The Gray Area with Sean Illing27 Touko 2019

Why good people are easily corrupted (with Lawrence Lessig)

I’ve been learning from, and arguing with, Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig for a decade now. We have a long-running debate over whether money or polarization is the root cause of our political ills. But our debate works because we share a crucial belief: Bad institutions overwhelm good individuals. In his latest book, America, Compromised, Lessig is doing something ambitious: He’s offering a new definition of institutional corruption, then showing how it plays out in politics, academia, the media, Wall Street, and the legal system. This is a definition of corruption that doesn’t require any individual to be corrupt. But it’s a definition that, if you accept it, suggests much of our society has been corrupted. Here, Lessig and I discuss what corruption is, how to understand an institution’s purpose, whether capitalism is itself corrupting, our upcoming books about the media, how small donors polarize politics, Lessig’s critique of democracy, why good people are particularly susceptible to institutional corruption, whether we should ban private money in politics, and ways to reinvent representative democracy. So, you know, nothing too big or heady. Book recommendations: The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalismby Edward E. Baptist Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy by Francis Fukuyama The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Powerby Shoshana Zuboff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Revisiting the "father of capitalism"

Sean Illing talks with Glory Liu, the author of Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher became an Icon of American Capitalism. Smith is most well-known for being the “father of capitalism,” b...

19 Elo 202451min

Breaking our family patterns

Sean Illing speaks with marriage and family therapist Vienna Pharaon, whose book 'The Origins of You' aims to help us identify and heal the wounds that originated from our family, which shape our patt...

12 Elo 20241h 2min

Why Orwell matters

In an Orwellian twist, the word “Orwellian” has been misused so much over the decades that it’s essentially lost its meaning. But George Orwell, author of the classics Animal Farm and 1984, was very c...

5 Elo 202452min

The timebomb the founding fathers left us

The US Constitution is a brilliant political document, but it’s far from perfect. This week’s guest, Erwin Chemerinsky, argues that many of today’s threats to democracy are a direct result of compromi...

29 Heinä 202451min

Swear like a philosopher

You can’t drop an f-bomb on the radio, but fortunately for our guest, you can say anything you want in a podcast. This week, host Sean Illing talks to philosopher Rebecca Roache, author of For F*ck’s ...

22 Heinä 202444min

Taking Nietzsche seriously

Sean Illing talks with political science professor Matt McManus about the political thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19th-century German philosopher with a complicated legacy, despite his crossover...

15 Heinä 20241h 2min

What India teaches us about liberalism — and its decline

Authoritarian tendencies have been on the rise globally and the liberal world order is on the decline. One hotspot of this tension lies in India, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi employs autocratic ...

8 Heinä 202446min

1992: The year politics broke

We’re living in an era of extreme partisan politics, rising resentment, and fractured news media. Writer John Ganz believes that we can trace the dysfunction to the 1990s, when right-wing populists li...

1 Heinä 202444min