A narrative history of political ideologies
12 episodes listed below
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ISM is a narrative history of ideas and revolution—socialism, anarchism, fascism, and beyond. Each season follows a political ideology through the moments when it collides with power, shaping cities, movements, and lives. Currently on Season One: The Origins of Socialism: Paris and the Making of Modern Revolution Written and produced by Matt Payne Original Musical Compositions by Ian Payne ismhistorypodcast.substack.com
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · August 2026
ISM reconstructs socialism's Paris origins and its American echoes as scripted narrative history built from primary sources and overlooked participants.
ISM | Ideas Meet Power works the political-history and labor-history side of the beat as scripted narrative history, opening on a reconstructed scene before pulling back into argument.
You want revolutionary history with smoke in the room and footnotes waiting backstage.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Thoreau's defense of John Brown becomes a hard, lucid case for conscience against government power.
Thoreau's refusal to let committees manage his conscience gives this ISM interlude its bite. Set in Concord, Massachusetts, on October 30, 1859, it follows him from two polite warnings against defending John Brown to Town Hall, where he would have spoken even to a hall of one.
A hushed Harpers Ferry opening frames the strategy and moral peril behind John Brown's campaign.
John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry opens with an eerie hush, as Osborne Anderson and Captain Aaron Stevens move through a town where Brown's men have already taken the engine house, armory, and rifle factory without a shot.
A revolution debates its principles as Versailles' guns make survival the only argument left.
Paris in 1871 comes through as a revolution arguing with itself while Versailles moves closer. Inside the Hotel de Ville, rival factions test the hard question at the center of the Commune: whether survival depends on a single command or on a politics that refuses new masters.
A London workers' meeting opens into a clear account of freedom imagined beyond the nation.
The First International begins in a crowded room at St. Martin's Hall in London, where workers and trade unionists meet on September 28, 1864, in a practical show of solidarity.
A child's blistered fingers lead from a Paris workshop to feminist claims in the new republic.
The episode moves into Paris and the origins of socialism through the workshop, where Jeanne de Reynes sees a child's blistered fingers and turns toward La Femme Libre.
A wounded silk worker and a red cap anchor a careful account of revolutionary politics moving underground.
The episode’s most vivid thread begins with a red cap in a Lyon workshop, where a wounded silk worker links industrial violence to revolutionary memory.
A vivid revolutionary spectacle opens onto the politics of virtue.
Jacobinism comes into focus through a vivid scene in Paris, 1794: the Festival of the Supreme Being, with its man-made mountain, choirs, processions, and crowds arranged as a spectacle of revolutionary virtue.
A dramatic account of socialism's shift from revolutionary streets to state power.
Socialism is treated as an idea under strain, moving from the gunpowder and bayonets of Montmartre in 1871 to the institutional power claimed by the Bolsheviks in 1917.
A season-long narrative reconstruction of the 2012 Benghazi attack and its political fallout.
Politics after the headline breaks open.
This episode explores the ideological split between Marxism and anarchism through historical events like the Kronstadt rebellion and the Hague Congress, tracing how early revolutionaries debated the role of the state in liberation.
ISM | Ideas Meet Power examines Henry David Thoreau's 1859 defense of John Brown after the Harper's Ferry raid, focusing on conscience against state authority.
ISM host Matt Payne frames John Brown's October 17, 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry through Osborne Anderson's encounter with Colonel Lewis Washington and an enslaved woman who learns she is free.
ISM | Ideas Meet Power examines the Paris Commune of 1871, contrasting reforms such as worker cooperatives, secular education, and elected National Guard officers with the pressure of war against Versailles.
The episode follows Louise Michel's exile to New Caledonia after the Paris Commune, exploring the origins of socialism through her story.
Matt Payne traces the International Workingmen's Association from its September 28, 1864 founding at London's St.
ISM's “Paris 1848: The Red Flag in Spring, Part II—The Fire” follows the February Revolution's shift from the fall of Louis-Philippe to a dispute over what the new republic owed workers, women, and property owners.
ISM | Ideas Meet Power traces how the 1831 Canut Revolt in Lyon, where 6,000 to 8,000 silk workers demanded fair wages, prefigured the class conflict of Paris in 1848.
Matt Payne’s Ism examines Jacobinism through the French Revolution’s 1794 Festival of the Supreme Being, which marked Maximilien Robespierre’s political apex less than two months before his arrest and execution.
ISM | Ideas Meet Power opens its socialism series with Louise Michel's 1871 Paris insurrection and Matt Payne's definition of socialism as "the great critique of capitalism." The episode links early industrial conditions—12-hour shifts, child labor, tenements, and industrial injuries—to socialism's emphasis on solidarity, community, and shared control of key resources.
This episode recounts the assassination of Jean-Paul Marat by Charlotte Corday during the French Revolution, setting the stage for a series on the origins of socialism.