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David Runciman

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. 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.
New episodes every Thursday and Sunday.

Past Present Future

Today’s bad idea is ‘genius’, the label that has enabled all sorts of terrible behaviour through the ages. Writer and broadcaster Helen Lewis explains how and why the idea of genius gets misapplied to people and things that just aren’t. Why are geniuses meant to be tortured? Why are individual geniuses prized over the collaborations that lie behind most innovations? Why do we think that people who are brilliant at one thing will be good at everything else? Plus, David makes the case for Dickens as a bona fide genius.

The Genius Myth by Helen Lewis is out from today wherever you get your books https://bit.ly/3FSAKda

David’s new 20-part series Postwar – about the 1945 general election and the making of modern Britain – is available now on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002d8v1

Next time on The History of Bad Ideas: The Decisive Battle w/Dan Snow
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The History of Bad Ideas: Genius

For the first episode in our new series on the history of thinking about thinking machines, David talks to philosopher Shannon Vallor about Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). The last great silent film is the most futuristic: a vision of robots and artificial life, it is also about where the human heart fits into an increasingly mechanised world. Is it prophetic? Is it monstrous? And who are the winners and losers when war is declared on the machines?
To hear a bonus episode on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to accompany this series sign up now to PPF+ and get ad-free listening and all our other bonuses too: £5 per month or £50 a year for 24 bonus episodes. https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
Next time: Isaac Asimov’s ‘Franchise’ 
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Thinking About Thinking Machines: Metropolis

To finish this series of bad ideas, David tries to persuade Gary Gerstle of the futility of televised leadership debates. From Nixon vs Kennedy to Harris vs Trump, do the voters really learn anything from these supposed exchanges of ideas? Are they ever much more than a competition to avoid gaffes? And what did British politics gain when it introduced prime ministerial election debates (apart from a brief attack of Cleggmania)?
A new bonus bad idea is available to accompany this series: David talks to Lucia Rubinelli about what’s wrong with the idea of sovereignty. To get this and all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening sign up now to PPF+ https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
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The latest edition of the PPF newsletter is out now - sign up to get it every fortnight https://www.ppfideas.com/newsletters 
Next time: The Great Political Films resumes with Z (1969)
Past Present Future is part of the Airwave Podcast Network
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The History of Bad Ideas: Televised Leadership Debates

We resume our series on the great political films with Costa-Gavras’s Z (1969), the quintessential late 60s movie about assassination, conspiracy, street politics and police brutality. How could a film shot in Algeria and starring French actors so faithfully reconstruct a recent Greek political killing? How did it capture the spirit of the times? And what does it say about the relationship between politics as violence and politics as story-telling?
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Next time: The Candidate (1972) w/Chris Smith
Past Present Future is part of the Airwave Podcast Network
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The Great Political Films: Z

Today’s episode is a conversation between David and the former politician Chris Smith (long-time MP and Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport in Tony Blair’s first government) about The Candidate (1972), the first great political film of the 1970s. How does its portrayal of the compromises of running for office hold up today? Is it a cynical film or an inspiring one? And what lessons does it have for politics in the age of Trump?
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Next time: Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (voted the greatest film of all time in the 2022 Sight and Sound critics’ poll) 
Past Present Future is part of the Airwave Podcast Network
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The Great Political Films: The Candidate w/Chris Smith

Today’s great political film is Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), voted the greatest film of all time in the 2022 Sight and Sound poll. A classic of feminist cinema it is also a film about the meaning of time and the illusions of choice. How can a movie which shows a woman peeling potatoes in real time have you on the edge of your seat? If the personal is the political, what do three days in the life of a Belgian housewife tell us about the true nature of power?
Coming this weekend on PPF+: two new bonus episodes to accompany this series: Shoah part one and Shoah part two, exploring Claude Lanzmann’s path-breaking, harrowing, unforgettable 9-hour documentary about the Holocaust. Sign up to PPF+ to get all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
Next time in our regular slot: Kagemusha (1980)
Past Present Future is part of the Airwave Podcast Network
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The Great Political Films: Jeanne Dielman

Today’s great political film is Akira Kurosawa’s epic of war and deception Kagemusha (1980). Set in late sixteenth-century Japan it tells the story of a thief tasked with impersonating a warlord. Can physical resemblance translate into political authority? How far does the conspiracy need to go? And who in the end is the real criminal?
Out now: two new bonus episodes on PPF+ to accompany this series: Shoah part one and Shoah part two, exploring Claude Lanzmann’s path-breaking, harrowing, unforgettable 9-hour documentary about the Holocaust. Sign up to PPF+ to get all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
Next time: Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing
Past Present Future is part of the Airwave Podcast Network
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The Great Political Films: Kagemusha

Our political films season has reached the late 1980s with Do The Right Thing (1989), Spike Lee’s searing take on racial tension on a Brooklyn block on a boiling hot summer’s day. How does a fight over pizza turn into a full-blown riot? With everyone feeling exploited, who is really to blame? And where do Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X – not to mention Jesse Jackson Jr. – fit in?
Out now: two new bonus episodes on PPF+ to accompany this series: Shoah part one and Shoah part two, exploring Claude Lanzmann’s path-breaking, harrowing, unforgettable 9-hour documentary about the Holocaust. Sign up to PPF+ to get all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
Next time: Fight Club w/ Helen Lewis
Past Present Future is part of the Airwave Podcast Network
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The Great Political Films: Do The Right Thing

David talks to writer and journalist Helen Lewis about David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999), the film that launched a thousand memes. Does this tale of thwarted masculinity and corporate malfeasance code left or code right? Who, in the end, is Tyler Durden: Joe Rogan or Jordan Peterson, Elon Musk or Andrew Tate? Is Fight Club a relic of the pre-digital age or a prophetic vision of what was coming? And … Meat Loaf?!
Out now: two new bonus episodes on PPF+ to accompany this series: Shoah part one and Shoah part two, exploring Claude Lanzmann’s path-breaking, harrowing, unforgettable 9-hour documentary about the Holocaust. Sign up to PPF+ to get all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
Next Time: There Will Be Blood
Past Present Future is part of the Airwave Podcast Network
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The Great Political Films: Fight Club w/ Helen Lewis

Our great political films series reaches the twenty-first century with Paul Thomas Anderson’s unforgettable There Will Be Blood (2007), starring Daniel Day-Lewis as oilman Daniel Plainview in one of the all-time great screen performances. Based on Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil! (1927), the movie swaps out Marx for Nietzsche and tells a story of money vs religion and family vs both. What, in the end, is the force that cannot be overcome?
Out now: two bonus episodes on PPF+ to accompany this series: Shoah part one and Shoah part two, exploring Claude Lanzmann’s path-breaking, harrowing, unforgettable 9-hour documentary about the Holocaust. Sign up to PPF+ to get all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
Next time: The Social Network
Past Present Future is part of the Airwave Podcast Network
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The Great Political Films: There Will Be Blood

Episode three in our series about the great political essays is about Thoreau’s ‘Civil Disobedience’ (1849), a ringing call to resistance against democratic idiocy. Thoreau wanted to resist slavery and unjust wars. How can one citizen turn the tide against majority opinion? Was Thoreau a visionary or a hypocrite? And what do his arguments say about environmental civil disobedience today?
Read Thoreau’s essay here
From the LRB:
Paul Laity on Thoreau and self-sufficiency
Jeremy Harding on XR and civil disobedience 

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History of Ideas 3: Thoreau

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