Show Notes
What if the most cited passage in Western philosophy has been deliberately misread — by both its critics and its supposed followers? In Part 2 of his conversation with Matt Ehret, Marshall examines the Allegory of the Cave, the Sophist movement, and a lineage of misuse running from ancient Athens to Leo Strauss and the neoconservative movement. Ehret argues that the Republic is not the blueprint for authoritarian rule that critics have called it. Plato’s method — as Ehret reads it across episodes 11 and 12 — is always diagnostic: the dialogue poses negative examples to expose unexamined assumptions, not to prescribe conclusions. The Allegory of the Cave, Book VII of the Republic, demonstrates this method at its most concentrated. Two groups, Ehret contends, have each extracted the imagery they found useful and stopped reading before the passage that changes everything: the philosopher’s obligation to return to the cave, out of love for those still inside, even at personal risk. The episode traces this misreading from its ancient roots — through Neoplatonist appropriations of the cave imagery — to its modern recurrence in Leo Strauss, the University of Chicago, and the neoconservative foreign policy establishment. Peter Thiel’s 2007 essay “The Straussian Moment” and Augustine’s battle against Gnostic Neoplatonism round out the arc. This is Part 2 of a three-episode conversation with Ehret tracing the Plato–Aristotle divide and its consequences for Western intellectual history.
Show Notes & Timestamps0:00 — Opening Hook — Plato, Unexamined Assumptions, and the Cave 0:50 — Introduction — Recap of Episode 11 and Episode Overview 2:00 — The Meno Revisited — Can Virtue Be Taught? 3:02 — Who Were the Sophists? — Teachers, Fees, and Athenian Democracy 7:20 — Transition to the Allegory of the Cave 10:47 — The Cave Explained — Shadows, Puppet Masters, and Degrees of Reality 13:35 — Two Groups Who Misread the Cave 14:20 — The Oligarchic Misreading — Puppet Masters as a Blueprint for Rule 15:00 — What Plato Actually Argued — The Philosopher’s Obligation to Return 16:00 — Free Will, the Soul, and the Gorgias Dialogue 18:27 — Marshall and Ehret — Confirming the Two Misreadings 19:10 — How Great Minds Get Abused — Plato’s Legacy After His Death 20:30 — Leo Strauss, the Noble Lie, and Neoconservatism 21:21 — The Straussian Lineage — From Strauss to Rumsfeld, Perle, and Wolfowitz 23:55 — Peter Thiel’s ‘The Straussian Moment’ Essay 24:06 — The Secret Doctrine Tradition — Locke, Hobbes, and Bacon 24:20 — Gnostic Neoplatonism vs. Authentic Platonism 25:33 — Christianity, Augustine, and the Battle Against Gnostic Distortion 28:07 — Closing Narration — What Episode 12 Established and Preview of Episode 13 29:09 — Series CTA
Key Concepts & TermsThe Allegory of the Cave — Plato’s image of imprisoned knowledge Plato’s allegory, found in Book VII of the Republic, describes prisoners chained in a cave who take the shadows on the wall in front of them to be reality. Behind them, puppet masters control what is projected; above, a fire burns; beyond the cave, the sun represents truth itself. Ehret argues — drawing on the Republic throughout this episode — that the allegory is a graduated account of how knowledge deepens: from shadow, to object, to the light of the sun. The passage is diagnostic rather than prescriptive. Plato is not recommending that puppet masters govern society; he is showing how unexamined assumptions trap minds at the level of shadow.
The Noble Lie — a founding myth designed to bind a society The term appears in the Republic when Socrates proposes that a well-ordered city might require a founding myth — a story told to citizens about their origins that is not literally true but that binds them to the political community. Leo Strauss, in Ehret’s account, extracted this concept and used it as the philosophical authorization for a governing class that manages the beliefs of the population through deliberate narrative control. The quest
More from Notions of Progress
In this third and final part of the conversation, Marxist economist Michael Roberts brings the argument of his 2016 book The Long Depression into the present. He begins with the view that the system works as long as decisions are good, which he finds unconvincing: a system that produces for profit, he argues, delivers both vitality and grotesque inequality, and cannot continue as it is. He describes a generation now worse off than its parents and presents the postwar golden age as the exception, a period when profitability was high enough for capitalism to make concessions. Turning to the current cycle, Roberts considers whether the long depression that followed 2008 may be ending, whether AI could lift profitability for a time, and why he expects the law of profitability to reassert itself, possibly in the 2030s or later. He answers economist Robert J. Gordon on stagnation and Thomas Piketty on taxing billionaires, and closes on three futures: a renewed expansion, a longer stagnation, or, if working people do not change the system, fascist and military regimes and what he calls barbarism, drawing on the fall of Rome. About Our Guest Michael Roberts worked in the City of London as an economist for more than thirty years before retiring. He is the author of The Great Recession: A Marxist View (2009) and The Long Depression (2016), the book at the center of this conversation; joint editor of The World in Crisis (2018); author of Marx 200: His Economics (2018) and Engels 200: His Economics (2020); and, with Guglielmo Carchedi, Capitalism in the 21st Century (2023). His next book, Time Is Running Out: The World Economy in the 2020s, is expected in December 2026. He writes regularly at thenextrecession.wordpress.com. Show Notes & Timestamps 00:00 Capitalism Fails People 01:17 Welcome and Recap 01:37 Financialization and Crisis Myths 03:02 How Capitalism Works 04:06 A Generation Worse Off 06:12 Golden Age Was Exception 08:19 Inflation and Profitability Shift 10:19 Another Expansion or New Slump 12:49 Who Benefits From Profits 13:49 Working Class Alternative 16:04 Reaction and Fascism Risk 17:01 Three Future Scenarios 21:06 Rome and Barbarism Warning 23:34 Closing Thanks and Wrap
