Past Present Future is a bi-weekly History of Ideas podcast with David Runciman, host and creator of Talking Politics, exploring the history of ideas from politics to philosophy, culture to technology. David talks to historians, novelists, scientists and many others about where the most interesting ideas come from, what they mean, and why they matter.
Ideas from the past, questions about the present, shaping the future.
New episodes every Thursday and Sunday.
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The History of Bad Ideas: Value-Free Tech
For today’s episode in the history of bad ideas David talks to philosopher Shannon Vallor about the myth that technology can be value free. It’s easy to see why Silicon Valley is so keen on the idea that it’s never the fault of the tech, only of the people who use it. But why do we let them get away with it? Where did this idea come from? How has it also poisoned arguments about gun laws and nuclear weapons? And what can we do to fight it and try to get technology that works with – not against – basic human values?
Out now on PPF+: A bonus episode with historian of religion Alec Ryrie exploring ‘The Age of Hitler’. When did not being like Hitler rather than trying to be like Jesus become the benchmark of moral conduct? And why is that period coming to an end? To get this and all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening sign up now to PPF+ https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
Next time on The History of Bad Ideas: Polycrisis
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The History of Bad Ideas: Monopoly
For today’s episode in the history of bad ideas David talks to economic historian Marc Palen about monopoly, an idea that has always had its defenders as well as its fierce critics. Why do monopolies arise even in supposedly competitive economies? How did the anti-monopoly movement of Henry George in the late-19th century argue that the monopolists could be taken down? How are those struggles echoed in the fight against Silicon Valley monopolists today? And what has all this got to do with Monopoly the board game?
Coming on Saturday on PPF+: A bonus episode with historian of religion Alec Ryrie exploring ‘The Age of Hitler’. Why did not being like Hitler rather than trying to be like Jesus become the benchmark of moral conduct? And why is that period now coming to an end? To get this and all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening sign up now to PPF+ https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
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The History of Bad Ideas: Meritocracy
Today’s bad idea is one that started out as satire and ended as a political slogan. David talks to historian of ideas Ben Jackson about meritocracy and its origins in Michael Young’s book The Rise of the Meritocracy published in 1958. Young foresaw a populist revolt against the meritocratic elite in the year 2034. Was his vision prophetic? Why did politicians like Tony Blair embrace a concept that Young thought was antithetical to a fair and just society? And who are the winners and losers from meritocracy today?
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The History of Bad Ideas: Charisma
For today’s episode in the history of bad ideas David talks to cultural historian Tom Wright about charisma, a term that often feels essential for understanding modern politics but which ends up obscuring far more than it explains. How did an old idea from Christian theology get used to explain the hold that political leaders have over crowds? Why is it so important not to confuse charm with charisma? What has made a word from early twentieth-century social science ubiquitous on twenty-first-century dating sites? And if Trump hasn’t got charisma, then what has he got?
Out now on PPF+: A bonus bad ideas episode in which David and Dan Snow talk about all sorts of ‘decisive battles’ that weren’t what they seem: Yarmuk, Hastings, Agincourt, Trafalgar, Warsaw 1920, Stalingrad, and more. To get this and all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening sign up now to PPF+ https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
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The History of Bad Ideas: The Decisive Battle
In today’s episode about the power of bad ideas, David talks to historian and podcaster Dan Snow about the myth that wars are settled on the battlefield. Why are we so drawn to the idea of the decisive military showdown? Is Napoleon to blame? What are the forces that actually settle military conflicts? Plus: were Abba really so wrong that Waterloo won the war?
Out tomorrow: A bonus episode in which David and Dan explore a range of battles to see what got settled and what didn’t: Yarmuk, Hastings, Agincourt, Trafalgar, Warsaw 1920, Stalingrad. To get this and all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening sign up now to PPF+ https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
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The History of Bad Ideas: Genius
Today’s bad idea is ‘genius’, the label that has enabled all sorts of terrible behaviour through the ages. Writer and broadcaster Helen Lewis explains how and why the idea of genius gets misapplied to people and things that just aren’t. Why are geniuses meant to be tortured? Why are individual geniuses prized over the collaborations that lie behind most innovations? Why do we think that people who are brilliant at one thing will be good at everything else? Plus, David makes the case for Dickens as a bona fide genius.
The Genius Myth by Helen Lewis is out from today wherever you get your books https://bit.ly/3FSAKda
David’s new 20-part series Postwar – about the 1945 general election and the making of modern Britain – is available now on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002d8v1
Next time on The History of Bad Ideas: The Decisive Battle w/Dan Snow
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The History of Bad Ideas: Austerity
For the first episode in our new series about how bad ideas take hold, David talks to economist Mark Blyth about austerity, the cost-cutting idea that refuses to die. Why is it an article of faith that states need periodic purging to stop them getting too greedy? Why does this so often happen at times when it does most harm, from the 1930s to the financial crisis that began in 2008? And how is the politics of austerity playing out today, in Starmer’s Britain, in Milei’s Argentina and in the DOGE wars happening in Trump’s America?
David’s new 20-part series Postwar – about the 1945 general election and the making of modern Britain – is available now on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/m002d8v1
Next time on The History of Bad Ideas: Genius w/Helen Lewis
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Politics on Trial: Charles I vs Parliament
Today’s political trial is perhaps the most consequential in English history: the trial and execution of King Charles I for treason in January 1649. How could a king commit treason when treason was a crime against the king? How could a court try a king when a king has no peers? How could anyone claim to speak for the people after a civil war when so many people had been on opposite sides? The answers to these questions would cost more than one person his life – but they would also change forever the prospect of holding tyrants to account.
Out now on PPF+: Part 2 of David’s conversation with Robert Saunders about the 1975 European referendum and the question of why it all ended up so differently in the Brexit referendum of 2016. Sign up now to get this and all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
David’s new 20-part series Postwar – about the 1945 general election and the making of modern Britain – is available now on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002d8v1
Next time: The History of Bad Ideas: Austerity w/Mark Blyth
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Politics on Trial: Galileo vs the Inquisition
Today’s trial is one of the most notorious in history but also one of the most misremembered. Galileo’s epic confrontation with the Catholic Church over the question of whether the earth moves round the sun – culminating with his interrogation and condemnation in Rome in 1633 – was not just a matter of truth vs ignorance or science vs superstition. It was also twenty-year long struggle on the part of both sides to find a way to co-exist. Did they succeed? Not exactly, but it wasn’t for want of trying. Then – and perhaps now – science and religion needed each other.
Out now on PPF+: Part 2 of David’s conversation with Robert Saunders about the 1975 European referendum and the question of why it all ended up so differently in the Brexit referendum of 2016. Sign up now to get this and all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
David’s new 20-part series Postwar – about the 1945 general election and the making of modern Britain – starts on BBC Radio 4 tomorrow and the first 10 episodes will be available to download on BBC Sounds https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002d8v1
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50th Anniversary Special: The 1975 European Referendum w/Robert Saunders
Today’s episode is about a pivotal event in British history that took place exactly 50 years ago: the 1975 referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Community. David talks to historian Robert Saunders about why it was so different in so many ways from the Brexit referendum in 2016. Why in 1975 were Labour and the SNP the Eurosceptic parties? What made the Tories pro-European? Where was immigration as an election issue? How did the Yes campaign overturn a big deficit in the polls? Plus: why didn’t it settle the question, so that another referendum had to be held four decades later?
Available tomorrow on PPF+: Part 2 of this conversation in which David and Robert try to make sense of the many differences between the 1975 and 2016 referendums as well as exploring where Britain stands in relation to Europe in 2025. Sign up now to get this and all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
Robert Saunders’s definitive history of the 1975 referendum Yes To Europe! is available wherever you get your books https://bit.ly/3FE04mP
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Politics on Trial: Mary Queen of Scots vs the Secret State
In today’s episode an extraordinary political trial that culminated in the execution of one queen at the behest of another: Mary Queen of Scots, convicted of treason in 1586 and beheaded in 1587. But who really wanted her dead, Queen Elizabeth or Elizabeth’s powerful political servants? Why did Mary demand to be tried before parliament rather than a court of noblemen? How did she attempt to defend herself in the face of apparently overwhelming incriminating evidence against her? And who was the only person who voted for her acquittal?
Listen to David’s episode about Schiller’s Mary Stuart as part of our Great Political Fictions series https://www.ppfideas.com/episodes/the-great-political-fictions%3A-mary-stuart
Next time: 50 years on from the 1975 Europe Referendum w/Robert Saunders
Coming soon in Politics on Trial: Galileo vs the Inquisition
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Politics on Trial: Thomas More vs the King
In today’s episode another trial that forms the basis for great drama: the case of Thomas More, tried and executed in 1535, events dramatised by Robert Bolt in A Man for All Seasons and Hilary Mantel in Wolf Hall. How did More try to argue that silence was no evidence of treason? Why was his defence so legalistic? Was he really ‘the Socrates of England’? And who was the true villain in this case: Thomas Cromwell, Richard Rich or the King himself?
Available now on PPF+: Socrates part 2, in which David explores the verdict of history on this case and the fierce arguments it still inspires. Sign up now to get this and all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
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Politics on Trial: Joan of Arc vs the Church
Today’s political trial took place in 1431 though it was still being re-litigated right through to the twentieth century: the case of Joan of Arc, charged with heresy by the Church and burned at the stake. Why was a political prisoner tried in an ecclesiastical court? Why were her interrogators so obsessed by her choice in clothes? How did Joan seek to explain her visions? And was this trial any more of a fix than the later trials that exonerated her?
Available now on PPF+: Socrates part 2, in which David explores the verdict of history on this case and the fierce arguments it still inspires. Sign up now to get this and all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
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Politics on Trial: Socrates vs Democracy
The first political trial in our new series is the one that set the template for all the others: the trial of Socrates in Athens in 399 BCE, which ended with a death sentence for the philosopher and a permanent stain on the reputation of Athenian democracy. Why, after a lifetime of philosophy, was Socrates finally prosecuted at the age of 70? Was the case motivated by private grievance or public outrage? What should Socrates have said in his own defence? Why, in the end, did he choose defiance instead?
Out on Saturday on PPF+: Socrates part 2 - David explores the verdict of history on this case and the fierce arguments it still inspires. Sign up now to get this and all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
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Politics on Trial: A History of Lawfare
To introduce our new series about historic political trials – from Socrates to Marine Le Pen – David explores what makes political confrontations in a court of law so fascinating and so revealing. Why do even the worst of dictators still want to play by the rules? What happens when realpolitik and legal principles collide? How does the political system often find itself in the dock? Who wins and who loses in the great game of lawfare?
Out now: a new bonus episode on PPF+ where David tries to answer your questions about Trump and the international order. Sign up now to get this and all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
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Ideas of Globalisation: What’s Gone Wrong? w/Dani Rodrik
For the final episode in this series David talks to the leading economist Dani Rodrik about the case he made in the early 2000s that globalisation was unsustainable in its current form. How does he think this prediction has been borne out? What forms of globalisation might work in the 21st century? Where are the strengths and weaknesses of the existing system? And what does he make of the antics of Donald Trump?
Available from Saturday on PPF+: David tries to answer your questions about Trump and the international order. Is it over? Is he over? When will it all be over? To get this and all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening sign up now to PPF+ https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
Next time: Politics on Trial: A History of Lawfare
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Ideas of Globalisation: The Crisis of the 1970s (and Trump!)
David talks to historian Meg Jacobs about how the 1970s changed everything for America’s understanding of its place in the global economy. How did first the Nixon Shock and then the Oil Shock reshape American politics? Why did America’s politicians respond to these shocks not with tariffs or sabre-rattling but with calls to national self-sacrifice? Did anyone heed those calls? And what lessons did Donald Trump draw from America’s crisis decade?
The latest edition of our free fortnightly newsletter is out now with guides, insights and clips to accompany this series, plus David writes about whether Nigel Farage really spells the end of two-party politics in the UK. It’s easy to sign up https://www.ppfideas.com/newsletters
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Ideas of Globalisation: Central Banks vs the People (and Trump!)
Today David talks to political and economic theorist Leah Downey about the role that central banks in general – and the Federal Reserve in particular – have played in the story of globalisation. How has the Fed tried to reconcile its obligations to American democracy with its obligations to the global order? Is the Eurodollar a token of American strength or American vulnerability? Are the world’s central bankers really just a private club? And what does history tell us about the likely outcome of Trump vs Powell?
The latest edition of our free fortnightly newsletter is out tomorrow with guides, insights and clips to accompany this series, plus David writes about whether Nigel Farage really spells the end of two-party politics in the UK. Sign up now https://www.ppfideas.com/newsletters
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Ideas of Globalisation: Hoover and Smoot-Hawley (and Trump!)
David talks to historian Gary Gerstle about the last time the Republican party got caught up in a tariffs disaster and how it changed American politics. The Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930 brought tariffs back and helped bring down both the Republican Party and the global economy. Why didn’t Hoover stop it? What did the fiasco reveal about the limits of presidential power back then? And what does it suggest about the limits of presidential power today?
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Ideas of Globalisation: Chamberlain and the Tariff Wars (and Trump!)
Today we explore the explosive fight over tariffs that took place in Britain in the first decade of the twentieth century. David talks to historian Robert Saunders about how Joseph Chamberlain made tariff reform a great popular cause and how it nearly destroyed his party. Are there parallels with Trump’s tariff wars today? Yes! Are there lessons for Trump’s opponents too? Yes!
Out now on PPF+: Lenin and Trotsky part 2, taking the story on from 1917 to explore civil war, the rise of Stalin and the re-invention of Trotskyism. To get this and all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening sign up now to PPF+ https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
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Ideas of Globalisation: Trade, Race and Empire (and Trump!)
We start a new mini-series on the history of ideas of globalisation by exploring how arguments from 150 years ago foreshadow what’s happening with Trump today. David talks to economic historian Marc Palen about the nineteenth-century fight between economic nationalists and the champions of an open economy. Was free trade for everyone or just for white people? Was it possible to be an imperialist and a globalist? What did the socialists want? And who thought that Canada should be annexed by the United States?
Out now on PPF+: Lenin and Trotsky part 2, taking the story on from 1917 to explore civil war, the rise of Stalin and the re-invention of Trotskyism. To get this and all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening sign up now to PPF+ https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
Next time on Ideas of Globalisation: The Tariff Wars of the 1900s.
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The History of Revolutionary Ideas: Lenin and Trotsky
To conclude this part of our revolutionary ideas series, we explore the overlapping lives and thinking of two emblematic twentieth-century revolutionaries: Lenin and Trotsky. David talks to historian of Russia Edward Acton about what inspired them, what connected them and what divided them. How were they radicalised? How did they interpret the failure of the 1905 revolution? How did they make the 1917 revolution happen?
Available from Saturday on PPF+: Lenin and Trotsky part 2, taking the story on from 1917 to explore civil war, the rise of Stalin and the re-invention of Trotskyism. To get this and all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening sign up now to PPF+ https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
Out tomorrow a new edition of our free fortnightly newsletter with links, clips and guides to all our recent episodes. Join our mailing list https://www.ppfideas.com/newsletters
Next time the start of a new series: The History of Globalisation
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PPF Live Special: Churchill – The Politician With Nine Lives w/Robert Saunders
Today’s episode is the second of our two recent live recordings of PPF, this one in front of an audience at the Bath Curious Minds Festival. David talks to historian Robert Saunders about the life of Winston Churchill and all its twists and turns of fortune: from disgrace in WWI, economic disaster in the 1920s, wilderness in the 1930s, through to redemption in 1945 and rejection by the voters in the same year. How to make sense of it all? Is there a thread that connects the ups and downs? Has there ever – anywhere – been another political life like it?
