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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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  • 329 episodes
  • Updated Today

Episodes329

Newest first
  • Oct 26, 2023 · 50 min

    History of Ideas: Umberto Eco

    <p>This week’s episode in our series on the great essays and great essayists explores Umberto Eco’s ‘Thoughts on Wikileaks’ (2010).&nbsp;Eco writes about what makes a true scandal, what are real secrets, and what it would mean to expose the hidden workings of power.&nbsp;It is an essay that connects digital technology, medieval mystery and Dan Brown.&nbsp;Plus David talks about the hidden meaning of Julian Assange.</p><br><p>More from the LRB:</p><p><a href="https://bit.ly/499vYSn" rel="noopener

  • Oct 19, 2023 · 54 min

    Rethinking Democracy w/ Lea Ypi

    This week David and Lea resume their conversation – and their differences of opinion – about how to understand politics in the modern world.&nbsp;What is it reasonable to expect of democracy?&nbsp;Are its failures because of bad design or bad faith?&nbsp;And why don’t we have more democracy at the international level where it’s really needed?&nbsp;This is the start of a series of monthly conversations between David and Lea about rethinking the ideas that made the modern world.<br /><hr><p style=

  • Oct 12, 2023 · 52 min

    Mary Beard on Caesar, Augustus & Zuckerberg

    <p>This week David asks Mary Beard what the Roman Empire can tell us about the nature of unaccountable power, then and now.&nbsp;How did Roman emperors rule when they had so little knowledge of the lives of their subjects?&nbsp;Can absolute personal power ever escape the limits of biology, from sex to death?&nbsp;And who are the modern-day equivalent of the Caesars: democratic populists or tech titans?</p><br><p>Mary Beard’s new book is <a href="https://bit.ly/3FbAh1K" rel="noopener noreferrer"

  • Oct 5, 2023 · 49 min

    Zadie Smith on Dickens, Hypocrisy & Justice

    <p>This week David talks to the novelist Zadie Smith about Charles Dickens: what he means to her, why we still read him, and what’s missing from the Dickensian view of the world.&nbsp;It’s a conversation about other writers as well – Turgenev, George Orwell and Toni Morrison – and about whether fiction shows us how to live or rather helps us to see the ways in which the truth about how we live is hidden from view.</p><br><p>Zadie Smith’s new novel is <a href="https://bit.ly/48DUdYr" rel="noopene

  • Sep 28, 2023 · 55 min

    History of Ideas: David Foster Wallace

    <p>This week’s episode in our series on the great political 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.&nbsp;Wallace believed that McCain’s distinctive political style revealed some hard truths about American democracy.&nbsp;Was he right?&nbsp;What did he miss?&nbsp;And how do those truths look now in the age of Trump?</p><br><p>More on David Foster Wallace fr

  • Sep 21, 2023 · 52 min

    Animal Farm and Other Allegories

    <p>This week David talks to novelists Adam Biles and John Lanchester about the timeless appeal of George Orwell’s Animal Farm.&nbsp;Why has it retained its hold far longer than other political allegories?&nbsp;Do readers need to know about the Russian history it describes?&nbsp;What makes the animals so relatable?&nbsp;Plus we discuss other favourite political allegories, from The Wizard of Oz to WALL-E.</p><p>Adam Biles’s new novel – inspired by Animal Farm – is <a href="https://bit.ly/45X7OIu"

  • Sep 14, 2023 · 1 hr 5 min

    The Other 9/11: Chile & Allende

    <p>This week is the fiftieth anniversary of the coup in Chile that ended the life of Salvador Allende and marked the temporary death of Chilean democracy.&nbsp;We talk to the politician and economist Andrés Velasco and the writer and translator Lorna Scott Fox about their memories of the coup and their understanding of its significance today.&nbsp;What does it say about the unfulfilled promise and ongoing fragility of democratic politics, in Chile and beyond?</p><br><p>More from the LRB:</p><p><

  • Sep 7, 2023 · 54 min

    The Handover

    <p>This week Lea Ypi joins David to talk about some of the ideas in his new book, The Handover: How We Gave Control of Our Lives to Corporations, States and AIs.&nbsp;They discuss how to think about the power of the state in the modern world: Can it be changed?&nbsp;Can it be controlled?&nbsp;Can it be anything other than capitalist?&nbsp;Plus, how will AI alter the relationship between human beings and the corporate machines that rule our world?</p><br><p>To order the Handover and support indep

  • Sep 3, 2023 · 56 min

    The Great Essays: Q & A

    In this bonus episode David answers some of your questions about our series on the great political essays and essayists, from Montaigne to Joan Didion.&nbsp;Can great political thinkers also be committed members of political parties?&nbsp;Which of these writers would make a good prime minister?&nbsp;And where are the great essays being written today?&nbsp;With PPF producer Ben Walker posing the questions.<br /><hr><p style='color:grey; font-size:0.75em;'> Hosted on Acast. See <a style='color:gre

  • Aug 31, 2023 · 54 min

    History of Ideas: Joan Didion

    <p>For the last episode in our summer season on the great twentieth-century essays and essayists, David discusses 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?</p><br><p>More on Joan Didion from the LRB ar

