Afleveringen
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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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Sign up now for bonus episodes and ad-free listening – and help support the podcast.
www.ppfideas.com
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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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?
To sign up for our free fortnightly newsletter to accompany this and future series, just click on the top link in our Link Tree: https://linktr.ee/ppfideas
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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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?
To sign up for our free fortnightly newsletter to accompany this and future series, just click on the top link in our Link Tree: https://linktr.ee/ppfideas
Coming up: 2008 and the election of Barack Obama
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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?
To sign up for our free fortnightly newsletter to accompany this and future series, just click on the top link in our Link Tree: https://linktr.ee/ppfideas
Coming up: The election of 1980 and the arrival of Reaganomics.
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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?
To sign up for our free fortnightly newsletter to accompany this and future series, just click on the top link in our Link Tree: https://linktr.ee/ppfideas
Coming up: How the election of 1936 sealed the New Deal.
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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?
To sign up for our free fortnightly newsletter to accompany this and future series, just click on the top link in our Link Tree: https://linktr.ee/ppfideas
Next time: 1912 and the great Republican split
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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?
To sign up for our free fortnightly newsletter to accompany this and future series, just click on the top link in our Link Tree: https://linktr.ee/ppfideas
Coming up: 1896 and the populist revolt
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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?
To sign up for our free fortnightly newsletter to accompany this and future series, just click on the top link in our Link Tree: https://linktr.ee/ppfideas
Coming up next: the Election of 1860 and Abraham Lincoln
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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.
To get the newsletter just click on the top link in our Link Tree: https://linktr.ee/ppfideas
Next week on the Ideas Behind American Elections: 1828.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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