American Political History

Before the American colonists ever claimed the rights of man, they claimed the rights of Englishmen. For the first ten years of the quarrel with Britain they argued not like philosophers but like lawy...

4 Jul 202331min

Every government claims the right to do what no private person may — to tax, to jail, to send men to die. By what right? For most of history the answer was God’s will or the king’s sword. Then a handf...

4 Jul 202329min

“Rights” is the most powerful word in American political life — and one of the slipperiest. Everyone claims them, on every side, for opposite things, and almost no one stops to define what a right act...

4 Jul 202329min

The free-will defense answered the problem of evil — but it rested on one claim: that we are free. So this episode puts freedom itself on trial, against a God who knows the future before it happens an...

4 Jul 202330min

In the year 524, a condemned man named Boethius sat in a cell awaiting a brutal execution and wrote down the question that has haunted the West ever since: if there is a God, whence comes evil? It is ...

4 Jul 202328min

For a thousand years they would not stand together. Greek reason was the pride of the pagans the Church had buried; Roman law was the law of the empire that fed Christians to the lions; and the philos...

4 Jul 202328min

In the year 1 BC, an ordinary, loving husband wrote home to his pregnant wife with a casual instruction: if the child is a girl, expose it. It was normal. It was legal. And it captures the world that ...

4 Jul 202331min

The Romans had a horror of one word — rex, king — and after they threw out their last one, they spent five centuries building a government designed so that no single man could ever rule them again. Th...

4 Jul 202330min