Summary
Is authority a justly unfashionable quality that we should consign to the past? Or does it still have a place in political and business leadership, schools, medical settings and in the home? What is the difference between authority and power, how have historical shifts such as the advent of the internet affected public perceptions of authority, and how much should authority feature in the raising of children?
In Radio 4's roundtable discussion programme about ideas past and present, Anne McElvoy and guests explore these questions and more.
Justine Greening is a former Conservative Secretary of State for Education and Minister for Women and Equalities Martin Gurri is a former CIA analyst who writes about the relationship between politics and media who published a book called The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium Sophie Scott-Brown is a philosopher and historian of anarchism Peter Hyman is a former headteacher and adviser to Tony Blair and Keir Starmer who writes a Substack, Changing the Story Tom Simpson is the Alfred Landecker Professor of Values and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford
Producer: Eliane Glaser
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:07.0 | I'm no longer ravenous. I'll no longer eat until I fall asleep. |
| 0:11.0 | The Hunger Game, a new five-part series exploring the meteoric rise of weight loss drugs. |
| 0:16.0 | It's been an incredible story with these drugs. |
| 0:18.1 | The uptake, the amount of product that's been sold, the amounts of money |
| 0:21.2 | is cost. What the drugs do, how they work, and the knock-on effects of their widespread use. |
| 0:26.5 | We'll be sitting here in three years' time going, oh, it caused problems that we're now going to have to |
| 0:31.6 | fix. The Hunger Game with me, Professor Gilesio. Listen first on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:38.4 | Hello and welcome to the Arts and Ideas podcast with me and Mikhailvoy. |
| 0:44.5 | Now, who said this? My relationship to power and authority is, I'm all for it. People need someone to watch over them. |
| 0:52.7 | 95% of people in the world need to be told what to do |
| 0:56.7 | and how to behave. No less, an authority figure on bodybuilding and California politics than the |
| 1:03.4 | Terminator himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger, taking the bull by the horns on the matter of whether |
| 1:09.3 | the firm pat-of- of authority is what most of us |
| 1:12.4 | really need. But we don't hear so much of the case for authority as a virtue these days, |
| 1:18.2 | a lot more about it being misused or exceeded. It's become a word that in my lifetime, at least, |
| 1:24.7 | feels like it's moved from desirable to suspect. Yet we see plenty of |
| 1:29.8 | power being exercised all around us and a lot of people competing to get more of it. See the |
| 1:35.7 | multi-way party scrap in the Gorton and Denton by-election this week for more power play. So what's |
| 1:42.3 | going on with authority and how are these tensions about what |
| 1:46.4 | it means and how much of it we want in our lives play out in our institutions, in our politics, |
| 1:52.7 | business and in the home? Now, I speak as someone who likes the idea of firm guidance, |
... |
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