Ideas Matter

Features the discussion ‘The dangers of progress?’ recorded at Living Freedom Summer School 2023. Historically, the quest for freedom was often understood to be bound up with the ideal of progress, but today, society seems less certain of the benefits of progress.  Key features of modernity such as urbanisation, mobility, secularism and affluence are often deemed counterproductive to liberty. How...

Features the lecture ‘‘Dystopian or dysfunctional? The 21st-century state’ recorded at Living Freedom Summer School 2023. In recent years, governments have appeared directionless and often incompetent. Institutions riven with disputes over cultural values seem unsure of what they stand for. Crisis seems to be the word of the year - energy crisis, cost-of-living crisis, climate crisis, housing cris...

Features the lecture ‘Freedom in the age of identity politics’ recorded at Living Freedom Summer School 2023. Loved or loathed, identity politics is inescapable in contemporary battles over freedom. To some, the political embrace of the personal is a vital tool in the struggle against oppressive institutions and practices. To others, identitarian politics is a divisive force in society and represe...

Features the lecture ‘Freedom of conscience: 21st century challenges’ recorded at Living Freedom Summer School 2023.    For many centuries, in religious and secular times alike, societies have wrestled with dilemmas as to how we should live in accordance with our inner-most thoughts and beliefs. What should we understand by the term freedom of conscience, how did it emerge and why is it so importa...

Living Freedom Forum in London in April explored Artificial Intelligence and the implications for freedom. Generative AI like ChatGPT and Midjourney have captured the public imagination and barely a day now passes without claim and counter-claim as to benefits or threats posed by artificial intelligence. But what actually is generative technology? How have we come to realise this new technology? A...

Initiated in 2015, Debating Matters Beyond Bars is a project which takes DM's schools-debating format inside prisons. Using our acclaimed substance-over-style format, teams of prisoners engage in debate with one another on a whole range of contemporary social, political and cultural topics. The programme aims to inspire them to think about issues beyond their current situation and to look forward...

The theme of this year's The Academy, the weekend residential summer school, is ‘Old Roots of the New Disorder’. The event takes place on 16/17 July. In this special podcast, The Academy convenor Jacob Reynolds talks to Professor Frank Furedi, keynote lecturer, about why at a time when the global geo-political and economic crisis afflicts all dimensions of human existence, The Academy represents a...

From the series ‘The elite: old and new’, theme of the boi charity’s event The Academy, held online in November 2021. The term ‘professional managerial class’ was coined in 1977. Thinkers on both left and right have drawn attention to the rise (and rise) of a seemingly new group in society who neither labour in traditional occupations nor own significant amounts of capital. This group of salaried...

From the series ‘The elite: old and new’, theme of the boi charity’s event The Academy, held online in November 2021. Published in the weeks after VE day in 1945, just as British voters swept a Labour Government into power, Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited was a surprise bestseller in both the UK and America, and captured the imagination of generations of readers. The story follows the life of...

From the series ‘The elite: old and new’, theme of the boi charity’s event The Academy, held online in November 2021. In recent years, populist movements have thrived on a sense of anger at global elites who have distanced themselves from political control by their own national populations. The coronavirus pandemic has further served to suggest that the global system is extremely fragile. Yet, as...

From the series ‘The elite: old and new’, theme of the boi charity’s event The Academy, held online in November 2021. From arguments in museums about the status of colonial-era collections to the proliferation of ever more expansive diversity policies in public service organisations, major institutions are at the forefront of the culture wars. What can controversies such as Stonewall’s involvement...

From the series ‘The elite: old and new’, theme of the boi charity’s event The Academy, held online in November 2021. Political discourse revolves around questions of power relations. Yet defining who really has power over society seems harder than ever. How do we understand the ‘elite’ and what gives them power? Has the elite changed its character, and if so how, and from when? This lecture exami...

Introduction to the series ‘The elite: old and new’, theme of the boi charity’s event The Academy, held online in November 2021. Politics has always been inseparable from the question: who has power? In previous eras, the answer to that question was to examine the issue of social class. Today, it is harder to offer such easy answers. Many speak of multiple ‘elites’ including business, educational,...

