“We’ll extinguish desire: we’ll get drinking, gossip, denunciation going; we’ll get unheard-of depravity going; we’ll stifle every genius in infancy. Everything reduced to a common denominator, complete equality.”

When Brad Pearce and I go on a livestream today at 4:30 PM ET, we’ll be starting with what I think is one of the most dramatic and surprising scenes in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “Demons.” In part 2, chapter 8 — “Ivan the Tsarevich” — the two dominant revolutionary personalities collide and argue. Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky, the deathly serious, scheming, ambitious son of a never-was pseudo-activist, delivers almost a sermon on the goals and methods of his movement. He is going to “stir up trouble,” but on a grand scale, achieving equality through force. “Only one thing is lacking in the world: obedience,” he says.

Young Verkhovensky is trying to convince Nikolai Stavrogin, the aristocrat whose money and inspirational image is needed to round out the plan. It’s a crossroads moment in the book, but Pyotr’s speech could send chills up the spine of anyone following modern politics — even the politics of last week.

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“And there’s hatred there, too,” he said, after a moment’s silence. “They’d be the first to be terribly unhappy if Russia somehow suddenly got reconstructed, even if it was in their own way, and somehow suddenly became boundlessly rich and happy. They’d have no one to hate then, no one to spit on, nothing to jeer at!”

— From Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “Demons.”

It was strange to read Demons during the most controversial Fourth of July in ages. Americans with money and/or education are more miserable than ever, and the gist of most of the public debates taking place contemperaneously with this past weekend’s fireworks was whether or not this self-loathing is warranted. I don’t remember this phenomenon in my lifetime, but another country went through something very similar once, and one of the world’s great authors captured it and preserved it in the form of an epic political thriller.

Dostoyevsky’s chief characters in Demons are not rich. Most are stragglers whose l…

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Today is a big day at Racket, for Brad Pearce and are starting our Get Lit dive into Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Demons, a book suppressed by the Soviets for much of the 20th century that’s never been more relevant to the West, especially after last week’s big victory by the DSA in the New York primary. Anyone puzzled by the iron humorlessness and defiant impracticality of characters like Hasan Piker, Zohran Mamdani, and Darializa Chevalier, to say nothing of the gushing welcome they’ve received by aging Boomers with glue-factory reservations on MSNOW, need only read this book.

Sometimes translated as The Devils or The Possessed, Demons to American readers will present as a predictive epic about wokism, told through a blistering satire of political activism that starts off as comedy and ends in the place no one described better than this author — hell. There’s more to say about this book, but first, here’s where you can find Brad and me this afternoon at 4:30 ET:

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Now for a brief cheat sheet on Demons, which is based on a real murder conspiracy but starts with an observation about family:

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It doesn’t mean what you might think, but “How a State is Ruined Because of Women” is one of the chapters in Book III of “Discourses on Livy,” Niccolo Machiavelli’s masterpiece on governance and stability. Brad Pearce and I will start wrapping up the great book today at 4:30 pm ET, at the links below:

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There’s an abundance of interesting material and brilliant writing in this last section from Machiavelli’s sweeping book, including a sagacious chapter titled “That the Faults of Peoples Begin With Their Princes” and counterintuitive passages like “the most useful thing in a free society is a way to keep the citizens poor.” Mostly there’s wisdom and warning in Book III, which looks at the ways even great societies fall, which they must, as “it is impossible to organize an everlasting Republic.” Please tune in if you can, and if you haven’t done so, pick up a copy of our next book, the hilarious and horrifying Demons by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

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Those who strive to create a great empire can can choose one of two paths, according to Niccolo Machiavelli. “This may be done in two ways; either through love or through force.”

We’re getting into a better groove now on “Get Lit,” the show in which Brad Pearce and I talk about great and sometimes-forgotten books. Today at 4:30 ET we’ll be talking about Book II of Machivelli’s “Discourses on Livy,” which is written in smooth prose and addresses issues still relevant to current politicians. There’s a lesson or two in here that captures what Machiavelli or the Romans would have thought about war with Iran, for instance, or our general policy of “Democracy Promotion.” Lots to get to, and we hope you’ll join us. Tune in at 4:30 pm ET below:

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If you’re like me, you learned about Niccolo Machiavelli in high school and read The Prince, a short, spicy book that advises influential men how to “seize absolute authority.” For this reason the term “Machiavellian” has become synonymous with a type of cynical villainy in the modern West.

Machiavelli however wrote another book, one not quite so short and easily categorized, called Discourses on Livy. If history chose to remember this book instead of The Prince, we’d all have a very different view of the man, as it shows how deeply he was interested not only in the concept of virtue but in the problem of preserving freedom and liberty and slowing corruption.

It’s a difficult book, but rewarding and very original, especially to a modern American’s ears. Brad and I will start slowly today, but trust us — it’s interesting.

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Illustrations by

3. Demons — Fyodor Dostoevsky

(Translation: Pevear and Volkhonsky, from Vintage)

2. Discourses on Livy — Niccolo Machiavelli

1. The Assemblywomen — Aristophanes