Announcing: Great Founders
Parnassus House is excited to announce our upcoming fall series, Great Founders: Regimes, Cities, States, and Firms. We invite you to learn more about the series, and register today.
Since the mid-twentieth century, the “Great Man Theory of History” has fallen out of favor as the principal means of explaining the past. Instead of understanding human affairs through the deeds and speeches of preeminent figures, today’s historians and social scientists look to the impersonal forces of commerce, trade, disease, food, colonialism, sex, etc.
Much of this democratizing in the social sciences and humanities is motivated by a legitimate impulse to tell a more complete story about our world. There are, however, at least three problems that attend this move—problems which require us to turn back to traditional modes as the appropriate corrective.
First, much of human history is shaped by elite players. To understand Athens and Sparta, you must study Solon and Lycurgus; Rome—Cicero, Caesar, and Augustus; France—Charlemagne and Napoleon; The United States of America—Washington, Lincoln, the Founding Fathers; and so on. And what is true in political history is often true in other domains. Each one has a pantheon of live players who shape and re-shape our sense of what is possible. To understand the history of science, religion, or the arts you need to study its greatest teachers, innovators, and practitioners.
Second, the democratizing tendency leads us to underestimate the significance of elite influence on the world. As Machiavelli argues, great founders establish the “modes and orders” that structure and inform civilization. This isn’t to say that all social phenomena are created on purpose. There is a role for emergence, local influence, change, and drift. The point is, rather, that all of the highest orders of complex social organization are the products of intentional design. Great founders don’t create their working materials, but they do shape their “clay” into forms that it otherwise wouldn’t take. Too often we forget, or take for granted, the purpose of the institutions we live within. But when we try to fully understand our social world, we are compelled to tell the story of these structures from the moment of their design.
Third, the study of great foundings helps us to better appreciate the nature and limits of collective enterprise. Great foundings allow us to see the “matter” in the light of the various “forms” that it takes. Any well-articulated social entity has its own order and principles—what we can call its “regime.” The regime is shaped decisively by the mind and will of its founder. It is then transmitted to his leadership corps, to be piloted and successively transmitted for as long as it continues to work effectively.
Our democratizing culture wants to do justice to the parts of history that it feels have been unduly neglected. Again, there is a legitimate motive here that we must respect. But when we steer away from understanding human life in light of the peaks of leadership, vision, and achievement, we cut ourselves off from a most useful window into human phenomena. To understand our world—to take stock of the promise and potential of our institutions—we need to climb to the higher altitudes of the great founders.
In this series, we will study examples of great founders from antiquity to the present. Our main concern will be to make sense of what it means to create a regime—an order of rules that instantiates a mode of life—and how regimes inform collective enterprise, including cities, nation states, companies, and firms.
Schedule
What is a Great Founder?
Tuesday, October 21, 12:00pm-1:45pm
Plutarch on the Spartan Regime
Tuesday, October 28, 12:00pm-1:45pm
Livy on the Dual Founding of Rome
Tuesday, November 4, 12:00pm-1:45pm
America’s Great Constitutional Founders
Thursday, November 13, 12:00pm-1:45pm
* meeting on Thursday due to Veterans Day closure on Tuesday
Lincoln’s Refounding of America
Tuesday, November 18, 12:00pm-1:45pm
– Off for the week of Thanksgiving –
Great Founders of Industry and Finance (Henry Ford, Ray Dalio)
Tuesday, December 2, 12:00pm-1:45pm
Great Founders of Futurism and Technology (Walt Disney, Steve Jobs)
Tuesday, December 9, 12:00pm-1:45pm
Contemporary Founders and Leaders (Lee Kuan Yew, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk)
Tuesday, December 16, 12:00pm-1:45pm
Location
Highland City Club
885 Arapahoe Ave
Boulder, CO 80301
Pricing
$600 for the series, or $75 per seminar (lunch included)
Registration
Registration is now closed. If you would like to join the wait list, please reach out to us at founders@parnassus.house.
Why choose to study with Parnassus House? First and foremost, studying with capable teachers will allow you to more fully access the depth and meaning of the texts and ideas we study. Secondly, meeting in person and engaging in dialogue will bring the ideas to life in ways that are hard to achieve otherwise. Lastly, you will meet new friends, and enjoy a delicious lunch every seminar on the beautiful grounds of the Highland City Club in downtown Boulder.
If you have any questions, please reach out to founders@parnassus.house.