Out now on PPF+: David discusses the influence of Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto (1909) – from cars to cod liver oil, from fascism to techno-optimism, from the madness of pre-WWI Europe to the craziness of Silicon Valley today. To get this and all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening sign up to PPF+ https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
Next time: The History of Revolutionary Ideas: Lenin and Trotsky
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The History of Revolutionary Ideas: The Rite of Spring w/Dominic Dromgoole
Our third Parisian revolution is another explosive night in the theatre, this time in the world of dance. David talks to Dominic Dromgoole about Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, which provoked absolute outrage when it premiered in 1913. Is that what its impresario Diaghilev wanted? How did Nijinsky cope? Did the response foreshadow the trauma to come in 1914? And how did the set designer Roerich end up playing a part in American presidential history?
Dominic Dromgoole’s Astonish Me! First Nights that Changed the World is available wherever you get your books https://profilebooks.com/work/astonish-me/
Out this weekend: a new bonus episode on PPF+ exploring the far-reaching impact of Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto (1909), from pre-WWI Europe to Silicon Valley. Sign up now to get this and all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
Next time: PPF Live: Churchill – The Politician With Nine Lives
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The History of Revolutionary Ideas: Ubu Roi w/Dominic Dromgoole
Today’s Parisian revolution is a theatrical performance that produced a riot. David talks to theatre director Dominic Dromgoole about Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi (1896), which only ran for a couple of nights but left an indelible mark on the culture of the age and has resonated ever since. Why did a play effectively written by children provoke such a storm among the adults? What made it it blow the mind of W. B. Yeats who was in the audience? How can something so bad be so liberating?
Next time: Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring
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The History of Revolutionary Ideas: Salon Des Refusés w/Dominic Dromgoole
Today’s episode is the first of three this week with the theatre director and writer Dominic Dromgoole, exploring revolutionary events in the world of art and theatre, starting with the opening of the Salon des Refusés in Paris in May 1863. How did the Emperor Napoleon end up sponsoring such a counter-cultural event? Why did it provoke such public outrage and astonishment? And in what ways did Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe revolutionise what was possible in the creation and consumption of modern art?
A new edition of our newsletter is out now with guides to the events of the Paris Commune and much more. Sign up to get it every fortnight https://www.ppfideas.com/newsletters
Next time: Ubu Roi w/Dominic Dromgoole
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The History of Revolutionary Ideas: Marx and the Paris Commune
Today the first of four episodes about Parisian revolutions. We start with the definitive nineteenth-century revolutionary and his definitive revolution: David talks to historian Bruno Leipold about why Karl Marx thought the Paris Commune in 1871 was the model of a workers' uprising and provided a vision of the socialist future. How had the Communards reinvented democracy? Was this a social, an economic or a political revolution? And how did Marx reconcile himself to its bloody failure?
Bruno Leipold’s intellectual biography of Marx and Marxism Citizen Marx is available now https://bit.ly/4i8Gmga
A new edition of our free fortnightly newsletter is out tomorrow with guides to the events of the Paris Commune and much more. Sign up now https://www.ppfideas.com/newsletters
Next time: Salon des Refusés w/Dominic Dromgoole
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The History of Revolutionary Ideas: Free Speech
Today’s revolutionary idea is one with a long history, not all of it revolutionary: David talks to the historian Fara Dabhoiwala about the idea of free speech. When did free speech first get articulated as a fundamental right? How has that right been used and abused, from the eighteenth century to the present? And what changed in the history of the idea of free speech with the publication of J. S. Mill’s On Liberty in 1859?
Fara Dabhoiwala’s What Is Free Speech? is available now https://bit.ly/4jgcvDt
Next time: Marx and the Paris Commune w/Bruno Leipold
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PPF Live Film Special: Network w/Helen Lewis
We take a brief break from revolutionary ideas for a special live episode of PPF recorded in front of an audience at the Regent Street Cinema in London. David talks to writer and journalist Helen Lewis about Network (1976), a film still best remembered for its catchphrase: ‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!’ Just how prophetic is that cry of rage in the age of Trump? What does the film say about the continuing power of television in the era of social media? And who or what does it remind us of: Ye, Tucker Carlson, Russell Brand, WWE wrestling… or is it about something else entirely?
Out now on PPF+: the second part of David’s conversation with Adam Rutherford about Darwin and the most revolutionary idea of them all. To get this and all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening sign up now to PPF+ https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
Next time: J. S. Mill and Free Speech w/Fara Dabhoiwala
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The History of Revolutionary Ideas: Darwin w/Adam Rutherford
David talks to geneticist and science writer Adam Rutherford about the book that fundamentally altered our understanding of just about everything: Darwin’s On The Origin of Species (1859). What made the idea of natural selection so different from the theories of evolution that preceded it? How did Darwin arrive at it? What changed when he published his theory and why is it, in so many ways, the most revolutionary idea of them all?
Out tomorrow on PPF+ Darwin Part 2: Adam Rutherford explores how Darwin’s ideas evolved after 1859 and how the revolution in thinking that he started has continued to this day. To get this and all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening sign up to PPF+ now https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
Next time: PPF Live recorded at the Regent Street Cinema: Network w/Helen Lewis
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The History of Revolutionary Ideas: The Taiping Revolution
Today’s revolutionary ideas come from China: David talks to historian Julia Lovell about the Taiping Revolution, another massive mid-19th-century upheaval that nearly overturned the established order. How did Christianity inspire an uprising against the Qing dynasty? Was it a revolution or a civil war? What was the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom? And where does this cataclysmic event fit into China’s 20th-century revolutionary history?
Out now: a bonus episode on 1848 with Chris Clark looking at the counter-revolution – how did the ruling regimes of Europe fight back? To get this and a year’s worth of bonus episodes sign up to PPF+ https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
Available tomorrow: the latest edition of our free fortnightly newsletter with clips, guides, further reading and much more. Sign up now https://www.ppfideas.com/newsletters
Next time: Darwin w/Adam Rutherford
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The History of Revolutionary Ideas: 1848: The Radical Revolution w/Chris Clark
In our second of three episodes on the revolutions that swept through Europe in 1848 David and Chris Clark explore the forces demanding radical change. What was ‘the Social Question’ and who was asking it? Where did the violence that erupted in the summer of 1848 come from? What, if anything did it achieve? And who paid the price?
Out tomorrow: a final bonus episode on 1848 looking at the counter-revolution: how did the ruling regimes of Europe fight back? To get this and a year’s worth of bonus episodes sign up now to PPF+ https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
Next time: The Taiping Revolution w/Julia Lovell
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The History of Revolutionary Ideas: 1848: The Liberal Revolution w/Chris Clark
In the first of three episodes about the revolutions that swept through Europe in 1848 David is joined by historian Chris Clark to explore the ideas behind this continental upheaval. We start with the ‘Liberal Revolution’: Who were the liberals and what had turned them into revolutionaries? How did the original French Revolution overshadow their hopes and fears? Were parliaments and constitutions capable of sustaining revolutionary fervour? And did the liberals of 1848 realise what they had unleashed?
Come to see PPF Live at the Bath Curious Minds Festival: join us on Saturday March 29th to hear David in conversation with Robert Saunders about the legacy of Winston Churchill: The Politician with Nine Lives https://bit.ly/42GPp3X
Next time: 1848: The Radical Revolution w/Chris Clark
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The History of Revolutionary Ideas: The Bayesian Revolution w/David Spiegelhalter
Today’s revolutionary idea is something a bit different: David talks to statistician David Spiegelhalter about how an eighteenth-century theory of probability emerged from relative obscurity in the twentieth century to reconfigure our understanding of the relationship between past, present and future. What was Thomas Bayes’s original idea about doing probability in reverse: from effect to cause? What happened when this way of thinking passed through the vortex of the French Revolution? How has it come to lie behind recent innovations in political polling, AI, self-driving cars, medical research and so much more? Why does it remain controversial to this day?
The latest edition of our free fortnightly newsletter is available: to get it in your inbox sign up now https://www.ppfideas.com/newsletter
Next time: 1848: The Liberal Revolution w/Chris Clark
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The History of Revolutionary Ideas: Slave Uprising: The Haitian Revolution
Today’s episode is about a very different revolution from any we’ve discussed so far: David talks to historian Hank Gonzalez about the Haitian Revolution, which for the first time in history saw a slave revolt result in an independent free state. How did the Haitian Revolution intersect with the American and French Revolutions that preceded it? Why were European powers unable to reverse it despite massive military intervention? What is its legacy for the state of Haiti today?
Tickets are still available for PPF Live at the Bath Curious Minds Festival: join us on Saturday 29th March to hear David in conversation with Robert Saunders about the legacy of Winston Churchill: The Politician with Nine Lives https://bit.ly/42GPp3X
Out tomorrow the latest edition of our free fortnightly newsletter: to get it in your inbox sign up now https://www.ppfideas.com/newsletters
Next time: The Bayesian revolution w/David Spiegelhalter
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The History of Revolutionary Ideas: French Revolution 3: Paine
For our third episode on the ideas behind the French Revolution, David talks to Richard Whatmore about the ubiquitous Thomas Paine, the Englishman who championed revolutionary politics around the world. How did Paine come to see France as the locus of all his revolutionary hopes? How were those hopes ultimately disappointed? And what happened to Paine’s vision of the Rights of Man?
Out now on PPF+: a special bonus episode on King Donald The First. David explores the arguments being made in 2025 for the restoration of monarchy in America. Who’s making them and why? What on earth are they thinking? Sign up now to get this and all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
Next time: Slave uprising: the Haitian Revolution
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The History of Revolutionary Ideas: French Revolution 2: Robespierre
For our second episode on the people and ideas behind the French Revolution David talks to historian and biographer Ruth Scurr about the man who came to embody the revolution in all its radicalism and all its terror: Maximilien Robespierre. Who was he and how did he rise so fast once the upheaval was underway? How did he harness the power of the Jacobin Club? How did he marshal the violence of the streets? What did he believe in? And what made him think it was possible to reconcile virtue with terror?
Out now: a special bonus episode for PPF+ subscribers on King Donald The First: David explores the arguments being made in 2025 for the restoration of monarchy in America. Who’s making them and why? What on earth are they thinking? Sign up now to get this and all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
Next time: French Revolution 3: Paine
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The History of Revolutionary Ideas: French Revolution 1: Sieyès
In the first of three episodes about the people and ideas behind the French Revolution, David talks to Lucia Rubinelli about the man who helped kickstart it all: the Abbé Sieyès. How did an obscure cleric galvanise a nation? What did he mean by the Third Estate and why did he think it was everything? What went wrong with his idea of a new constitutional order for France? And what happened when Sieyès encountered Napoleon?
Out now on PPF+: a special bonus episode on King Donald The First. David explores the arguments being made in 2025 for the restoration of monarchy in America. Who’s making them and why? What on earth are they thinking? Sign up now to get this and all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
Next time: French Revolution 2: Robespierre
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The History of Revolutionary Ideas: American Revolution 2: The Constitution
In the second of our two episodes about the American Revolution David talks to historian Eric Nelson about the ideas that shaped the US Constitution. Was the office of President a victory for the people who still wanted a king or for those who never wanted one again? What was old and what was new about the idea of the separation of powers? What really divided the Federalists and the Antifederalists? And how are these arguments still being played out in the early days of Trump 2.0?
Out tomorrow: a special bonus episode for PPF+ subscribers on King Donald The First: David explores the arguments being made in 2025 for the restoration of monarchy in America. Who’s making them and why? What on earth are they thinking? Sign up now to get this and all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
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Next time: French Revolution 1: Sieyes
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The History of Revolutionary Ideas: American Revolution 1: The Declaration of Independence
Today it’s the first of two episodes about one of the most significant revolutions of all: the American Revolution. David talks to historian Eric Nelson about the ideas behind America’s Declaration of Independence in 1776. How did a fight with the British parliament become a repudiation of the British king? What turned royalists into republicans? What kind of republic did they think they were building? And whose consent was going to be needed to build it?
Next time: American Revolution 2: The Constitution
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The History of Revolutionary Ideas: The Industrial Revolution
Today’s episode is about a revolution that started 250 years ago and is still going on (in the form of the digital revolution): the Industrial Revolution. David talks to economic historian Alexis Litvine about how new ways of making things changed human understanding of the world around us. Did the Industrial Revolution invent the idea of progress? Did it revolutionise the concept of nature? Did it upend the way we think about time? And what was the cost?
Tickets are available for PPF Live at the Bath Curious Minds Festival: on Saturday 29th March David will be in conversation with Robert Saunders about the legacy of Winston Churchill: The Politician with Nine Lives https://bit.ly/42GPp3X
Next time: American Revolution: The Declaration of Independence
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The History of Revolutionary Ideas: English Revolution 2: 1688
In the second of our episodes with historian Clare Jackson on the English revolutions of the 17th century we discuss the one that usually gets called ‘Glorious’: the revolution of 1688. Was it a revolution or was it an invasion? What rights did parliament win and what powers did it acquire? Was this the beginning of the modern military state? And does the Glorious Revolution deserve its name?
Out now: the latest edition of our free fortnightly newsletter with guides to the most recent episodes, links, clips and further reading: sign up now https://www.ppfideas.com/newsletters
Tickets are available for PPF Live at the Bath Curious Minds Festival: on Saturday March 29th David will be in conversation with Robert Saunders about the legacy of Winston Churchill: The Politician with Nine Lives https://bit.ly/42GPp3X. Come be a part of recording PPF live!
Next up in The History of Revolutionary Ideas: The Industrial Revolution
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The History of Revolutionary Ideas: English Revolution 1: Civil War
Today’s episode in our history of revolutionary ideas is about the event that is sometimes – but not always – called the English Revolution: the Civil War of the 1640s and the short-lived republic that followed. David talks to historian Clare Jackson about whether this really was a revolution and about the thinking that inspired it. What was old, what was new, what was borrowed and what was left when it was all over – what happened to the dreams of a brave new world?
Out tomorrow: the latest edition of our free fortnightly newsletter with guides to the most recent episodes, links, clips and further reading: sign up now https://www.ppfideas.com/newsletters
Tickets are available for PPF Live at the Bath Curious Minds Festival: on Saturday March 29th David will be in conversation with Robert Saunders about the legacy of Winston Churchill: The Politician with Nine Lives https://bit.ly/42GPp3X
Next up in The History of Revolutionary Ideas: English Revolution 2: 1688
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The History of Revolutionary Ideas: The Scientific Revolution
Today’s episode is about a revolution that took centuries to happen if it ever really happened at all: The Scientific Revolution. David talks to historian of science Simon Schaffer about what changed in human understanding – and what didn’t – in the age of Galileo and Newton. Was the new science a revolution of ideas or of practices? What did it mean for the hold of religious and political authority? Who or what were the driving forces behind it? And did the people who lived through it realise what was happening?
Out now on PPF+: David’s conversation with Alec Ryrie about Jean Calvin, who may have been the Reformation’s true revolutionary. What was Calvinism and how did it change the world? To get this and all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening sign up now to PPF+ https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
Tickets are available now for PPF Live at the Bath Curious Minds Festival: join us on Saturday 29th March to hear David in conversation with Robert Saunders about the legacy of Winston Churchill: The Politician with Nine Lives https://bit.ly/42GPp3X
Next Time on the History of Revolutionary Ideas: The English Revolutions (part one): The Civil War
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The History of Revolutionary Ideas: The Reformation (part 1): Luther
Today’s revolutionary thinker is Martin Luther, the man who upended the religious, political and intellectual life of Europe, maybe without entirely meaning to. David talks to historian Alec Ryrie about how a German monk took on the entire authority of the Catholic Church and survived the experience. What did he hope to achieve? Who were his principal backers? How did he reimagine the idea of human freedom? And where is his influence most widely felt today?