In this second of a three-part conversation, Marxist economist Michael Roberts takes the central claim from Part One — that the 2008 crash opened a long depression — back to the two historical cases on which his 2016 book The Long Depression rests. He begins with the 1870s, answering the Austrian-school argument that no depression took place and a rival monetary explanation tied to the gold standard; his reply draws on the data for Britain, the hegemonic economy of the period. He then sets out the mechanism he takes from the third volume of Marx’s Capital: capitalists invest only when it is profitable, and competition drives them to invest ever more in machinery relative to labor, which Roberts argues pulls the rate of profit down over time, held back for a while by counteracting tendencies. The same pattern, on his account, ran beneath the stock-market boom of the late 1920s and the slump of the 1930s. The episode closes on the rival crisis theories Roberts contests — policy error, unregulated finance, underconsumption, and overproduction — and on his case for profitability as the driver of booms and slumps alike. About Our GuestMichael Roberts worked in the City of London as an economist for over 30 years before retiring. He is the author of several books: The Great Recession: A Marxist View (2009); The Long Depression (2016), the book at the center of this conversation; World in Crisis (joint editor, 2018); Marx 200: His Economics (2018); and Engels 200: His Economics (2020). With Guglielmo Carchedi, he co-authored Capitalism in the 21st Century (2023). His new book, Time Is Running Out: The World Economy in the 2020s and Beyond, is forthcoming in December 2026. He writes regularly at thenextrecession.wordpress.com. Show Notes & Timestamps00:00 Profit Drives Capitalism 01:41 Setting Up Three Crises 02:38 1873 Depression Debates 05:22 Profitability Causes Slumps 07:22 Marx’s Law Explained 09:56 Organic Composition Basics 13:13 Counteracting Tendencies 15:07 Profit Waves Through History 18:32 From 1929 to War Economy 23:58 Competing Crisis Theories 28:06 Why Profit Matters Most
In this first of a three-part conversation, Marxist economist Michael Roberts joins Notions of Progress to lay out the central argument of his 2016 book The Long Depression: that the 2008 financial crash was not an ordinary recession, but the opening of a longer structural depression driven by capitalism’s own tendency toward falling profitability. Before getting there, Roberts traces his own path — from a Marxist conversion as a student to a three-decade career as an economist inside the City of London, a combination he treats as complementary rather than contradictory. He then lays out a materialist conception of history underlying his economics: social change driven by who owns and controls production, not by ideas or political leadership taken on their own. Capitalism, on his account, is real progress — rising productivity, rising living standards — and, at the same time, structurally exploitative and radically unequal. The episode closes on the specific technical definition of a “depression” that Parts Two and Three will test against the historical record: not simply a downturn, but one whose recovery never returns to the prior trend line. About Our GuestMichael Roberts worked in the City of London as an economist for over 30 years before retiring. He is the author of several books: The Great Recession: A Marxist View (2009); The Long Depression (2016), the book at the center of this conversation; World in Crisis (joint editor, 2018); Marx 200: His Economics (2018); and Engels 200: His Economics (2020). With Guglielmo Carchedi, he co-authored Capitalism in the 21st Century (2023). His new book, Time Is Running Out: The World Economy in the 2020s and Beyond, is forthcoming in December 2026. He writes regularly at thenextrecession.wordpress.com. Show Notes & Timestamps00:00 Cold Open: The Contradictions of Capital 01:03 Welcome & Introduction 03:38 Michael’s Background 08:38 A Marxist in the City of London 11:03 The Nature of Capitalism 16:25 Inequality & Systemic Change 20:35 The Long Depression Thesis 28:31 Next Time: Historical Parallels
This episode closes out a three-part conversation with Gavin Mueller (University of Amsterdam), author of Breaking Things at Work. In Part 2, Mueller traced Marx's own ambivalence toward machinery through the split between orthodox and heterodox Marxism, Frederick Taylor's theory of workplace control, the Technocracy Movement, and Norbert Wiener's early warnings to organized labor about automation. In this final part, Mueller brings that history into the present. The conversation moves from Shoshana Zuboff's early sociological research inside computerized factories to her later, better-known work on surveillance capitalism, and from there into Mueller's own reading of artificial intelligence: the argument that AI systems depend on training data gathered without most people's consent, the concept of cognitive offloading, and the rapidly growing, cross-partisan resistance movement against AI data centers. Mueller closes with what he calls Luddism's real legacy — not a rejection of the future, but the insistence that a different one is still possible.
In Episode 17, Gavin Mueller (University of Amsterdam) traced the Luddites back to the guild economy of England's Midlands. In this second installment of a three-part conversation, Mueller follows that struggle into the twentieth century: Karl Marx's own ambivalence toward machinery, and the split between Karl Kautsky's “orthodox” Marxism — which treated capitalist technology as a scientifically inevitable path to socialism — and the workers' movements that resisted that framing directly on the shop floor. Mueller traces Frederick Winslow Taylor's “scientific management” as, above all, a theory of control rather than efficiency; the short-lived but influential Technocracy Movement's vision of automation as an unstoppable social force; and mathematician Norbert Wiener's cybernetics, including his largely unheeded 1949 letter warning UAW president Walter Reuther that automation posed a genuine threat to organized labor. The episode closes on how that warning intersected with civil rights-era debates about automation's disproportionate impact on Black workers. As with the whole series, the through-line is not a settled verdict on technology and progress, but the recurring argument over whether machines serve human ends or reshape them.