And they often were writing with a very specific agenda. We look at Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau. Now you look at Adam Smith in Scotland. We look David Hume or Adam Ferguson. You look at Benjamin Franklin in the United States. These people wrote in all sorts of different genres. They wrote in, they wrote all sorts of different kinds of books. They have many different purposes and very few of them did a lot of what we would call rigorous academic philosophy. And Kant was different. Kant was very much an academic philosopher. Kant was nothing if not rigorous. He came at the end of the enlightenment by most people's measure. He wrote these very, very difficult, very rigorous, very brilliant works, such as The Creek of Pure Reason. And so, it's certainly been the case that people who wanted to describe the Enlightenment as a philosophy have tended to look to Kant. So for example, there's a great German philosopher and intellectual historian of the early 20th century named Ernst Kassirer, who had to leave Germany because of the Nazis. And he wrote a great book called The Philosophy of the Enlightened. And that leads directly to Immanuel Kant. And of course, Casir himself was a Kantian, identified with Kant. And so he wanted to make Kant, in a sense, the telos, the end point, the culmination, the fulfillment of the Enlightenment. But so I think that's why Kant has such a particularly important position. You're defining it both ways.Andrew Keen: I've always struggled to understand what Kant was trying to say. I'm certainly not alone there. Might it be fair to say that he was trying to transform the universe and certainly traditional Christian notions into the Enlightenment, so the entire universe, the world, God, whatever that means, that they were all somehow according to Kant enlightened.David Bell: Well, I think that I'm certainly no expert on Immanuel Kant. And I would say that he is trying to, I mean, his major philosophical works are trying to put together a system of philosophical thinking which will justify why people have to act morally, why people act rationally, without the need for Christian revelation to bolster them. That's a very, very crude and reductionist way of putting it, but that's essentially at the heart of it. At the same time, Kant was very much aware of his own place in history. So Kant didn't simply write these very difficult, thick, dense philosophical works. He also wrote things that were more like journalism or like tablets. He wrote a famous essay called What is Enlightenment? And in that, he said that the 18th century was the period in which humankind was simply beginning to. Reach a period of enlightenment. And he said, he starts the essay by saying, this is the period when humankind is being released from its self-imposed tutelage. And we are still, and he said we do not yet live in the midst of a completely enlightened century, but we are getting there. We are living in a century that is enlightening.Andrew Keen: So the seeds, the seeds of Hegel and maybe even Marx are incant in that German thinking, that historical thinking.David Bell: In some ways, in some ways of course Hegel very much reacts against Kant and so and then Marx reacts against Hegel. So it's not exactly.Andrew Keen: Well, that's the dialectic, isn't it, David?David Bell: A simple easy path from one to the other, no, but Hegel is unimaginable without Kant of course and Marx is unimagineable without Hegel.Andrew Keen: You note that Kant represents a shift in some ways into the university and the walls of the universities were going up, and that some of the other figures associated with the the Enlightenment and Scottish Enlightenment, human and Smith and the French Enlightenment Voltaire and the others, they were more generalist writers. Should we be nostalgic for the pre-university period in the Enlightenment, or? Did things start getting serious once the heavyweights, the academic heavyweighs like Emmanuel Kant got into this thing?David Bell: I think it depends on where we're talking about. I mean, Adam Smith was a professor at Glasgow in Edinburgh, so Smith, the Scottish Enlightenment was definitely at least partly in the universities. The German Enlightenment took place very heavily in universities. Christian Vodafoy I just mentioned was the most important German philosopher of the 18th century before Kant, and he had positions in university. Even the French university system, for a while, what's interesting about the French University system, particularly the Sorbonne, which was the theology faculty, It was that. Throughout the first half of the 18th century, there were very vigorous, very interesting philosophical debates going on there, in which the people there, particularly even Jesuits there, were very open to a lot of the ideas we now call enlightenment. They were reading John Locke, they were reading Mel Pench, they were read Dekalb. What happened though in the French universities was that as more daring stuff was getting published elsewhere. Church, the Catholic Church, started to say, all right, these philosophers, these philosophies, these are our enemies, these are people we have to get at. And so at that point, anybody who was in the university, who was still in dialog with these people was basically purged. And the universities became much less interesting after that. But to come back to your question, I do think that I am very nostalgic for that period. I think that the Enlightenment was an extraordinary period, because if you look between. In the 17th century, not all, but a great deal of the most interesting intellectual work is happening in the so-called Republic of Letters. It's happening in Latin language. It is happening on a very small circle of RUD, of scholars. By the 19th century following Kant and Hegel and then the birth of the research university in Germany, which is copied everywhere, philosophy and the most advanced thinking goes back into the university. And the 18th century, particularly in France, I will say, is a time when the most advanced thought is being written for a general public. It is being in the form of novels, of dialogs, of stories, of reference works, and it is very, very accessible. The most profound thought of the West has never been as accessible overall as in the 18 century.Andrew Keen: Again, excuse this question, it might seem a bit naive, but there's a lot of pre-Enlightenment work, books, thinking that we read now that's very accessible from Erasmus and Thomas More to Machiavelli. Why weren't characters like, or are characters like Erasmuus, More's Utopia, Machiavell's prints and discourses, why aren't they considered part of the Enlightenment? What's the difference between? Enlightened thinkers or the supposedly enlightened thinkers of the 18th century and thinkers and writers of the 16th and 17th centuries.David Bell: That's a good question, you know, I think you have to, you, you know, again, one has to draw a line somewhere. That's not a very good answer, of course. All these people that you just mentioned are, in one way or another, predecessors to the Enlightenment. And of course, there were lots of people. I don't mean to say that nobody wrote in an accessible way before 1700. Obviously, lots of the people you mentioned did. Although a lot of them originally wrote in Latin, Erasmus, also Thomas More. But I think what makes the Enlightened different is that you have, again, you have a sense. These people have have a sense that they are themselves engaged in a collective project, that it is a collective project of enlightenment, of enlightening the world. They believe that they live in a century of progress. And there are certain principles. They don't agree on everything by any means. The philosophy of enlightenment is like nothing more than ripping each other to shreds, like any decent group of intellectuals. But that said, they generally did believe That people needed to have freedom of speech. They believed that you needed to have toleration of different religions. They believed in education and the need for a broadly educated public that could be as broad as possible. They generally believed in keeping religion out of the public sphere as much as possible, so all those principles came together into a program that we can consider at least a kind of... You know, not that everybody read it at every moment by any means, but there is an identifiable enlightenment program there, and in this case an identifiable enlightenment mindset. One other thing, I think, which is crucial to the Enlightenment, is that it was the attention they started to pay to something that we now take almost entirely for granted, which is the idea of society. The word society is so entirely ubiquitous, we assume it's always been there, and in one sense it has, because the word societas is a Latin word. But until... The 18th century, the word society generally had a much narrower meaning. It referred to, you know, particular institution most often, like when we talk about the society of, you know, the American philosophical society or something like that. And the idea that there exists something called society, which is the general sphere of human existence that is separate from religion and is separate from the political sphere, that's actually something which only really emerged at the end of the 1600s. And it became really the focus of you know, much, if not most, of enlightenment thinking. When you look at someone like Montesquieu and you look something, somebody like Rousseau or Voltaire or Adam Smith, probably above all, they were concerned with understanding how society works, not how government works only, but how society, what social interactions are like beginning of what we would now call social science. So that's yet another thing that distinguishes the enlightened from people like Machiavelli, often people like Thomas More, and people like bonuses.Andrew Keen: You noted earlier that the idea of progress is somehow baked in, in part, and certainly when it comes to Kant, certainly the French Enlightenment, although, of course, Rousseau challenged that. I'm not sure whether Rousseaut, as always, is both in and out of the Enlightenment and he seems to be in and out of everything. How did the Enlightement, though, make sense of itself in the context of antiquity, as it was, of Terms, it was the Renaissance that supposedly discovered or rediscovered antiquity. How did many of the leading Enlightenment thinkers, writers, how did they think of their own society in the context of not just antiquity, but even the idea of a European or Western society?David Bell: Well, there was a great book, one of the great histories of the Enlightenment was written about more than 50 years ago by the Yale professor named Peter Gay, and the first part of that book was called The Modern Paganism. So it was about the, you know, it was very much about the relationship between the Enlightenment and the ancient Greek synonyms. And certainly the writers of the enlightenment felt a great deal of kinship with the ancient Greek synonymous. They felt a common bond, particularly in the posing. Christianity and opposing what they believed the Christian Church had wrought on Europe in suppressing freedom and suppressing free thought and suppassing free inquiry. And so they felt that they were both recovering but also going beyond antiquity at the same time. And of course they were all, I mean everybody at the time, every single major figure of the Enlightenment, their education consisted in large part of what we would now call classics, right? I mean, there was an educational reformer in France in the 1760s who said, you know, our educational system is great if the purpose is to train Roman centurions, if it's to train modern people who are not doing both so well. And it's true. I mean they would spend, certainly, you know in Germany, in much of Europe, in the Netherlands, even in France, I mean people were trained not simply to read Latin, but to write in Latin. In Germany, university courses took part in the Latin language. So there's an enormous, you know, so they're certainly very, very conversant with the Greek and Roman classics, and they identify with them to a very great extent. Someone like Rousseau, I mean, and many others, and what's his first reading? How did he learn to read by reading Plutarch? In translation, but he learns to read reading Plutach. He sees from the beginning by this enormous admiration for the ancients that we get from Bhutan.Andrew Keen: Was Socrates relevant here? Was the Enlightenment somehow replacing Aristotle with Socrates and making him and his spirit of Enlightenment, of asking questions rather than answering questions, the symbol of a new way of thinking?David Bell: I would say to a certain extent, so I mean, much of the Enlightenment criticizes scholasticism, medieval scholastic, very, very sharply, and medieval scholasticism is founded philosophically very heavily upon Aristotle, so to that extent. And the spirit of skepticism that Socrates embodied, the idea of taking nothing for granted and asking questions about everything, including questions of oneself, yes, absolutely. That said, while the great figures of the Red Plato, you know, Socrates was generally I mean, it was not all that present as they come. But certainly have people with people with red play-doh in the entire virus.Andrew Keen: You mentioned Benjamin Franklin earlier, David. Most of the Enlightenment, of course, seems to be centered in France and Scotland, Germany, England. But America, many Europeans went to America then as a, what some people would call a settler colonial society, or certainly an offshoot of the European world. Was the settling of America and the American Revolution Was it the quintessential Enlightenment project?David Bell: Another very good question, and again, it depends a bit on who you talk to. I just mentioned this book by Peter Gay, and the last part of his book is called The Science of Freedom, and it's all about the American Revolution. So certainly a lot of interpreters of the Enlightenment have said that, yes, the American revolution represents in a sense the best possible outcome of the American Revolution, it was the best, possible outcome of the enlightened. Certainly there you look at the founding fathers of the United States and there's a great deal that they took from me like Certainly, they took a great great number of political ideas from Obviously Madison was very much inspired and drafting the edifice of the Constitution by Montesquieu to see himself Was happy to admit in addition most of the founding Fathers of the united states were you know had kind of you know We still had we were still definitely Christians, but we're also but we were also very much influenced by deism were very much against the idea of making the United States a kind of confessional country where Christianity was dominant. They wanted to believe in the enlightenment principles of free speech, religious toleration and so on and so forth. So in all those senses and very much the gun was probably more inspired than Franklin was somebody who was very conversant with the European Enlightenment. He spent a large part of his life in London. Where he was in contact with figures of the Enlightenment. He also, during the American Revolution, of course, he was mostly in France, where he is vetted by some of the surviving fellows and were very much in contact for them as well. So yes, I would say the American revolution is certainly... And then the American revolutionary scene, of course by the Europeans, very much as a kind of offshoot of the enlightenment. So one of the great books of the late Enlightenment is by Condor Say, which he wrote while he was hiding actually in the future evolution of the chariot. It's called a historical sketch of the progress of the human spirit, or the human mind, and you know he writes about the American Revolution as being, basically owing its existence to being like...Andrew Keen: Franklin is of course an example of your pre-academic enlightenment, a generalist, inventor, scientist, entrepreneur, political thinker. What about the role of science and indeed economics in the Enlightenment? David, we're going to talk of course about the Marxist interpretation, perhaps the Marxist interpretation which sees The Enlightenment is just a euphemism, perhaps, for exploitative capitalism. How central was the growth and development of the market, of economics, and innovation, and capitalism in your reading of The Enlightened?David Bell: Well, in my reading, it was very important, but not in the way that the Marxists used to say. So Friedrich Engels once said that the Enlightenment was basically the idealized kingdom of the bourgeoisie, and there was whole strain of Marxist thinking that followed the assumption that, and then Karl Marx himself argued that the documents like the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, which obviously were inspired by the Enlightment, were simply kind of the near, or kind of. Way that the bourgeoisie was able to advance itself ideologically, and I don't think that holds much water, which is very little indication that any particular economic class motivated the Enlightenment or was using the Enlightment in any way. That said, I think it's very difficult to imagine the Enlightement without the social and economic changes that come in with the 18th century. To begin with globalization. If you read the great works of the Enlightenment, it's remarkable just how open they are to talking about humanity in general. So one of Voltaire's largest works, one of his most important works, is something called Essay on Customs and the Spirit of Nations, which is actually History of the World, where he talks learnedly not simply about Europe, but about the Americas, about China, about Africa, about India. Montesquieu writes Persian letters. Christian Volpe writes about Chinese philosophy. You know, Rousseau writes about... You know, the earliest days of humankind talks about Africa. All the great figures of the Enlightenment are writing about the rest of the world, and this is a period in which contacts between Europe and the rest the world are exploding along with international trade. So by the end of the 18th century, there are 4,000 to 5,000 ships a year crossing the Atlantic. It's an enormous number. And that's one context in which the enlightenment takes place. Another is what we call the consumer revolution. So in the 18th century, certainly in the major cities of Western Europe, people of a wide range of social classes, including even artisans, sort of somewhat wealthy artisians, shopkeepers, are suddenly able to buy a much larger range of products than they were before. They're able to choose how to basically furnish their own lives, if you will, how they're gonna dress, what they're going to eat, what they gonna put on the walls of their apartments and so on and so forth. And so they become accustomed to exercising a great deal more personal choice than their ancestors have done. And the Enlightenment really develops in tandem with this. Most of the great works of the Enlightment, they're not really written to, they're treatises, they're like Kant, they're written to persuade you to think in a single way. Really written to make you ask questions yourself, to force you to ponder things. They're written in the form of puzzles and riddles. Voltaire had a great line there, he wrote that the best kind of books are the books that readers write half of themselves as they read, and that's sort of the quintessence of the Enlightenment as far as I'm concerned.Andrew Keen: Yeah, Voltaire might have been comfortable on YouTube or Facebook. David, you mentioned all those ships going from Europe across the Atlantic. Of course, many of those ships were filled with African slaves. You mentioned this in your piece. I mean, this is no secret, of course. You also mentioned a couple of times Montesquieu's Persian letters. To what extent is... The enlightenment then perhaps the birth of Western power, of Western colonialism, of going to Africa, seizing people, selling them in North America, the French, the English, Dutch colonization of the rest of the world. Of course, later more sophisticated Marxist thinkers from the Frankfurt School, you mentioned these in your essay, Odorno and Horkheimer in particular, See the Enlightenment as... A project, if you like, of Western domination. I remember reading many years ago when I was in graduate school, Edward Said, his analysis of books like The Persian Letters, which is a form of cultural Western power. How much of this is simply bound up in the profound, perhaps, injustice of the Western achievement? And of course, some of the justice as well. We haven't talked about Jefferson, but perhaps in Jefferson's life and his thinking and his enlightened principles and his... Life as a slave owner, these contradictions are most self-evident.David Bell: Well, there are certainly contradictions, and there's certainly... I think what's remarkable, if you think about it, is that if you read through works of the Enlightenment, you would be hard-pressed to find a justification for slavery. You do find a lot of critiques of slavery, and I think that's something very important to keep in mind. Obviously, the chattel slavery of Africans in the Americas began well before the Enlightment, it began in 1500. The Enlightenment doesn't have the credit for being the first movement to oppose slavery. That really goes back to various religious groups, especially the Fakers. But that said, you have in France, you had in Britain, in America even, you'd have a lot of figures associated with the Enlightenment who were pretty sure of becoming very forceful opponents of slavery very early. Now, when it comes to imperialism, that's a tricky issue. What I think you'd find in these light bulbs, you'd different sorts of tendencies and different sorts of writings. So there are certainly a lot of writers of the Enlightenment who are deeply opposed to European authorities. One of the most popular works of the late Enlightenment was a collective work edited by the man named the Abbe Rinal, which is called The History of the Two Indies. And that is a book which is deeply, deeply critical of European imperialism. At the same time, at the same of the enlightenment, a lot the works of history written during the Enlightment. Tended, such as Voltaire's essay on customs, which I just mentioned, tend to give a kind of very linear version of history. They suggest that all societies follow the same path, from sort of primitive savagery, hunter-gatherers, through early agriculture, feudal stages, and on into sort of modern commercial society and civilization. And so they're basically saying, okay, we, the Europeans, are the most advanced. People like the Africans and the Native Americans are the least advanced, and so perhaps we're justified in going and quote, bringing our civilization to them, what later generations would call the civilizing missions, or possibly just, you know, going over and exploiting them because we are stronger and we are more, and again, we are the best. And then there's another thing that the Enlightenment did. The Enlightenment tended to destroy an older Christian view of humankind, which in some ways militated against modern racism. Christians believed, of course, that everyone was the same from Adam and Eve, which meant that there was an essential similarity in the world. And the Enlightenment challenged this by challenging the biblical kind of creation. The Enlightenment challenges this. Voltaire, for instance, believed that there had actually been several different human species that had different origins, and that can very easily become a justification for racism. Buffon, one of the most Figures of the French Enlightenment, one of the early naturalists, was crucial for trying to show that in fact nature is not static, that nature is always changing, that species are changing, including human beings. And so again, that allowed people to think in terms of human beings at different stages of evolution, and perhaps this would be a justification for privileging the more advanced humans over the less advanced. In the 18th century itself, most of these things remain potential, rather than really being acted upon. But in the 19th century, figures of writers who would draw upon these things certainly went much further, and these became justifications for slavery, imperialism, and other things. So again, the Enlightenment is the source of a great deal of stuff here, and you can't simply put it into one box or more.Andrew Keen: You mentioned earlier, David, that Concorda wrote one of the later classics of the... Condorcet? Sorry, Condorcets, excuse my French. Condorcès wrote one the later Classics of the Enlightenment when he was hiding from the French Revolution. In your mind, was the revolution itself the natural conclusion, climax? Perhaps anti-climax of the Enlightenment. Certainly, it seems as if a lot of the critiques of the French Revolution, particularly the more conservative ones, Burke comes to mind, suggested that perhaps the principles of in the Enlightment inevitably led to the guillotine, or is that an unfair way of thinking of it?David Bell: Well, there are a lot of people who have thought like that. Edmund Burke already, writing in 1790, in his reflections on the revolution in France, he said that everything which was great in the old regime is being dissolved and, quoting, dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. And then he said about the French that in the groves of their academy at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows. Nothing but the Gallows. So there, in 1780, he already seemed to be predicting the reign of terror and blaming it. A certain extent from the Enlightenment. That said, I think, you know, again, the French Revolution is incredibly complicated event. I mean, you certainly have, you know, an explosion of what we could call Enlightenment thinking all over the place. In France, it happened in France. What happened there was that you had a, you know, the collapse of an extraordinarily inefficient government and a very, you know, in a very antiquated, paralyzed system of government kind of collapsed, created a kind of political vacuum. Into that vacuum stepped a lot of figures who were definitely readers of the Enlightenment. Oh so um but again the Enlightment had I said I don't think you can call the Enlightement a single thing so to say that the Enlightiment inspired the French Revolution rather than the There you go.Andrew Keen: Although your essay on liberties is the Enlightenment then and now you probably didn't write is always these lazy editors who come up with inaccurate and inaccurate titles. So for you, there is no such thing as the Enlighten.David Bell: No, there is. There is. But still, it's a complex thing. It contains multitudes.Andrew Keen: So it's the Enlightenment rather than the United States.David Bell: Conflicting tendencies, it has contradictions within it. There's enough unity to refer to it as a singular noun, but it doesn't mean that it all went in one single direction.Andrew Keen: But in historical terms, did the failure of the French Revolution, its descent into Robespierre and then Bonaparte, did it mark the end in historical terms a kind of bookend of history? You began in 1720 by 1820. Was the age of the Enlightenment pretty much over?David Bell: I would say yes. I think that, again, one of the things about the French Revolution is that people who are reading these books and they're reading these ideas and they are discussing things really start to act on them in a very different way from what it did before the French revolution. You have a lot of absolute monarchs who are trying to bring certain enlightenment principles to bear in their form of government, but they're not. But it's difficult to talk about a full-fledged attempt to enact a kind of enlightenment program. Certainly a lot of the people in the French Revolution saw themselves as doing that. But as they did it, they ran into reality, I would say. I mean, now Tocqueville, when he writes his old regime in the revolution, talks about how the French philosophes were full of these abstract ideas that were divorced from reality. And while that's an exaggeration, there was a certain truth to them. And as soon as you start having the age of revolutions, as soon you start people having to devise systems of government that will actually last, and as you have people, democratic representative systems that will last, and as they start revising these systems under the pressure of actual events, then you're not simply talking about an intellectual movement anymore, you're talking about something very different. And so I would say that, well, obviously the ideas of the Enlightenment continue to inspire people, the books continue to be read, debated. They lead on to figures like Kant, and as we talked about earlier, Kant leads to Hegel, Hegel leads to Marx in a certain sense. Nonetheless, by the time you're getting into the 19th century, what you have, you know, has connections to the Enlightenment, but can we really still call it the Enlightment? I would sayAndrew Keen: And Tocqueville, of course, found democracy in America. Is democracy itself? I know it's a big question. But is it? Bound up in the Enlightenment. You've written extensively, David, both for liberties and elsewhere on liberalism. Is the promise of democracy, democratic systems, the one born in the American Revolution, promised in the French Revolution, not realized? Are they products of the Enlightment, or is the 19th century and the democratic systems that in the 19th century, is that just a separate historical track?David Bell: Again, I would say there are certain things in the Enlightenment that do lead in that direction. Certainly, I think most figures in the enlightenment in one general sense or another accepted the idea of a kind of general notion of popular sovereignty. It didn't mean that they always felt that this was going to be something that could necessarily be acted upon or implemented in their own day. And they didn't necessarily associate generalized popular sovereignty with what we would now call democracy with people being able to actually govern themselves. Would be certain figures, certainly Diderot and some of his essays, what we saw very much in the social contract, you know, were sketching out, you knows, models for possible democratic system. Condorcet, who actually lived into the French Revolution, wrote one of the most draft constitutions for France, that's one of most democratic documents ever proposed. But of course there were lots of figures in the Enlightenment, Voltaire, and others who actually believed much more in absolute monarchy, who believed that you just, you know, you should have. Freedom of speech and freedom of discussion, out of which the best ideas would emerge, but then you had to give those ideas to the prince who imposed them by poor sicknesses.Andrew Keen: And of course, Rousseau himself, his social contract, some historians have seen that as the foundations of totalitarian, modern totalitarianism. Finally, David, your wonderful essay in Liberties in the spring quarterly 2025 is The Enlightenment, Then and Now. What about now? You work at Princeton, your president has very bravely stood up to the new presidential regime in the United States, in defense of academic intellectual freedom. Does the word and the movement, does it have any relevance in the 2020s, particularly in an age of neo-authoritarianism around the world?David Bell: I think it does. I think we have to be careful about it. I always get a little nervous when people say, well, we should simply go back to the Enlightenment, because the Enlightenments is history. We don't go back the 18th century. I think what we need to do is to recover certain principles, certain ideals from the 18 century, the ones that matter to us, the ones we think are right, and make our own Enlightenment better. I don't think we need be governed by the 18 century. Thomas Paine once said that no generation should necessarily rule over every generation to come, and I think that's probably right. Unfortunately in the United States, we have a constitution which is now essentially unamendable, so we're doomed to live by a constitution largely from the 18th century. But are there many things in the Enlightenment that we should look back to, absolutely?Andrew Keen: Well, David, I am going to free you for your own French Enlightenment. You can go and have some croissant now in your local cafe in Paris. Thank you so much for a very, I excuse the pun, enlightening conversation on the Enlightenment then and now, Essential Essay in Liberties. I'd love to get you back on the show. Talk more history. Thank you. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

On Wednesday's Mark Levin Show, you are hearing it in the leftwing press, in the Never-Trump editorial pages and more - you cannot and must not deport anyone without some kind of notice and due process. Yet, there's nothing from these people on how this is supposed to actually work. What kind of due process are they talking about? The kind of due process that applies to citizens? If not, then what lower standard suffices as constitutional due process? Exactly how would due process, of any kind, be administered to millions and millions of illegal immigrants? We don't have enough courts of any kind in our country to handle the tsunami of cases that would be involved. This was all intentional. The border was opened to anyone. This is the Cloward-Pivens strategy: flood the system, overwhelm the system, break the system, and in doing so achieve your goals. Effectively, this is massive amnesty. Also, it seems these Federal judges are trying to stop mass deportation efforts and disrupt the Trump administration's response to Biden's mass immigration policies. Later, Hans von Spakovsky calls in and explains that he was stunned by Judge Boasberg's order because he's blatantly defying the Supreme Court. Boasberg's order was void from the moment he signed it. So how can he hold the Trump administration in contempt? Either Boasberg is incompetent or he's deliberately ignoring the Supreme Court. Afterward, Jonathan Turley calls in to discuss the criminal referral against NY AG Letitia James. James claims ​that ​her ​Virginia ​home ​was ​her ​principal ​residence. ​That ​was ​not ​and ​cannot ​be ​true ​because ​she was and still ​is ​an ​official ​of ​the ​New ​York ​government ​who ​must ​live ​within ​the ​state. What's ​notable ​about ​her ​false ​statements ​is ​that ​each ​one ​​worked ​towards ​a ​better mortgage ​rate. ​ Then, the Declaration of Independence discusses natural law and natural rights. Where do these concepts originate? They are influenced by John Locke and Montesquieu, but not entirely, as they ultimately come from God. When they say the people are sovereign, that ide comes from God. This is why the government can never be sovereign. The United States is first county on earth to be founded on these principles. Finally, Heritage President, Kevin Roberts, calls in to discuss the organization's impactful projects and ongoing efforts to revitalize federalism in America. Roberts shares insights on the current political landscape, the significance of state legislative work, and the importance of maintaining a conservative agenda while addressing challenges such as tariffs and international relations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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William J. Federer is a nationally known speaker, historian, author, and president of Amerisearch, Inc. He's the speaker on The American Minute daily broadcast. He has authored numerous books including, America's God and Country Encyclopedia of Quotations, Who is the King in America?, Socialism: The Real History From Plato to the Present - How the Deep State Capitalizes on Crises to Consolidate Control and the newly released, Silence Equals Consent: The Sin of Omission.On January 20th, 2025, President Donald Trump began his second term as the 47th president of the United States. He won both the popular as well as the electoral vote, leaving no doubt concerning his election. The people decided this change was necessary for what many believed was the preservation of our nation. In the weeks that have followed, his administration is having to deal with an unprecedented 132 legal challenges by liberal judges.Some are referring to this as a judicial "January 6th." Others see it as a judicial coup or judicial insurrection. In fact, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer has even admitted, "...we did put 235 judges, progressive judges, judges not under the control of Trump, last year on the bench, and they are ruling against Trump time after time after time."This program takes a look at the "road" our judiciary is traveling on as William looked at numerous warnings about judicial overreach as expressed by individuals such as Montesquieu, Thomas Jefferson, Alexis De Tocqueville, George Washington and also modern commentators such as Phyllis Schlafly and law professor Alan Dershowitz.

