#14 The Gun, The Ship and The Pen: On Written Constitutions with Professor Linda Colley

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.

What is the Cultural Commons? Is there a tradition that links Burke with Nietzsche? What about Burke and Gandhi? What was Gandhi's critique of modernity? And what was Burke's, too, of Capital? Is there an Indian secularism? In this conversation it is my honour to speak with Professor Akeel Bilgrami about his past and present work in philosophy, political economy, and intellectual history.

Who are we to each other, and to ourselves? In this conversation, Sylvana Tomaselli and I explore Wollstonecraft’s visceral critique of Burke in A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790). We explore the differences between their thinking about women, men, relationships, and love; and consider some of the points on which their thoughts surprisingly align.

In this conversation, I speak with Leslee Udwin about her quest to end discrimination around the world – particularly violence against women and girls. We discuss: the relationship between her acting and activism; her direction of India's Daughter (2015), the award-winning documentary in which she interviewed the rapists and murderers of Jyoti Singh in Delhi; and her founding of Think Equal, the not for profit that aims to undo hate by teaching children under the age of 6 how to love through empathy, emotion and embodying the other as self.