Ideas Matter

Scholars often describe Australian politics as being a competition between Labor and non-Labor. The implication being that what holds the right-wing of Australian politics together is its shared opposition to the labour movement and its political arm, the Labor Party. Historically, the non-Labor side of Australian politics has formed and re-formed four times, finding its most successful incarnatio...

What is post-liberalism, that strange ideology which unites figures as disparate as JD Vance, Patrick Deneen, Maurice Glasman, and Adrian Vermeule? Political theorist Paul Kelly joins Ideas Matter to help make sense of post-liberalism, as well as expose some of its internal contradictions. Paul Kelly is a political theorist at the London School of Economics, and author of several books - including...

The Western world has had a catastrophic experience with difference. Colonialism, racism and imperialism are all uniquely Western phenomena, at least according to today's guest, Professor Shuchen Xiang. China, conversely, has an alternative history - one that embraces and assimilates difference. This is China's cosmopolitan tradition. Shuchen Xiang is Mount Hua Professor of Philosophy at X...

Dr Liam Byrne is a political biographer and historian. He is author of several books, both published by Melbourne University Press: "Becoming John Curtin and James Scullin: The Making of the Modern Labor Party" and "No Power Greater: A History of Union Action in Australia" . I recently interviewed Liam to talk about the history of trade unionism in Australia. In this far-reachi...

What do John Stuart Mill, John Rawls, and Chantal Mouffe all have in common? They are all representatives of a distinct liberal socialist tradition, according to today's guest, Matthew McManus. Matt is a lecturer in political science at the University of Michigan, and author of several books on political theory. Today we are discussing his most recent work, The Political Theory of Liberal Socialis...

What are the ideologies of the Manosphere, and how are they being mainstreamed? Claudia Young, a PhD Candidate at the University of Melbourne, is researching these very questions. In this wide-ranging conversation, we discuss what it means to be 'black-pilled' versus 'red-pilled', how Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson are popularising misogynistic ideas, as well as Raewyn Connell's path-breaking boo...

Can becoming a better liberal really increase your wellbeing? That is the argument made by today's guest, Alexandre Lefebvre, in his latest book: Liberalism as a Way of Life (2024). Liberalism is the hegemonic morality of our times. Rather than despairing at this fact, as many on the post-liberal right do, we should double down on our ideals and strive to become better liberals. A fairer, more pla...

Kickstarting a new era of Ideas Matter, Louis interviews Canadian-born political theorist Daniel Bell about his latest book, The Dean of Shandong: Confessions of a Minor Bureaucrat at a Chinese University (2023) . Bell is currently Chair Professor of Political Theory at the University of Hong Kong. Prior to that, he served as the Dean of Shandong University's Department of Political Science and Pu...

Sex. The Ego. Repression. Sublimation. The Death Drive. That's right, we're reading Freud. Specifically we are reading two essays by Freud, "Civilised Sexuality Morality and Modern Nervous Illness" (1908) and "Civilisation and its Discontents" (1930). These works provide a brief introduction to core Freudian concepts such as repression and sublimation. Join us for a cri...

Some call him "The First Teacher", others simply refer to him as "The Philosopher" - but you probably know him as Aristotle. If all philosophy is a footnote to Plato, then Aristotle is footnote number one. Join us as we discuss the most influential work of moral philosophy in the whole world, The Nicomachean Ethics. The mentioned essay by Quentin Skinner is called "Meaning...

Ideas Matter discusses its first non-Western text: the Dao De Jing by Lao Tzu. Daoism is one of the three major religions/philosophies in China, alongside Confucianism and Buddhism. Unlike most other cultures however, these religions are not mutually exclusive. Confucianism is deeply informed by Daoist cosmology, which was in turn informed by the introduction of Buddhism into China from India. The...

Alex makes his long-awaited return to the Ideas Matter studio, just in time for a special guest appearance by Dan Crowley. Dan is a man of many talents, a true renaissance man. Most relevant for our purposes is his day job as a scholar of Ancient Greece, particularly of the historian Herodotus. We interview Dan about his research which seeks to reinvigorate Herodotus' approach to historical st...

