Ideas Matter, Culture Wars: then and now, ep 12, ‘The Cultural Turn’

Professor Frank Furedi discusses the cultural turn that emerged in the 1970s and its subsequent development in the decades that followed. The talk explores the reaction to the 60s counterculture, the rise of post-material values and the contemporary politicisation of culture.

LECTURER
Professor Frank Furedi, sociologist and social commentator; author, How Fear Works: culture of fear in the 21st century and Populism and the European Culture Wars.

TALKING POINTS IN THIS PODCAST
• The role of environmental issues in the intellectual elite’s adoption of post-material values in the 1970s
• The erosion of meaning and dissolving of long established physical and cultural boundaries of Western civilisation
• The demise of the traditional authority of the liberal ideal of autonomy
• The depoliticization of public life and the new marriage of cultural and technocratic politics.

FURTHER READING
• The Hidden History of Identity Politics by Frank Furedi, 1 December 2017 www.frankfuredi.com/article/the_hid…entity_politics
• Icarus Fallen: The Search for Meaning in an Uncertain World by Chantal Delsol, ISI Books, 2010

THE ACADEMY 2019
• In the context of today’s instrumental approaches to knowledge, The Academy summer school is a modest attempt to demonstrate the value of scholarship, and of the worth of the university as a place of free enquiry dedicated to the pursuit of truth.

IDEAS MATTER PODCAST
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