For today’s episode in the history of bad ideas David talks to economic historian Marc Palen about monopoly, an idea that has always had its defenders as well as its fierce critics. Why do monopolies arise even in supposedly competitive economies? How did the anti-monopoly movement of Henry George in the late-19th century argue that the monopolists could be taken down? How are those struggles echoed in the fight against Silicon Valley monopolists today? And what has all this got to do with Monop...
Jul 03, 2025•58 min•Season 5Ep. 199
Today’s bad idea is one that started out as satire and ended as a political slogan. David talks to historian of ideas Ben Jackson about meritocracy and its origins in Michael Young’s book The Rise of the Meritocracy published in 1958. Young foresaw a populist revolt against the meritocratic elite in the year 2034. Was his vision prophetic? Why did politicians like Tony Blair embrace a concept that Young thought was antithetical to a fair and just society? And who are the winners and losers from ...
Jun 29, 2025•1 hr 3 min•Season 5Ep. 198
For today’s episode in the history of bad ideas David talks to cultural historian Tom Wright about charisma, a term that often feels essential for understanding modern politics but which ends up obscuring far more than it explains. How did an old idea from Christian theology get used to explain the hold that political leaders have over crowds? Why is it so important not to confuse charm with charisma? What has made a word from early twentieth-century social science ubiquitous on twenty-first-cen...
Jun 26, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Season 5Ep. 197
In today’s episode about the power of bad ideas, David talks to historian and podcaster Dan Snow about the myth that wars are settled on the battlefield. Why are we so drawn to the idea of the decisive military showdown? Is Napoleon to blame? What are the forces that actually settle military conflicts? Plus: were Abba really so wrong that Waterloo won the war? Out tomorrow: A bonus episode in which David and Dan explore a range of battles to see what got settled and what didn’t: Yarmuk, Hastings...
Jun 22, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Season 5Ep. 196
Today’s bad idea is ‘genius’, the label that has enabled all sorts of terrible behaviour through the ages. Writer and broadcaster Helen Lewis explains how and why the idea of genius gets misapplied to people and things that just aren’t. Why are geniuses meant to be tortured? Why are individual geniuses prized over the collaborations that lie behind most innovations? Why do we think that people who are brilliant at one thing will be good at everything else? Plus, David makes the case for Dickens ...
Jun 19, 2025•57 min•Season 5Ep. 195
For the first episode in our new series about how bad ideas take hold, David talks to economist Mark Blyth about austerity, the cost-cutting idea that refuses to die. Why is it an article of faith that states need periodic purging to stop them getting too greedy? Why does this so often happen at times when it does most harm, from the 1930s to the financial crisis that began in 2008? And how is the politics of austerity playing out today, in Starmer’s Britain, in Milei’s Argentina and in the DOGE...
Jun 15, 2025•1 hr•Season 5Ep. 194
Today’s political trial is perhaps the most consequential in English history: the trial and execution of King Charles I for treason in January 1649. How could a king commit treason when treason was a crime against the king? How could a court try a king when a king has no peers? How could anyone claim to speak for the people after a civil war when so many people had been on opposite sides? The answers to these questions would cost more than one person his life – but they would also change forever...
Jun 12, 2025•1 hr 4 min•Season 13Ep. 193
Today’s trial is one of the most notorious in history but also one of the most misremembered. Galileo’s epic confrontation with the Catholic Church over the question of whether the earth moves round the sun – culminating with his interrogation and condemnation in Rome in 1633 – was not just a matter of truth vs ignorance or science vs superstition. It was also twenty-year long struggle on the part of both sides to find a way to co-exist. Did they succeed? Not exactly, but it wasn’t for want of t...
Jun 08, 2025•1 hr 6 min•Season 13Ep. 192
Today’s episode is about a pivotal event in British history that took place exactly 50 years ago: the 1975 referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Community. David talks to historian Robert Saunders about why it was so different in so many ways from the Brexit referendum in 2016. Why in 1975 were Labour and the SNP the Eurosceptic parties? What made the Tories pro-European? Where was immigration as an election issue? How did the Yes campaign overturn a big deficit in the polls? Plus: ...
Jun 05, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Season 6Ep. 191
In today’s episode an extraordinary political trial that culminated in the execution of one queen at the behest of another: Mary Queen of Scots, convicted of treason in 1586 and beheaded in 1587. But who really wanted her dead, Queen Elizabeth or Elizabeth’s powerful political servants? Why did Mary demand to be tried before parliament rather than a court of noblemen? How did she attempt to defend herself in the face of apparently overwhelming incriminating evidence against her? And who was the ...
Jun 01, 2025•56 min•Season 13Ep. 190
In today’s episode another trial that forms the basis for great drama: the case of Thomas More, tried and executed in 1535, events dramatised by Robert Bolt in A Man for All Seasons and Hilary Mantel in Wolf Hall. How did More try to argue that silence was no evidence of treason? Why was his defence so legalistic? Was he really ‘the Socrates of England’? And who was the true villain in this case: Thomas Cromwell, Richard Rich or the King himself? Available now on PPF+: Socrates part 2, in which ...
May 29, 2025•58 min•Season 13Ep. 189
Today’s political trial took place in 1431 though it was still being re-litigated right through to the twentieth century: the case of Joan of Arc, charged with heresy by the Church and burned at the stake. Why was a political prisoner tried in an ecclesiastical court? Why were her interrogators so obsessed by her choice in clothes? How did Joan seek to explain her visions? And was this trial any more of a fix than the later trials that exonerated her? Available now on PPF+: Socrates part 2, in w...
May 25, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Season 13Ep. 188
The first political trial in our new series is the one that set the template for all the others: the trial of Socrates in Athens in 399 BCE, which ended with a death sentence for the philosopher and a permanent stain on the reputation of Athenian democracy. Why, after a lifetime of philosophy, was Socrates finally prosecuted at the age of 70? Was the case motivated by private grievance or public outrage? What should Socrates have said in his own defence? Why, in the end, did he choose defiance i...
May 22, 2025•55 min•Season 13Ep. 187
To introduce our new series about historic political trials – from Socrates to Marine Le Pen – David explores what makes political confrontations in a court of law so fascinating and so revealing. Why do even the worst of dictators still want to play by the rules? What happens when realpolitik and legal principles collide? How does the political system often find itself in the dock? Who wins and who loses in the great game of lawfare? Out now: a new bonus episode on PPF+ where David tries to ans...
May 18, 2025•52 min•Season 13Ep. 186
For the final episode in this series David talks to the leading economist Dani Rodrik about the case he made in the early 2000s that globalisation was unsustainable in its current form. How does he think this prediction has been borne out? What forms of globalisation might work in the 21st century? Where are the strengths and weaknesses of the existing system? And what does he make of the antics of Donald Trump? Available from Saturday on PPF+: David tries to answer your questions about Trump an...
May 15, 2025•54 min•Season 12Ep. 185
David talks to historian Meg Jacobs about how the 1970s changed everything for America’s understanding of its place in the global economy. How did first the Nixon Shock and then the Oil Shock reshape American politics? Why did America’s politicians respond to these shocks not with tariffs or sabre-rattling but with calls to national self-sacrifice? Did anyone heed those calls? And what lessons did Donald Trump draw from America’s crisis decade? The latest edition of our free fortnightly newslett...
May 11, 2025•1 hr 4 min•Season 12Ep. 184
Today David talks to political and economic theorist Leah Downey about the role that central banks in general – and the Federal Reserve in particular – have played in the story of globalisation. How has the Fed tried to reconcile its obligations to American democracy with its obligations to the global order? Is the Eurodollar a token of American strength or American vulnerability? Are the world’s central bankers really just a private club? And what does history tell us about the likely outcome o...
May 08, 2025•57 min•Season 12Ep. 183
David talks to historian Gary Gerstle about the last time the Republican party got caught up in a tariffs disaster and how it changed American politics. The Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930 brought tariffs back and helped bring down both the Republican Party and the global economy. Why didn’t Hoover stop it? What did the fiasco reveal about the limits of presidential power back then? And what does it suggest about the limits of presidential power today? Next time on Ideas of Globalisation: Central Banks...
May 04, 2025•1 hr 2 min•Season 12Ep. 182
Today we explore the explosive fight over tariffs that took place in Britain in the first decade of the twentieth century. David talks to historian Robert Saunders about how Joseph Chamberlain made tariff reform a great popular cause and how it nearly destroyed his party. Are there parallels with Trump’s tariff wars today? Yes! Are there lessons for Trump’s opponents too? Yes! Out now on PPF+: Lenin and Trotsky part 2, taking the story on from 1917 to explore civil war, the rise of Stalin and th...
May 01, 2025•58 min•Season 12Ep. 181
We start a new mini-series on the history of ideas of globalisation by exploring how arguments from 150 years ago foreshadow what’s happening with Trump today. David talks to economic historian Marc Palen about the nineteenth-century fight between economic nationalists and the champions of an open economy. Was free trade for everyone or just for white people? Was it possible to be an imperialist and a globalist? What did the socialists want? And who thought that Canada should be annexed by the U...
