Society

In this foundational lecture, Weber dissects what it means to make politics a profession, distinguishing leaders who "live for" politics from those who merely "live off" it. He introduces his enduring definition of the state as the entity claiming a monopoly on legitimate violence, closing with a sober meditation on the ethical burden of wielding power in a disenchanted modern world.

Tocqueville argues that democratic equality, by dissolving fixed hierarchies, leaves individuals more self-sufficient but also more isolated from one another. He warns that this drift toward "individualism" can hollow out civic bonds unless counteracted by voluntary associations, making active communal participation what keeps democracies from fragmenting into disconnected private interests.

Drawing on fieldwork with the Ju/'hoansi hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari, Suzman explores how small-scale societies use mockery and social pressure to suppress displays of relative wealth and status. He argues humans are wired less by an aversion to material deprivation than by sensitivity to unequal standing relative to others, a claim with sharp implications for modern inequality.

This piece summarizes research showing that working-class Britons who climb into elite professions still hit an invisible "class ceiling," earning notably less than colleagues from privileged backgrounds in the same jobs. It frames origin-based pay gaps as a structural feature of the labor market, challenging the assumption that reaching a high-status occupation is itself evidence mobility barriers have been overcome.

O'Sullivan argues that today's dominant social platforms are buckling under a flood of AI-generated content and eroding user trust, marking the exhaustion of an institutional model built on centralized attention-harvesting. He sketches an alternative future of smaller, community-governed digital spaces, framing the platform crisis as a question of institutional design rather than technology.