Out tomorrow on PPF+ a new bonus episode: David talks to Alec Ryrie about Calvin, who may have been the Reformation’s true revolutionary. What was Calvinism and how did it change the world? To get this and all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening sign up now to PPF+https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
Tickets are available now for PPF Live at the Bath Curious Minds Festival: on Saturday March 29th David will be in conversation with Robert Saunders about the legacy of Winston Churchill: The Politician with Nine Lives https://bit.ly/42GPp3X
Next up in The History of Revolutionary Ideas: The Scientific Revolution
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The History of Revolutionary Ideas: Humanism
Today’s episode in our history of revolutionary ideas is about a medieval movement that used the ancient past to rethink and reimagine the present and the future. David talks to historian Eric Nelson about humanism and its enormous impact on the history of ideas. How did humanism emerge out of catastrophe? What did it do to the hold of Church and Empire on the medieval mind? Was humanist politics really revolutionary politics? And where is the ‘human’ in humanism?
As part of our Great Political Films series we are hosting a special screening of Network (1976) at the Regent Street Cinema in London on 18th March, followed by a live podcast recording with David and Helen Lewis. Aaron Sorkin said: ‘No predictor of the future – not even Orwell – has ever been as right as Network.’ Come see why! Tickets now available https://www.ppfideas.com/event-list
Next up in The History of Revolutionary Ideas: The Reformation 1: Luther
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The History of Revolutionary Ideas: Magna Carta
Today’s episode in our history of revolutionary ideas is about a medieval document that is sometimes thought to contain a ground-breaking promise of basic political rights. David talks to historian Nick Vincent about Magna Carta (1215) and what it did and didn’t actually say. Why did the warring parties agree to it? Was it a constitutional charter or a peace treaty? What happened when its terms were broken? And how did it come to acquire the totemic significance it has today?
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Come to see PPF recorded live! As part of the Curious Minds festival in Bath David will be in conversation with regular PPF contributor Robert Saunders about the legacy of Winston Churchill: The Politician With Nine Lives. It’s happening at the Komedia in Bath at 11am on Saturday 29th March. Tickets now available https://www.ppfideas.com/event-list
Next up in The History of Revolutionary Ideas: Humanism
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The History of Revolutionary Ideas: Islam
Today’s episode in our history of revolutionary ideas explores the world-altering impact of Islam from the seventh century onwards. David talks to the leading Islamic scholar Tim Winter (Abdal Hakim Murad) about what changed – and what didn’t – with the appearance of Islamic law, Islamic culture and Islamic ideas of community. Was Islam really egalitarian? How could a universalist religion encompass so much variety? Why did it spread so fast? And what caused it to split so soon?
Come see PPF recorded live! As part of the Curious Minds festival in Bath David will be in conversation with regular PPF contributor Robert Saunders about the legacy of Winston Churchill: The Politician With Nine Lives. It’s happening at the Komedia in Bath at 11am on Saturday 29th March. Priority booking for PPF listeners opens at 9am on Tuesday 28th January – just go to our website for more info and to get your tickets: https://www.ppfideas.com/event-list
Out now on PPF+: the second part of David’s conversation with Agnes Callard about Socrates, exploring politics, AI, therapy and death. Sign up now for £5 per month or £50 for a whole year to get this and all our bonus episodes (21 and counting!) plus ad-free listening https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
Next up in The History of Revolutionary Ideas: Magna Carta
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The History of Revolutionary Ideas: Christianity w/Tom Holland
Today’s episode in our series on revolutionary ideas is a conversation covering two millennia with the historian Tom Holland exploring the never-ending upending of human understanding brought about by Christianity. How can weakness be the ultimate strength? How can political order be built out of the glorification of suffering? How can a universal religion create so much hierarchical division? And in a Christian world, is it ever possible to escape the charge of hypocrisy?
Out now on PPF+: the second part of David’s conversation with Agnes Callard about Socrates, exploring politics, AI, therapy and death. Sign up now for £5 per month or £50 for a whole year to get this and all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
Next up in The History of Revolutionary Ideas: Islam w/Tim Winter
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The History of Revolutionary Ideas: Socrates w/Agnes Callard
To begin our history of revolutionary ideas in earnest, David talks to the philosopher Agnes Callard about Socrates, the philosopher who changed – and can still change – everything. Just what is so radical about the Socratic method? How does it open up new ways of thinking about the meaning of life? Can anyone do it? And where does it leave 2000+ years of intervening philosophy?
Out tomorrow on PPF+: the second part of David’s conversation with Agnes Callard about Socrates, exploring politics, AI, therapy and death. Sign up now for £5 per month or £50 for a whole year to get this and all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life by Agnes Callard is available now https://bit.ly/4h0pZmg
Next up in The History of Revolutionary Ideas: Christianity w/Tom Holland
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The History of Revolutionary Ideas: What Makes a Revolutionary Idea?
To kick off our new series on revolutionary ideas past, present and future David talks to two regular PPF contributors – the philosopher Lea Ypi and the scientist Adam Rutherford – about what makes an idea truly revolutionary. Do revolutionary ideas change the world? Can the world be changed without them? Can bad ideas ever be revolutionary ideas? And where should we be looking for revolutionary ideas today?
Sign up to our free fortnightly newsletter to get more ideas, clips, reading suggestions and extra insights to accompany this and all our series. Join our mailing list now: https://www.ppfideas.com/newsletters
Next Time: The History of Revolutionary Ideas: Socrates w/Agnes Callard
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The Great Political Films: The Zone of Interest
The final episode in our great political films series explores Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023), his haunting take on the home life of the man who ran Auschwitz. This is a film like nothing else. It is not about the banality of evil or the proximity of innocence to horror. Instead it takes us inside a nightmare world from which there is no escape: the grimmest fairy story of them all.
Out now: a new bonus episodes on PPF+ exploring the joys of Armando Iannucci’s In The Loop, not just one of the smartest films about contemporary politics but also the funniest. Sign up now for £5 per month or £50 for a whole year to get this and all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
Coming next: we begin our new series on The History of Revolutionary Ideas
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The Great Political Films: Zero Dark Thirty
The penultimate episode in our great political films series explores Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty (2012), her controversial take on the War on Terror. Tracking the CIA’s years-long pursuit of Osama Bin Laden, it’s part spy procedural, part story of a female outsider in a man’s world, and part a complex disquisition on political violence. Where does bureaucracy end and killing begin? Can torture ever be justified? And whose judgment is ultimately the one that counts?
Out now: a new bonus episodes on PPF+ exploring the joys of Armando Iannucci’s In The Loop, not just one of the smartest films about contemporary politics but also the funniest. Sign up now for £5 per month or £50 for a whole year to get this and all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
Next time: The Zone of Interest
Coming soon: a new series on The History of Revolutionary Ideas
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The Great Political Films: The Social Network
The second David Fincher film in our series (after Fight Club) is The Social Network (2010), the Aaron Sorkin-scripted take on how Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook and the price paid by everyone else. A tale of power and privilege, innocence and cynicism, it is also about how exploitation can be sold as exclusivity. What is left when we have given away our control over who we are in order to decide who counts as a friend?
Out later this week: a new bonus episodes on PPF+ exploring the joys of Armando Iannucci’s In The Loop, not just one of the smartest films about contemporary politics but also the funniest. Sign up now for £5 per month or £50 for a whole year to get this and all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
Next time: Zero Dark Thirty
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The Great Political Films: There Will Be Blood
Our great political films series reaches the twenty-first century with Paul Thomas Anderson’s unforgettable There Will Be Blood (2007), starring Daniel Day-Lewis as oilman Daniel Plainview in one of the all-time great screen performances. Based on Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil! (1927), the movie swaps out Marx for Nietzsche and tells a story of money vs religion and family vs both. What, in the end, is the force that cannot be overcome?
Out now: two bonus episodes on PPF+ to accompany this series: Shoah part one and Shoah part two, exploring Claude Lanzmann’s path-breaking, harrowing, unforgettable 9-hour documentary about the Holocaust. Sign up to PPF+ to get all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
Next time: The Social Network
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The Great Political Films: Fight Club w/ Helen Lewis
David talks to writer and journalist Helen Lewis about David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999), the film that launched a thousand memes. Does this tale of thwarted masculinity and corporate malfeasance code left or code right? Who, in the end, is Tyler Durden: Joe Rogan or Jordan Peterson, Elon Musk or Andrew Tate? Is Fight Club a relic of the pre-digital age or a prophetic vision of what was coming? And … Meat Loaf?!
Out now: two new bonus episodes on PPF+ to accompany this series: Shoah part one and Shoah part two, exploring Claude Lanzmann’s path-breaking, harrowing, unforgettable 9-hour documentary about the Holocaust. Sign up to PPF+ to get all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
Next Time: There Will Be Blood
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The Great Political Films: Do The Right Thing
Our political films season has reached the late 1980s with Do The Right Thing (1989), Spike Lee’s searing take on racial tension on a Brooklyn block on a boiling hot summer’s day. How does a fight over pizza turn into a full-blown riot? With everyone feeling exploited, who is really to blame? And where do Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X – not to mention Jesse Jackson Jr. – fit in?
Out now: two new bonus episodes on PPF+ to accompany this series: Shoah part one and Shoah part two, exploring Claude Lanzmann’s path-breaking, harrowing, unforgettable 9-hour documentary about the Holocaust. Sign up to PPF+ to get all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
Next time: Fight Club w/ Helen Lewis
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The Great Political Films: Kagemusha
Today’s great political film is Akira Kurosawa’s epic of war and deception Kagemusha (1980). Set in late sixteenth-century Japan it tells the story of a thief tasked with impersonating a warlord. Can physical resemblance translate into political authority? How far does the conspiracy need to go? And who in the end is the real criminal?
Out now: two new bonus episodes on PPF+ to accompany this series: Shoah part one and Shoah part two, exploring Claude Lanzmann’s path-breaking, harrowing, unforgettable 9-hour documentary about the Holocaust. Sign up to PPF+ to get all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
Next time: Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing
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The Great Political Films: Jeanne Dielman
Today’s great political film is Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), voted the greatest film of all time in the 2022 Sight and Sound poll. A classic of feminist cinema it is also a film about the meaning of time and the illusions of choice. How can a movie which shows a woman peeling potatoes in real time have you on the edge of your seat? If the personal is the political, what do three days in the life of a Belgian housewife tell us about the true nature of power?
Coming this weekend on PPF+: two new bonus episodes to accompany this series: Shoah part one and Shoah part two, exploring Claude Lanzmann’s path-breaking, harrowing, unforgettable 9-hour documentary about the Holocaust. Sign up to PPF+ to get all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
Next time in our regular slot: Kagemusha (1980)
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The Great Political Films: The Candidate w/Chris Smith
Today’s episode is a conversation between David and the former politician Chris Smith (long-time MP and Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport in Tony Blair’s first government) about The Candidate (1972), the first great political film of the 1970s. How does its portrayal of the compromises of running for office hold up today? Is it a cynical film or an inspiring one? And what lessons does it have for politics in the age of Trump?
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Next time: Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (voted the greatest film of all time in the 2022 Sight and Sound critics’ poll)
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The Great Political Films: Z
We resume our series on the great political films with Costa-Gavras’s Z (1969), the quintessential late 60s movie about assassination, conspiracy, street politics and police brutality. How could a film shot in Algeria and starring French actors so faithfully reconstruct a recent Greek political killing? How did it capture the spirit of the times? And what does it say about the relationship between politics as violence and politics as story-telling?
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Next time: The Candidate (1972) w/Chris Smith
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The History of Bad Ideas: Televised Leadership Debates
To finish this series of bad ideas, David tries to persuade Gary Gerstle of the futility of televised leadership debates. From Nixon vs Kennedy to Harris vs Trump, do the voters really learn anything from these supposed exchanges of ideas? Are they ever much more than a competition to avoid gaffes? And what did British politics gain when it introduced prime ministerial election debates (apart from a brief attack of Cleggmania)?
A new bonus bad idea is available to accompany this series: David talks to Lucia Rubinelli about what’s wrong with the idea of sovereignty. To get this and all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening sign up now to PPF+ https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
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Next time: The Great Political Films resumes with Z (1969)
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The History of Bad Ideas: Party Members Choosing Leaders
For our penultimate bad idea in this series, David talks to Robert Saunders about what’s gone wrong with British politics since party members got to decide who leads the party – and in some cases who gets to be prime minister. Is the problem the principle of the thing or the people who end up in charge (Corbyn, Truss)? How did reforms undertaken in the name of democracy manage to undermine democracy? And what are the alternatives?
A new bonus bad idea is available to accompany this series: David talks to Lucia Rubinelli about what’s gone wrong with the idea of sovereignty. To get this and all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening sign up now to PPF+ https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
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Next Bad Idea: Televised Leadership Debates
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The History of Bad Ideas: Steady State Theory
Today’s bad idea is a theory of the universe: David talks to astrophysicist Chris Lintott about Steady State Theory, the rival cosmological model to the Big Bang, which held its own for a while in the 1940s and 1950s but turned out to be unsustainable. Why did its best-known champion Fred Hoyle have so much faith in it? What did it expose about the limitations of Big Bang theory? And what does it reveal about scientific hubris and human weakness in the face of the unknown?
Available now is a new bonus bad idea to accompany this series: David talks to Lucia Rubinelli about what’s gone wrong with the idea of sovereignty. To get this and all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening sign up to PPF+ https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
Next Bad Idea: Party Members Choosing Leaders
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The History of Bad Ideas: The End of History
Today’s bad idea concerns history itself: David talks to world historian Ayse Zarakol about the temptations and the pitfalls of the idea of The End of History. Francis Fukuyama popularised the phrase in 1989 at the end of the Cold War. What did his vision of the triumph of liberal democracy miss? Was it a Western fantasy or a modern fantasy or both? How has history exacted its revenge? And if history doesn’t end, does it repeat?
Coming on Saturday a bonus bad idea to accompany this series: David talks to Lucia Rubinelli about what’s gone wrong with the idea of sovereignty. To get this and all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening sign up to PPF+ https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
Looking for Christmas presents? We have a special Xmas gift offer: give a subscription to PPF+ and your recipient will also receive a personally inscribed copy of David’s new book The History of Ideas. Find out more https://www.ppfideas.com/gifts
Next Bad Idea: Steady State Theory
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The History of Bad Ideas: Modernisation!
For today’s bad idea David talks to political philosopher Alan Finlayson about what goes wrong when politicians get their hands on the concept of modernisation. Why does it leave them so in thrall to new technology? What does it miss about how change really happens? And where does the modernisation project end?
Looking for Christmas presents? We have a special Xmas gift offer: give a subscription to PPF+ and your recipient will also receive a personally inscribed copy of David’s new book The History of Ideas. Find out more https://www.ppfideas.com/gifts
Next Bad Idea: The End of History
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The History of Bad Ideas: The Marketplace of Ideas
Today’s bad idea is about how ideas get adopted, argued over and rejected: David talks to political philosopher Alan Finlayson about what’s wrong with seeing this as a competitive marketplace. From St. Paul to Citizens United, from John Stuart Mill to Jordan Peterson, what happens when ideas get turned into commodities? Who wins and who loses? And what is an ‘ideological entrepreneur’?
Looking for Christmas presents? We have a special Xmas gift offer: give a subscription to PPF+ and your recipient will also receive a personally inscribed copy of David’s new book The History of Ideas. Find out more https://www.ppfideas.com/gifts
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Next Bad Idea: Modernisation!
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The History of Bad Ideas: Nobel Prizes
For our latest bad idea with an interesting history David talks to the geneticist and science writer Adam Rutherford about what’s wrong with Nobel Prizes. Why do we revere the winners of the science prizes when we know how contrived the other prizes are? What makes us so attached to this relic of an outmoded idea of scientific progress? And what happens when someone is struck down with ‘Nobelitis’?