  • Aug 24, 2023 · 57 min

    History of Ideas: Susan Sontag

    <p>This episode in our history of the great essays and great essayists is about Susan Sontag’s ‘Against Interpretation’ (1963).&nbsp;What was interpretation and why was Sontag so against it?&nbsp;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.</p><br><p>Sontag in the LRB:</p><p><a href="https://bit.ly/3Yr6URL" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Terry Castle on Sontag

  • Aug 17, 2023 · 53 min

    History of Ideas: James Baldwin

    <p>This week David discusses James Baldwin’s ‘Notes of a Native Son’ (1955), an essay that combines autobiography with a searing indictment of America’s racial politics.&nbsp;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.&nbsp;What happens when North and South collide?</p><br><p>More on Baldwin from the LRB:</p><p><a href="https://bit.ly/3E9AySp" rel="noopener noreferrer" ta

  • Aug 10, 2023 · 55 min

    History of Ideas: Simone Weil

    <p>This week’s episode in our series on the great essays and great essayists is about Simone Weil’s ‘Human Personality’ (1943).&nbsp;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.&nbsp;What does Weil have to put in their place?&nbsp;The answer is radical and surprising.</p><br><p>Read ‘Human Personality’ <a href="https://bit.ly/3KCRVhR" re

  • Aug 3, 2023 · 54 min

    History of Ideas: George Orwell

    <p>This week David discusses George Orwell’s ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ (1941), his great wartime essay about what it does – and doesn’t – mean to be English.&nbsp;How did the English manage to resist fascism?&nbsp;How are the English going to defeat fascism?&nbsp;These were two different questions with two very different answers: hypocrisy and socialism.&nbsp;David takes the story from there to Brexit and back again.</p><br><p>For more on Orwell from the LRB:</p><p><a href="https://bit.ly/3OztA

  • Jul 27, 2023 · 54 min

    History of Ideas: Virginia Woolf

    <p>This week our history of the great essays and great essayists reaches the twentieth century and Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece ‘A Room of One’s Own’ (1929).&nbsp;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.&nbsp;And how, despite all that, it still manages to be as fresh and funny as anything written since.</p><br><p>Read more on Virginia Woolf in the LRB:</p><p><a

  • Jul 20, 2023 · 1 hr

    From Lincoln to Trump: What Happened to the Republican Party?

    <p>This week David talks to American historian Gary Gerstle about the shape-shifting journey of the US Republican Party, from the Civil War to the battles of today.&nbsp;How did the party of the North become the party of the South?&nbsp;When did the war party lose its appetite for war?&nbsp;Why does an organisation born out of anti-Catholicism now see its mission as to get Catholics onto the Supreme Court?&nbsp;And what could finally break the party apart?</p><p>Gary Gerstle’s latest book is <a

  • Jul 13, 2023 · 58 min

    History of Ideas: Thoreau

    <p>For the third episode in this series about the great political essays, David explores Thoreau’s ‘Civil Disobedience’ (1849), a ringing call to resistance against democratic idiocy.&nbsp;Thoreau wanted to resist slavery and unjust wars.&nbsp;How can one citizen turn the tide against majority opinion?&nbsp;Was Thoreau a visionary or a hypocrite?&nbsp;And what do his arguments say about environmental civil disobedience today?</p><p>Read Thoreau’s essay <a href="https://bit.ly/44oO144" rel="noope

  • Jul 6, 2023 · 54 min

    Whose Space is it Anyway?

    <p>This week we talk to astrophysicist Chris Lintott and writer Tom Stevenson about the threat from outer space: is it the asteroids, is it the aliens, or is it us?&nbsp;What changed when space travel moved from a Cold War battleground to a billionaire’s playground?&nbsp;Are China and America about to re-start the space race?&nbsp;And what will happen if we do find evidence of extraterrestrial life - will anyone believe it?&nbsp;</p><p>Read more from Chris and Tom about space in the LRB:</p><p><

  • Jun 29, 2023 · 1 hr 2 min

    Why J.S. Mill Matters w/ Tara Westover

    <p>This week David talks to Tara Westover and the philosopher Clare Chambers about the enduring legacy of John Stuart Mill.&nbsp;Reading Mill’s Essays on Religion changed Tara’s life: she explains what happened, and discusses how Mill speaks to contemporary concerns about identity, conviction and doubt.&nbsp;Plus we talk free speech, the marketplace of ideas, the subjection of women - and why Mill isn’t comfort reading (but Thomas Carlyle is!).</p><br><p>Sign up to LRB Close Readings:</p><p>Dire

  • Jun 22, 2023 · 59 min

    Are There Too Many People?

    <p>This week David talks to science writer Meehan Crist about Thomas Malthus and the perennial question of overpopulation. Malthus wrote 225 years ago and was wrong about almost everything, yet his ideas still have a powerful hold on our imaginations and our fears. How many people is too many? What are the limits of population in the age of climate change? And why does Elon Musk think we should all be having more children?</p><p>Thomas Malthus, <a href="https://bit.ly/3pbT5cN" rel="noopener nore