Show Notes

My guest today is Richard Reeves. He’s a social and political commentator and he has written for the several newspapers and magazines in the US and the UK including the Guardian and The Atlantic. He has also written a biography of John Stuart Mill, John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand. Between 2010 and 2012, Richard was director of strategy to the UK’s Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg. He has also served as director of Demos, the London-based political think-tank. He is currently a senior fellow in Economic Studies at the Brooking Institution in Washington DC. You can find out more about him at his website www.richardvreeves.com. We discuss All Minus One: John Stuart Mill's Ideas on Free Speech Illustrated, edited by Richard Reeves and Jonathan Haidt, with illustrations by Dave Cicirelli.

Selected Quotes

“The way that media and communications and societies have developed have not been in the direction that Mill hoped, which was bringing more and more heterodox opinions together in sort of daily productive dialogue, but actually more of a kind of fragmentation where people are able to choose their own media, choose their own messages and create echo chambers, within which we are not actually engaging with other people’s ideas. We’re not subjecting our own ideas to critical scrutiny and having that useful, productive exchange. What we’re doing instead is we’re retreating into mini tribes where we try to only engage people who already think what we think and just confirm what we think. Actually Dave [Cicirelli] said in one of our earlier conversations, he said everybody is looking for the website www.IToldYouIWasRight.com.”

"The other bit of Mill’s argument has to be held in the same thought process as the argument for free speech which is that it’s a demand on us as citizens not to just sit passively and wait for someone to come along and argue with us, but it’s a duty of citizenship and a liberal democracy to seek disagreements, to seek those who disagree with us, to be testing our own ideas against others."

Transcript

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Chris Martin: My guest today is Richard Reeves. He’s a social and political commentator and he has written for several newspapers and magazines in both the US and the UK, including The Guardian and The Atlantic. He has also written a biography of John Stuart Mill and between 2010 and 2012, Richard was Director of Strategy to the UK’s Deputy Prime Minister.

He has also served as Director of Demos, the London-based political think tank and he’s currently a senior fellow in economics studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC. You can find out more about him at his website www.RichardvReeves.com. So here is Richard Reeves.

Welcome to the show.

Richard Reeves: Hi. Thanks for having me.

Chris Martin: It’s good to have you on. So you and Jonathan Haidt are about to release an edition of chapter two of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. It’s an edition called All Minus One and it’s illustrated. Tell me a bit about how this came about.

Richard Reeves: Well, Jon, through his work at Heterodox Academy, his office had been doing a lot to try and kind of encourage this idea ...