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Next up on Bad Ideas: The Marketplace of Ideas
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The History of Bad Ideas: The Silent Majority
To kick off our new series on the history of bad ideas David talks to historian Sophie Scott-Brown about the idea of ‘the silent majority’, beloved by American presidents from Nixon to Trump. Where does this idea come from? Is it conservative or revolutionary? If the majority are actually silent, how can anyone know what they are thinking? And aren’t the silent majority really the dead?
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Next up on Bad Ideas: Nobel Prizes
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American Elections: 2024: The Meaning of Trump’s Triumph
For the final (extended) episode in our American Elections series David talks to Gary Gerstle about the historical significance of Donald Trump’s decisive victory this week. Was this election and its outcome unprecedented in American history or are there parallels to guide us? Can Trump be both an existential threat to American democracy and a politician it’s possible for his opponents to work with? What is the likely shape of the new political order that his administration represents? And will democracy itself survive the experience?
Out now: a new bonus episode to accompany our Great Political Films series in which David talks to Helen Thompson about Apocalypse Now, the ultimate film about war and madness. Sign up now to PPF+ to get this and all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
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Next time: The History of Bad Ideas: The Silent Majority
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The Great Political Films: The Battle of Algiers
For the last episode in this season of great political films David explores Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966), which changed the face of political movie-making forever. Filmed to look like archive footage, featuring actual participants in the events it describes, and showing both sides of the vicious contest between insurgents and counter-insurgents, it humanises a horrifying conflict. It also raises the question: where is the line between realism and rage?
Coming on Saturday: a new bonus episode to accompany this series in which David talks to Helen Thompson about Apocalypse Now, the ultimate film about war and madness. Sign up now to PPF+ to get this and all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
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Next time: Gary Gerstle on the 2024 Presidential Election
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The Great Political Films: Dr Strangelove & Fail Safe w/ Jill Lepore
This episode is about two great films on the same dark theme: David talks to American historian Jill Lepore about Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove and Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe, which appeared within a few months of each other in 1964. Both films explore what might happen if America’s nuclear defence system went rogue. One is grimly hilarious; the other is utterly terrifying. Which packs the biggest punch today?
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Next time: The Battle of Algiers
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The Great Political Films: The Leopard w/ Lucia Rubinelli
For today’s great political film David discusses Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard (1963) with the Italian historian of ideas Lucia Rubinelli. How did a communist aristocrat from Milan come to make a film about a Sicilian prince? How did Burt Lancaster get cast in the leading role? Is this a political film or a film against politics? And what is the real meaning of the celebrated line: ‘If we want things to stay as they are, things must change…’?
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Next time: Dr Strangelove & Fail Safe w/ Jill Lepore
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The Great Political Films: The Manchurian Candidate
Today’s great political film is John Frankenheimer’s masterpiece of Cold War paranoia The Manchurian Candidate (1962), which came out the week of the Cuban Missile Crisis. It’s a 1960s movie about 1950s fears: brainwashing, the Korean War, McCarthyism, all shot through with Kennedy-era anxieties about sexual potency and psychoanalysis. Who’s a Soviet agent? Who’s a mummy’s boy? And it managed to anticipate what was coming next in American politics: the age of assassination.
A new bonus episode to accompany this series is out now: David explores why so many American presidents choose High Noon as their favourite film. Sign up now to PPF+ for just £5 per month or £50 a year and get all our other bonuses plus ad free listening too. https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
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Next time: The Leopard w/ Lucia Rubinelli
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The Great Political Films: The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
In today’s episode David discusses Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), a great patriotic anti-war film made in the depths of WWII. Why did Churchill want the film’s production stopped and was he right to suspect it was about him? What does the film say about the politics of nostalgia and the illusions of heroism? And how is Blimp’s moustache like Kane’s Rosebud?
A new bonus episode to accompany this series is out on Saturday: David explores why so many American presidents choose High Noon as their favourite film. Sign up now to PPF+ for just £5 per month or £50 a year and get all our other bonuses plus ad free listening https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
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Next time: The Manchurian Candidate
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The Great Political Films: Citizen Kane
Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) is many people’s favourite film of all time, including Donald Trump’s. Why does Trump love it so? What does he get right and what does he get wrong about the trajectory of the life of Charles Foster Kane? What does the film reveal about the relationship between celebrity, influence and political power? And why is Rosebud not the real mystery at the heart of this story?
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Next time: The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
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The Great Political Films: Mr Smith Goes to Washington
Today’s great political film is Frank Capra’s Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939), a much-loved tale of the little guy taking on the corrupt establishment. But there’s far more to it than that, including an origin story that suggests Jefferson Smith (James Stewart) might not be what he seems. From filibusters to fascism, from the New Deal to America First, from Burton K. Wheeler to Harry S. Truman, this is a heart-warming film that still manages to go to the dark heart of American politics.
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Next time: Citizen Kane
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The Great Political Films: La Grande Illusion
For the first episode in our new series David explores Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion (1937), a great anti-war film that is also a melancholy meditation on friendship between enemies, love across borders, and the inevitability of loss. What, in the end, is the great illusion: war itself, or the belief that we can escape its baleful consequences?
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Next time: Mr Smith Goes to Washington
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Michael Lewis on Sam Bankman-Fried and Effective Altruism
David talks to author Michael Lewis about SBF and EA: about the man he got to know before, during and after his spectacular fall and about the philosophy with which he was associated. What did Sam Bankman-Fried believe was the purpose of making so much money? How did he manage to get so side-tracked from doing good? Why when it all went wrong did he fail to save himself? A conversation about utilitarianism, risk and human weakness.
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Next time: The Great Political Films: La Grande Illusion
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American Elections: 2024: Is Anyone Winning?
David checks in with Gary Gerstle one more time before November to explore where things now stand with the US presidential election. In a conversation recorded in the immediate aftermath of the Walz/Vance debate, they discuss dead cats, October headwinds, comparisons with 2016 and a president missing in action. Plus, if the result really is too close to call, can the American Republic survive the fallout?
There is another bonus episode out now to accompany our recent series on Thinking Machines: David and Shannon Vallor talk about where AI is really taking us, sorting the reality from the hype. Sign up now for just £5 per month or £50 a year for 24 bonus episodes https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
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Next time: Michael Lewis on Sam Bankman-Fried and Effective Altruism
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Thinking About Thinking Machines: Monk & Robot
For episode four of our series on the history of thinking about thinking machines, David and Shannon discuss a very different sci-fi sensibility: Becky Chambers’ Monk & Robot series (A Psalm for the Wild-Built (2021) and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy (2022)). What would it mean for robots to ‘wake up’? How might robots teach humans about the nature of care and about the care of nature? And where do robots fit into a neurodiverse world? Plus: robots vs octopi.
There is another bonus episode to accompany this series available from Saturday on PPF+: David and Shannon talk about where AI is really taking us, sorting the reality from the hype. Sign up now for just £5 per month or £50 a year for 24 bonus episodes. https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
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Next time: Gary Gerstle on the current state of the American election.
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Thinking About Thinking Machines: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Today’s episode in our series on the history of thinking about thinking machines explores the novel that inspired Blade Runner: Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). David talks to Shannon Vallor about what the book has that the film lacks and how it comprehensively messes with the line between human and machine, the natural and the artificial. What is the meaning of the electric sheep?
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Next time: Becky Chambers’ Monk & Robot series.
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Thinking About Thinking Machines: Isaac Asimov’s ‘Franchise’
In today’s episode in our series on the history of thinking about thinking machines, David and Shannon discuss Isaac Asimov’s 1955 short story ‘Franchise’, which imagines the American presidential election of 2008 as decided by one voter and a giant computer. Part prophecy, part parody: have either its predictions or its warnings about democracy come true? How does the power of technology shape contemporary politics? And why was Asimov’s vision of the future so reactionary?
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Next time: Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
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Thinking About Thinking Machines: Metropolis
For the first episode in our new series on the history of thinking about thinking machines, David talks to philosopher Shannon Vallor about Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). The last great silent film is the most futuristic: a vision of robots and artificial life, it is also about where the human heart fits into an increasingly mechanised world. Is it prophetic? Is it monstrous? And who are the winners and losers when war is declared on the machines?
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Next time: Isaac Asimov’s ‘Franchise’
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What if… Scotland Had Voted for Independence?
For our last episode in this series of historical counterfactuals, David talks to the historian Ben Jackson about what might have happened if the 2014 Scottish Independence referendum had gone the other way. How close was the vote and what could have swung it differently? Were the dark warnings about the consequences of independence likely to have been borne out? And what would an independent Scotland mean for the world today?
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Coming next: a new series on the history of thinking about thinking machines, from films to novels to short stories, with Shannon Vallor, author of The AI Mirror. First up: Metropolis.
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What if… The Berlin Wall Hadn’t Fallen?
Our counterfactuals series moves forward to 1989: David talks to Lea Ypi about what might have happened if the Berlin Wall hadn’t fallen when it did. Was the night it came down really just one big accident? How long could the East German regime have lasted? And what does the fate of non-European communist states tell us about how it could have gone very differently?
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Next time: What If… Scotland Had Voted For Independence in 2014?
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What if… The 1919 Paris Peace Conference Had Actually Kept the Peace?
David talks to historian Margaret MacMillan, author of the prize-winning Peacemakers, about whether the 1919 Paris Peace Conference deserves its reputation as a missed opportunity and the harbinger of another war. Could the peace have been fairer to the Germans? Could the League of Nations have been given real teeth? Could the Bolsheviks have been involved? Or did the peacemakers make the best of a bad job?
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Next time: What If… The Berlin Wall Hadn’t Fallen?
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What If… The Russian Revolution Hadn’t Been Bolshevik?
Today’s episode is another big early twentieth-century counterfactual: David talks to the historian of Russia Edward Acton about how the Russian Revolution might have unfolded if the Left SRs and not the Bolsheviks had come out on top. Could Lenin have been sidelined? Might the Terror have been avoided? And what would it have meant to the wider world if revolutionary socialism had been liberated from Marxist communism?
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Next time: What if… The 1919 Paris Peace Conference Had Actually Kept the Peace?
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What If… Franz Ferdinand Had Survived Sarajevo?
We return to our series on historical counterfactuals with the big one: how might WWI have been avoided? David talks to Chris Clark, author of The Sleepwalkers, the definitive history of the July crisis of 1914, to explore how it might have turned out differently. What would have happened if Franz Ferdinand had survived the assassination attempt in Sarajevo? Why did his death spark the greatest European conflict of them all?
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Part 2 with Chris Clark will be out on PPF+ tomorrow.
Next time: What if… The Russian Revolution Hadn’t Been Bolshevik?
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Fifteen Fictions for Summer re-release: Hamilton
Our Great Political Fictions re-release concludes with a musical: Lin-Manuel Miranda’s wildly popular and increasingly controversial Hamilton (2015). What does it get right and what does it get wrong about America’s founding fathers? How fair is it to judge a Broadway musical by the standards of academic history? And why does a product of the Obama era still resonate so powerfully in the age of Trump and Biden?
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Fifteen Fictions for Summer re-release: American Wife
The penultimate episode in our Great Political Fictions re-release is about Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife (2008), which re-imagines the life of First Lady Laura Bush.One of the great novels about the intimacy of power and the accidents of politics, it sticks to the historical record while radically retelling it. What does the standard version leave out about the Bush presidency? How does an ordinary life become an extraordinary one? And where is the line between fact and fiction?
Tomorrow: Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton
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Fifteen Fictions for Summer re-release: The Line of Beauty
Today’s Great Political Fiction is Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty (2004), which is set between Thatcher’s two dominant general election victories of 1983 and 1987. A novel about the intersection between gay life and Tory life, high politics and low conduct, beauty and betrayal, it explores the price of power and the risks of liberation. It also contains perhaps the greatest of all fictional portrayals of a real-life prime minster: Thatcher dancing the night away.
Tomorrow: Curtis Sittingfield’s American Wife
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Fifteen Fictions for Summer re-release: The Handmaid’s Tale
For the twelfth episode in our Great Political Fictions re-release, David discusses Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), her unforgettable dystopian vision of a future American patriarchy. Where is Gilead? When is Gilead? How did it happen? How can it be stopped? From puritanism and slavery to Iran and Romania, from demography and racism to Playboy and Scrabble, this novel takes the familiar and the known and makes them hauntingly and terrifyingly new.
Tomorrow: Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty
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Fifteen Fictions for Summer re-release: Midnight’s Children
In today’s Great Political Fiction David explores Salman Rushdie’s 1981 masterpiece Midnight’s Children, the great novel about the life and death of Indian democracy. How can one boy stand in for the whole of India? How can a nation as diverse as India ever have a single politics? And how is a jar of pickle the answer to these questions? Plus, how does Rushdie’s story read today, in the age of Modi?
Tomorrow: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale
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Fifteen Fictions for Summer re-release: Atlas Shrugged
In today’s episode David discusses Ayn Rand’s insanely long and insanely influential Atlas Shrugged (1957), the bible of free-market entrepreneurialism and source book to this day for vicious anti-socialist polemics. Why is this novel so adored by Silicon Valley tech titans? How can something so bad have so much lasting power? And what did Rand have against her arch-villain Robert Oppenheimer?
Tomorrow: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children
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Fifteen Fictions for Summer re-release: Mother Courage & Her Children
Our ninth Great Political Fiction is Bertolt Brecht’s classic anti-war play, written in 1939 at the start of one terrible European war but set in the time of another: the Thirty Years’ War of the 17th century. How did Brecht think a three-hundred-year gap could help us to understand our own capacity for violence and cruelty? Why did he make Mother Courage such an unlovable character? Why do we feel for her plight anyway? And what can we do about it?
Tomorrow: Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged
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Fifteen Fictions for Summer re-release: The Time Machine
Our eighth Great Political Fiction is H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895) which isn’t just a book about time travel. It’s also full of late-19th century fear and paranoia about what evolution and progress might do to human beings in the long run. Why will the class struggle turn into savagery and human sacrifice? Who will end up on top? And how will the world ultimately end?
Tomorrow: Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage & Her Children
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Fifteen Fictions for Summer re-release: Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde
Today’s Great Political Fiction is Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) - a story that it’s easy to know without really knowing it at all. David explores all the ways that Robert Louis Stevenson’s tale confounds our expectations about good and evil. What does Dr Jekyll really want? What are all the men in the book trying to hide? And what has any of this got to do with Q-Anon and Hillary Clinton?
Tomorrow: H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine
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Fifteen Fictions for Summer re-release: Phineas Redux
The sixth Great Political Fiction in our summer re-release is Anthony Trollope’s Phineas Redux (1874), his lightly and luridly fictionalised account of parliamentary polarisation in the age of Gladstone and Disraeli. A tale of political and personal melodrama, it explores what happens when political parties steal each other’s clothes and politicians find themselves hung out to dry by their colleagues. A story of integrity and hypocrisy and how hard it is to tell them apart.
Tomorrow: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde
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Fifteen Fictions for Summer re-release: Middlemarch Part 2
This second episode about George Eliot’s masterpiece explores questions of politics and religion, reputation and deception, truth and public opinion. What is the relationship between personal power and faith in a higher power? Is it ever possible to escape from the gossip of your friends once it turns against you? Who can rescue the ambitious when their ambitions are their undoing?
Tomorrow: Anthony Trollope’s Phineas Redux
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Fifteen Fictions for Summer re-release: Middlemarch Part 1
Today’s Great Political Fiction is George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872), which has so much going on that it needs two episodes to unpack it. In this episode David discusses the significance of the book being set in 1829-32 and the reasons why Nietzsche was so wrong to characterise it as a moralistic tale. Plus he explains why a book about personal relationships is also a deeply political novel.
