Gateway to the Epicureans: Epicurus, Lucretius, and Their Modern Heirs

Two and half centuries ago, John Adams complained, “Our modern philosophers are all the low grovelling disciples of Epicurus.”

That’s even truer today.

The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus is—acknowledged or not—the source of secular “woke” liberalism.

In his own time, Epicurus was a fringe thinker. He and his few followers speculated about how invisibly small entities of indivisible matter called “atoms,” hurtling endlessly through an infinite void according to fixed physical laws, could...