When Should the Majority Rule – and is it time to resign democracy?
When do limits on majorities enhance democratic rule, and when do they undermine it? Join Nic Cheeseman as he talks to Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, well-known as authors of the best-selling boo...
16 Sep 202530min
Matthew Benjamin Cole, "Fear the Future: Dystopia and Political Imagination in the Twentieth Century" (U of Michigan Press, 2025)
Are we already living in some kind of fascist or technocratic dystopia? How do we avert the AI dystopia? These are the types of things that you'll see thrown about in op-eds and analysis pieces all ov...
13 Sep 20251h 48min
“Plato and the Tyrant” with author James Romm
In 388 BCE, Plato, at the age of about forty and in the midst of writing The Republic, visited for the first time the then-Greek city state of Syracuse, on the eastern shores of Sicily. Syracuse was r...
13 Sep 202558min
Vera Michlin-Shapir, "Fluid Russia: Between the Global and the National in the Post-Soviet Era" (Cornell UP, 2021)
Fluid Russia: Between the Global and the National in the Post-Soviet Era (Cornell UP, 2021) offers a new framework for understanding Russian national identity by focusing on the impact of globalizatio...
12 Sep 202554min
Andrea Louise Campbell, "Taxation and Resentment: Race, Party, and Class in American Tax Attitudes" (Princeton UP, 2025)
Why Americans favor progressive taxation in principle but not in practice Most Americans support progressive taxation in principle, and want the rich to pay more. But the specific tax policies that m...
10 Sep 202557min
Thomas Graham, "Getting Russia Right" (Polity Press, 2023)
“I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia,” Winston Churchill once said. “It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” That saying sounds as true now as ever in the midst of Russia’s ...
10 Sep 202559min
Ariel Colonomos, "Pricing Lives: The Political Art of Measurement" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Pricing Lives: The Political Art of Measurement (Oxford UP, 2023) discusses how human lives are equated with the material, and argues that pricing lives lies at the core of the political; in fact, as ...
9 Sep 202544min
Stanley Bill and Ben Stanley, "Good Change: The Rise and Fall of Poland's Illiberal Revolution" (Stanford UP, 2025)
In Poland between 2015 and 2023, Jarosław Kaczyński and his Law and Justice Party (PiS) attempted a novel experiment. Could a governing party sustain a coalition committed religiously inspired social ...
8 Sep 202539min
