Sharing insights from his book 'Why Politics Fails', in this 10-Minute Talk Ben Ansell FBA unpacks the challenges of democracy. Given that humans rarely agree, there can be no such thing as the ‘will of the people’ – which is why it’s so difficult to override individual self-interest in favour of our collective interest in resolving some of our most pressing political problems. From the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to Brexit, hear about the importance of losers’ consent and “agreeable” disagreement. 

Please note, at 3:34 the spelling of the Sejm of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth should be S-E-J-M.

Speaker: Professor Ben Ansell, Professor of Comparative Democratic Institutions at the University of Oxford, and the BBC's 2023 Reith Lecturer. 

This podcast is for informative and educational purposes.
10-Minute Talks are a series of pre-recorded talks from Fellows of the British Academy, published on YouTube and also available on Apple Podcasts. https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/10-minute-talks/id1530020476  

Subtitles, also known as closed captions, are available on our YouTube videos. You can access them by clicking on the 'CC' button or gear icon on the video. The 'CC' button and gear icon are usually located at the bottom of videos.  

Find out more about the British Academy: https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/  

For future events, visit our website: https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/events/  

Subscribe to our email newsletter: https://email.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/p/6P7Q-5PO/newsletter