Also today: Middlemarch Part 2
Tomorrow: Anthony Trollope’s Phineas Redux
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Fifteen Fictions for Summer re-release: Fathers and Sons
Our fourth Great Political Fiction is Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862), the definitive novel about the politics – and emotions – of intergenerational conflict. How did Turgenev manage to write a wistful novel about nihilism? What made Russian politics in the early 1860s so chock-full of frustration? Why did Turgenev’s book infuriate his contemporaries – including Dostoyevsky?
Tomorrow: George Eliot’s Middlemarch Parts 1 & 2
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Fifteen Fictions for Summer re-release: Mary Stuart
Our third Great Political Fiction is Friedrich Schiller’s monumental play Mary Stuart (1800), which lays bare the impossible choices faced by two queens – Elizabeth I of England and Mary Queen of Scots – in a world of men. Schiller imagines a meeting between them that never took place and unpicks its fearsome consequences. Why does it do such damage to them both? How does the powerless Mary maintain her hold over the imperious Elizabeth? Who suffers most in the end and what is that suffering really worth?
Tomorrow: Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons
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Fifteen Fictions for Summer re-release: Gulliver’s Travels
Today’s episode on the Great Political Fictions is about Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) – part adventure story, part satire of early-eighteenth-century party politics, but above all a coruscating reflection on the failures of human perspective and self-knowledge. Why do we find it so hard to see ourselves for who we really are? What makes us so vulnerable to mindless feuds and wild conspiracy theories? And what could we learn from the talking horses?
Tomorrow: Friedrich Schiller’s Mary Stuart
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Fifteen Fictions for Summer re-release: Coriolanus
In the first episode of the summer daily re-release of our series on the Great Political Fictions, David talks about Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (1608-9), the last of his tragedies and perhaps his most politically contentious play. Why has Coriolanus been subject to so many wildly different political interpretations? Is pride really the tragic flaw of the military monster at its heart? What does it say about the struggle between elite power and popular resistance and about the limits of political argument?
Tomorrow: Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels
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What If… The Vietnam War Had Ended in 1964?
What If… The Vietnam War Had Ended in 1964?
For our latest counterfactual David talks to historian Thant Myint-U about his grandfather U Thant, UN Secretary General for most of the 1960s and the man who might have ended the Vietnam War before it really got started. How close did U Thant get to bringing LBJ and the Vietcong to the negotiating table in 1964? What ultimately scuppered his chances? And how differently might the Cold War have turned out if he had succeeded?
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Coming soon: More What Ifs… on WWI, the Russian Revolution and the Fall of the Berlin Wall.
Up next: Fifteen Fiction for Summer from Coriolanus to Hamilton
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What If… Wallace not Truman Had Become US President in 1945?
Today’s episode explores one of the big counterfactuals of twentieth-century American politics: David talks to historian Benn Steil about how close the ultraliberal Henry Wallace came to being FDR’s running mate in 1944 and successor as president in 1945. How near did Wallace get to making it onto the ticket at the 1944 Democratic National Convention? Who or what stopped him? What would his presidency have meant for the Cold War and the nuclear arms race? Was getting President Truman instead a missed opportunity or a lucky escape?
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Next time: What if… the Vietnam War had ended in 1964?
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What If… The French Revolution Had Happened in China?
For our second episode on big historical counterfactuals, David talks to world historian Ayse Zarakol about how the East might well have risen to global dominance before the West. What if the key revolutions of the modern world – political and industrial – had happened in Asia first? What if there had been an Iranian Napoleon? And how much of our understanding of modern history is based on the biases of hindsight?
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Next time: What if… Henry Wallace had become American President in 1945?
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What If… Science Counterfactuals w/ Adam Rutherford
To kick off our new series on counterfactual histories David talks to the geneticist and science writer Adam Rutherford about whether ‘What Ifs’ make sense in science. If one person doesn’t make the big discovery, will someone else do it? Are scientific breakthroughs the product of genius or of wealth and power? And how might the world have been a completely different place if the Haber-Bosch process had not been developed in Germany in 1913?
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Next time: What if… the French Revolution had happened in China?
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The Great Political Fictions: Tim Rice on Evita
Something different for our last episode on the Great Political Fictions as this time David talks to the person who wrote it: Tim Rice, the lyricist of the epic musical about the life of Eva Peron, Evita (co-written with Andrew Lloyd-Webber). Where did the idea for such an unlikely subject come from? Why has it struck a chord with politicians from Thatcher to Trump? What does it say about the relationship between celebrity, populism and power?
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Next time: Adam Rutherford on counterfactual science to kick off our new series on ‘What Ifs…’
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The Great Political Fictions: Helen Lewis on To Kill A Mockingbird
David talks to the writer and broadcaster Helen Lewis about Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird (1960), one of the most widely read and best-loved novels of the twentieth century, and in the twenty-first century increasingly one of the most controversial. Is the book an attack on or an apology for Southern racism? How does its view of race relate to the picture it paints of class and caste in 1930s Alabama? And what on earth are we to make of the recently published prequel/sequel Go Set A Watchman? Plus we discuss Demon Copperhead, JD Vance, and more.
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Next time: Tim Rice talks about Evita
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The Great Political Fictions: Lea Ypi on The Wild Duck
The writer and political philosopher Lea Ypi talks about the impact on her of Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck (1884), which she first read when she was eight – thinking it was a children’s book (it isn’t!) – and has been returning to ever since. A play about family and betrayal, idealism and disappointment, temptation and self-destruction, is it also a parable about the illusions of politics? And how might it shake a person’s faith?
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Next time: Helen Lewis on To Kill A Mockingbird
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The Great Political Poems
David talks to Mark Ford and Seamus Perry, hosts of the LRB’s Close Readings poetry podcast, about what makes a great political poem. Can great poetry be ideological? How much does context matter? And is it possible to tell political truths in verse? From Yeats’s ‘Easter 1916’ to Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’ to Auden’s ‘Spain 1937’: a conversation about political conviction and poetic ambiguity.
To find out more about Close Readings and how to subscribe, just visit the LRB’s website https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/close-readings
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Next time: Lea Ypi on Ibsen’s The Wild Duck
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American Elections: The Republican Convention
This week we check back in with Gary Gerstle to discuss what’s been happening in American politics after a tumultuous week. What does it say about Trump’s electoral strategy that he picked J.D. Vance as his running mate? How would the Republican party have coped if the assassin’s bullet hadn’t missed? Who might replace Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket and how? Plus, what fate lies in store for Bidenomics if Trump plasters his name all over it?
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And sign up to PPF+ to get all our bonus episodes along with ad-free listening: available now for PPF+ subscribers, Robert Saunders on his favourite political novel, George Eliot’s Felix Holt
Next time: The Great Political Poems
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The Great Political Fictions: Hamilton
Our series concludes with a musical: Lin-Manuel Miranda’s wildly popular and increasingly controversial Hamilton (2015). What does it get right and what does it get wrong about America’s founding fathers? How fair is it to judge a Broadway musical by the standards of academic history? And why does a product of the Obama era still resonate so powerfully in the age of Trump and Biden?
The latest edition of our free fortnightly newsletter - which accompanies the last three episodes in this Fictions series including Hamilton - is out tomorrow, with lots of extra info, clips and reflections – just sign up here: https://linktr.ee/ppfideas
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Next time: Gary Gerstle on the Republican National Convention
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The Great Political Fictions: American Wife
The penultimate episode in our fictions series is about Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife (2008), which re-imagines the life of First Lady Laura Bush. One of the great novels about the intimacy of power and the accidents of politics, it sticks to the historical record while radically retelling it. What does the standard version leave out about the Bush presidency? How does an ordinary life become an extraordinary one? And where is the line between fact and fiction?
Sign up now to PPF+ to get all our bonus episodes along with ad-free listening: coming soon for PPF+ subscribers Robert Saunders on his favourite political novel plus a special episode on Evita: www.ppfideas.com
Next time: Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton
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The Great Political Fictions: The Line of Beauty
Our political fictions series returns with Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty (2004), which is set between Thatcher’s two dominant general election victories of 1983 and 1987. A novel about the intersection between gay life and Tory life, high politics and low conduct, beauty and betrayal, it explores the price of power and the risks of liberation. It also contains perhaps the greatest of all fictional portrayals of a real-life prime minster: Thatcher dancing the night away.
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Next time: Curtis Sittenfeld re-imagines Laura Bush in American Wife
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UK General Elections: 2024
To wrap up our series David and Robert attempt some instant history on the election result that’s just happened: in some ways predictable, in others utterly remarkable. What does such a big win for Labour on such a relatively small vote mean? What’s happening in Scotland? Where next for the Tories? And is the UK now an outlier in a world of increasing political turmoil, or is the turmoil just under the surface here too?
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Coming Up: More Great Political Fictions
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UK General Elections: 2019
For election day, David and Robert discuss the previous general election in December 2019, which saw Boris Johnson win a decisive victory under the slogan ‘Get Brexit Done’. How did he (or Dominic Cummings) do it? Was Corbyn to blame for Labour’s defeat? And how the hell did the Tories get from that resounding victory to their current disarray in just 4½ years?
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Coming next: 2024 – What Happened?
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UK General Elections: 1997
In this extra episode for election week David talks to historian Robert Saunders about the last great Labour landslide of 1997, when Tony Blair won the biggest majority in his party’s history (till now?). Why did the Tories get no credit for a strong economy? How did New Labour change political campaigning? Was this the election that did for the prospects of proportional representation? Plus – the Millennium Dome: totemic or tat?
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For election day tomorrow: the Boris + Brexit election of 2019
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UK General Elections: 1979
Today’s pivotal UK election is the one that brought Margaret Thatcher to Downing Street in 1979. David talks to historian Robert Saunders about how she did it and how it could have turned out very differently. What might have happened if the election had been called the previous year? Did Thatcherism already exist in 1979 or had it still to be invented? And how close did the Labour party come to permanent schism in the years following her victory?
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Next time: 1997 and the New Labour landslide
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UK General Elections: 1945
In today’s episode on pivotal UK elections David talks to historian Robert Saunders about the first great Labour landslide of 1945 and how it changed Britain. Why did Churchill not get his expected reward for winning the war? How genuinely radical and popular was the Labour programme? What made the mild-mannered Attlee such an effective leader? And how did the Tories – and Churchill – manage to get themselves back in the game?
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Next time: 1979 and the advent of Thatcherism
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UK General Elections: 1906
The first episode in our new series with historian Robert Saunders on pivotal general elections is about the Tory disaster and Liberal triumph of 1906. David and Robert explore the reasons behind the worst result in modern Conservative party history – until now? How did the Liberals achieve their landslide? What made ‘Big Loaf, Little Loaf’ a winning election slogan? And who was Henry Campbell-Bannerman, the great forgotten prime minister?
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Coming up: the Labour landslide of 1945
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The Great Political Fictions: The Handmaid’s Tale
For the final episode in the current series, David discusses Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), her unforgettable dystopian vision of a future American patriarchy. Where is Gilead? When is Gilead? How did it happen? How can it be stopped? From puritanism and slavery to Iran and Romania, from demography and racism to Playboy and Scrabble, this novel takes the familiar and the known and makes them hauntingly and terrifyingly new.
Coming next: The Ideas Behind UK General Elections, starting with the game-changing election of 1906.
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The Great Political Fictions: Midnight’s Children
In the penultimate episode of the current part of our Fictions series, David explores Salman Rushdie’s 1981 masterpiece Midnight’s Children, the great novel about the life and death of Indian democracy. How can one boy stand in for the whole of India? How can a nation as diverse as India ever have a single politics? And how is a jar of pickle the answer to these questions? Plus, how does Rushdie’s story read today, in the age of Modi?
Next time: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale
Coming next week on PPF: The Ideas Behind UK General Elections
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The Great Political Fictions: Atlas Shrugged
In this episode David discusses Ayn Rand’s insanely long and insanely influential Atlas Shrugged (1957), the bible of free-market entrepreneurialism and source book to this day for vicious anti-socialist polemics. Why is this novel so adored by Silicon Valley tech titans? How can something so bad have so much lasting power? And what did Rand have against her arch-villain Robert Oppenheimer?
Next time: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children
Coming soon on PPF: The Ideas Behind UK General Elections
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The Great Political Fictions: Mother Courage and Her Children
Bertolt Brecht’s classic anti-war play was written in 1939 at the start of one terrible European war but set in the time of another: the Thirty Years’ War of the 17th century. How did Brecht think a three-hundred-year gap could help us to understand our own capacity for violence and cruelty? Why did he make Mother Courage such an unlovable character? Why do we feel for her plight anyway? And what can we do about it?
Next time: Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged
Coming next week on PPF: The Ideas Behind UK General Elections
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The Great Political Fictions: The Time Machine
H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895) isn’t just a book about time travel. It’s also full of late-19th century fear and paranoia about what evolution and progress might do to human beings in the long run. Why will the class struggle turn into savagery and human sacrifice? Who will end up on top? And how will the world ultimately end?
Next time: Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children
Coming soon on PPF: The Ideas Behind UK General Elections
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The Great Political Fictions: Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) is a story that it’s easy to know without really knowing it at all. This week’s episode explores all the ways that Robert Louis Stevenson’s tale confounds our expectations about good and evil. What does Dr Jekyll really want? What are all the men in the book trying to hide? And what has any of this got to do with Q-Anon and Hillary Clinton?
Next time: H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine.
Coming next month on PPF: The Ideas Behind UK General Elections
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The Great Political Fictions: Phineas Redux
This week's great political novel is Anthony Trollope’s Phineas Redux (1874), his lightly and luridly fictionalised account of parliamentary polarisation in the age of Gladstone and Disraeli. A tale of political and personal melodrama, it explores what happens when political parties steal each other’s clothes and politicians find themselves hung out to dry by their colleagues. A story of integrity and hypocrisy and how hard it is to tell them apart.
Next time: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
Coming next month on PPF: The Ideas Behind UK General Elections
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The Great Political Fictions: Middlemarch (part 2)
This second episode about George Eliot’s masterpiece explores questions of politics and religion, reputation and deception, truth and public opinion. What is the relationship between personal power and faith in a higher power? Is it ever possible to escape from the gossip of your friends once it turns against you? Who can rescue the ambitious when their ambitions are their undoing?
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Next time: Trollope’s Phineas Redux, the great novel of parliamentary ups and downs.
Coming soon on the Great Political Fictions: Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Time Machine, Mother Courage and her Children, Atlas Shrugged, Midnight’s Children, The Handmaid’s Tale, and much more.
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The Great Political Fictions: Middlemarch (part 1)
Our series on the great political novels and plays resumes with George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872), which has so much going on that it needs two episodes to unpack it. In this episode David discusses the significance of the book being set in 1829-32 and the reasons why Nietzsche was so wrong to characterise it as a moralistic tale. Plus he explains why a book about personal relationships is also a deeply political novel.
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Next time: Middlemarch (part 2) on marriage, hypocrisy, guilt and redemption.
Coming soon on the Great Political Fictions: Phineas Redux, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Time Machine, Mother Courage and her Children, and much more.
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The History of Bad Ideas: Mesmerism
For our last episode in this series David is joined by Helen Lewis to discuss Mesmerism – aka animal magnetism – an eighteenth-century method of hypnosis for which great medical benefits were claimed. Was its originator, Franz Mesmer, a charlatan or a healer? Was his movement science or religion or something in between? And what can it tell us about twenty-first century phenomena from online social contagion to hypnotherapy?
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Coming next: The Great Political Fictions resumes with Middlemarch, the greatest of them all.
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The History of Bad Ideas: The Death of the Author
For our penultimate episode in this series David talks to Kathleen Stock about Roland Barthes’s idea of the Death of the Author (1967). Once very fashionable, the notion that readers not writers are the arbiters of what a text means has had a long and sometimes painful afterlife. As well as exploring its curious appeal and its persistent blindspots, Kathleen discusses her personal experience of how it can go wrong.
