Ideas Matter: Culture Wars, then and now, episode 2: ‘The emergence of the culture wars’

This is the second podcast to the series Culture Wars: then and now, recorded in 2019 at the summer school The Academy.

The series explores the emergence and evolution of the culture wars, and aims to understand the intellectual, cultural, social and political ideas that shape them. 

In this lecture, Frank Furedi introduces the concept of the culture wars, explores its historical context and outlines how changing conceptions of morality and the status of moral authority distinguish today’s culture wars from those that took place in the past.

LECTURER
Professor Frank Furedi, sociologist and social commentator; author, How Fear Works: culture of fear in the 21st century and Populism and the European Culture Wars

Talking Points in this podcast

• The dominant issues that serve as the focus of the culture wars today
• The emergence of a socio-political impulse to remove ourselves from the past
• The culture wars as catalysed by the corrosion of Western society’s confidence in its own values
• The importance of autonomy and sovereignty

BIBLIOGRAPHY
First World War: Still No End in Sight (chapters 6 & 8), Frank Furedi, Bloomsbury Continuum, 2014

Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning (Preface) Lionel Trilling, Penguin, 1965

THE ACADEMY 2019
In the context of today’s instrumental approaches to knowledge, The Academy summer school is a modest attempt to demonstrate the value of scholarship, and of the worth of the university as a place of free enquiry dedicated to the pursuit of truth. Find out more: https://theboi.co.uk/the-academy

IDEAS MATTER PODCAST
Ideas Matter podcast takes the most important issues of our times and explores the ideas and intellectual trends that have shaped where we are today. Subscribe and listen to Ideas Matter on iTunes, Podbean or SoundCloud.

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