Photo by Arnaud Schildknecht/Unsplash
Photo by Arnaud Schildknecht/Unsplash
In much of the world, there’s a shared sense that liberal democracies have grown corrupt and stagnant, leaving them unable to respond to society’s most pressing problems – including the climate crisis and inequality, in its many forms – and making them vulnerable to anti-democratic movements. Addressing an audience at the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) in London this April, the UK economist and philosopher Daniel Chandler draws from his book Free and Equal: What Would a Fair Society Look Like? (2023) to outline practical steps towards a more effective progressive political movement, and by extension, a more just society. In doing so, he suggests that we should look to the ideas of the 20th-century US philosopher John Rawls, who outlined a blueprint for a ‘realistic utopia’ within a liberal democratic framework in his landmark work A Theory of Justice (1971).
Video by the RSA
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Death
Even in modern secular societies, belief in an afterlife persists. Why?
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Design and fashion
The mundane becomes mesmerising in this deep dive into segmented displays
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Architecture
Tour the European architecture that dreamed of a wondrous, fictitious China
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Spirituality
Trek alongside spiritual pilgrims on a treacherous journey across Pakistan
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Thinkers and theories
Photographs offer a colonialist window to the past – one that must be challenged
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Animals and humans
An artist and ants collaborate on an exhibit of ‘tiny Abstract Expressionist paintings’
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Mathematics
How a curious question about colouring maps changed mathematics forever
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Meaning and the good life
The world turns vivid, strange and philosophical for one plane crash survivor
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Cities
The rise and fall of Kowloon Walled City, Hong Kong’s infamous urban monolith
18 minutes