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Coming Next: Helen Lewis on Mesmerism
Coming Soon: The Great Political Fictions Part 2, starting with Middlemarch
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The History of Bad Ideas: Anti-Suffragettes
In this episode of our series on the lingering hold of bad ideas David talks to the writer and broadcaster Helen Lewis about the arguments made at the turn of the last century against giving the vote to women. Why were so many women against female enfranchisement? What did attitudes to women in politics reveal about the failings of men? And where can the echoes of these arguments still be heard today?
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Next time on The History of Bad Ideas: Kathleen Stock discusses The Death of the Author.
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The History of Bad Ideas: Taxonomy
For the latest episode in our series about the hold of bad ideas, we welcome back the geneticist Adam Rutherford to talk about Linnaean taxonomy, a seemingly innocuous scheme of classification that has had deeply pernicious consequences. From scientific racism to social stratification to search engine optimisation, taxonomy gets everywhere. Can we escape its grip?
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Next time on The History of Bad Ideas: Helen Lewis on women against the enfranchisement of women.
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The History of Bad Ideas: Antisemitism
Today’s bad idea is one with a very long history: David talks to the historian Christopher Clark about antisemitism and the reasons for its endless recurrence. What has made discrimination against the Jews different from other kinds of violent prejudice over the course of European history? How did the ‘Jewish Question’ become the battleground of German politics? Why do so many Christians have a love-hate relationship with Judaism? And where does the state of Israel fit into this story?
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Next time on The History of Bad Ideas: Adam Rutherford on Taxonomy.
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The History of Bad Ideas: Facebook Friends
In today’s episode about seemingly good ideas gone badly wrong David talks to the philosopher and journalist Kathleen Stock about Facebook Friends, something that was meant to make us happier and better connected but really didn’t. How did online friendship become so performative? Does its failings say more about Facebook and its business models or does it say more about us? And why are academics so susceptible to the madness of social media?
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Next time on The History of Bad Ideas: historian Christopher Clark on Antisemitism
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The History of Bad Ideas: The Gold Standard
In the second episode in our series on bad ideas David talks to the political economist Helen Thompson about the gold standard, which was meant to anchor the world economy until it all fell apart a hundred years ago. Why does gold so often appear like a stable basis for money in an unstable world – and why not silver? What made the gold standard a source of instability instead? How can money work if it has no material basis? And is quantitative easing a bad idea as well?
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Next time on The History of Bad Ideas: Kathleen Stock on Facebook Friends
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The History of Bad Ideas: Eugenics
For the first episode in our new series about the hold of bad ideas David talks to the geneticist and science broadcaster Adam Rutherford about eugenics: from its origins in the 19th century through its heyday in the 20th century to its continuing legacy today. Is eugenics bad science, bad morality, bad politics – or all three? What are the fears that keep drawing people back to trying to control the consequences of human reproduction? And is a new age of consumerist eugenics upon us?
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Next time on The History of Bad Ideas: Helen Thompson on the Gold Standard
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The History of Freedom w/Lea Ypi: Liberation Movements
In our final episode David and Lea discuss liberation movements, from post-colonial liberation to women’s liberation, gay liberation and animal liberation. What, if anything, do these movements have in common? Is liberation about equality or is it about difference? And who needs liberating next – children?
You can hear our bonus episodes for this series by signing up to PPF+ www.ppfideas.com In the first bonus episode – available now – David and Lea answer listeners’ questions about AI, technology, online surveillance and brains-in-a-vat: what happens to freedom if we’re living in a computer simulation?
Coming next our brand new series: The History of Bad Ideas, beginning with Adam Rutherford on eugenics.
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The History of Freedom w/Lea Ypi: Existentialism and Psychoanalysis
In the penultimate episode in this series David and Lea discuss two twentieth-century philosophies of freedom and the human psyche. What can existentialism teach us about the nature of free choice under conditions of despair? Is there any escape from bad faith? And what can individuals – or even entire societies – learn about their freedom from being put on the couch?
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Coming next on the History of Freedom: Liberation Movements
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The History of Freedom w/Lea Ypi: Anarchism and Nihilism
In our series about different ideas of freedom David and Lea have reached anarchism and nihilism. What is the positive vision of human freedom behind the anarchist rejection of the established order? What can nineteenth-century anarchists teach us about freedom in the twenty-first century? And if nihilists are against everything, what are they for?
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Coming up next: David and Lea discuss existentialism and psychoanalysis.
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The History of Freedom w/Lea Ypi: What is the Free Market?
In the latest episode of our series about different ideas of freedom David and Lea explore what makes the free market free – and where it fails. How does buying and selling stuff advance human freedom? What does the free market free us from? And is it really possible to be free in a world dominated by credit and debt?
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Next on the History of Freedom: Anarchism and Nihilism
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The History of Freedom w/Lea Ypi: Kant, Enlightenment and Peace
In this episode in our series about ideas of freedom David and Lea explore Immanuel Kant’s vision of rational freedom and perpetual peace. Why was Kant so sure that human reason would produce enlightened progress? Was he right? What are the obstacles likely to derail the advance of peace, then and now? How well do his arguments about free speech and free expression hold up in the age of the internet?
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Coming up next on the History of Freedom: How Free is the Free Market?
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The History of Freedom w/ Lea Ypi: Machiavelli and Political Liberty
History of Freedom w/ Lea Ypi: Machiavelli and Political Liberty
For the third episode in our series about ideas of freedom David and Lea discuss Machiavelli, republicanism and what it means to live in a free state. What are the institutions that can protect people from domination and exploitation? How can political elites be held to account? Where are human beings most likely to find themselves at the mercy of others – and what can be done to help them escape?
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Coming up next on the History of Freedom: Kant, Enlightenment and Peace
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The History of Freedom w/Lea Ypi: The Ancients - Socrates, Seneca & Jesus
In episode two of our new series David and Lea explore some ancient ideas of freedom and ask what they mean today. What can Socrates teach us about the nature of free inquiry and the pitfalls of democratic freedom? Is Stoicism a guide to emancipation from desire or an exercise in selfishness? And how did Christianity upend the notion of freedom by annexing it to ideas of salvation and love? A conversation about dissent, self-knowledge and faith.
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Coming next on the History of Freedom: Machiavelli, republicanism and what it means to live in a free state, then and now.
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The History of Freedom w/Lea Ypi: Why Does It Matter?
In the first episode of our new series about the history of freedom, David and Lea discuss what the idea means to them and why it matters so much. What did freedom mean to Lea growing up in communist Albania? Is it possible to know true freedom without also having experienced oppression? And how is being free different from being lucky?
Subscribe now to PPF+ to get bonus episodes and ad-free listening for this and all future series. Just go to www.ppfideas.com.
Coming up next on the History of Freedom: The Ancients – Socrates, Seneca & Jesus.
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Introducing PPF+
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American Elections: 2008
For our final episode in this series, David and Gary discuss the election of 2008, which saw Barack Obama’s extraordinary ascent to the presidency. How did he outthink and outmanoeuvre Hilary Clinton? What role did the financial crisis play in his path to the White House? And was it really the vice-presidential candidates in this election who pointed the way to America’s political future?
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Coming next: our new series – The History of Freedom with Lea Ypi. Plus news of how you can sign up to PPF Plus to get bonus episodes and ad-free listening.
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American Elections: 1980
Our series on the Ideas Behind American Elections has reached 1980 and the election of Ronald Reagan. David and Gary discuss whether Jimmy Carter was always doomed, what made Reaganomics different and how Reagan succeeded in being an optimist and a scaremonger at the same time. Did this election really inaugurate a new era in American politics – and if so, are we still living in it?
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Coming up: 2008 and the election of Barack Obama
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American Elections: 1936
The election of 1936 saw FDR re-elected in a landslide. It was also an election in which fundamental questions about the future direction of America were at stake. David and Gary discuss what made it a turning point for American democracy and ultimately for the wider world. Could the power of the Supreme Court be tamed? What was the true nature of economic freedom? And what threatened the New Deal - dissent at home or looming dangers abroad?
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Coming up: The election of 1980 and the arrival of Reaganomics.
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American Elections: 1912
We’ve reached the twentieth century and today’s episode is about the decisive election of 1912. David and Gary discuss the year when the Republicans split, the Democrats recaptured the White House after an absence of twenty years, and American politics shifted decisively towards progressivism. Who were the real progressives? What was Theodore Roosevelt trying to achieve in setting up a new party? How did Woodrow Wilson mange to win the nomination and the presidency? And was this the election that saw the dawn of a new environmental politics?
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Coming up: How the election of 1936 sealed the New Deal.
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American Elections: 1896
This episode in our series on the Ideas Behind American Elections looks at 1896, when a single speech nearly upended American politics. The speech was William Jennings Bryan’s ‘Cross of Gold’ address at the Democratic Party convention, which won him the nomination. How did a 36-year old outsider from Nebraska get so close to reaching the White House? What made the issue of silver coinage the driving force behind American populism? And why was 1896 the template for a new kind of campaigning, in which the power of oratory had to square off against the power of money?
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Next time: 1912 and the great Republican split
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American Elections: 1860
In the third episode in our series on the Ideas Behind American Elections David and Gary talk about what was maybe the most significant election of all: 1860, when Lincoln became president and the country careened into civil war. How did the newly formed Republican Party break the stranglehold of the established parties? Why could the South neither unite against it nor accept its victory? What enabled Lincoln to wrestle the Republican nomination at the party's convention in Chicago and what might have happened if he had failed?
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Coming up: 1896 and the populist revolt
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American Elections: 1828
For the second episode in our new series on the Ideas Behind American Elections, David and Gary discuss 1828: the first great populist election, which saw the arrival of Andrew Jackson and a new style of politics in the White House. What made Jackson different from his predecessors? How did this election reinvent the American party system? And why were Jackson's arguments with Vice-President John Calhoun about economic tariffs so toxic that they brought the country close to civil war?
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Coming up next: the Election of 1860 and Abraham Lincoln
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American Elections: 1800
In the first episode of our new series on the Ideas Behind American Elections, David and historian Gary Gerstle explore the presidential contest of 1800: scurrilous, complicated, game changing. How did it help create the American party system? Was it really democratic? What would have happened if Aaron Burr had won? Plus, just how accurate is the depiction of the election in Hamilton the musical?
PLUS sign up now for the new PPF newsletter. A free, fortnightly guide to recent episodes, jam-packed with further reading, more to watch and listen to, plus extras from David. Starting with the Great Political Fictions.
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Next week on the Ideas Behind American Elections: 1828.
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Q & A: Shakespeare, Gulliver and Trump
In an extra episode this week David answers your questions about the most recent series of the History of Ideas - in particular about the political lessons of Gulliver’s Travels, for its own time and for our own. Plus, how is Trump like - and not like - Coriolanus, and where are the female authors for this series? (A: they’re coming!)
Starting in our regular slot next week, PPF moves to two episodes a week as we launch our new series on the Ideas Behind American Elections with Gary Gerstle - beginning with the election of 1800: Adams v Jefferson v Hamilton v Burr.
We will also be letting you know how to sign up to our free fortnightly newsletter - coming soon!
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The Great Political Fictions: Fathers and Sons
This week’s Great Political Fiction is Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862), the definitive novel about the politics – and emotions – of intergenerational conflict. How did Turgenev manage to write a wistful novel about nihilism? What made Russian politics in the early 1860s so chock-full of frustration? Why did Turgenev’s book infuriate his contemporaries – including Dostoyevsky?
More from the LRB:
Pankaj Mishra on the disillusionment of Alexander Herzen
'"Emancipation", he concluded, "has finally proved to be as insolvent as redemption".'
Julian Barnes on Turgenev and Flaubert
‘When the two of them meet, they are already presenting themselves as elderly men in their early forties (Turgenev asserts that after 40 the basis of life is renunciation).’
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The Great Political Fictions: Mary Stuart
This week’s Great Political Fiction is Friedrich Schiller’s monumental play Mary Stuart (1800), which lays bare the impossible choices faced by two queens – Elizabeth I of England and Mary Queen of Scots – in a world of men. Schiller imagines a meeting between them that never took place and unpicks its fearsome consequences. Why does it do such damage to them both? How does the powerless Mary maintain her hold over the imperious Elizabeth? Who suffers most in the end and what is that suffering really worth?
Next week: Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862)
Coming up: The Ideas Behind American Elections – a twice-weekly series running throughout March with Gary Gerstle, looking at 8 American presidential elections from 1800 to 2008 and exploring the ideas that shaped them and helped to shape the world.
Coming soon: sign up to the PPFIdeas newsletter!
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The Great Political Fictions: Gulliver’s Travels
This week’s episode on the great political fictions is about Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) – part adventure story, part satire of early-eighteenth-century party politics, but above all a coruscating reflection on the failures of human perspective and self-knowledge. Why do we find it so hard to see ourselves for who we really are? What makes us so vulnerable to mindless feuds and wild conspiracy theories? And what could we learn from the talking horses?
More from the LRB:
Clare Bucknell on Swift the satirist
‘Swift’s satire was fabulous as well as honest, a distorting magnifying glass as well as a mirror.’
Terry Eagleton on Swift’s double standards
‘Swift and Montaigne are outraged by colonial brutality while being deep-dyed authoritarians themselves.’
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The Great Political Fictions: Coriolanus
In the first episode of our new series on the great political fictions, David talks about Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (1608-9), the last of his tragedies and perhaps his most politically contentious play. Why has Coriolanus been subject to so many wildly different political interpretations? Is pride really the tragic flaw of the military monster at its heart? What does it say about the struggle between elite power and popular resistance and about the limits of political argument?
More from the LRB:
Colin Burrow on Ralph Fiennes as Coriolanus
Michael Wood on Coriolanus in the Hunger Games
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The End of Enlightenment
This week David talks to Richard Whatmore and Lea Ypi about what caused the loss of faith in the idea of Enlightenment at the end of the eighteenth century and the parallels with our loss of faith today. Why did hopes for a better, more rational world start to seem like wishful thinking? How was Britain implicated in the demise of Enlightenment ideals? And what might have happened if there had been no French Revolution?
Richard Whatmore’s The End of Enlightenment is available now
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Rory Stewart: What Does it Mean to be a 21st-Century Tory?
This week David talks to Rory Stewart about his life in politics and the history of the ideas behind his political philosophy. What does it mean to be a Tory in the twenty-first century? When and how did the Conservative party get taken over by Whigs? Where – if anywhere – can independents find a home in contemporary British democracy? A conversation about the many different forces that shape our politics, from Gulliver’s Travels to Liz Truss.
Politics on the Edge by Rory Stewart is published by Penguin Books
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The End of the UK?
This week David talks to the political scientist Mike Kenny about the possible fate of the United Kingdom. What makes the UK such an unusual political arrangement? How has it managed to hold together through war, economic decline, Brexit, Covid? What still threatens to break it apart?
Mike Kenny’s new book is Fractured Union: Politics, Sovereignty and the Fight to Save the UK
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History of Ideas 12: Ta-Nehisi Coates
Episode 12 in our series on the great essays is about Ta-Nehisi Coates’s ‘The Case for Reparations’, published in the Atlantic in 2014. Black American life has been marked by injustice from the beginning: this essay explores what can – and what can’t – be done to remedy it, from slavery to the housing market, from Mississippi to Chicago. Plus, what has this story got to do with the origins of the state of Israel?
Read the original essay here.
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History of Ideas 11: Umberto Eco
Episode 11 in our series on the great essays explores Umberto Eco’s ‘Thoughts on Wikileaks’ (2010). Eco writes about what makes a true scandal, what are real secrets, and what it would mean to expose the hidden workings of power. It is an essay that connects digital technology, medieval mystery and Dan Brown. Plus David talks about the hidden meaning of Julian Assange.
