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
Nature and landscape
California’s landscapes provide endless inspiration for a woodcut printmaker
10 minutes
video
Love and friendship
Never marry a man you love too much, and other views on romance in Sierra Leone
5 minutes
video
Engineering
Can monumental ‘ice stupas’ help remote Himalayan villages survive?
15 minutes
video
Virtues and vices
Why Bennie tried to disappear, and what happened when he was found decades later
16 minutes
video
History of technology
Curious singles and tech sceptics – what ‘computer dating’ looked like in 1966
6 minutes
video
Animals and humans
Join seabirds as they migrate, encountering human communities along the way
13 minutes
video
Stories and literature
Two variants of a Hindu myth come alive in an animated ode to Indian storytelling
14 minutes
video
Technology and the self
The commodified childhood – scenes from two sisters’ lives in the creator economy
14 minutes
video
Fairness and equality
There’s a dirty side to clean energy in the metal-rich mountains of South Africa
10 minutes