I didn't have an opportunity to read Polybius when I was a student, so my exposure to his ideas on politics came about when I had to teach Political Thought.

As these slides show, he did articulate the notion that governments appear to be in an endless state of flux: monarchies degenerate into kingships, then tyrannies, then aristocracies, then oligarchies, then democracies, then eventually mob rule. These political revolutions is, he would argue, a neverending cycle, for which reason the "best" form of government would be a mixed constitution with elements from each form of government.

Pundits can debate until they're blue in the face if he was right or not. All I know is that the idea is so elegant in its simplicity that it gets students' attention and piques their interest fairly easily.

On a personal note, this stage in the course syllabus was particularly memorable for me because is was around this time that I began experimenting with PowerPoint's animation capabilities. The slide deck above is the "print version" of my slides as students should remember them; in the original version I made, I animated all the text on the fifth slide the way I envisioned using the slide in the lecture -- the text appearing and disappearing at each click of the mouse. Looking back, it was pretty effective since it helped me with my delivery, although it did result in a slide that would never be legible in print, because it looks like this:


A mess, sure, but it worked perfectly!

(And if anyone is wondering: yes, I've learned that it's possible to achieve the same effect in a much simpler manner, thank you very much.)

[For more about Presentation Thursdays, read the first in the series].