More from the LRB:
Andrew O’Hagan on Julian Assange
‘I’d never been with a person who had such a good cause and such a poor ear.’
Frank Kermode on the Name of the Rose
‘This novel has so much in it that differs from any known kind of detective story that we must look to Eco’s pre-semiotic career for help.’
Jenny Diski on Eco and ugliness
‘The breadth of Eco’s search spreads out to include disgust, horror, fear, obscenity, misogyny, perversity, bigotry, social exclusiveness, repression, inexplicability, evil, deformation, degradation, heterogeneity.’
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History of Ideas 10: David Foster Wallace
Episode 10 in our series on the great essays is about David Foster Wallace’s ‘Up, Simba!’, which describes his experiences following the doomed campaign of John McCain for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000. Wallace believed that McCain’s distinctive political style revealed some hard truths about American democracy. Was he right? What did he miss? And how do those truths look now in the age of Trump?
More on David Foster Wallace from the LRB:
Jenny Turner on Wallace and his moment
‘The risk Wallace takes is to guess he is not the only "obscenely well-educated", curiously lost and empty white boy out there; that his sadness is also the experience of a whole historical moment.’
Patricia Lockwood on Wallace and his influence
‘It was the essayists who were left to cope with his almost radioactive influence. He produced a great deal of excellent writing, the majority of it not his own.’
Dale Peck’s notorious takedown of Infinite Jest
‘If nothing else, the success of Infinite Jest is proof that the Great American Hype machine can still work wonders.’
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History of Ideas 9: Joan Didion
Episode 9 in our series on the great essays is about Joan Didion's 'The White Album' (1979), her haunting, impressionistic account of the fracturing of America in the late 1960s. From Jim Morrison to the Manson murders, Didion offers a series of snapshots of a society coming apart in ways no one seemed to understand. But what was true, what was imagined, and where did the real sickness lie?
More on Joan Didion from the LRB archive:
Thomas Powers on Didion and California:
'The thing that California taught her to fear most was snakes, especially rattlesnakes...This gets close to Didion's core anxiety: watching for something that could be anywhere, was easily overlooked, could kill you or a child playing in the garden – just like that.'
Mary-Kay Wilmers on Didion and memory:
'Reassurance is something Didion doesn't need. She is talking to herself, weighing up the past, going over old stories, keeping herself company. Staging herself.'
Martin Amis on Didion's style:
'The Californian emptiness arrives and Miss Didion attempts to evolve a style, or manner, to answer to it. Here comes divorces, breakdowns, suicide bids, spliced-up paragraphs, 40-word chapters and italicised wedges of prose that used to be called "fractured".'
Patricia Lockwood on reading Didion now:
'To revisit Slouching Towards Bethlehem or The White Album is to read an old up-to-the-minute relevance renewed. Inside these essays the coming revolution feels neither terrifying nor exhilarating but familiar – if you are a reader of Joan Didion, you have been studying it all your life.'
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History of Ideas 8: Susan Sontag
Episode 8 in our history of the great essays is about Susan Sontag’s ‘Against Interpretation’ (1963). What was interpretation and why was Sontag so against it? David explores how an argument about art, criticism and the avant-garde can be applied to contemporary politics and can even explain the monstrous appeal of Donald Trump.
Sontag in the LRB:
Terry Castle on Sontag and friendship
‘At its best, our relationship was rather like the one between Dame Edna and her feeble sidekick Madge – or possibly Stalin and Malenkov.’
James Wolcott on Sontag and polemics
‘The upside of Sontag’s downside was that her ire was generated by the same power supply that electrified her battle for principles that others only espoused.’
Mark Grief on Sontag and identity
‘One of the most appealing things about Susan Sontag was that she didn’t ask to be liked. Sontag’s persona was not personal. It was superior.’
Joanna Biggs on Sontag and Paris
‘Paris let her say no to an academic life, but not to a life of ideas. The best thinking was done in cafes, or in bed, or at the movies, not in libraries.’
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History of Ideas 7: James Baldwin
Episode 7 in our series on the great essays is about James Baldwin’s ‘Notes of a Native Son’ (1955), an essay that combines autobiography with a searing indictment of America’s racial politics. At its heart it tells the story of Baldwin’s relationship with his father, but it is also about fear, cruelty, violence and the terrible compromises of a country at war. What happens when North and South collide?
More on Baldwin from the LRB:
Michael Wood on Baldwin and power
‘James Baldwin’s thinking recalls Virginia Woolf’s view of the way that women have been used as mirrors by men.’
Colm Toibin on reading Baldwin
‘James Baldwin’s legacy is both powerful and fluid, allowing it to fit whatever category each reader requires, allowing it to influence each reader in a way that tells us as much about the reader as it does about Baldwin.’
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History of Ideas 6: Simone Weil
Episode 6 in our series on the great essays is about Simone Weil’s ‘Human Personality’ (1943). Written shortly before her death aged just 34, it is an uncompromising repudiation of the building blocks of modern life: democracy, rights, personal identity, scientific progress – all these are rejected. What does Weil have to put in their place? The answer is radical and surprising.
Read ‘Human Personality’ here
For more on Weil from the LRB archive:
‘If we take Weil as seriously as she took herself, our nice lives will fall apart.’
Alan Bennett on Kafka and Weil
‘Many parents, one imagines, would echo the words of Madame Weil, the mother of Simone Weil, a child every bit as trying as Kafka must have been. Questioned about her pride in the posthumous fame of her ascetic daughter, Madame Weil said: “Oh! How much I would have preferred her to be happy.”’
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History of Ideas 5: George Orwell
Episode 5 in our series on the great essays is about George Orwell. His wartime essay ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ (1941) is about what it does – and doesn’t – mean to be English. How did the English manage to resist fascism? How are the English going to defeat fascism? These were two different questions with two very different answers: hypocrisy and socialism. David takes the story from there to Brexit and back again.
For more on Orwell from the LRB:
Samuel Hynes on Orwell and politics
‘He was not, in fact, really a political thinker at all: he had no ideology, he proposed no plan of political action, and he was never able to relate himself comfortably to any political party.’
Julian Symons on Orwell and fame
‘If George Orwell had died in 1939 he would be recorded in literary histories of the period as an interesting maverick who wrote some not very successful novels.’
Terry Eagleton on Orwell and experience
‘Orwell detested those, mostly on the left, who theorised about situations without having experienced them, a common empiricist prejudice. There is no need to have your legs chopped off to sympathise with the legless.’
More from the History of Ideas:
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History of Ideas 4: Virginia Woolf
Episode 4 in our series on the great essays is about Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece ‘A Room of One’s Own’ (1929). David discusses how an essay on the conditions for women writing fiction ends up being about so much else besides: anger, power, sex, modernity, independence and transcendence. And how, despite all that, it still manages to be as fresh and funny as anything written since.
Read more on Virginia Woolf in the LRB:
Jacqueline Rose on Woolf and madness
‘It is, one might say, a central paradox of modern family life that its members are required to mould themselves in each other’s image and yet to know, as separate individuals or egos, exactly who they are.’
Gillian Beer on Woolf and reality
‘The “real world” for Virginia Woolf was not solely the liberal humanist world of personal and social relationships: it was the hauntingly difficult world of Einsteinian physics and Wittgenstein’s private languages.’
Rosemary Hill on Woolf and domesticity
‘Woolf, who had once found it humiliating to do her own shopping, spent the last morning of her life dusting with Louie, before she put her duster down and went to drown herself.’
John Bayley on Woolf and writing
‘For Virginia Woolf wish-fulfilment was in words themselves, that protected her from herself and from society.’
Listen to David’s History of Ideas episode about Max Weber’s ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics’.
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History of Ideas 3: Thoreau
Episode three in our series about the great political essays is about Thoreau’s ‘Civil Disobedience’ (1849), a ringing call to resistance against democratic idiocy. Thoreau wanted to resist slavery and unjust wars. How can one citizen turn the tide against majority opinion? Was Thoreau a visionary or a hypocrite? And what do his arguments say about environmental civil disobedience today?
Read Thoreau’s essay here
From the LRB:
Paul Laity on Thoreau and self-sufficiency
Jeremy Harding on XR and civil disobedience
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History of Ideas 2: Hume
Episode two in our series on the great essays is about David Hume. How can eighteenth-century arguments about the national debt help make sense of American politics today? When does public borrowing become a recipe for national disaster? Who is really in charge of the public finances: the government or the bankers, Washington, D.C. or Wall Street? And what has all this got to do with Hume’s arguments for the morality of suicide?
Read Hume’s original essay ‘Of Public Credit’ here.
For more on Hume from the archive of the LRB:
Jonathan Rée on Hume’s voracious appetites: ‘“The Corpulence of his whole person was better fitted to communicate the Idea of the Turtle-Eating Alderman than of a refined Philosopher,” as a friend put it.’
Fara Dabhoiwala on Hume and mockery: ‘David Hume often resorted to ridicule to undermine hypocrisy or superstition, even if he doubted its capacity to settle controversial questions, arguing that mockery was as likely to distort as to reveal the truth.’
John Dunn on Hume and us: ‘Hume is in some ways so very modern . . . But just because he is in some ways so close to us, it is easy to lose the sense that in many others his beliefs and experiences stand at some little distance from our own.’
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History of Ideas 1: Montaigne
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History of Ideas Q&A
For our last episode before Christmas David answers some of your questions about the History of Ideas series – What would Dickens have made of Trump? How would reparations work? Which essays are missing from the list?
Coming up: the whole series on the great essays, one a day, every day, starting on Christmas Day.
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The Art of the Essay
As we wrap up our History of Ideas series David discusses what makes a great essay and whether the best contemporary writing is as good as what went before. The answer is yes, as shown by Jiayang Fan’s brilliant 2020 essay ‘How My Mother and I Became Chinese Propaganda’. David explores why this is such a remarkable example of what can be done with the form and why the art of the essay is alive and well.
Read Jiayang Fan’s essay here
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Something’s Got to Give
This week David talks to the economists Dieter Helm and Diane Coyle about the challenges of building sustainability into the way we live now. Why is GDP such a poor guide to long-term economic well-being? How can we stop squandering future resources? What should the next Labour government do to create a sustainable economy – and what will happen if they don’t?
Dieter Helm’s new book is available to download for free here
Read the Bennett Institute report on Universal Basic Infrastructure here
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Democracy Q&A w/ Lea Ypi
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History of Ideas: Ta-Nehisi Coates
In the penultimate episode in our series on the great essays, David talks about Ta-Nehisi Coates’s ‘The Case for Reparations’, published in the Atlantic in 2014. Black American life has been marked by injustice from the beginning: this essay explores what can – and what can’t – be done to remedy it, from slavery to the housing market, from Mississippi to Chicago. Plus, what has this story got to do with the origins of the state of Israel?
Read the original essay here.
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Democracy vs Nationalism w/ Lea Ypi
In the latest instalment of David’s ongoing conversation with Lea Ypi about the past, present and future of democracy they discuss whether democratic politics can ever break free from the stranglehold of the nation-state. When and why did nationalism take such a strong grip of the idea of democracy? What are the international or cosmopolitan alternatives? And can a democracy police its borders without having actual borders or actual police?
Listen to the previous episodes in this series here.
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Jill Lepore on Trump, Guns and the Red Mirage
This week David talks to the historian and essayist Jill Lepore about where the chaotic last decade of American politics fits into the longer history of the nation. When and how did gun rights become a matter of principle rather than of pragmatism? What makes insurrection so appealing to so many people? Is another civil war really a possibility? Plus, what did the January 6th Committee miss about January 6th?
Jill Lepore’s new book is The American Beast: Essays 2012-2022
Listen to Gary Gerstle on PPF discussing what happened to the Republican Party
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The Leviacene: Defining Our Times
This week David explores a different way of thinking about the current epoch: what if this isn’t the Anthropocene but the Leviacene? Who or what is really driving planetary destruction? Can human nature explain it? Or should we be looking at the political and economic superpowers that are leaving their marks all over the natural world?
For more on these themes, David’s new book The Handover is available now, including as an audiobook.
Listen to our earlier podcast with historian of science Meehan Crist on Malthus and Malthusianism.
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History of Ideas: Umberto Eco
This week’s episode in our series on the great essays and great essayists explores Umberto Eco’s ‘Thoughts on Wikileaks’ (2010). Eco writes about what makes a true scandal, what are real secrets, and what it would mean to expose the hidden workings of power. It is an essay that connects digital technology, medieval mystery and Dan Brown. Plus David talks about the hidden meaning of Julian Assange.
More from the LRB:
Andrew O’Hagan on Julian Assange
‘I’d never been with a person who had such a good cause and such a poor ear.’
Frank Kermode on the Name of the Rose
‘This novel has so much in it that differs from any known kind of detective story that we must look to Eco’s pre-semiotic career for help.’
Jenny Diski on Eco and ugliness
‘The breadth of Eco’s search spreads out to include disgust, horror, fear, obscenity, misogyny, perversity, bigotry, social exclusiveness, repression, inexplicability, evil, deformation, degradation, heterogeneity.’
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Rethinking Democracy w/ Lea Ypi
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Mary Beard on Caesar, Augustus & Zuckerberg
This week David asks Mary Beard what the Roman Empire can tell us about the nature of unaccountable power, then and now. How did Roman emperors rule when they had so little knowledge of the lives of their subjects? Can absolute personal power ever escape the limits of biology, from sex to death? And who are the modern-day equivalent of the Caesars: democratic populists or tech titans?
Mary Beard’s new book is Emperor of Rome
Read or listen to Mary Beard’s LRB lecture on Women in Power
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Zadie Smith on Dickens, Hypocrisy & Justice
This week David talks to the novelist Zadie Smith about Charles Dickens: what he means to her, why we still read him, and what’s missing from the Dickensian view of the world. It’s a conversation about other writers as well – Turgenev, George Orwell and Toni Morrison – and about whether fiction shows us how to live or rather helps us to see the ways in which the truth about how we live is hidden from view.
Zadie Smith’s new novel is The Fraud, available now.
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History of Ideas: David Foster Wallace
This week’s episode in our series on the great political essays is about David Foster Wallace’s ‘Up, Simba!’, which describes his experiences following the doomed campaign of John McCain for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000. Wallace believed that McCain’s distinctive political style revealed some hard truths about American democracy. Was he right? What did he miss? And how do those truths look now in the age of Trump?
More on David Foster Wallace from the LRB:
Jenny Turner on Wallace and his moment
‘The risk Wallace takes is to guess he is not the only "obscenely well-educated", curiously lost and empty white boy out there; that his sadness is also the experience of a whole historical moment.’
Patricia Lockwood on Wallace and his influence
‘It was the essayists who were left to cope with his almost radioactive influence. He produced a great deal of excellent writing, the majority of it not his own.’
Dale Peck’s notorious takedown of Infinite Jest
‘If nothing else, the success of Infinite Jest is proof that the Great American Hype machine can still work wonders.’
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Animal Farm and Other Allegories
This week David talks to novelists Adam Biles and John Lanchester about the timeless appeal of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Why has it retained its hold far longer than other political allegories? Do readers need to know about the Russian history it describes? What makes the animals so relatable? Plus we discuss other favourite political allegories, from The Wizard of Oz to WALL-E.
Adam Biles’s new novel – inspired by Animal Farm – is Beasts of England, available now.
Read John Lanchester in the current issue of the LRB.
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The Other 9/11: Chile & Allende
This week is the fiftieth anniversary of the coup in Chile that ended the life of Salvador Allende and marked the temporary death of Chilean democracy. We talk to the politician and economist Andrés Velasco and the writer and translator Lorna Scott Fox about their memories of the coup and their understanding of its significance today. What does it say about the unfulfilled promise and ongoing fragility of democratic politics, in Chile and beyond?
