This week David talks to science writer Meehan Crist about Thomas Malthus and the perennial question of overpopulation. Malthus wrote 225 years ago and was wrong about almost everything, yet his ideas still have a powerful hold on our imaginations and our fears. How many people is too many? What are the limits of population in the age of climate change? And why does Elon Musk think we should all be having more children? Thomas Malthus, ‘An Essay on the Principle of Overpopulation’ (1798)  Meehan Crist’s 2020 LRB lecture, ‘Is it OK to Have a Child?’
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Are There Too Many People?

Past Present Future is a bi-weekly History of Ideas podcast with David Runciman, host and creator of Talking Politics, exploring the history of ideas from politics to philosophy, culture to technology.&nbsp;David talks to historians, novelists, scientists and many others about where the most interesting ideas come from, what they mean, and why they matter.
Ideas from the past, questions about the present, shaping the future.&nbsp;Brought to you in partnership with the London Review of Books.
New episodes every Thursday and Sunday. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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This week's great political novel is Anthony Trollope’s Phineas Redux (1874), his lightly and luridly fictionalised account of parliamentary polarisation in the age of Gladstone and Disraeli. A tale of political and personal melodrama, it explores what happens when political parties steal each other’s clothes and politicians find themselves hung out to dry by their colleagues. A story of integrity and hypocrisy and how hard it is to tell them apart.
Next time: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
Coming next month on PPF: The Ideas Behind UK General Elections
Sign up now to PPF+ to get 2 bonus episodes every month and ad-free listening www.ppfideas.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Great Political Fictions: Phineas Redux

This second episode about George Eliot’s masterpiece explores questions of politics and religion, reputation and deception, truth and public opinion. What is the relationship between personal power and faith in a higher power? Is it ever possible to escape from the gossip of your friends once it turns against you? Who can rescue the ambitious when their ambitions are their undoing?
To get two bonus episodes from our recent Bad Ideas series – on Email and VAR – sign up now to PPF+ and enjoy ad-free listening as well www.ppfideas.com Next time: Trollope’s Phineas Redux, the great novel of parliamentary ups and downs.
Coming soon on the Great Political Fictions: Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Time Machine, Mother Courage and her Children, Atlas Shrugged, Midnight’s Children, The Handmaid’s Tale, and much more. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Great Political Fictions: Middlemarch (part 2)

Our series on the great political novels and plays resumes with George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872), which has so much going on that it needs two episodes to unpack it. In this episode David discusses the significance of the book being set in 1829-32 and the reasons why Nietzsche was so wrong to characterise it as a moralistic tale. Plus he explains why a book about personal relationships is also a deeply political novel.
To get two bonus episodes from our recent Bad Ideas series – on Email and VAR – sign up now to PPF+ and enjoy ad-free listening as well www.ppfideas.com
Next time: Middlemarch (part 2) on marriage, hypocrisy, guilt and redemption.
Coming soon on the Great Political Fictions: Phineas Redux, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Time Machine, Mother Courage and her Children, and much more. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Great Political Fictions: Middlemarch (part 1)

For our last episode in this series David is joined by Helen Lewis to discuss Mesmerism – aka animal magnetism – an eighteenth-century method of hypnosis for which great medical benefits were claimed. Was its originator, Franz Mesmer, a charlatan or a healer? Was his movement science or religion or something in between? And what can it tell us about twenty-first century phenomena from online social contagion to hypnotherapy? 
To get two bonus Bad Ideas episodes – on Email and VAR – sign up now to PPF+, where you will also get all our past and future bonus episodes plus ad-free listening www.ppfieas.com 
Coming next: The Great Political Fictions resumes with Middlemarch, the greatest of them all. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The History of Bad Ideas: Mesmerism

For our penultimate episode in this series David talks to Kathleen Stock about Roland Barthes’s idea of the Death of the Author (1967). Once very fashionable, the notion that readers not writers are the arbiters of what a text means has had a long and sometimes painful afterlife. As well as exploring its curious appeal and its persistent blindspots, Kathleen discusses her personal experience of how it can go wrong.
Two bonus Bad Ideas episodes for PPF+ subscribers – on Email and VAR – will be available very soon. Sign up now and get ad-free listening too! www.ppfideas.com
Coming Next: Helen Lewis on Mesmerism
Coming Soon: The Great Political Fictions Part 2, starting with Middlemarch Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Are There Too Many People?

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