Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West. This is philosophize this. Thank you to everybody that supports

the show on Patreon. It's currently the only way the show is being funded other than

t-shirt sales, so I deeply appreciate it. Today's episode is about a famous debate regarding

democracy that took place at the beginning of the 20th century. I hope you love the show today.

So just thinking ahead, I think it's going to be extremely valuable for us to spend a little time

on 20th century political philosophy. And that's what we're going to do right now. See,

there's a lot of conversation in the realm of 20th century political philosophy that

not only is going to be very useful for us and the future of this show, but the 20th century

is just filled with famous political debates that end up being incredibly fruitful for the societies

that they were conducted in. These debates in many cases, you could say, did more for their

societies in the 20th century than any other century of political debate did for theirs

basically ever. I mean, even though two philosophers at the beginning of the 20th century really

didn't seem like it was going to be that way at first. See, there's this conversation going on at

the end of the 19th century heading into the 20th century about whether it's a good idea to even

be talking about political philosophy anymore at all. Where this is coming from are the same conversations

that eventually give rise to structuralism. Remember, structuralism, one of its main tendencies to

talk about how the ideas that we've come up with over the years haven't been some ongoing

progression towards some ultimate truth as we may have thought about in the past. When it comes to

your subjectivity, you were not some free acting agent just disinterestedly navigating the universe

that everything that you do think and can possibly think is ultimately dictated by the narrow

historical, cultural, and biological parameters that you were born into. The ideas that you have about

the world equally narrow and subject to an arbitrary historical context. Well, the problems people

...