What can the history of political thought teach us about today's crisis of mass incarceration? In this episode of The Civic Agora (Stanford Civics Initiative), we sit down with Jacob Abolafia-Yale and Harvard graduate, and author of The Prison Before the Panopticon. Together, we explore the history of punishment, the origins of imprisonment, debates on progress in political theory, and the legacy of thinkers from Plato to Foucault.

- Key topics:

- When and why imprisonment became the dominant punishment

- Philosophical debates that imagined prisons before they existed

- Competing traditions of incarceration: authorization vs. reform

- Rethinking Foucault's view of prisons

- What intellectual history offers for reform today

Watch the full conversation to gain new insights into justice, punishment, and the future of political philosophy.

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In this episode of The Civic Agora, we chat with Avshalom Schwartz. Avshalom is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Stanford Civics Initiative at Stanford University studying political theory. His research focuses on the role of imagination in politics, the conceptual history of the imagination, and questions of legitimacy and political stability in classical and early modern political thought.

His book manuscript, "Democratic Phantasies: Political Imagination and the Athenian Democracy," offers a new theoretical account of the “democratic imagination,” or the potential role of imagination in democratic politics. Focusing on one of the most creative and imaginative moments in human history—the ancient Athenian democracy—it shows, first, that we find in classical historiography, prose, drama, and philosophy important resources that can enrich our modern understanding of the political functions of the imagination. Second, it argues that democratic Athens provides us with a model of a democratic political imagination, one that can generate the civic sensibilities required for preserving a democratic society, promote fruitful association among citizens, and encourage the acceptance of diverse viewpoints and ways of living a good life.

He is also interested in the role of imagination in the history of philosophy, especially in classical, medieval, Renaissance, and early modern scientific and political thought. His work in this area has focused on Hobbes’s theory of the imagination, its historical and intellectual context, and its relationship to his political thought.

His work has appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, History of Political Thought, and History of European Ideas, among others.

He is a former Gerald J. Lieberman fellow, one of Stanford University’s highest distinctions for doctoral students. He was also a Ric Weiland Graduate Fellow and held graduate fellowships with Stanford’s Center for Ethics in Society and the Stanford Basic Income Lab. In 2020, He received an M.A. in classics from Stanford University. Before coming to Stanford, He received a B.A. in political science and economics and an M.A. in political science from Tel Aviv University, both Summa cum Laude.

In this episode, we chat with Brian Coyne. He is a Lecturer in Political Science. Originally from New Jersey, he received his B.A. in Government from Harvard College in 2007 and his Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University in 2014. His approach to political theory is to see it as a set of tools that we can use to analyze, critique, and improve our politics, and in his work he tries to sharpen and expand our tools. His dissertation, "Non-State Power and Non-State Legitimacy," analyzes the power of non-state actors like corporations and international institutions that influence our lives and shape our politics alongside the state institutions that are the traditional focus of political theory.

One of Coyne’s current research interests is what education for democratic citizenship needs to look like to face our many current challenges, and he has been part of the team developing the Citizenship in the 21st Century class that is part of Stanford’s new first-year curriculum in Civic, Liberal, and Global Education. Coyne's other research interests include political representation, responses to climate change, and the politics of urban space and planning. An avid bicyclist, he has written freelance stories about two-wheeled travel for the San Francisco Chronicle and other publications. From 2014 to 2017, he taught in Stanford's Thinking Matters program and has also taught senior citizens at San Francisco State University's Osher Lifelong Learning Center and high school students at San Francisco College Track. His classes in Political Science at Stanford include Justice, Democratic Theory, Citizenship, Ethics and Politics of Public Service, and Liberalism & Its Critics. He has also taught with the Urban Studies Program and the Public Policy Program.