Free Thinking - Against Democracy
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 4 March 2015
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Churchill famously commented that ‘democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.' Rana Mitter and his guests David Runciman, Professor of Politics, University of Cambridge; Duncan Kelly, Reader in Political Thought, University of Cambridge; Patricia Thornton, University Lecturer in the Politics of China, University of Oxford and Tim Stanley, blogger and columnist for The Daily Telegraph test Free Thinking to its limits by looking at the alternatives to our own political system.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, it's a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that at some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.4 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.9 | Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:32.2 | Can you smell frying beef? |
| 0:35.1 | Well, if you can, that's because tonight we're slaughtering a sacred cow and asking, |
| 0:39.6 | is democracy really such a good idea? I know this programme's called free thinking, but it sometimes |
| 0:45.1 | seems that this is the one question you're really not allowed to ask. We often assume that democracy |
| 0:50.3 | is the only way to run a society, and that even questioning that idea makes you a dangerous character. |
| 0:56.1 | The first draft of recent UK anti-terror legislation proposed giving statutory powers to crack down on vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values, |
| 1:06.3 | including democracy, the rule of law, and individual liberty. |
| 1:10.3 | That would certainly have got Hugh Lorry into into trouble in this Friand-Lorry sketch. |
| 1:15.1 | What's so good about democracy? |
| 1:16.7 | What's so good about democracy? |
| 1:19.2 | What's so good about democracy, ladies and gentlemen? |
| 1:22.9 | Democracy is freedom of thought and belief and speech. |
| 1:26.2 | That's what's so good about it, you degraded heap of smelliness. |
| 1:30.2 | Well, I'll leave it to you to decide who to nominate as a degraded heap of smelliness. |
| 1:34.3 | But let's be clear about one thing. |
| 1:36.3 | The idea that liberal, pluralist, electoral democracy is the normal way of doing things |
| 1:41.2 | is a very recent idea, maybe just a few decades old. To help us understand |
| 1:45.8 | why we think democracy is so natural and whether the anti-democrats sometimes have the best |
| 1:51.3 | tunes, we have four deeply enlightened thinkers here. David Rumsman is author of The Confidence |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.