8 posts
Luther vs Calvin is a comparison that is easy to blur. Both broke with the Catholic Church, both said the Bible is the final authority, and both taught that faith, not good works, saves a person. The differences are in…
Gandhi vs Martin Luther King is less a contest than a family tree. King's civil rights organization took its working methods from Mohandas Gandhi. The Nobel Prize calls Gandhi "the strongest symbol of non-violence in the…
Keynes vs Hayek is one of the best-known arguments in 20th century economics. John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek were working out their ideas in the same years, knew each other's views, and argued about the same…
Locke vs Rousseau is one of the classic pairings in political philosophy. Both imagined people living without government, and both said a legitimate state rests on a kind of agreement, a social contract. But they used…
Socrates vs Plato is a strange pairing, because most of the "Socrates" you can read was written by Plato. Socrates wrote nothing himself. Plato wrote dialogues in which Socrates does most of the talking. So the real…
Confucius vs Laozi is the classic pairing in Chinese thought. Confucius says you become good by working at it: through family duty, ritual and study. Laozi says the striving itself is the problem, and you should want…
If you are studying Adam Smith vs Karl Marx, you are comparing two thinkers who looked at the same kind of workplace and saw very different things. Smith saw a machine for making a nation rich. Marx saw a place where…
Machiavelli vs Hobbes is one of the most useful comparisons in political philosophy. Both men looked hard at power, fear and force, and both refused to pretend that rulers are kept in place by goodness alone. But they…