William J. Federer is a nationally known speaker, historian, author, and president of Amerisearch, Inc. He's the speaker on The American Minute daily broadcast. He has authored numerous books including, America's God and Country Encyclopedia of Quotations, Who is the King in America?, Socialism: The Real History From Plato to the Present - How the Deep State Capitalizes on Crises to Consolidate Control and the newly released, Silence Equals Consent: The Sin of Omission.On January 20th, 2025, President Donald Trump began his second term as the 47th president of the United States. He won both the popular as well as the electoral vote, leaving no doubt concerning his election. The people decided this change was necessary for what many believed was the preservation of our nation. In the weeks that have followed, his administration is having to deal with an unprecedented 132 legal challenges by liberal judges.Some are referring to this as a judicial "January 6th." Others see it as a judicial coup or judicial insurrection. In fact, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer has even admitted, "...we did put 235 judges, progressive judges, judges not under the control of Trump, last year on the bench, and they are ruling against Trump time after time after time."This program takes a look at the "road" our judiciary is traveling on as William looked at numerous warnings about judicial overreach as expressed by individuals such as Montesquieu, Thomas Jefferson, Alexis De Tocqueville, George Washington and also modern commentators such as Phyllis Schlafly and law professor Alan Dershowitz.

Vous aimez notre peau de caste ? Soutenez-nous ! https://www.lenouvelespritpublic.fr/abonnementUne émission de Philippe Meyer, enregistrée en public à l'École alsacienne le 16 mars 2025.Avec cette semaine :Nicolas Baverez, essayiste et avocat.Jean-Louis Bourlanges, essayiste.Marc-Olivier Padis, directeur des études de la fondation Terra Nova.Richard Werly, correspondant à Paris du quotidien helvétique en ligne Blick.COMMENT RÉARMER ?Après l'intervention télévisée du chef de l'État le 5 mars, la défense nationale est devenue la priorité du gouvernement. Fleurons de l'industrie de l'armement, PME et start-up innovantes, sous-traitants ... Tout un écosystème est mobilisé pour faire face à la menace russe amplifiée et au retrait de l'allié américain. Le ministre des Armées Sébastien Lecornu a évoqué une enveloppe de 100 milliards d'euros par an pour la défense à l'horizon 2030, contre 68 milliards inscrits dans la loi de programmation militaire, soit 1,5 point de PIB supplémentaire évoqué par le président de la République, pour passer de 2% à 3%-3,5% chaque année. Le ministre des Armées a esquissé quelques priorités : « Les munitions et la guerre électronique sont les urgences puis la dronisation et la robotisation des armées. » L'accélération des cadences est déjà visible sur certains segments comme les munitions, l'artillerie et les missiles. Il faut également rester performant dans le domaine de l'intelligence artificielle, et du spatial. Du côté des grands programmes, Sébastien Lecornu entend augmenter le nombre d'avions de combat et de frégates de premier rang.Les revues stratégiques successives qui évaluent régulièrement les menaces pesant sur le pays et prévoient les moyens d'y répondre, n'ont jamais écarté le risque d'un retour de la guerre de haute intensité. C'est pourquoi le modèle d'armée complet français a toujours été préservé au nom de la souveraineté nationale, afin de pouvoir agir sur tous les niveaux de conflictualité, même s'il a souvent été qualifié d'échantillonaire. La France s'inscrit également dans un cadre européen avec de nombreux programmes de coopération comme le système de combat aérien du futur avec l'Allemagne et l'Espagne ; l'hélicoptère du futur avec notamment l'Italie, l'Espagne, et l'Allemagne ou les missiles avec le Royaume-Uni.Interrogés par Ipsos-Ceci pour La Tribune Dimanche, les Français sont 68 % à considérer favorablement une augmentation du budget de la Défense quitte à augmenter encore les déficits pour 66 % d'entre eux et même sacrifier des budgets de l'Éducation ou de la Santé (51 %). La sécurité nationale passant ainsi devant la sécurité sociale. Avant d'en arriver là, le gouvernement veut toutefois explorer d'autres pistes de financement. Le ministre français de l'Économie, Éric Lombard, exclut d'activer la clause de sauvegarde prévue par Bruxelles pour financer les investissements dans la défense par de la dette. Parmi les outils envisagés à Bercy ou à Matignon, figurent notamment le recours au Livret A ou encore un grand emprunt. Vendredi, le président de la République, Emmanuel Macron a reçu les industriels de la défense pour leur fixer une nouvelle feuille de route visant à accélérer les cadences de livraison d'équipements. Face aux difficultés budgétaires et industrielles, Bercy doit organiser le 20 mars prochain une réunion rassemblant les banques et les assurances, mais aussi des acteurs de l'industrie de la défense.TRUMP-MUSK : QUELS CONTREPOIDS ?Les décisions et les méthodes de Donald Trump depuis son retour à la Maison Blanche, le 20 janvier, soulèvent des interrogations quant aux limites du pouvoir présidentiel aux États-Unis. Le système politique américain repose sur le principe des checks and balances, visant à ce que « le pouvoir arrête le pouvoir », comme l'avait théorisé Montesquieu au XVIIIème siècle. Chacune des trois branches du gouvernement – exécutif, législatif, judiciaire - dispose de moyens de contrôle sur les autres (checks) pour viser un certain équilibre (balance). Les Républicains contrôlent la présidence, la Chambre des représentants et le Sénat. Même si leur majorité à la Chambre est très étroite, la passivité des sénateurs conservateurs face aux nominations les plus controversées de Trump n'augure pas d'un rôle de frein à la présidence de la part du Congrès. Bien que les Républicains n'aient pas capturé l'ensemble du pouvoir judiciaire, ils disposent d'une nette majorité à la Cour suprême.Depuis deux mois, les recours en justice se multiplient dans les États fédérés à majorité Démocrate qui cherchent à mettre en place des contentieux stratégiques sur quasiment toutes les mesures : suspension des traitements médicaux pour les personnes transgenres, autorisations pour Elon Musk d'accéder aux informations du fisc et de la Sécurité sociale, licenciements massifs de fonctionnaires publics ou intimidations à leur encontre, suppression du droit du sol pour les personnes nées de parents irrégulièrement ou temporairement immigrés, élimination de plusieurs autorités administratives …Même les Églises se tournent vers la justice pour protéger les lieux de culte du décret y autorisant les raids de la police de l'immigration. Mais une bonne partie des dossiers risquent soit d'être enterrés, soit portés devant une Cour Suprême qui a proclamé, avant l'élection de 2024, que Donald Trump, poursuivi dans de multiples affaires, bénéficiait d'une présomption d'immunité en raison du principe de séparation des pouvoirs. Et, le vice-président, J.D. Vance, diplômé de la faculté de droit Yale, a déclaré que « les juges n'ont pas le droit de contrôler le pouvoir légitime de l'exécutif. » En outre, si l'administration Trump décidait de désobéir à une décision des juges, la Cour ne dispose pas de moyens de coercition.Face à une opposition étonnamment passive et encore sonnée, les contrepouvoirs paraissent bien faibles. Sauf un, que Montesquieu ne connaissait pas : Wall Street. Les entreprises américaines, surtout les grandes entreprises cotées en Bourse, dépendantes du marché mondial et de la chaîne de valeur globale paraissent être les seules à pouvoir refreiner les ardeurs autocratiques du clan au pouvoir à la Maison Blanche. Wall Street, qui avait soutenu l'élection de Donald Trump, semble déjà déchanter.Chaque semaine, Philippe Meyer anime une conversation d'analyse politique, argumentée et courtoise, sur des thèmes nationaux et internationaux liés à l'actualité. Pour en savoir plus : www.lenouvelespritpublic.fr