"All political action has then in itself a directedness towards knowledge of the good: of the good life, or of the good society", writes Leo Strauss in his well-known essay 'What is Political Philosophy?', published in 1957. For Strauss, political philosophy is essentially normative. We do not understand political things unless we take them as phenomena which cry out to be evaluated as good or bad...

What does it mean to be realistic about politics? Why does Raymond Geuss, a Cambridge political theorist, describe himself as a "neo-Leninist"?   In this episode, Louis gives a run-down of Geuss' hugely influential text Philosophy and Real Politics (2008), which revives the longstanding tradition of political realism in Western philosophy. Political realism is a way of studying politics which...

In this video Louis gives a run through of John Rawls' seminal text "A Theory of Justice" published in 1971.  A Theory of Justice is a must-read for anyone interested in Anglo-American political theory. It spawned the liberal-communitarian debate which dominated the academy for twenty years and produced some of the most well-known names in political philosophy: Michael Sandel, Alasdair Macint...

In part two of our episode on Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy we discuss the importance of myth, Nietzsche’s critique of “theoretical man” and why he sees Socrates as the birth of science, as well as the travesty of modern art. Nietzsche’s critique of egalitarianism is forceful enough to give Louis pause over his Marxist ethical commitments. Can we really have a society in which everyone is a creativ...

Friedrich Nietzsche has exerted a profound influence on Western philosophy. Thinkers diverse as Martin Heidegger, Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud and Michel Foucault all count Nietzsche as one of their inspirations. Nietzsche is also one of the most popular philosophers among the general public and is sometimes regarded as the “non-philosopher’s philosopher”. In our second episode covering this enigmatic...

William James was an American philosopher and psychologist, most known for expounding the philosophy of pragmatism. In episode sixteen of Ideas Matter, Louis and Alex read a series of lectures James gave in 1906 entitled “Pragmatism: A New Name For Some Old Ways of Thinking”. We discuss James’ theory of truth, the pragmatic method, pragmatism’s influence on educational philosophy, and offer our ow...

Plato’s ‘Symposium’ is a Socratic dialogue about love. Situated in the home of the famous Athenian poet Agathon, Symposium presents a series of speeches by prominent Athenians who expound on the nature of love. We encounter a range of ideas familiar to the modern mind: love creates happiness, encourages us to lead good lives, creates harmony and justice, and is the longing for unity with our bette...

Ideas Matter takes a trip back to the fourth century AD to read St Augustine of Hippo, a famed Christian theologian from Thagaste, North Africa. Augustine’s writings have proved tremendously influential not only within Christian theology, but in philosophy and political theory more broadly. His teachings on the nature of human sin - that we sin because it is fun - have informed political realism i...

As per listener request, today we delve into Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ‘ The Social Contract’. Published in 1762, Rousseau sets himself the ambitious task of reconciling individual freedoms with the collective protection of society. Rousseau thinks we can have both. Although society has the power to corrupt humanity, it also has the power to refine and enlightenment us, replacing our crude natural f...

What does it mean to be against morality? Why does Friedrich Nietzsche describe Western morality as a “slave-morality”? Episode 12 of Ideas Matter answers these questions and more, with our deep-dive into Nietzsche’s ‘On the Genealogy of Morality’. Nietzsche is one of the most popular philosophers today, especially with those who don’t normally read philosophy. His beautiful literary prose brings...

In this episode we read two of Kant's most influential essays: “An Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose” and “What is Enlightenment?”. In "Universal History", Kant suggests that history is the progressive development of humanity’s reason. In “What is Enlightenment?”, Kant argues that being enlightened is the capacity to think for oneself. History’s purpose, theref...

Can there ever be a peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism? According to Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Bolsheviks and eventual head of the Soviet Union, workers must seize the state in a violent revolution. The task does not end here. Workers must reconstruct the state into a “dictatorship of the proletariat” in order to prevent a bourgeois counter-revolution. Eventually, once the bourge...

No one wants to be described as Machiavellian…or do they? On today’s episode, Louis and Alex discuss common misinterpretations of everyone’s favourite, but frequently misunderstood thinker: Niccolò Machiavelli. What is Machiavelli’s main message? (5:00) Is Machiavelli immoral? (23:02) Historical versus philosophical approaches to politics (31:32) Machiavelli and international relations theory (37:...