More from the LRB:
Lorna Scott Fox on the feminisation of Chile:
‘I doubt any of the men in a cabinet meeting are worrying about whether there is loo paper at home, as I do.’
Greg Grandin on Allende in power:
‘Allende was a pacifist, a democrat and a socialist by conviction not convenience.’
Michael Wood on Neruda and death:
‘The dead are never entirely dead in Neruda’s poems, forgetting and remembering are always entangled.’
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The Handover
This week Lea Ypi joins David to talk about some of the ideas in his new book, The Handover: How We Gave Control of Our Lives to Corporations, States and AIs. They discuss how to think about the power of the state in the modern world: Can it be changed? Can it be controlled? Can it be anything other than capitalist? Plus, how will AI alter the relationship between human beings and the corporate machines that rule our world?
To order the Handover and support independent bookshops, please use the code HANDOVER at checkout here.
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The Great Essays: Q & A
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History of Ideas: Joan Didion
For the last episode in our summer season on the great twentieth-century essays and essayists, David discusses Joan Didion's 'The White Album' (1979), her haunting, impressionistic account of the fracturing of America in the late 1960s. From Jim Morrison to the Manson murders, Didion offers a series of snapshots of a society coming apart in ways no one seemed to understand. But what was true, what was imagined, and where did the real sickness lie?
More on Joan Didion from the LRB archive:
Thomas Powers on Didion and California:
'The thing that California taught her to fear most was snakes, especially rattlesnakes...This gets close to Didion's core anxiety: watching for something that could be anywhere, was easily overlooked, could kill you or a child playing in the garden – just like that.'
Mary-Kay Wilmers on Didion and memory:
'Reassurance is something Didion doesn't need. She is talking to herself, weighing up the past, going over old stories, keeping herself company. Staging herself.'
Martin Amis on Didion's style:
'The Californian emptiness arrives and Miss Didion attempts to evolve a style, or manner, to answer to it. Here comes divorces, breakdowns, suicide bids, spliced-up paragraphs, 40-word chapters and italicised wedges of prose that used to be called "fractured".'
Patricia Lockwood on reading Didion now:
'To revisit Slouching Towards Bethlehem or The White Album is to read an old up-to-the-minute relevance renewed. Inside these essays the coming revolution feels neither terrifying nor exhilarating but familiar – if you are a reader of Joan Didion, you have been studying it all your life.'
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History of Ideas: Susan Sontag
This episode in our history of the great essays and great essayists is about Susan Sontag’s ‘Against Interpretation’ (1963). What was interpretation and why was Sontag so against it? David explores how an argument about art, criticism and the avant-garde can be applied to contemporary politics and can even explain the monstrous appeal of Donald Trump.
Sontag in the LRB:
Terry Castle on Sontag and friendship
‘At its best, our relationship was rather like the one between Dame Edna and her feeble sidekick Madge – or possibly Stalin and Malenkov.’
James Wolcott on Sontag and polemics
‘The upside of Sontag’s downside was that her ire was generated by the same power supply that electrified her battle for principles that others only espoused.’
Mark Grief on Sontag and identity
‘One of the most appealing things about Susan Sontag was that she didn’t ask to be liked. Sontag’s persona was not personal. It was superior.’
Joanna Biggs on Sontag and Paris
‘Paris let her say no to an academic life, but not to a life of ideas. The best thinking was done in cafes, or in bed, or at the movies, not in libraries.’
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History of Ideas: James Baldwin
This week David discusses James Baldwin’s ‘Notes of a Native Son’ (1955), an essay that combines autobiography with a searing indictment of America’s racial politics. At its heart it tells the story of Baldwin’s relationship with his father, but it is also about fear, cruelty, violence and the terrible compromises of a country at war. What happens when North and South collide?
More on Baldwin from the LRB:
Michael Wood on Baldwin and power
‘James Baldwin’s thinking recalls Virginia Woolf’s view of the way that women have been used as mirrors by men.’
Colm Toibin on reading Baldwin
‘James Baldwin’s legacy is both powerful and fluid, allowing it to fit whatever category each reader requires, allowing it to influence each reader in a way that tells us as much about the reader as it does about Baldwin.’
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History of Ideas: Simone Weil
This week’s episode in our series on the great essays and great essayists is about Simone Weil’s ‘Human Personality’ (1943). Written shortly before her death aged just 34, it is an uncompromising repudiation of the building blocks of modern life: democracy, rights, personal identity, scientific progress – all these are rejected. What does Weil have to put in their place? The answer is radical and surprising.
Read ‘Human Personality’ here
For more on Weil from the LRB archive:
‘If we take Weil as seriously as she took herself, our nice lives will fall apart.’
Alan Bennett on Kafka and Weil
‘Many parents, one imagines, would echo the words of Madame Weil, the mother of Simone Weil, a child every bit as trying as Kafka must have been. Questioned about her pride in the posthumous fame of her ascetic daughter, Madame Weil said: “Oh! How much I would have preferred her to be happy.”’
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History of Ideas: George Orwell
This week David discusses George Orwell’s ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ (1941), his great wartime essay about what it does – and doesn’t – mean to be English. How did the English manage to resist fascism? How are the English going to defeat fascism? These were two different questions with two very different answers: hypocrisy and socialism. David takes the story from there to Brexit and back again.
For more on Orwell from the LRB:
Samuel Hynes on Orwell and politics
‘He was not, in fact, really a political thinker at all: he had no ideology, he proposed no plan of political action, and he was never able to relate himself comfortably to any political party.’
Julian Symons on Orwell and fame
‘If George Orwell had died in 1939 he would be recorded in literary histories of the period as an interesting maverick who wrote some not very successful novels.’
Terry Eagleton on Orwell and experience
‘Orwell detested those, mostly on the left, who theorised about situations without having experienced them, a common empiricist prejudice. There is no need to have your legs chopped off to sympathise with the legless.’
More from the History of Ideas:
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History of Ideas: Virginia Woolf
This week our history of the great essays and great essayists reaches the twentieth century and Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece ‘A Room of One’s Own’ (1929). David discusses how an essay on the conditions for women writing fiction ends up being about so much else besides: anger, power, sex, modernity, independence and transcendence. And how, despite all that, it still manages to be as fresh and funny as anything written since.
Read more on Virginia Woolf in the LRB:
Jacqueline Rose on Woolf and madness
‘It is, one might say, a central paradox of modern family life that its members are required to mould themselves in each other’s image and yet to know, as separate individuals or egos, exactly who they are.’
Gillian Beer on Woolf and reality
‘The “real world” for Virginia Woolf was not solely the liberal humanist world of personal and social relationships: it was the hauntingly difficult world of Einsteinian physics and Wittgenstein’s private languages.’
Rosemary Hill on Woolf and domesticity
‘Woolf, who had once found it humiliating to do her own shopping, spent the last morning of her life dusting with Louie, before she put her duster down and went to drown herself.’
John Bayley on Woolf and writing
‘For Virginia Woolf wish-fulfilment was in words themselves, that protected her from herself and from society.’
Listen to David’s History of Ideas episode about Max Weber’s ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics’.
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From Lincoln to Trump: What Happened to the Republican Party?
This week David talks to American historian Gary Gerstle about the shape-shifting journey of the US Republican Party, from the Civil War to the battles of today. How did the party of the North become the party of the South? When did the war party lose its appetite for war? Why does an organisation born out of anti-Catholicism now see its mission as to get Catholics onto the Supreme Court? And what could finally break the party apart?
Gary Gerstle’s latest book is The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order.
For more on the Great Abortion Switcheroo of the 1970s.
Listen again to David’s episode on Hume and American default.
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History of Ideas: Thoreau
For the third episode in this series about the great political essays, David explores Thoreau’s ‘Civil Disobedience’ (1849), a ringing call to resistance against democratic idiocy. Thoreau wanted to resist slavery and unjust wars. How can one citizen turn the tide against majority opinion? Was Thoreau a visionary or a hypocrite? And what do his arguments say about environmental civil disobedience today?
Read Thoreau’s essay here
From the LRB:
Paul Laity on Thoreau and self-sufficiency
Jeremy Harding on XR and civil disobedience
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Whose Space is it Anyway?
This week we talk to astrophysicist Chris Lintott and writer Tom Stevenson about the threat from outer space: is it the asteroids, is it the aliens, or is it us? What changed when space travel moved from a Cold War battleground to a billionaire’s playground? Are China and America about to re-start the space race? And what will happen if we do find evidence of extraterrestrial life - will anyone believe it?
Read more from Chris and Tom about space in the LRB:
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Why J.S. Mill Matters w/ Tara Westover
This week David talks to Tara Westover and the philosopher Clare Chambers about the enduring legacy of John Stuart Mill. Reading Mill’s Essays on Religion changed Tara’s life: she explains what happened, and discusses how Mill speaks to contemporary concerns about identity, conviction and doubt. Plus we talk free speech, the marketplace of ideas, the subjection of women - and why Mill isn’t comfort reading (but Thomas Carlyle is!).
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Are There Too Many People?
This week David talks to science writer Meehan Crist about Thomas Malthus and the perennial question of overpopulation. Malthus wrote 225 years ago and was wrong about almost everything, yet his ideas still have a powerful hold on our imaginations and our fears. How many people is too many? What are the limits of population in the age of climate change? And why does Elon Musk think we should all be having more children?
Thomas Malthus, ‘An Essay on the Principle of Overpopulation’ (1798)
Meehan Crist’s 2020 LRB lecture, ‘Is it OK to Have a Child?’
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History of Ideas: Hume
For the second episode in this season of History of Ideas, David discusses the Scottish philosopher David Hume and explores how eighteenth-century arguments about the national debt can help make sense of American politics today. When does public borrowing become a recipe for national disaster? Who is really in charge of the public finances: the government or the bankers, Washington, D.C. or Wall Street? And what has all this got to do with Hume’s arguments for the morality of suicide?
Read Hume’s original essay ‘Of Public Credit’ here: https://davidhume.org/texts/pld/pc
For more on Hume from the archive of the LRB:
Jonathan Rée on Hume’s voracious appetites: ‘“The Corpulence of his whole person was better fitted to communicate the Idea of the Turtle-Eating Alderman than of a refined Philosopher,” as a friend put it.’ https://bit.ly/3qFgYtE
Fara Dabhoiwala on Hume and mockery: ‘David Hume often resorted to ridicule to undermine hypocrisy or superstition, even if he doubted its capacity to settle controversial questions, arguing that mockery was as likely to distort as to reveal the truth.’ https://bit.ly/3X6KbtK
John Dunn on Hume and us: ‘Hume is in some ways so very modern . . . But just because he is in some ways so close to us, it is easy to lose the sense that in many others his beliefs and experiences stand at some little distance from our own.’ https://bit.ly/3qJRwTW
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Rawls, Capitalism & Justice
This week Daniel Chandler and Lea Ypi join David to talk about the legacy of the great American political philosopher John Rawls and his theory of justice. Did Rawls provide a prescription for the only fair way of doing capitalism? Or did he really show why capitalism and justice will never be reconciled? What can Rawls teach us about how to treat each other as equals? And does it even make sense to talk about justice in Britain or America when the world as a whole remains so fundamentally unequal?
Daniel Chandler’s new book is Free and Equal: What Would a Fair Society Look Like?
Lea Ypi’s Free: Coming of Age at the End of History is out now in paperback.
You can hear David’s History of Ideas episode about Rawls and the theory of justice here.
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Live Special: The American Century w/ David Miliband
This week’s episode was recorded live at the Hay Festival, where David was joined on stage by David Miliband and Helen Thompson to discuss the past, present and future of American power. What explains American global dominance? Can it be justified? How will it be replaced? They discuss the fall-out of the Ukraine war, the threat posed by China, the challenge of climate change and the possibility of a second Trump presidency and ask – is the American century over?
David Miliband writes about the consequences of the Ukraine war in Foreign Affairs.
Hear more from Helen Thompson on the These Times podcast from UnHerd.
Follow Past Present Future on Twitter @PPFIdeas
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AI: Can the Machines Really Think?
Gary Marcus and John Lanchester join David to discuss all things AI, from ChatGPT to the Turing test. Why is the Turing test such a bad judge of machine intelligence? If these machines aren’t thinking, what is it they are doing? And what are we doing giving them so much power to shape our lives? Plus we discuss self-driving cars, the coming jobs apocalypse, how children learn, and what it is that makes us truly human.
Gary’s new podcast is Humans vs. Machines.
Read Turing’s original paper here.
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History of Ideas: Montaigne
For the first episode in the new series of History of Ideas – on the great essays and the great essayists – David discusses Montaigne, the man who invented a whole new way of writing and being read. From the fear of death to the joys of life, from the perils of atheism to the pitfalls of faith, from sex to religion and back again, Montaigne wrote the book of himself, which was also a guide to what it means to be human. Elephants, civil war, gout, cosmology, torture, tennis balls, disease, diets, and politics too: all life is here.
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Living Behind the Iron Curtain
This week David talks to Katja Hoyer and Lea Ypi about life under communism. East Germany was the most successful of the communist states of Eastern Europe, measured by economic prosperity and sporting success. Did the GDR ever really offer a model of how Soviet-style communism could give people what they wanted, including social mobility and consumerism? Why did it fall apart in the end? And how did the GDR experiment look from inside Albania, where Lea grew up? A conversation about freedom, dissent, paranoia and blue jeans.
Katja Hoyer’s latest book is Beyond the Wall: East Germany 1949-1990.
Lea Ypi’s prize-winning Free: Coming of Age at the End of History is available in paperback now.
To hear more about Rosa Luxemburg, this is from Season 2 of History of Ideas.
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How Dallas Saw the Future
This week David talks to Helen Thompson about Dallas and the end of oil. How did the world’s most popular soap opera come to explain the energy crisis and the future of a world hooked on fossil fuels? Is the fate of the Ewing family – fire and ruin – going to be the fate of America? And did J.R. Ewing really pave the way for President Donald Trump? Plus David and Helen discuss ‘oil fictions’, from Isaac Asimov to Italo Calvino.
Watch the moment when ‘Miss Ellie Saves the Day’.
Helen Thompson on ’the cosmic stakes of the age of oil’.
Isaac Asimov’s imaginary report on a world without oil.
Italo Calvino’s short story, ’The Petrol Pump’.
Past Present Future is brought to you in partnership with the London Review of Books.
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The Novel that Unravels Democracy
David talks to Ian McEwan about Italo Calvino’s The Watcher (1963), one of the greatest of all works of political fiction. Challenging, disturbing, redemptive: this is a book about who gets to count and who doesn’t, and what identity politics really means. David and Ian also discuss how political fiction works - and why the climate change novel is so hard to write. Plus they argue about whether children should be allowed to vote.
Next week: Helen Thompson on Dallas and the end of oil.
Ian McEwan’s latest novel is Lessons, available now.
To read more about Calvino, here is a recent appreciation of his later writings in the New Yorker.
On the children’s focus groups, here is the report.
For more links and info about future episodes, follow Past Present Future on Twitter @PPFIdeas
Past Present Future is brought to you in partnership with the London Review of Books.
Sign up to LRB Close Readings:
Directly in Apple: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: lrb.supportingcast.fm
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Introducing Past Present Future
Past Present Future is a new weekly podcast with David Runciman, host and creator of Talking Politics, exploring the history of ideas from politics to philosophy, culture to technology. David talks to historians, novelists, scientists and many others about where the most interesting ideas come from, what they mean, and why they matter.
Ideas from the past, questions about the present, shaping the future.
Brought to you in partnership with the London Review of Books.
New episodes every Thursday.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Fler poddar
Podcasten Past Present Future är skapad av David Runciman. Podcastens innehåll och bilderna på den här sidan hämtas med hjälp av det offentliga podcastflödet (RSS).
En liten tjänst av I'm With Friends. Finns även på engelska.