Stay ConnectedPast 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 Wednesday and Sunday.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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