On the forty-eighth episode of the Constitutionalist, Shane Leary and Matthew Reising discuss John Adams and Thomas Jefferson's discussion of natural aristocracy, in a series of letter from August 14 to October 28 of 1813. We want to hear from you! Constitutionalistpod@gmail.com The Constitutionalist is proud to be sponsored by the Jack Miller Center for Teaching America's Founding Principles and History. For the last twenty years, JMC has been working to preserve and promote that tradition through a variety of programs at the college and K-12 levels. Through their American Political Tradition Project, JMC has partnered with more than 1,000 scholars at over 300 college campuses across the country, especially through their annual Summer Institutes for graduate students and recent PhDs. The Jack Miller Center is also working with thousands of K-12 educators across the country to help them better understand America's founding principles and history and teach them effectively, to better educate the next generation of citizens. JMC has provided thousands of hours of professional development for teachers all over the country, reaching millions of students with improved civic learning. If you care about American education and civic responsibility, you'll want to check out their work, which focuses on reorienting our institutions of learning around America's founding principles. To learn more or get involved, visit jackmillercenter.org. The Constitutionalist is a podcast cohosted by Professor Benjamin Kleinerman, the RW Morrison Professor of Political Science at Baylor University and Founder and Editor of The Constitutionalist Blog, Shane Leary, a graduate student at Baylor University, and Dr. Matthew Reising, a John and Daria Barry Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Princeton University. Each week, they discuss political news in light of its constitutional implications, and explore a unique constitutional topic, ranging from the thoughts and experiences of America's founders and statesmen, historical episodes, and the broader philosophic ideas that influence the American experiment in government.

