Treason
Overthink
Ellie Anderson, Ph.D. and David Peña-Guzmán, Ph.D.
4.7 • 549 Ratings
🗓️ 6 January 2026
⏱️ 63 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Do we ever have a duty to commit treason? In episode 155 of Overthink, Ellie and David talk about “the crime of crimes.” They look at the emergence of this legal concept and its evolution over time, and discuss some of the most important historical cases involving treason: Benedict Arnold, Aaron Burr, and John Brown. Can we say that treason is always bad when America's founding itself depended on an act of treason? Who is capable of committing a treasonous act? And is treason ever morally permissible? In the Substack bonus segment, your hosts discuss how treason is seen in Hobbes’ political philosophy and whether we need to recover insurrection as a political possibility.
Works Discussed:
Neil Cartlidge, “Treason,” The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Law and Literature
Cécile Fabre, “The Morality of Treason”
George P. Fletcher, “The Case for Treason”
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish
Phyllis Greenacre, “Treason and the Traitor”
Leonard Harris, “Honor and Insurrection or A Short Story about why John Brown (with David Walker’s Spirit) was Right and Frederick Douglass (with Benjamin Banneker’s Spirit) was Wrong”
Lee McBride, “Insurrectionary Ethics and Racism”
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Overthink. |
| 0:21.5 | The podcast where two professors offer a philosophical angle on anything and everything. |
| 0:26.3 | I am David Peña-Gusman. |
| 0:27.9 | And I'm Ellie Anderson. |
| 0:29.8 | For an extended version of this episode, community discussion, and a lot more, |
| 0:34.4 | subscribe to Overthink on Substack. |
| 0:36.8 | David, it's been five years to the day since the |
| 0:40.5 | insurrection at the United States Capitol on January 6th. On that day, as I'm sure, |
| 0:46.4 | almost all of our listeners remember, a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol and disrupted |
| 0:51.7 | a joint session of Congress to certify the results of the 2020 |
| 0:55.3 | presidential election. These Trump supporters, who were convinced by Trump and his henchman's |
| 1:02.2 | baseless claims that the election was stolen and that Trump won, went to the Capitol with the |
| 1:07.8 | intent of preventing the election results from being certified. |
| 1:11.7 | The FBI deemed this an act of domestic terrorism. |
| 1:15.4 | And what took place that day led to Trump's impeachment by the House of Representatives for |
| 1:19.6 | incitement of insurrection, though he was then acquitted by the Senate. |
| 1:24.0 | And when we saw that this episode was going to come out on January 6th, we proposed making the topic |
| 1:29.9 | Tristan, because that's something that we haven't really covered in the podcast before. |
| 1:34.7 | But funnily enough, Ellie, you and I both sort of miss the entire unfolding of the events of |
| 1:40.3 | January 6, 2021, when it actually happened, right? |
| 1:44.2 | Because you and I were busy in our respective closets recording for hours, content for |
| 1:51.5 | overthrith. |
... |
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