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The History of Ideas Podcast
with David Runciman

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The History of Revolutionary Ideas: The Reformation (part 2): Calvin

7 February 2025

In this bonus episode David talks to historian Alec Ryrie about another key figure of the Reformation: Jean Calvin. Who was Calvin and what made Calvinism such a powerful theological and political movement? Does it deserve its reputation for ruthless discipline and puritan morality? How has its influence been felt from revolutionary America to apartheid South Africa?

The History of Revolutionary Ideas: Socrates w/Agnes Callard (Part Two)

20 January 2025

This bonus episode is the second part of David’s conversation with philosopher Agnes Callard about Socrates and the transformative potential of the Socratic method. In it they discuss politics and how to depoliticise it; AI and how to deal with it; death and how to face it; and parties and how to avoid them.

The Great Political Films: In The Loop

8 January 2025

The final bonus episode to accompany this political films series also happens to be David’s favourite political film (if favourite means comfort-viewing!): Armando Iannucci’s In The Loop (2009). A biting satire of British and American politics in the run-up to the Iraq war, it’s also hilarious, affectionate, and very, very sweary. No swearing in this episode, but plenty of talk about what makes it so funny. Plus: how does this version of New Labour politics c.2003 match up to the real thing?

The Great Political Films: Shoah part two

21 December 2024

The second of our two bonus episodes on Claude Lanzmann’s monumental Shoah (1985) explores the testimony of those who saw what was happening in Treblinka, Auschwitz and the Warsaw Ghetto. How did they bear it? How did they live to tell the tale? When did the certainty of death change the calculus of resistance? And what does this film’s story-telling succeed in preserving when all else is lost?

The Great Political Films: Shoah part one

20 December 2024

The first of two bonus episodes about Claude Lanzmann’s epic 9-hour documentary Shoah (1985) recording eye-witness testimony from survivors of, bystanders to and perpetrators of the Holocaust. Part one explores how the extermination of the Jews became a reality for those who experienced it first-hand. How did something unimaginable become something unavoidable? When did the unfathomable truth of what was happening hit home? And how on earth did Lanzmann get his witnesses to talk?

The History of Bad Ideas: Sovereignty

30 November 2024

This bonus episode for PPF+ to accompany our bad ideas series is about what’s gone wrong with the idea of sovereignty. David talks to historian of ideas Lucia Rubinelli about how a seventeenth-century vision of politics still exerts its grip in the twenty-first century. Why does political authority have to have a single source? What are the alternatives? And did Brexit really give the UK its sovereignty back?

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