La minoritaria asociación de Juezas y Jueces para la Democracia ha salido en defensa de su colega, Cándido Conde-Pumpido, que ha convertido el Constitucional en un órgano político al servicio de Sánchez. Montesquieu perfeccionó la idea de los tres poderes planteada por Locke, ya que incluyó el Judicial, y desde entonces autores como Constant, Alberdi, Tocqueville, Stein, Duverger, Kelsen, Bobbio, Dahl y otros han planteado la existencia o la conveniencia de ampliarlos. 

Dr. W.B. Allen's book on George Washington is on the shelves at Mt. Vernon and his 50 years-in-the-making book on Montesquieu came out recently... but have you heard about his newest book? Tune in to The Public Square® today to hear more. Topic: Our Mission The Public Square® with hosts Dave Zanotti and Wayne Shepherd thepublicsquare.com Air Date: Thursday, February 20, 2025

durée : 00:03:46 - Le Pourquoi du comment : philo - par : Frédéric Worms - Le pouvoir risque l'absolutisme. Montesquieu pense l'équilibre des trois pouvoirs, mais est-ce suffisant ? Pour Foucault et Deleuze, les pouvoirs sont multiples. Entre contrôle et liberté, obéissance et protection, quels contre-pouvoirs garantir pour préserver nos droits fondamentaux ? - réalisation : Riyad Cairat

durée : 00:03:50 - Le Pourquoi du comment : philo - par : Frédéric Worms - Un pouvoir sans limite devient tyrannique. Pour éviter cet abus, Montesquieu a pensé la séparation des pouvoirs en institutions indépendantes. Dans les sociétés modernes, comment garantir cet équilibre ? Sans contre-pouvoirs, la politique risque-t-elle toujours de sombrer dans la tyrannie ? - réalisation : Riyad Cairat

Pour vous abonner et écouter l'émission en une fois, sans publicité : https://m.audiomeans.fr/s/S-tavkjvmo François de Paule Latapie (1739-1823) est un personnage incroyable, érudit des Lumières, né à Bordeaux dans une famille modeste.Fils de notaire, il bénéficie du soutien de Montesquieu, qui lui offre une éducation privilégiée. Latapie devient le secrétaire de Jean-Baptiste de Secondat (fils de Montesquieu) et le précepteur de son petit-fils.Il se forme en médecine, chimie, botanique et diverses disciplines scientifiques et littéraires.Il évolue à Paris grâce au réseau de Montesquieu et fréquente les cercles éclairés de l'époque. Passionné par le voyage, il explore l'Europe, notamment l'Italie, l'Angleterre et la France, entre 1774 et 1777.Ses écrits incluent un journal détaillé de ses déplacements, riche de réflexions personnelles et observations sur les sociétés traversées. Inspecteur des manufactures et naturaliste, il se distingue par ses contributions aux savoirs techniques et sa capacité à intégrer différents milieux sociaux et intellectuels.En compagnie de Gilles Montègre, historien, maître de conférence, et grand spécialiste de la période des Lumières, nous allons voyager dans ce 18è siècle extraordinaire, et voir comment nous a été révélé ce personnage qui « vaut le détour » comme on dit dans les Guides Verts ;)

Pour vous abonner et écouter l'émission en une fois, sans publicité : https://m.audiomeans.fr/s/S-tavkjvmo François de Paule Latapie (1739-1823) est un personnage incroyable, érudit des Lumières, né à Bordeaux dans une famille modeste.Fils de notaire, il bénéficie du soutien de Montesquieu, qui lui offre une éducation privilégiée. Latapie devient le secrétaire de Jean-Baptiste de Secondat (fils de Montesquieu) et le précepteur de son petit-fils.Il se forme en médecine, chimie, botanique et diverses disciplines scientifiques et littéraires.Il évolue à Paris grâce au réseau de Montesquieu et fréquente les cercles éclairés de l'époque. Passionné par le voyage, il explore l'Europe, notamment l'Italie, l'Angleterre et la France, entre 1774 et 1777.Ses écrits incluent un journal détaillé de ses déplacements, riche de réflexions personnelles et observations sur les sociétés traversées. Inspecteur des manufactures et naturaliste, il se distingue par ses contributions aux savoirs techniques et sa capacité à intégrer différents milieux sociaux et intellectuels.En compagnie de Gilles Montègre, historien, maître de conférence, et grand spécialiste de la période des Lumières, nous allons voyager dans ce 18è siècle extraordinaire, et voir comment nous a été révélé ce personnage qui « vaut le détour » comme on dit dans les Guides Verts ;)

Pour vous abonner et écouter l'émission en une fois, sans publicité : https://m.audiomeans.fr/s/S-tavkjvmo François de Paule Latapie (1739-1823) est un personnage incroyable, érudit des Lumières, né à Bordeaux dans une famille modeste.Fils de notaire, il bénéficie du soutien de Montesquieu, qui lui offre une éducation privilégiée. Latapie devient le secrétaire de Jean-Baptiste de Secondat (fils de Montesquieu) et le précepteur de son petit-fils.Il se forme en médecine, chimie, botanique et diverses disciplines scientifiques et littéraires.Il évolue à Paris grâce au réseau de Montesquieu et fréquente les cercles éclairés de l'époque. Passionné par le voyage, il explore l'Europe, notamment l'Italie, l'Angleterre et la France, entre 1774 et 1777.Ses écrits incluent un journal détaillé de ses déplacements, riche de réflexions personnelles et observations sur les sociétés traversées. Inspecteur des manufactures et naturaliste, il se distingue par ses contributions aux savoirs techniques et sa capacité à intégrer différents milieux sociaux et intellectuels.En compagnie de Gilles Montègre, historien, maître de conférence, et grand spécialiste de la période des Lumières, nous allons voyager dans ce 18è siècle extraordinaire, et voir comment nous a été révélé ce personnage qui « vaut le détour » comme on dit dans les Guides Verts ;)

Pour vous abonner et écouter l'émission en une fois, sans publicité : https://m.audiomeans.fr/s/S-tavkjvmo François de Paule Latapie (1739-1823) est un personnage incroyable, érudit des Lumières, né à Bordeaux dans une famille modeste.Fils de notaire, il bénéficie du soutien de Montesquieu, qui lui offre une éducation privilégiée. Latapie devient le secrétaire de Jean-Baptiste de Secondat (fils de Montesquieu) et le précepteur de son petit-fils.Il se forme en médecine, chimie, botanique et diverses disciplines scientifiques et littéraires.Il évolue à Paris grâce au réseau de Montesquieu et fréquente les cercles éclairés de l'époque. Passionné par le voyage, il explore l'Europe, notamment l'Italie, l'Angleterre et la France, entre 1774 et 1777.Ses écrits incluent un journal détaillé de ses déplacements, riche de réflexions personnelles et observations sur les sociétés traversées. Inspecteur des manufactures et naturaliste, il se distingue par ses contributions aux savoirs techniques et sa capacité à intégrer différents milieux sociaux et intellectuels.En compagnie de Gilles Montègre, historien, maître de conférence, et grand spécialiste de la période des Lumières, nous allons voyager dans ce 18è siècle extraordinaire, et voir comment nous a été révélé ce personnage qui « vaut le détour » comme on dit dans les Guides Verts ;)

