In 401 BCE, a Greek mercenary army of roughly 10,000 soldiers found itself stranded deep in enemy territory after the failure of a Persian dynastic coup. Their leader had been killed and they were surrounded. Their only way home was north through the mountains. And what they met there changed history’s record forever. The Greek…
The present insists on its own novelty. It frames its crises as self contained, detached from deeper continuities. A potential war involving the United States, Israel, and Iran is often interpreted in this way, reduced to questions of deterrence, nuclear capability, and shifting alliances. Such a reading is not incorrect, but it is incomplete. It…
For anyone interested in politics and philosophy, there must be an understanding that we do not study these fields only to learn from them, but also to teach others how to think about power. The purpose is not to accumulate passive knowledge, but to raise awareness around virtues and vices of life. When we speak…
Invasion rarely begins as ambition, and it is almost never admitted as fear. It is instead framed as necessity that more or less has everything to do with power and nothing to do with logic. States do not describe their actions as expansion, for instance. They describe them as prevention, stabilization, or response to pressure…
There are men who say that war is a necessity, as though necessity were a law of nature and not a confession of failure. They speak of defense and honor and survival, and in their speech there is the comfort of order, as if by naming a thing just they have already made it so….
Institutions have always depended on systems of knowledge and administration. Empires recorded taxes on clay tablets, kingdoms relied on scribes and archives, and modern states built bureaucracies capable of organizing vast amounts of information. Governance has therefore never been purely political as it has always relied on technologies that allow authority to operate across distance,…
Reflections on The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene There is something unsettling about how convincing The 48 Laws of Power feels. Robert Greene does not describe power as an abstract ideal or a constitutional arrangement. He presents it as choreography. Every gesture, silence, alliance, and display becomes part of a calculated performance. Power,…
Reflections on Medici Money by Tim Parks What I learned from Medici Money is that wealth alone does not create rule. Coordination does. Legitimacy does. Cultural embedding does. The Medici mastered the interplay between finance, reputation, art, and religion. They understood that to be seen as princely, one must first become necessary. In fourteenth century…