Past Present Future

Past Present Future

Past Present Future is a bi-weekly History of Ideas podcast with David Runciman, host and creator of Talking Politics, exploring the history of ideas from politics to philosophy, culture to technology. David talks to historians, novelists, scientists and many others about where the most interesting ideas come from, what they mean, and why they matter. Ideas from the past, questions about the present, shaping the future. New episodes every Thursday and Sunday.

Episodes

Ideas of Globalisation: What’s Gone Wrong? w/Dani Rodrik

May 15, 2025 • 54 mins
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 Sat...
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Ideas of Globalisation: The Crisis of the 1970s (and Trump!)

May 11, 2025 • 64 mins
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 c...
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Ideas of Globalisation: Central Banks vs the People (and Trump!)

May 8, 2025 • 56 mins
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 priva...
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Ideas of Globalisation: Hoover and Smoot-Hawley (and Trump!)

May 4, 2025 • 62 mins
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 presidentia...
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Ideas of Globalisation: Chamberlain and the Tariff Wars (and Trump!)

May 1, 2025 • 58 mins
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 ...
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Ideas of Globalisation: Trade, Race and Empire (and Trump!)

April 27, 2025 • 60 mins
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 social...
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The History of Revolutionary Ideas: Lenin and Trotsky

April 24, 2025 • 56 mins
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 f...
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PPF Live Special: Churchill – The Politician With Nine Lives w/Robert Saunders

April 20, 2025 • 63 mins
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 ...
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The History of Revolutionary Ideas: The Rite of Spring w/Dominic Dromgoole

April 17, 2025 • 46 mins
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 pr...
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The History of Revolutionary Ideas: Ubu Roi w/Dominic Dromgoole

April 15, 2025 • 46 mins
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 aud...
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The History of Revolutionary Ideas: Salon Des Refusés w/Dominic Dromgoole

April 13, 2025 • 42 mins
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 revolu...
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The History of Revolutionary Ideas: Marx and the Paris Commune

April 10, 2025 • 56 mins
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? A...
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The History of Revolutionary Ideas: Free Speech

April 6, 2025 • 63 mins
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 Da...
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PPF Live Film Special: Network w/Helen Lewis

April 3, 2025 • 66 mins
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...
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The History of Revolutionary Ideas: Darwin w/Adam Rutherford

March 30, 2025 • 54 mins
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? ...
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The History of Revolutionary Ideas: The Taiping Revolution

March 27, 2025 • 66 mins
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? O...
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The History of Revolutionary Ideas: 1848: The Radical Revolution w/Chris Clark

March 23, 2025 • 53 mins
In our second of three episodes on the revolutions that swept through Europe in 1848 David and Chris Clark explore the forces demanding radical change. What was ‘the Social Question’ and who was asking it? Where did the violence that erupted in the summer of 1848 come from? What, if anything did it achieve? And who paid the price? Out tomorrow: a final bonus episode on 1848 looking at the counter-revolution: how did the ruling regi...
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The History of Revolutionary Ideas: 1848: The Liberal Revolution w/Chris Clark

March 20, 2025 • 56 mins
In the first of three episodes about the revolutions that swept through Europe in 1848 David is joined by historian Chris Clark to explore the ideas behind this continental upheaval. We start with the ‘Liberal Revolution’: Who were the liberals and what had turned them into revolutionaries? How did the original French Revolution overshadow their hopes and fears? Were parliaments and constitutions capable of sustaining revolutionary...
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The History of Revolutionary Ideas: The Bayesian Revolution w/David Spiegelhalter

March 16, 2025 • 61 mins
Today’s revolutionary idea is something a bit different: David talks to statistician David Spiegelhalter about how an eighteenth-century theory of probability emerged from relative obscurity in the twentieth century to reconfigure our understanding of the relationship between past, present and future. What was Thomas Bayes’s original idea about doing probability in reverse: from effect to cause? What happened when this way of think...
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The History of Revolutionary Ideas: Slave Uprising: The Haitian Revolution

March 13, 2025 • 58 mins
Today’s episode is about a very different revolution from any we’ve discussed so far: David talks to historian Hank Gonzalez about the Haitian Revolution, which for the first time in history saw a slave revolt result in an independent free state. How did the Haitian Revolution intersect with the American and French Revolutions that preceded it? Why were European powers unable to reverse it despite massive military intervention? Wha...
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