Pour vous abonner et écouter l'émission en une fois, sans publicité : https://m.audiomeans.fr/s/S-tavkjvmo François de Paule Latapie (1739-1823) est un personnage incroyable, érudit des Lumières, né à Bordeaux dans une famille modeste.Fils de notaire, il bénéficie du soutien de Montesquieu, qui lui offre une éducation privilégiée. Latapie devient le secrétaire de Jean-Baptiste de Secondat (fils de Montesquieu) et le précepteur de son petit-fils.Il se forme en médecine, chimie, botanique et diverses disciplines scientifiques et littéraires.Il évolue à Paris grâce au réseau de Montesquieu et fréquente les cercles éclairés de l'époque. Passionné par le voyage, il explore l'Europe, notamment l'Italie, l'Angleterre et la France, entre 1774 et 1777.Ses écrits incluent un journal détaillé de ses déplacements, riche de réflexions personnelles et observations sur les sociétés traversées. Inspecteur des manufactures et naturaliste, il se distingue par ses contributions aux savoirs techniques et sa capacité à intégrer différents milieux sociaux et intellectuels.En compagnie de Gilles Montègre, historien, maître de conférence, et grand spécialiste de la période des Lumières, nous allons voyager dans ce 18è siècle extraordinaire, et voir comment nous a été révélé ce personnage qui « vaut le détour » comme on dit dans les Guides Verts ;)

Conspiracy theories have always been a part of human history, weaving tales of hidden truths and shadowy powers that challenge our understanding of the world. From ancient myths to modern online movements, these theories have the power to captivate, divide, and even mobilize entire communities. But what drives their enduring appeal? More importantly, how do they shape the societies in which they thrive?In this continuing series, we delve into the world of conspiracy theories—exploring their origins, their psychological and cultural impact, and the way they influence everything from politics to social dynamics. Whether debunking long-held beliefs or uncovering the mechanisms that allow such ideas to spread, this series aims to shed light on the complexities and consequences of these pervasive narratives.Exploring Controversies in Literature: The Protocols of ZionIn the realm of literature, certain texts have sparked debates, influenced ideologies, and ignited global controversies. One such text is The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. This document has been alternately described as a historical blueprint for domination, a fabricated conspiracy theory, and a central text in the study of antisemitic propaganda. In a classic episode of Power of Prophecy, host Texe Marrs delved into the origins, implications, and global reactions to this contentious book.This blog post provides an overview of the discussion, exploring the historical context, claims of authenticity, and broader societal implications of The Protocols of Zion. Whether you approach this topic as a curious reader or a critical thinker, understanding the arguments around this infamous text can offer insights into how literature influences perceptions, ideologies, and global discourse.Historical Context of The ProtocolsThe Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion first emerged in the early 20th century and was initially published in Russia. According to Marrs, the book was appended to a larger work titled The Great Within the Small by Sergius Nilus, a Russian Orthodox monk. The text purports to outline a secret plan for global domination orchestrated by Jewish leaders.Over time, The Protocols gained notoriety, both as an alleged exposé of a conspiratorial framework and as a powerful tool of antisemitic propaganda. Marrs described the book's dissemination and the fierce backlash it faced, noting that it has been banned in numerous countries. He emphasized how these bans have, paradoxically, increased its mystique and fueled debates over its authenticity.The episode also explored the context of early 20th-century geopolitics, linking the book to the rise of communism in Russia and beyond. Marrs alleged that The Protocols provided insight into the ideological strategies employed during this turbulent period, arguing that the text's predictions have remained eerily relevant in contemporary times.The Authenticity Debate: Truth or Forgery?Central to the controversy surrounding The Protocols is the question of its authenticity. Marrs discussed the text's polarizing reception, highlighting how critics and proponents alike have scrutinized its origins. Critics, including Jewish organizations, argue that the document is a fabricated narrative designed to incite hatred. Proponents, on the other hand, claim that the text accurately predicts political and societal developments, suggesting it was crafted by individuals with insider knowledge of global strategies.Marrs cited notable historical figures such as Henry Ford and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his defense of the text's significance. Ford famously remarked that the content of The Protocols “fits in with what is going on,” while Solzhenitsyn, described as the “conscience of the 20th century,” analyzed the text for its literary and ideological merit. According to Marrs, Solzhenitsyn believed that The Protocols contained elements of brilliance, describing it as a “master plan” that demonstrates extraordinary foresight, albeit written in a fragmented and flawed manner.One of the most compelling points raised in the episode was the theory that parts of The Protocols were plagiarized from Maurice Joly's 1864 work, Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu. Marrs acknowledged similarities between the two texts but argued that such parallels do not diminish the significance or relevance of The Protocols. Instead, he posited that borrowing ideas is a common practice in literature and revolutionary texts.Thanks for reading The Breakdown! This post is public so feel free to share it.Censorship and SuppressionA recurring theme in Marrs' discussion was the widespread censorship of The Protocols. He argued that the efforts to ban or suppress the book have inadvertently amplified its intrigue. Marrs expressed concern over what he described as a global tendency toward censorship and control of controversial ideas, drawing parallels to historical regimes that sought to suppress dissenting literature.The host shared examples of how publishers and individuals associated with The Protocols have faced threats and persecution. He noted that the text's suppression began as early as 1905 and continued throughout the 20th century, with various governments and organizations seeking to restrict its availability. Marrs portrayed this censorship as indicative of the text's potential impact, suggesting that its content poses a threat to those in positions of power.Religious and Cultural AnalysisMarrs also explored the religious and cultural dimensions of The Protocols. He linked its content to Jewish texts such as the Kabbalah and Talmud, claiming that these writings provide a deeper understanding of the ideological underpinnings of The Protocols. According to Marrs, the symbolism within The Protocols aligns with certain concepts from Jewish mysticism, including the idea of a “great serpent” that traverses nations and culminates in global dominance.This interpretation of The Protocols as a blueprint for religious, political, and economic domination has been one of the most contentious aspects of its legacy. Marrs encouraged listeners to examine these claims critically, urging them to explore the broader historical and cultural context in which such ideas emerged.Implications for SocietyOne of the most thought-provoking aspects of the episode was Marrs' assertion that The Protocols offers a warning for future societal developments. He argued that the text serves as both a cautionary tale and a call to vigilance, highlighting the potential consequences of unchecked power and ideological manipulation.Marrs also drew connections between the themes of The Protocols and modern global issues, such as political corruption, economic inequality, and media control. By examining these parallels, he aimed to illustrate how the text's content remains relevant in contemporary discourse.A Call to Critical EngagementAs the episode concluded, Marrs issued a call to action for listeners to engage critically with The Protocols and similar controversial texts. He emphasized the importance of free speech and open debate in uncovering truths and fostering understanding. Marrs also encouraged readers to approach the text with an analytical mindset, considering both its historical context and its potential distortions.Marrs framed his discussion as an effort to preserve intellectual freedom and challenge censorship. He argued that understanding controversial ideas, even those that provoke discomfort or disagreement, is essential for maintaining a free and informed society.Final ThoughtsThe Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion remains one of the most polarizing texts in modern history. Whether viewed as a forgery, a prophetic document, or a tool of propaganda, its impact on literature, ideology, and global discourse is undeniable.In this episode of Power of Prophecy, Texe Marrs provided a comprehensive exploration of the text's history, authenticity, and implications. By examining the debates surrounding The Protocols, Marrs invited listeners to grapple with the complexities of controversial literature and its role in shaping societal narratives.Ultimately, this discussion serves as a reminder of the power of ideas—both to illuminate truths and to perpetuate divisions. As readers and thinkers, our responsibility lies in approaching such texts with critical inquiry, seeking to understand their origins, significance, and lasting impact on the world.The Breakdown is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aaronbarker.substack.com/subscribe

