#13 Our Human Tradition: On Consolation with Professor Michael Ignatieff

A reading of "Counterrevolutionary Subordination in Trump's America" originally published April 10 on Substack! 

In this conversation I speak with Prof. Jeffrey Wasserstrom about his upcoming book The Milk Tea Alliance: Inside Asia's Struggle Against Autocracy and Beijing (June, 2025). We discuss his current work on Orwell and Asia, Orwell's essay on Gandhi, the new democratic solidarity movements arising across Asia in resistance to authoritarianism in Thailand, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, and the philosophy and outlook of Thai activist Netiwit Chotiphatphaisal. We also discuss the relationship between solidarity and music.

John Dunn is Emeritus Professor of Political Theory, Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge and one of three founders of the Cambridge School of intellectual history. It was an honour for me to speak with John about the globalisation of political thinking. We must develop, Dunn argues, a global history of political thought that in face of globalisation can 'tell the history of the interactive fates of humans themselves.' Dunn reflects on his early experiences in post-war Germany, Iran, India, and Britain, as well as his experiences later in Ghana and with Japanese thinkers, and how they all made the global a stage for his thinking about politics. We discuss the relationship between history and future-oriented political theory and reflect on what it would mean to begin the daunting work of constructing a global history of political thought.

In this podcast, Dr Iain McGilchrist and I speak about themes from his book The Matter with Things. We discuss the collapse of Western civilisation’s spiritual life, the hemisphere hypothesis as Dr McGilchrist presents it in his neuroscientific research and his philosophical investigations, his sense of the Sacred, the unknown of the All, and how we might find a space for silence, metaphor, and love in our modern lives.

In this podcast, I speak with Professor Faisal Devji from St Antony’s College, Oxford, about Mahatma Gandhi’s complex relationship with violence, revolution, and reform.

Taking a (well-earned!) pause on politics and reform, in this episode of Beaconsfield podcast I speak with Michael Posner, author of a three-part oral history of Leonard Cohen: the songwriter and poet who has meant more to me in my life than perhaps any other. We discuss Leonard’s character from the perspective of those who knew him best, his relationships with those he loved and lost, his various hidden selves, and his original sense of God, defeat, brokenness, and reconciliation. At the heart of Leonard's work is a reach for the light through the cracks of humanity - I hope you find this conversation as meaningful as I did.

It was a joy to speak with Yale's Gregory Collins about his book, Commerce and Manners in Edmund Burke’s Political Economy. The Burke that emerges is one not immediately familiar to us: a principled reformer with powers of imaginative eloquence, yes; yet one with an equally deep appreciation of empirical data and its ability to inform sound political decision making.

Linda Colley is one of the world's most eminent scholars of global and imperial history. Professor of History at Princeton, she is a highly respected contributor to public debates around constitutionalism in the United Kingdom, and the recent author of The Gun, The Ship and The Pen: Warfare, Constitutions and the Making of the Modern World. In this conversation, we reflect on written constitutions as they globally evolved through crisis and revolution in the 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. In the process, we examine the strange ways in which written constitutions have come to both entrench and redress existing inequalities for women and Indigenous peoples, as well as the threats to written constitutions around the world today, and what might be done to preserve these fallible, yet still essential, paper creations of human beings.

What do failure, loss, and tragedy have to teach us about being human? How might we live in hope and truth despite our wounds? Why must we venture beyond ourselves to console others? In this podcast, it is an honour to speak with Professor Michael Ignatieff about the human tradition of consolation. We explore what religious traditions, the lives of past thinkers and statesmen, and Michael's own experience in active politics have to teach us about the need for consolation: to live, in an imperfect world, in solidarity with each other.

In the first podcast of the year, Professor the Hon Bob Carr and I reflect on the lessons for reform leadership that emerge from his time as former Premier of NSW (1995-2005) and as Australian Foreign Minister (2012-2013). We also consider: the reform tradition of the Australian Labor Party; the nature and reach of historical study; the ongoing follies of human beings; and the statesmanship of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt.