A student's note

Hello and welcome to the eighth episode of Theory of the Week, a weekly show from A Student’s Note where we explore a theory‑esque concept each week.
This week I would like to introduce another important contractualist—besides Locke and Hobbes, who we covered in the fifth episode. Today I would like to talk about Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of the most influential but also controversial figures in modern political philosophy.
He was born in Geneva in 1712 and was markedly an intellectual outsider among his contemporary Enlightenment thinkers, because he was deeply sceptical of the progress and rationalism that figures like Voltaire celebrated. You may know him from the famous line “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”
Interestingly, while the diagnosis was condemned during his life, with both personal and intellectual consequences, it is the solution that became the subject of a later controversy.
But let us start from the beginning.



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Hello and welcome to the seventh episode of Theory of the Week, a weekly show from A Student’s Note where we explore a theory‑esque concept each week.
We are once again back from a break. My January and February were full of exams and papers, so we were missing a speaker for a while. But enough of that.
Today we are talking about a classic figure of modern political philosophy: John Rawls. He is mainly known for his Theory of Justice, also called justice as fairness – which some of you may have heard of. In this episode, I will first give some biographical background, then outline his theory, and finally talk about the wider impact of John Rawls.
Let us begin!


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Hello and welcome to the sixth episode of Theory of the Week. A weekly show from A Student’s Note where we explore a theory-esque concept each week.
For Christmas we took a little break, and hope you were able to do the same. In any case, we hope you had a fantastic Christmas.
This time I would like to explore social contract theory, but there are a lot of theorists who used this heuristic of natural state and society. To account for the different approaches, I chose to contrast the theories of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, two classical contractualists.
In my opinion, this comparison gives a good understanding of how different classical theorists came to surprisingly different results.
But I have already talked a lot without explaining what a social contract theory is. So let’s start from the beginning.


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Welcome to the fifth episode of Theory of a Week, a weekly show from a student’s note, where we explore a theory-esque concept each week.
This week we are entering the arena of international relations theories by exploring the social-constructivist approach. Social constructivism gives us tools to explain changes in the nature of international politics and offers a powerful critique of neorealist theories, which tend to explain change as a return to a predefined ‘natural state’ of self-help.
These tools help us give more nuanced answers when we try, for example, to make sense of NATO allies starting to doubt whether the United States would really defend them, or Germany suddenly redefining its relationship with Russia.
For this, I would like to take a slightly different approach than usual and trace the core argument from Alexander Wendt’s 1992 article ‘Anarchy is what states make of it: the social construction of power politics’ from beginning to end, instead of combining different sources and perspectives.
So this week, we really need to start from the beginning.


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Hello and welcome to the fourth episode of Theory of a Week, a weekly show from a student’s note, where we explore a theory-esque concept each week.
This week is somewhat of a continuation of last week’s episode, because we will cover a second path‑defining economist: John Maynard Keynes. He was active in early 20th‑century Europe, a period marked by war, social unrest, and the Great Depression. In this crisis‑ridden context, many core economic ideas were questioned – including Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” and the belief in fully self‑regulating markets.
In this episode, we introduce Keynes’s key insights about aggregate demand, unemployment, and the role of the state in stabilising a capitalist economy. We discuss why, for Keynes, markets can get stuck in deep recessions, why government spending and fiscal policy matter, and how his ideas reshaped macroeconomics and economic policy after the 1930s.
If you’re interested in macroeconomics, economic crises, or debates about austerity versus stimulus, this episode on John Maynard Keynes and the rise of Keynesian economics is for you.
Let’s get started.
Chapters
* Introduction
* The Great Depression
* The break with classical economic thought
* The role of the state
* A new vision of economic order
* Closing thought
Music credits
Music track: Daydreams by PufinoSource: https://freetouse.com/musicMusic for Video (Free Download)



This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit astudentsnote.substack.com