Vous écoutez le podcast "Les interviews Histoire", notre émission hebdomadaire gratuite pour tous. Abonnez-vous à "5.000 ans d'Histoire" et accédez à environ 350 podcasts d'1 heure pour seulement 2€ par mois sans Pub ! Avec une nouvelle émission chaque semaine : https://m.audiomeans.fr/s/S-tavkjvmo Voilà une histoire entièrement renouvelée du voyage en Europe au siècle des Lumières. Suivant les pas de Voltaire, de Casanova mais aussi d'un mystérieux voyageur qui pourrait avoir été le fils caché de Montesquieu, on découvre qu'en dehors du « Grand Tour » bien connu des aristocrates, un voyage émancipateur a vu le jour, ouvrant la voie à une approche inédite de la nature et des sociétés humaines.Femmes, artisans, savants, domestiques, aventuriers ou philosophes : c'est une nouvelle « société du voyage » qui arpente au XVIIIe siècle les routes de l'Europe, à pied, en voiture ou à la voile, des Highlands à l'Italie en passant par les Alpes ou les îles méditerranéennes. L'Europe des Lumières n'a pas seulement exploré les confins du monde : elle est aussi partie à la découverte d'elle-même, se soumettant à de salutaires autocritiques. Les Européens expérimentent alors d'autres manières de voyager, revendiquant une intimité avec l'espace naturel, les territoires proches, les savoirs et les savoir-faire locaux. Et les voyageurs expriment des émotions qui trahissent un ardent désir de liberté, permettant de repenser l'articulation entre le temps des Lumières et l'âge des révolutions.Confrontant les manuscrits inédits du Bordelais François de Paule Latapie avec 254 autres écrits de voyageurs des Lumières, Gilles Montègre propose une autre approche historique du voyage, écrite au ras du sol et au fil du chemin. À l'heure où le défi environnemental remet en question le modèle du tourisme de masse, ce livre est aussi une invitation à redonner du sens à nos manières de voyager.L'auteur, l'historien et spécialiste Gilles Montègre, est avec nous pour les Interviews Histoire, en partenariat avec le Salon du Livre d'Histoire de Versailles

In this conversation from 2021, Alex speaks with Jacob Levy about Montesquieu's role in shaping contemporary political science, the American revolutionary project, and the role of the separation of powers as a bulwark against despotism.  References 1. “Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom” by Jacob Levy Link: https://www.amazon.ca/Rationalism-Pluralism-Freedom-Jacob-Levy/dp/0198808917  2. “The Multiculturalism of Fear” by Jacob Levy Link: https://www.amazon.ca/Multiculturalism-Fear-Jacob-T-Levy/dp/0198297122  3. “Montesquieu's Constitutional Legacies” by Jacob Levy Link: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1117087  4. “Beyond Publius: Montesquieu, Liberal Republicanism, and the Small-Republic Thesis” by Jacob Levy Link: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=739447  5. “The Spirit of Laws” by Charles Baron de Montesquieu Link: https://www.amazon.ca/Spirit-Laws-Charles-Baron-Montesquieu/dp/1616405287#:~:text=The%20Spirit%20of%20Laws%2C%20first,by%20the%20Roman%20Catholic%20Church.  6. “Leviathan” by Thomas Hobbes  Link: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3207/3207-h/3207-h.htm  7. “Second Treatise of Government” by John Locke Link: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/7370/7370-h/7370-h.htm

Ep.228 ELLIOTT BARNES A Los Angeles native, Elliott Barnes graduated from Cornell University in New York State in 1985 with a Bachelors and a Masters in Architecture and Urban Planning. In 1984 the AIA member architect began his career with Arthur Erickson Architects in Los Angeles. In 1987, he joined the Paris office of renowned designer Andrée Putman, who in 1997 handed over the design management of her firm to him, a position he occupied until 2003. In 2004 Elliott Barnes created his own interior design firm in Paris. His aesthetic talents meant that he was immediately sought-after for exceptional design projects, including private residential properties, retail and institutional spaces, hotels and spa, installations in France and abroad. As his work shows, it is his obsession with detail that characterizes his style, which is both eclectic and demure. His notable projects include a visitors and reception center for Champagne Billecart Salmon in Mareuil-sur-Aÿ, the new Tai Ping showroom in Paris, the five-star Hotel de Montesquieu in Paris, as well as the Ritz Carlton palace in Wolfsburg in Germany. A sterling silver limited edition collection for Christofle around the theme of Champagne now on exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, a chalet in Megève (France), the headquarters and tasting center of Ruinart in Reims, a rug collection for Tai Ping, or a penthouse showcase apartment of the real estate group Mitsui in Tokyo, and a chalet in Verbier (Switzerland). He designed the scenography for the exhibition on Gaby Aghion at the Jewish Museum in New York in October 2023. In 2024 his Endless Summer II bench, was acquired by Le Mobilier National, the French National Furniture Collection. The Elliott Barnes style resides in his elegant handling of light and use of both unusual and noble materials which invest unique, exclusive spaces with an innovative approach to luxury. His design talent has been acclaimed by the magazines AD France-AD 100 since 2014, ELLE Decor USA-A List and Architectural Digest USA-AD100 since 2021. In 2023 he was the winner of the «Talent for Elegance» award from The Centre du Luxe et de la Création, France. Wallpaper magazine selected him as one of the 300 American design creatives to know in 2023 and one of the 400 American creatives to know in the Tastemakers category in 2024. Elliott Barnes is considered one of the top 100 interior designers in the world. Passionate about art, Elliott Barnes is also the founder of The Barnes Contemporary (@thebarnescontemporary), a private collection based upon portraits of his family members by artists from the African diaspora. This collection was initiated 12 years ago. Photo Credit~ Benoit Auguste Elliott Barnes www.elliottbarnesinteriors.com Elle Décor https://www.elledecor.com/design-decorate/a43727224/christofle-elliott-barnes/ Musée des Arts décoratifs https://madparis.fr/Exposition-Christofle Christofle https://www.christofle.com/us_en/dellipse-elliottbarnes | https://www.christofle.com/us_en/madparis-christofle | https://www.christofle.com/us_en/our-maison/designers/elliott-barnes ACH Collection https://achcollection.com/trends/home-world/elliott-barnes-and-his-megeve-ski-chalet-that-you-must-know/

V epizodi 166 je moj gost bil ddr. Igor Grdina, redni profesor za slovensko književnost in za kulturno zgodovino. V epizodi se dotakneva naslednjih tematik: Študij zgodovine Ali je zanimanje za zgodovino res večje? Nedostopni arhivi Kitajske in Rusije Skrivanje resnice in uničevanje zapisov Razsvetljenstvo, krščanstvo in Montesquieu Vpliv žensk na zgodovino; Francija v 18.stoletju 2.svetovna vojna in Francoska revolucija Kitajska je komunistična Ali je nesvoboden človek lahko inovativen? Spodbujanje novih vplivnih posameznikov ============= Obvladovanje matematike je ključ do odklepanja neštetih priložnosti v življenju in karieri. Zato je Klemen Selakovič soustvaril aplikacijo Astra AI. Ta projekt uteleša vizijo sveta, kjer se noben otrok ne počuti neumnega ali nesposobnega. Kjer je znanje človeštva dostopno vsakomur. Pridruži se pri revoluciji izobraževanja s pomočjo umetne inteligence. https://astra.si/ai/  

Liberty is doomed where power is united - consolidated in the same hands. That's the warning Montesquieu gave us about separation of powers. This was one of the biggest battles between Federalists and Anti-Federalists But here's the twist: both sides used the exact same words to support opposite arguments. In this episode, we're diving into this critical debate over the ideas of the most-cited political writer of the ratification debates The post Anti-Federalist vs Federalist CLASH: Montesquieu and Separation of Powers first appeared on Tenth Amendment Center.