Ideas Matter

Eighth and final lecture in series Psychology and Democracy from The Academy 2020 organised by Battle of Ideas (boi) charity. In this episode, the lecture ‘Scientism and the Manufacture of Consent: then and now’ draws together themes explored earlier in the series. It looks at how, in an age without a clear set of authoritative political ideas, an ideology - as yet without a name - has taken root....

Seventh lecture in series Psychology and Democracy from The Academy 2020 organised by Battle of Ideas (boi) charity. Our focus in this episode is The Hidden Persuaders, the 1957 study by Vance Packard, American journalist, social critic and best-selling author. The Hidden Persuaders is Packard’s foray into the role of our unconscious desires and how psychological methods are exploited by arenas su...

Sixth lecture in series Psychology and Democracy from The Academy 2020 organised by Battle of Ideas (boi) charity. Our focus in this podcast is Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence. The novel was published in 1928, the period just after the First World War when anticipation of future possibilities coexisted with feelings of dread over the world to come. Against a backdrop of fears over mass s...

On 20 June 2020, Battle of Ideas Charity hosted The Academy Online, a series of talks and book discussions exploring the theme Psychology and Democracy. This podcast features the introductory talk to a discussion on the 1948 novel ‘Walden Two’ by BF Skinner, an American psychologist, author, inventor and social philosopher. Skinner liked to describe his own philosophy as 'radical behaviorism' and...

On 20 June 2020, Battle of Ideas charity hosted The Academy Online, a series of talks and book discussions exploring the theme Psychology and Democracy. In this podcast we feature the opening lecture The frightful crowd: the psychology of ‘the masses’. Today, discussion of crowds, the demos and by implication democracy itself, is pervasive, for example in the debates on how to influence collective...

On 20 June 2020, Battle of Ideas Charity hosts The Academy Online, a series of talks and book discussions exploring the theme Psychology and Democracy. An important text on the reading list is Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. In this podcast we feature a short talk that reflects on how Huxley’s renowned work encapsulated emerging ideas in the inter war period and proved prescient to future trends....

From the archives of The Academy, this lecture ‘Freud: The unconscious and the repressive society’ is a taster and some useful context for this year’s Academy Online event ‘Psychology and Democracy’ on 20 June 2020 (details below). Lecturer, Dr Michael Fitzpatrick reflects on the work of Sigmund Freud, including ‘Civilisation and its Discontents’ which was published in 1929 and signals a shift in...

From the archives of The Academy, this lecture ‘Man’s inner nature: self reflection and being psychological’ is a taster and some useful context for this year’s Academy Online event ‘Psychology and Democracy’ on 20 June 2020 (details below). Lecturer, Dr Tim Black, spotlights shifting artistic sensibilities in the early 20th century and explores the journey away from society and material reality t...

Professor Frank Furedi discusses the cultural turn that emerged in the 1970s and its subsequent development in the decades that followed. The talk explores the reaction to the 60s counterculture, the rise of post-material values and the contemporary politicisation of culture. LECTURER Professor Frank Furedi, sociologist and social commentator; author, How Fear Works: culture of fear in the 21st ce...

This talk examines the assumption that today’s ‘progressive left’ is a continuation of the left-wing politics of the 1960s. It's the 11th in our series Culture Wars:then and now, recorded at the Academy 2019 summer school that was organised by the Battle of Ideas (boi) charity.   LECTURER Dr Greg Scorzo, director and editor, Culture on the Offensive website and host of The Art of Thinking events T...

If the twentieth was the Mass Century, Timandra Harkness argues that the twenty-first is the Personalised Century – a time when mass production, mass media, and mass politics are giving way to customised manufacture, social media and identity politics. But what are the implications? Is the irony of the turn to a personalised world that the person is disappearing? LECTURER Timandra Harkness, journa...

Ben Cobley discusses his book, The Tribe, explaining how the progressive liberal-left and its associated ‘system of diversity’ have come to dominate society. In this lecture, he talks about the intellectual inspirations behind The Tribe, exploring how Chantal Mouffe, Karl Popper and Martin Heidegger helped him to illuminate the fraught world of identity politics today. LECTURER Ben Cobley, author,...

In 1992, conservative Republican Pat Buchanan declared the launch of a ‘culture war’ for the heart of the US. In the late 2000s, following the rise of the Tea Party movement, Andrew Breitbart suggested that politics is downstream from culture, and his young protégés like Milo Yiannopoulos and Ben Shapiro created turmoil in university campuses. Trump rode the bandwagon of conservative anti-establis...

Under the seemingly all-encompassing umbrella of ‘mental health’, the public sphere appears saturated with claims about emotional damage. This lecture explores such claims of emotional harm and analyses the conversation-stopping effect of dismissing the rational human subject and the degeneration of public debate into never-ending culture wars. LECTURER Dr Ashley Frawley – senior lecturer in publi...

Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of the culture industry argued that movies and mass-produced entertainment represented the ‘de-artification’ or commodification of art by capitalism: an inauthentic and formulaic regurgitation of reality that deceived its audiences. The real thing was difficult and hard to understand: modernism separated itself off from mass culture in order to try and save high cu...

This lecture on the crisis of bourgeois ideology, from Nietzsche to Heidegger, is a pre-history of today’s culture wars. It explores the broad sweep and trajectory of modernist culture, from the mid nineteenth century through to the interwar years of the 20th century. LECTURER Dr Tim Black, books and essays editor, Spiked. TALKING POINTS IN THIS PODCAST Why growing disillusion of Europe’s bourgeoi...

For a long time the family has been viewed as the location of all sorts of social and moral problems and are where many of the key discussions in the culture wars have traditionally been played out.  But recently the focus seems to have shifted from traditional issues such as marriage, sexual freedom or abortion  to the questions of parenting – resulting in more instrumental, and less moral argume...

The debate surrounding Parkfield school in Birmingham and wider discussion on the role of sex and relationship classes  within educational programmes, are just the latest incidences of schools becoming a battlefield for the culture wars.   Starting with developments in the 1870s when the state intervention in schooling in England & Wales became more pronounced, James Tooley explores the impact of...

This is the second podcast to the series Culture Wars: then and now, recorded in 2019 at the summer school The Academy. The series explores the emergence and evolution of the culture wars, and aims to understand the intellectual, cultural, social and political ideas that shape them.  In this lecture, Frank Furedi introduces the concept of the culture wars, explores its historical context and outli...

This is the introductory podcast to the series 'Culture Wars: then and now', recorded in 2019 at the summer school The Academy. The series explores the emergence and evolution of the culture wars. Lecturers explore the intellectual, cultural, social and political ideas that shape the culture wars. LECTURER Angus Kennedy, convenor, The Academy; author, Being Cultured: in defence of discrimination;...

The following conversation between journalist Ella Whelan and the academic and author Dr Jan Macvarish was a taster for Jan’s lecture, ‘Family matters’, at The Academy - our residential summer school which took place on 20-21st July.  https://theboi.co.uk/the-academy-2019

The following conversation between journalist Ella Whelan and the author and broadcaster Timandra Harkness was a taster for Timandra’s lecture, ‘The Personalised Century’, at The Academy - our residential summer school which took place on 20-21st July.  https://theboi.co.uk/the-academy-2019

Professor Frank Furedi talks to journalist Ella Whelan about the boi's upcoming residential summer school, The Academy. If you’d like to join us on the 20th and 21st July 2019 at The Academy summer school for a weekend of stimulating debate in a beautiful location, head to The Academy 2019 to find out more and book tickets. This edition was edited by Will Nestor-Sherman.