Apr 27, 2025•1 hr•Season 12Ep. 180
To conclude this part of our revolutionary ideas series, we explore the overlapping lives and thinking of two emblematic twentieth-century revolutionaries: Lenin and Trotsky. David talks to historian of Russia Edward Acton about what inspired them, what connected them and what divided them. How were they radicalised? How did they interpret the failure of the 1905 revolution? How did they make the 1917 revolution happen? Available from Saturday on PPF+: Lenin and Trotsky part 2, taking the story ...
Apr 24, 2025•56 min•Season 11Ep. 179
Today’s episode is the second of our two recent live recordings of PPF, this one in front of an audience at the Bath Curious Minds Festival. David talks to historian Robert Saunders about the life of Winston Churchill and all its twists and turns of fortune: from disgrace in WWI, economic disaster in the 1920s, wilderness in the 1930s, through to redemption in 1945 and rejection by the voters in the same year. How to make sense of it all? Is there a thread that connects the ups and downs? Has th...
Apr 20, 2025•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 178
Our third Parisian revolution is another explosive night in the theatre, this time in the world of dance. David talks to Dominic Dromgoole about Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, which provoked absolute outrage when it premiered in 1913. Is that what its impresario Diaghilev wanted? How did Nijinsky cope? Did the response foreshadow the trauma to come in 1914? And how did the set designer Roerich end up playing a part in American presidential history? Dominic Dromgoole’s Astonish Me! First Nights...
Apr 17, 2025•47 min•Season 11Ep. 177
Today’s Parisian revolution is a theatrical performance that produced a riot. David talks to theatre director Dominic Dromgoole about Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi (1896), which only ran for a couple of nights but left an indelible mark on the culture of the age and has resonated ever since. Why did a play effectively written by children provoke such a storm among the adults? What made it it blow the mind of W. B. Yeats who was in the audience? How can something so bad be so liberating? Next time: Stra...
Apr 15, 2025•46 min•Season 11Ep. 176
Today’s episode is the first of three this week with the theatre director and writer Dominic Dromgoole, exploring revolutionary events in the world of art and theatre, starting with the opening of the Salon des Refusés in Paris in May 1863. How did the Emperor Napoleon end up sponsoring such a counter-cultural event? Why did it provoke such public outrage and astonishment? And in what ways did Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe revolutionise what was possible in the creation and consumption of mode...
Apr 13, 2025•43 min•Season 11Ep. 175
Today the first of four episodes about Parisian revolutions. We start with the definitive nineteenth-century revolutionary and his definitive revolution: David talks to historian Bruno Leipold about why Karl Marx thought the Paris Commune in 1871 was the model of a workers' uprising and provided a vision of the socialist future. How had the Communards reinvented democracy? Was this a social, an economic or a political revolution? And how did Marx reconcile himself to its bloody failure? Bruno Le...
Apr 10, 2025•56 min•Season 11Ep. 174
Today’s revolutionary idea is one with a long history, not all of it revolutionary: David talks to the historian Fara Dabhoiwala about the idea of free speech. When did free speech first get articulated as a fundamental right? How has that right been used and abused, from the eighteenth century to the present? And what changed in the history of the idea of free speech with the publication of J. S. Mill’s On Liberty in 1859? Fara Dabhoiwala’s What Is Free Speech? is available now https://bit.ly/4...
Apr 06, 2025•1 hr 4 min•Season 11Ep. 173
We take a brief break from revolutionary ideas for a special live episode of PPF recorded in front of an audience at the Regent Street Cinema in London. David talks to writer and journalist Helen Lewis about Network (1976), a film still best remembered for its catchphrase: ‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!’ Just how prophetic is that cry of rage in the age of Trump? What does the film say about the continuing power of television in the era of social media? And who or what ...
Apr 03, 2025•1 hr 6 min•Season 10Ep. 172
David talks to geneticist and science writer Adam Rutherford about the book that fundamentally altered our understanding of just about everything: Darwin’s On The Origin of Species (1859). What made the idea of natural selection so different from the theories of evolution that preceded it? How did Darwin arrive at it? What changed when he published his theory and why is it, in so many ways, the most revolutionary idea of them all? Out tomorrow on PPF+ Darwin Part 2: Adam Rutherford explores how ...
Mar 30, 2025•55 min•Season 11Ep. 171
Today’s revolutionary ideas come from China: David talks to historian Julia Lovell about the Taiping Revolution, another massive mid-19th-century upheaval that nearly overturned the established order. How did Christianity inspire an uprising against the Qing dynasty? Was it a revolution or a civil war? What was the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom? And where does this cataclysmic event fit into China’s 20th-century revolutionary history? Out now: a bonus episode on 1848 with Chris Clark looking at the c...
Mar 27, 2025•1 hr 7 min•Season 11Ep. 170