Fifth podcast in the series ‘The use and abuse of history’, theme of the boi charity’s event The Academy, held online in April 2021.  The founding ideals of the United States of America are increasingly called into question. Rather than an experiment in democratic self-government and throwing off the shackles of British imperialism, America is seen as a racist creation devoted to the institution o...

From the series ‘The use and abuse of history’, theme of the boi charity’s event The Academy, held online in April 2021. The most common historical comparison in contemporary debates is to fascism. From the pro-trump riot at the Capitol to laws requiring the wearing of masks, every political event is compared to the fascism of Nazi Germany. Undoubtedly, and for good reason, the horrors of the earl...

From the series ‘The use and abuse of history’, theme of the boi charity’s event The Academy, held online in April 2021. The term ‘cultural Marxism’ has long proved controversial. Some insist that it helps explain a shift in left-wing thought from a materialist focus on economic transformation to a concern for cultural issues and identity politics. Others dismiss it as an anti-Semitic conspiracy t...

From the series ‘The use and abuse of history’, theme of the boi charity’s event The Academy, held online in April 2021. From discussions about reparations to the descendants of slaves to the battles over public monuments, the legacy of the past is bitterly contested in today’s culture wars. Many insist that contemporary societies need to do much more to come to terms with, and atone for, the evil...

Introductory podcast to the series ‘The use and abuse of history’, theme of the boi charity’s event The Academy, held online in April 2021. Our politics is suffused with historical comparisons, and the meaning of key historical events is bitterly contested. How do we relate to history today? How can we learn from the past without reducing it to a series of moral parables? When are historical compa...

Seventh and final podcast in the series on Race and Racism, theme of BoI charity’s event The Academy, held online in late 2020. In this episode we feature two talks that reflect on the emergence of a new elite and the institutionalisation of identity. Lecturers: Inaya Folarin Iman, founder, Equiano Project and presenter, GB News Frank Furedi, a sociologist, public intellectual and author including...

Sixth podcast in the series on Race and Racism, theme of BoI charity’s event The Academy, held online in late 2020. In this episode we feature the talk ‘The Birth of a Nation’. ‘The Birth of a Nation’, the controversial  film by DW Griffith from 1915 is renowned for its racist portrayal of black people and celebration of the Klu Klux Klan. More than a century after its release it continues to exci...

Fifth podcast in the series on Race and Racism, theme of BoI charity’s event The Academy, held online in late 2020. In this episode we feature the talk: The troubled universalism of ‘The Souls of Black Folk’. ‘The Souls of Black Folk’ was published in 1903 by W.E.B. Du Bois, the American sociologist, historian, author and campaigner. Today, identity politics and campaigns such as decolonising the...

Fourth podcast in the series on Race and Racism, theme of BoI charity’s event The Academy, held online in late 2020. In this episode we feature the lecture ‘The use and abuse of the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement’. The emergence of Black Lives Matter has been accompanied by renewed interest in the American civil rights movement that made such an impact in the 1960s. But what are the key attri...

Third podcast in the series on Race and Racism, theme of BoI charity’s event The Academy, held online in late 2020. In this episode, we feature the lecture ‘Race Riots 1919 – 1992: from the First World War to Culture War’. The summer of 2020 was marked by Black Lives Matters protests and also by an explosion of violence that spread through American cities such as Minneapolis, Atlanta and many more...

Second podcast in our series on Race and Racism, the theme of BoI charity’s event The Academy, held online in late 2020.  In this episode, we feature the lecture ‘Historical racism and the new language of racialisation’.  At a time when questions related to race have very much come to the forefront of political discussion, this talk examines what the new antiracism stands for - and argues that it...

This is the first podcast in our new series on Race and Racism, the theme of BoI charity’s event The Academy held online in late 2020. In this episode, we feature Jacob Reynolds, who along with Dr James Panton, was the co-convenor of the event. Jacob reflects briefly on the return of race to the forefront of politics, and sets the scene for the series of podcasted talks that will follow this, each...