Arts & Ideas13 Heinä 2017

Free Thinking: Landmark: Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy

Simon Heffer, novelist and co-director of the Fun Palaces campaign Stella Duffy, New Generation Thinker Will Abberley and the writer and sociologist Tiffany Jenkins join Matthew Sweet and an audience at the University of Sussex to debate the ideas explored by Matthew Arnold and their resonance today. The series of periodical essays were first published in Cornhill Magazine, 1867-68, and subsequently published as a book in 1869.

Arnold argued that modern life was producing a society of 'Philistines' who only cared for material possessions and hedonistic pleasure. As a medicine for this moral and spiritual degradation, Arnold prescribed 'culture', which he defined as 'the best which has been thought and said in the world', stored in Europe's great literature, philosophy and history. By engaging with this heritage, he argued, humans could develop towards a higher state of mental and moral 'perfection'.

Simon Heffer is the author of books including High minds: the Victorians and the birth of modern Britain; Moral Desperado: A Life of Thomas Carlyle and Nor Shall My Sword: The Reinvention of England.

Tiffany Jenkins is Culture Editor for the journal Sociology Compass. Her books include Contesting Human Remains in Museum Collections, Keeping Their Marbles and she is editor of a collection of essays from various writers called Political Culture, Soft Interventions and Nation Building.

Will Abberley is a Lecturer in English at the University of Sussex and the author of English Fiction and the Evolution of Language, 1850-1914

Stella Duffy is a writer and the co-director of the Fun Palaces campaign for wider participation in all forms of arts and culture.;

Producer: Fiona McLean

Tämä jakso on lisätty Podme-palveluun avoimen RSS-syötteen kautta eikä se ole Podmen omaa tuotantoa. Siksi jakso saattaa sisältää mainontaa.

Jaksot(2000)

Wealth

Anne McElvoy and guests discuss the concentration, distribution and morality of wealth now and look back at An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published by the Scottish ec...

5 Kesä 56min

Free Thinking at the Hay Festival: Responsibility

Freedom is one of the leading values of our society. But with freedom comes responsibility, which is a much more contested principle. Deciding where responsibility lies, and what it means to take it, ...

29 Touko 56min

Thinking with Food

The links between food and philosophy, ideas about experimentation, taste and how food and traditions become part of our identity are explored by Matthew Sweet in Radio 4's round-table discussion prog...

22 Touko 56min

Technologies of the Self

‘Technologies of the self’ is a phrase from the French philosopher Michel Foucault to describe things people might do to shape the people they are, like dieting, exercise, journaling, or in an earlier...

15 Touko 57min

The Middle

From taking the middle ground to the mid-life crisis, Middle England to middle managers, to being a middle child - is occupying a position in the middle out of fashion?Anne McElvoy hosts Radio 4's ide...

8 Touko 57min

Weapons, real and symbolic

How do weapons exert real and symbolic power, both now and in history?Joining Matthew Sweet in Radio 4's round table discussion programme about ideas are:The former soldier and politician Tobias Ellwo...

1 Touko 56min

Weapons, real and symbolic

How do weapons exert real and symbolic power, both now and in history?Joining Matthew Sweet are:The former soldier and politician Tobias EllwoodThe sculptor Hew Locke, whose artworks exploring colonia...

1 Touko 56min

Purity

From spiritual cleanliness to purity spirals: Matthew Sweet is joined by guests including David Aaronovitch; Catherine Coldstream, author of Cloistered – My Years as a Nun; Linda Woodhead, Professor o...

24 Huhti 56min