In Episode 17, Gavin Mueller (University of Amsterdam) traced the Luddites back to the guild economy of England's Midlands. In this second installment of a three-part conversation, Mueller follows that struggle into the twentieth century: Karl Marx's own ambivalence toward machinery, and the split between Karl Kautsky's “orthodox” Marxism — which treated capitalist technology as a scientifically inevitable path to socialism — and the workers' movements that resisted that framing directly on the

They've been remembered as machine-smashers who tried to stop the future with a hammer — but historian Eric Hobsbawm called what they were doing “collective bargaining by riot.” In this episode, Prof. Gavin Mueller (University of Amsterdam), author of Breaking Things at Work, walks through who the Luddites actually were: skilled textile workers in England's Midlands, organized under the mythical banner of King Ludd, fighting to preserve their wages, their working conditions, and the quality of t

They've been remembered as machine-smashers who tried to stop the future with a hammer — but historian Eric Hobsbawm called what they were doing “collective bargaining by riot.” In this episode, Prof. Gavin Mueller (University of Amsterdam), author of Breaking Things at Work, walks through who the Luddites actually were: skilled textile workers in England's Midlands, organized under the mythical banner of King Ludd, fighting to preserve their wages, their working conditions, and the quality of t

What happens to an ethics built on belonging to a city once that city stops being able to protect anyone? This episode opens the Hellenistic arc of Notions of Progress by tracing how Philip and Alexander's conquests brought organized Greek political independence to an end, and how philosophy responded once the polis could no longer guarantee anyone's flourishing. At the center of that response is Diogenes of Sinope, a philosopher who lived in a discarded wine jar, told Alexander the Great to ste

Aristotle claimed that human beings have a built-in purpose — but is that idea a foundation for a good life, or a blueprint for control? This episode, the second half of a two-part look at Aristotle, brings five thinkers into the conversation across twenty-five centuries of philosophy. Karl Popper, writing in the shadow of the Second World War, warns that a fixed idea of human purpose can curdle into political destiny when scaled up from a person to a nation. Alasdair MacIntyre, Hans-Georg Gadam

In the last three episodes, Matt Ehret argued that the history of progress is a contest between two competing visions of civilization: one that develops its internal capacities, and one that manages and depletes them. At the center of that argument was a framework introduced in Episode 11 — the open system and the closed system. That framework raised a question we deliberately set aside: what exactly is being opened or closed? What is the standard by which we judge whether a civilization is deve