As a Social Studies Concentrator and the upcoming Comp Director and Editor-at-Large for CrimArts, I thought it would only be fitting if my vanity piece combined the two loves which have so far defined my college career. My favorite class at Harvard has undoubtedly been Social Studies 10a and 10b, and so, I dug up my syllabus from Canvas and have attempted to be creative (which I now realize is futile in the midst of exams…).

Nonetheless, I present: The nerdiest thing I have done yet…The Crimson’s Arts Section, if it were comped by the famous political philosophers of Social Studies. What section would they write for, and, more importantly, what would they write?

Culture: Antonio Gramsci and Hannah Arendt

Antonio Gramsci’s big theory is literally called cultural hegemony and says that power is achieved through norms/belief systems (aka vibes). Gramsci would be the first to pick up a Culture pitch and would certainly inundate the Culture exec’s inbox with many self-pitches like Moo Deng’s grip on society, the Clean Girl aesthetic, and America’s matcha obsession. He would never stop pitching. Ever.

Hannah Arendt, on the other hand, would take a cooler, more intellectualized approach. She wouldn’t self-pitch often, but when she would, it would be a 2000-word essay on freedom and creativity in the age of artificial intelligence, art as inherently political. She would insist that it’s “not a culture piece,” while writing (smoking while writing) the most devastating culture piece of the semester. (And yes, I think she’d be a fan of my Republican makeup article from last semester.)

Music: Émile Durkheim and Theodor Adorno

French philosopher Emile Durkheim — aka the founder of sociology— would be the comper who skips seminars for concerts and somehow justifies doing so theoretically. Tate McRae? Check. Bad Bunny? Yep. Beyoncé? Four times, minimum. Why? Durkheim would say it’s all about the energy or the collective effervescence (decent band or album name), his term for what makes every audience member feel that they are part of something larger than themselves. Every chant or synchronized phone light session during a sad song would be Durkheim’s time to shine. He would LOVE Coachella.

Theodor Adorno, meanwhile, would be that music writer who knows all the stuff that you don’t know. Prolific, sure, but only existential album reviews and devastating thinkpieces. Like he did in “The Culture Industry,” he would drag any album for being mass-produced, commercialized, or superficial. Only indie songs and “underground” music like Phoebe Bridgers and Magdalena Bay for him. Only authenticity. He would hate Coachella, and he would write a whole book, dedicated to Durkheim, about why.

TV: Thomas Hobbes and Friedrich Nietzsche

Thomas Hobbes is the OG reality TV theorist. The state of man is the state of war, he believed, and so he would consistently pitch think pieces on how reality TV is the purest expression of human nature. “Love Island” drama? “The Real Housewives”? Every alliance collapse, dramatic recoupling, and screaming match would confirm his thesis in humanity.

Friedrich Nietzsche would write for TV just to get people to stop watching it. He’d see TV as herd mentality and so, without watching any of these shows, he would write scathing reviews of “Modern Family,” “The Summer I Turned Pretty,” “Nobody Wants This,” and then he would surprise us all with a reverent retrospective on “Succession” (which he also didn’t watch but heard Hobbes talk about) and its challenge to moral and ethical norms. Each Nietzsche column would end in a dramatic statement, i.e. “Good TV is dead!” and would be followed by a footnote, saying that good TV never existed in the first place.

Theater: Simone de Beauvoir and Immanuel Kant

Simone de Beauvoir, writer of “The Second Sex,” would be all about the politics of theater. She would ask all the important questions: Why are men usually the heroes? Why are women relegated as side characters? What does it mean to perform? She’d be into dreams, myths, fog machines, and neon lights. Beauvoir would begin her magnum opus theater think piece with a perfect line: “One is not born, but rather becomes an actor.” Unclear if you would actually get any information on what the play was about, but if Beauvoir ever took the stage, she would certainly be method.

Immanuel Kant (my favorite) would take a different approach. Theater is his Kantian sublime, that mix of awe and pleasure, like witnessing a raging storm. Yet he would constantly be side-eyeing the actors. Are they ends in themselves, or means to an end? Is acting moral? Kant would also fixate on the economics of fame: Are actors pursuing their dreams as personal autonomy, or are they chasing the money?

Campus: Michel Foucault and Mary Wollstonecraft

The Campus section would be dominated (dominated!) by Michel Foucault. He wouldn’t just write reviews of campus events and orchestra performances, he would somehow become Campus admin and Big Brother overnight. Peddling with his beloved theories on panopticon, he would insist that constant surveillance was actually good for knowledge production. He would also install cameras everywhere, make sure you knew you were on camera and then ask you about it. Also, he would be really good at remembering that Massachusetts has a two-party consent law when it comes to recordings for interviews.

Mary Wollstonecraft, author of “A Vindication of The Rights of Woman,” would have none of that. She would focus on education through art and intellectual pursuits as liberation for women. She’d create a women-only corner of campus, champion women-led performances, and have her own campus subsection only for female readers and supporters of female art. She would also be most likely to bash Foucault in with his own surveillance equipment, then publish a very polite, very civilized rebuttal about how surveillance without equality is just plain tyranny.

Film: Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx

Sigmund Freud would see every film as a manifestation of the unconscious mind. There is no such thing as a fun movie because every movie has a deeper, symbolic, hidden meaning on the existential elements of life. Among his favorite movies would be ones with unresolved parental issues (“Daddy’s Home 2,” “Mamma Mia!,” “A Bad Moms Christmas”). He wouldn’t just write reviews, he would seek out the directors, the actors, and question them about their childhood, their dreams, and their angst. But his secret favorite movie? “Inside Out.”

Karl Marx would attend every movie premiere but complain the entire time about how expensive the popcorn was (More for extra butter? How bourgeois!). He would watch “The Hunger Games” ritually (then demand more sequels, one for every year like the games themselves). His review would be long, furious, with lots of footnotes and an impossible works cited page. He would find class conflict in every movie, even “Cars,” where there are no humans and no labor relations, just talking cars.

Books: Walter Benjamin and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Walter Benjamin would love writing for the Books section. His book reviews would likely be very, very lengthy (yes, even more so than anyone aforementioned) and he would finish his article wayyyyyy after the deadline, but it would be so good that no one would care since reading his review would be like reading the book itself. He would criticize books that focus on a single historical narrative and would instead advocate for those that did not subscribe to a linear progression but were fragmented and random. He would be big on poetry collections and would stress George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel out.

Hegel saw history as non-random and as inherently progressive. “There is a higher truth!” Hegel would shout at pitch meetings. Then he would advise all his fellow compers to write their reviews in three key steps: thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. No meandering. No tangents. That’s one approach, I guess.

—Outgoing TV Executive and incoming Comp Director and Editor-at-Large Caroline J. Rubin had too much fun writing this and can be reached at [email protected].