The attached audio, just below, was recorded in 1894 with an ingenious piece of technology invented in 1878, by Thomas Edison. It was conducted by John Philip Sousa himself, who died in 1932. The recording was digitally transcribed and remastered for distribution on CD, in 2005. I have “ripped” the file from CD, converted it to an internet friendly format, and uploaded it to my server. Now, we are all free to listen to it whenever and wherever we like, with the push of a button.
I was born in a tiny southwestern suburb of Chicago, in August of 1967. Lots of people were. There’s really nothing particularly special about that. There are loads of garbage celebrities and politicians born in 1967. Jimmy Kimmel (13 November), Joe Rogan (7 August), and Peter Thiel (11 October), for example. So, if you’re looking for someone interesting and exciting, you’ve come to the wrong place. I’m just an average schmuck from the Chicagoland area, with nearly the same birthdate as Joe Rogan.
Traditionally, there are two great debates at the core of political philosophy. The first is what justifies political authority, and the second is what should be the form of the institution that assumes that authority. The first debate includes questions of fundamental justice. Issues like what the state owes to its subjects, and what the subjects owe to each other, are central to the debate. The second debate depends somewhat on the answer to the first, in that it seeks to answer how the duties, obligations, rights, and responsibilities of the first debate are to be enacted and enforced. Should offices be permanent or temporary? Should powers be segregated? Should it include democratic mechanisms? Who should be enfranchised? Should it be federated or centralized? Should it monopolize certain goods? And so forth.
I hope to show how Descartes, Locke, Spinoza, Berkeley, Hume, Rousseau, and Kant respond to, develop, reform, and contradict the ideas of their predecessors and peers, such as Hobbes, Leibniz, Hutcheson, Voltaire, and Diderot, and in doing so, to convey the extraordinary courage and innovativeness of the Enlightenment as a whole… (Pg. 9)
