Understanding our great upheaval
The books and ideas behind the Academy 2025
Between world affairs and the see-sawing government at home, it seems hard to keep up with what is really driving current events. In fact, this sense of upheaval needs some attention of its own. That’s why I will be joining Ideas Matter at their annual event The Academy, held this year the 5th and 6th July. Each year, I join dozens of free-thinkers for a resident weekend of lectures, discussions and food and drink. It’s an intellectual retreat and a real intellectual treat. This is the last weekend for earlybird discounted tickets so it is a great time to get your tickets.
In our weekend essay, Jacob Reynolds takes us through the reading list and intellectual underpinnings of this important event for the summer.
Upheaval: Why politics needs a new language
Get your earlybird discounted tickets here until Monday 2 June.
Saturday 5 & Sunday 6 July 2025
Wyboston Lakes, Great North Road, Wyboston
Bedfordshire, MK44 3AL
At a time when the language of politics feels tired and hollow – ideologies staggering about like zombies in search of brains – the reading list for our upcoming event provides a bit of an intellectual armoury to understand precisely why our political vocabulary feels so utterly exhausted. Each book selected is not merely a historical curiosity but a guide to dissecting our confused moment.
Start with Aristotle’s Politics. Here is one of the original attempts to grapple seriously with the organisation of society, power, and citizenship. Aristotle grounds us firmly in the pragmatic reality that politics is fundamentally about how different people with different interests can live together. Given our polarised and fragmented present, Aristotle’s clarity about community, virtue, and practical wisdom seems refreshingly radical.
Fast-forward two millennia to James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution. Writing in 1941, Burnham noticed that ownership was already slipping from capitalists to technocrats. Burnham saw the rise of a managerial elite supplanting traditional capitalist and democratic institutions. Sound familiar? Today's corporate and bureaucratic technocracy, managing everything from climate policy to cultural norms, demonstrates Burnham’s uncanny prescience. Understanding Burnham is key to deciphering our technocratic reality.
Where Burnham exposed the new class, Daniel Bell’s The End of Ideology dissected its mood. Published in 1960, Bell argued that grand narratives had exhausted themselves. The managerial age would be pragmatic, not prophetic. Yet the void Bell identified was quickly filled by therapeutic identity politics and ESG pieties. The apparent end of ideology gave birth to today’s stifling moralism, a pseudo-religious fervour wrapped in technocratic language, suggesting Bell diagnosed symptoms, but perhaps missed their trajectory.
John Rawls’s Political Liberalism represents both the last stand and the crowning ideology of the liberal centre’s last stand. Recognising the reality of disagreement, he nonetheless tried to save liberal institutions from the very centrifugal forces they had unleashed. Unfortunately, his solution was a tight policing of the “consensus”. Rawls’ legacy is the idea that liberal societies would have to jettison true democracy in order to stay “liberal”. Understanding Rawls is understanding why liberalism now polices speech more fiercely than any church court.
To try and plug the gap - and to prepare the ground for discussions on citizenship and belonging - we’ve included this year two books from Roger Scruton. England: An Elegy and Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition. Scruton mourns the institutions, affections and landscapes that once tied English liberty to inherited obligation. With our nod to England’s last philosopher - and former lecturer at this event - we hope to stimulate a discussion of whether conservatism has anything left to contribute to the task of national renewal.
If there are few conservatives left (and perhaps even fewer capital-C ones), there has been an explosion of people talking about “post-Liberalism”. So we turn to The Politics of Virtue, written by Adrian Pabst and this year’s lecturer John Milbank. They mount a post-liberal assault on the reduction of man to consumer and state to service-provider. Drawing on Christian metaphysics and civic republicanism, they argue that freedom divorced from the common good enslaves. Whether or not you share their theology, they understand that freedom is more than just a tug-of-war between state and market.
Two more books explore this idea. Patrick Deneen’s much discussed Why Liberalism Failed attempts to argue that the “liberal order” has become so authoritarian not out of some accident, but because it fulfilled the liberal project all to well. By relentlessly emancipating the individual from every unchosen bond, liberalism hollows out the civic soil it needs to survive. Similar themes are developed, albeit more explosively, in Auron MacIntyre’s The Total State. Liberal democracy, he argues, mutates into a quasi-religious regime enforcing egalitarian sermons through corporate, bureaucratic and algorithmic organs.
Both books have been very influential among the American new Right. Indeed, Deneen was one of JD Vance’s teachers and major influences. So Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land and J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy drag analysis down from faculty lounges to the trailer parks. Hochschild listens respectfully to Louisiana Trump voters; Vance gives voice to the rust-belt. Together they expose the cultural contempt that sustains the managerial order. You cannot govern people you insist on despising. Their testimonies are a standing rebuke to conservative bloviators who fetishise GDP figures while communities collapse.
Aristotle teaches what politics is for; Burnham and Bell describe what it became; Rawls illustrates liberalism’s high-water mark and hidden rot; Scruton, Milbank and Pabst attempt to restore the language of home, virtue and the sacred; Hochschild and Vance remind us real people bleed beneath our theories; Deneen diagnoses terminal decline; MacIntyre sketches the authoritarian sequel.
It is, however, part of the predicament of the moment that we seem to lack a kind of positive project. For those of us more sympathetic to The Enlightenment, we long to hear how to sustain the traditions of freedom without surrendering the individual to the collective. For all its faults, this is what the much-maligned “liberal project” got right. But such a book has not yet been written, so we cannot include one on the reading list.
But this gives us an opportunity. Through a weekend of thought and discussion, we can perhaps chart a course through the upheavals of the moment and decide which parts of our inheritance need revision, and which parts we cannot surrender.
The Academy is an attempt to provide a forum where these ideas can be thought-through. We hope you can join us. Purchase your tickets before the early bird offer ends on Monday!