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
video
Meaning and the good life
Why Orwell urged his readers to celebrate the spring, cynics be damned
11 minutes
video
Engineering
Can monumental ‘ice stupas’ help remote Himalayan villages survive?
15 minutes
video
Fairness and equality
There’s a dirty side to clean energy in the metal-rich mountains of South Africa
10 minutes
video
Fairness and equality
‘To my old master’ – a freed slave answers the request to return to his old plantation
7 minutes
video
Fairness and equality
Visit the small Texas community that lives in the shadow of SpaceX launches
14 minutes
video
Political philosophy
The radical activist couple who fought for social change in the courtroom
21 minutes
video
Art
In his poem ‘London’, William Blake crafted a bleak vision of the city he loved
9 minutes
video
Political philosophy
Beyond the veil – what rules would govern John Rawls’s ‘realistic Utopia’?
6 minutes
video
Politics and government
How it looked to Afghan women to see the Taliban return to power
33 minutes