Past Present Future

David Runciman

Past 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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328 episodes
Updated Sunday

Episodes328

Newest first

Jan 4, 2024 · 49 min
History of Ideas 11: Umberto Eco
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:<a href="https://bit.ly/499vYSn" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">
Jan 3, 2024 · 54 min
History of Ideas 10: David Foster Wallace
Episode 10 in our series on the great essays is about David Foster Wallace’s ‘Up, Simba!’, which describes his experiences following the doomed campaign of John McCain for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000. Wallace believed that McCain’s distinctive political style revealed some hard truths about American democracy. Was he right? What did he miss? And how do those truths look now in the age of Trump? More on David Foster Wallace from the LRB:<
Jan 2, 2024 · 52 min
History of Ideas 9: Joan Didion
Episode 9 in our series on the great essays is about Joan Didion's 'The White Album' (1979), her haunting, impressionistic account of the fracturing of America in the late 1960s. From Jim Morrison to the Manson murders, Didion offers a series of snapshots of a society coming apart in ways no one seemed to understand. But what was true, what was imagined, and where did the real sickness lie? More on Joan Didion from the LRB archive:<a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/
Jan 1, 2024 · 55 min
History of Ideas 8: Susan Sontag
Episode 8 in our history of the great essays is about Susan Sontag’s ‘Against Interpretation’ (1963). What was interpretation and why was Sontag so against it? David explores how an argument about art, criticism and the avant-garde can be applied to contemporary politics and can even explain the monstrous appeal of Donald Trump. Sontag in the LRB:<a href="https://bit.ly/3Yr6URL" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Terry Castle on Sontag and friendship</a>&nbsp
Dec 31, 2023 · 51 min
History of Ideas 7: James Baldwin
Episode 7 in our series on the great essays is about James Baldwin’s ‘Notes of a Native Son’ (1955), an essay that combines autobiography with a searing indictment of America’s racial politics. At its heart it tells the story of Baldwin’s relationship with his father, but it is also about fear, cruelty, violence and the terrible compromises of a country at war. What happens when North and South collide? More on Baldwin from the LRB:<a href="https://bit.ly/3E9AySp" r
Dec 30, 2023 · 53 min
History of Ideas 6: Simone Weil
Episode 6 in our series on the great essays 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’ <a href="https://bit.ly/3KCRVhR" rel="noopener noreferrer" target
Dec 29, 2023 · 53 min
History of Ideas 5: George Orwell
Episode 5 in our series on the great essays is about George Orwell. His wartime essay ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ (1941) is 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:<a href
Dec 28, 2023 · 52 min
History of Ideas 4: Virginia Woolf
Episode 4 in our series on the great essays is about 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:<a href="https://bit.ly/3OtRMQa" rel="noopener
Dec 27, 2023 · 56 min
History of Ideas 3: Thoreau
Episode three in our series about the great political essays is about 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 <a href="https://bit.ly/44oO144" rel="noopener noreferrer"
Dec 26, 2023 · 1 hr
History of Ideas 2: Hume
Episode two in our series on the great essays is about David Hume. How can eighteenth-century arguments about the national debt 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 Credi
Dec 25, 2023 · 52 min
History of Ideas 1: Montaigne
Episode one in our series on the great essays is about Montaigne, the man who invented a whole new way of writing and being read. From the fear of death to the joys of life, from the perils of atheism to the pitfalls of faith, from sex to religion and back again, Montaigne wrote the book of himself, which was also a guide to what it means to be human. Elephants, civil war, gout, cosmology, torture, tennis balls, disease, diets, and politics too: all life is here. <hr><p style='col
Dec 21, 2023 · 53 min
History of Ideas Q&A
For our last episode before Christmas David answers some of your questions about the History of Ideas series – What would Dickens have made of Trump? How would reparations work? Which essays are missing from the list? Coming up: the whole series on the great essays, one a day, every day, starting on Christmas Day. <hr> Hosted on Acast. See <a style='color:grey;' target='_blank' rel='noopener noreferrer' href='https://acas
Dec 14, 2023 · 53 min
The Art of the Essay
As we wrap up our History of Ideas series David discusses what makes a great essay and whether the best contemporary writing is as good as what went before. The answer is yes, as shown by Jiayang Fan’s brilliant 2020 essay ‘How My Mother and I Became Chinese Propaganda’. David explores why this is such a remarkable example of what can be done with the form and why the art of the essay is alive and well. Read Jiayang Fan’s essay <a href="https://bit.ly/46XTCP8" rel="no
Dec 7, 2023 · 58 min
Something’s Got to Give
This week David talks to the economists Dieter Helm and Diane Coyle about the challenges of building sustainability into the way we live now. Why is GDP such a poor guide to long-term economic well-being? How can we stop squandering future resources?  What should the next Labour government do to create a sustainable economy – and what will happen if they don’t? Dieter Helm’s new book is available to download for free <a href="https://bit.ly/3uNZnSn" rel="noopener
Nov 30, 2023 · 59 min
Democracy Q&A w/ Lea Ypi
This week David and Lea answer your questions about democracy. When does democratic freedom shade over into anarchy? What’s the connection between democracy and human rights? Do the voters choose the government or does the government choose the voters? Plus: what makes Lea an optimist about socialism? <hr> Hosted on Acast. See <a style='color:grey;' target='_blank' rel='noopener noreferrer' href='https://acast.com/privacy'>acast.com/privacy</a> for m
Nov 23, 2023 · 55 min
History of Ideas: Ta-Nehisi Coates
In the penultimate episode in our series on the great essays, David talks 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 <a href="h
Nov 16, 2023 · 54 min
Democracy vs Nationalism w/ Lea Ypi
In the latest instalment of David’s ongoing conversation with Lea Ypi about the past, present and future of democracy they discuss whether democratic politics can ever break free from the stranglehold of the nation-state. When and why did nationalism take such a strong grip of the idea of democracy? What are the international or cosmopolitan alternatives? And can a democracy police its borders without having actual borders or actual police? Listen to the previous epis
Nov 9, 2023 · 55 min
Jill Lepore on Trump, Guns and the Red Mirage
This week David talks to the historian and essayist Jill Lepore about where the chaotic last decade of American politics fits into the longer history of the nation. When and how did gun rights become a matter of principle rather than of pragmatism? What makes insurrection so appealing to so many people? Is another civil war really a possibility? Plus, what did the January 6th Committee miss about January 6th?Jill Lepore’s new book is <a href="https://bit.ly/3Mz
Nov 2, 2023 · 55 min
The Leviacene: Defining Our Times
This week David explores a different way of thinking about the current epoch: what if this isn’t the Anthropocene but the Leviacene? Who or what is really driving planetary destruction? Can human nature explain it? Or should we be looking at the political and economic superpowers that are leaving their marks all over the natural world?For more on these themes, David’s new book <a href="https://bit.ly/3shDzh0" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">The Handove
Oct 26, 2023 · 50 min
History of Ideas: Umberto Eco
This week’s episode in our series on the great essays and great essayists 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:<a href="https://bit.ly/499vYSn" rel="noopener