The Intellectual History of Humanity

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Russ Baker: I want to talk about how we've lost the idea of humans as social animals. He says Plato had a tripartite conception of the human soul - appetite, reason and spirit. But for Machiavelli participating in right type of polity was not an end of itself, he says. Baker: Hobbes codified it as the ground of political theory. The default state is antagonistic social sort of all-out warfare,. And you and I are worried about our food, our self-preservation."

When the 20-year-old overachiever Johnathan Bi's first startup crashed and burned, he headed to a Zen retreat in the Catskills to "debug himself." He discovered René Girard and his mimetic theory--the idea that imitation is a key and often unconscious driver of human behavior. Listen as entrepreneur and philosopher Bi shares with EconTalk host Russ Roberts what he learned from Girard and Girard's insights into how we meet our primal need for money, fame, and power. The conversation includes the contrasts between economics and Girard's perspective.