Politics in the 20th Century
In Our Time
BBC
4.6 • 9.9K Ratings
🗓️ 22 October 1998
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Melvyn Bragg talks to Gore Vidal and Alan Clarke about the future of the nation-state; is the concept dead and buried? And what is the relationship between politics and morality - have salaciousness and self-righteousness taken over where seriousness of intent and a strong nerve left off, or was it ever thus? With Gore Vidal, American writer, commentator and author of The Smithsonian Institution; Alan Clarke, historian, politician and author of The Tories: Conservatives and the Nation State, 1922-97.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.uk. |
| 0:09.0 | I hope you enjoy the program. |
| 0:12.0 | Hello, my guest today are the novelist and commentator Gore Vidal, |
| 0:15.0 | whose new novel The Smithsonian Institution is published this week. |
| 0:19.0 | His historical novels educate America, |
| 0:21.0 | his pukish novels such as Myra Brackenbridge and this one delight |
| 0:24.6 | us all, and his essays, Virgin Ireland is a new collection in paperback, emanate from a man whom |
| 0:29.8 | some say, and I agree, is the best President America never had. |
| 0:33.0 | And a historian and politician Alan Clark MP, |
| 0:36.0 | whose history of the Conservative Party this century has just been published. |
| 0:39.0 | Since the Donkeys in 1961, his histories have often been thought controversial, is also famous for his bare knuckle |
| 0:45.6 | diaries and noted for, let us say, a certain independence of opinion. |
| 0:50.1 | Gervidal, in your essays, the new collection, Virgin Islands, you refer to Plato's view of the cyclical |
| 0:56.5 | nature of human society, the way it evolved. |
| 0:59.5 | You go to the Neapolitan scholar Vico, and you talk about society going from theocracy to an aristocracy to a tyranny and then into a time of chaos and you characterize our time as a time of chaos. That's the title of the essay. How would you characterize, why do you think |
| 1:14.1 | of this as chaos and how do you characterize a chaos in which you see us today? |
| 1:18.0 | Well, we're sort of at the end of the American Imperial and we're the end of the nation state everybody's sick of that and if |
| 1:27.4 | VICO working from Plato's Republic is right we're about to enter a new phase or we're in it now which is |
| 1:36.2 | chaos in which the future arrangements are not very clear. We had a speaker of the House of Representatives in the |
| 1:45.6 | 19th century who was so politically reactionary that they said if God had asked him |
| 1:52.1 | his opinion of creation he would have voted for |
| 1:55.6 | chaos. |
... |
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