A collage of images, featuring most prominently a person holding a sign reading "no justice no peace"

Category: Public Philosophy

Academia / Beyond the Ivory Tower / General / Public Philosophy

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Beyond the Ivory Tower Interview with Chris Armstrong

This is the latest interview in our Beyond the Ivory Tower series, a conversation between Matt Perry and Chris Armstrong. Chris is a Professor of Political Theory at the University of Southampton, winner of the 2023 Lynton Caldwell Award from the American Political Science Association and the author of A Blue New Deal (Yale University Press), an accessible and popular book about the politics of the ocean. He primarily works on issues at the intersection of global justice and the environment. He has published 6 books in total (including with Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press), over 50 journal articles and numerous articles in popular media, including The Guardian and The Conversation. Matt spoke to Chris about his experiences writing for a wider audience, his motivations to do so, and what tips he might have for others hoping to do the same.

© Chris Armstrong

Matt Perry: Thanks again for agreeing to chat! First, I’d like to ask you why you decided to pursue a career in Political Theory, and what factors led you to address the topics your work focuses on?

Chris Armstrong: When I was at school, I had no conception whatsoever of what political theory might be, or even that it existed. People in my family didn’t go to university. I didn’t really realize you could think about power, ideologies, culture and society in quite an analytical way until I picked up a sociology textbook secondhand.

I announced to my teachers that I was going to completely change all the A levels that I had been intending to do, away from sciences, and then went off to university to do Politics and Sociology. I then did my master’s in International Relations. Still, I was fairly untutored in political theory until my PhD, and in that sense I’ve found my way slowly into the (sub)discipline from the outside. I did my PhD on gender inequality. I set myself the task of investigating whether Michael Walzer’s theory could help us think about gender inequality, which was an interesting project. I’ve been finding my way since then, and I’ve shifted the direction of my work a few times. I moved into thinking about global justice first and then thinking about more environmental issues.

Right now in my career, I’m really appreciating the fact that a lot of what I read is science, history and law. And I kind of read quite indiscriminately across disciplines. In a sense, what I’m doing there is finding my way back to the beginning, where I just read indiscriminately and was interested in everything.

MP: That’s great. I have a second general question before we get onto your public engagement: what do you perceive to be the role of academia, and more specifically the political theorist?

CA: I’ve never been particularly impressed by claims about the authority of political theory. I mentioned I did my PhD on Michael Walzer. Walzer is not someone I work on now. But one thing I was impressed by was his deflationary account of political theory. He essentially thinks that the political theorist is just one more citizen: a participant in public debate, but nothing more than that. I like that idea. It is a very democratic commitment to reasoning with your fellow citizens, arguing with people, not claiming that you’ve arrived at some kind of deep truth that the population just have to fall in with, but that we should have a continual commitment to engaging with others.

MP: That resonates with me, too. I wanted to ask you: what are your own motivations for public engagement in general, but also for writing your book, A Blue New Deal?

CA: Whilst thinking about global justice in my previous work, I got more and more interested in environmental issues. And I suppose at some stage, it dawned on me that there was this big, missing element in many political theory discussions about climate, environmental protection, territory, and natural resources: the ocean.

It’s probably the biggest carbon sink, definitely the biggest ecosystem, and it contains most of the territory on our planet, but it is often simply missing from political theory discussions. You can find bits of political theory on the ocean, of course. But you mainly have to go back to Grotius and the people who engage with him, or to Carl Schmitt, if that’s to your taste. But in the tradition of analytical political theory and reasoning about territory, territorial claims, and justice, it’s missing. And that’s intellectually interesting, but it’s also deeply problematic, if it is in fact the biggest haven of biodiversity, the biggest carbon sink, and so on. So one track that I was going down was to try to persuade other political theorists to engage with the ocean.

I suppose in the end I realized that talking to fellow political theorists was important, but not the only thing that I wanted to do. The more I learned about the governance of the ocean, the more I realized how massively dysfunctional it is. I felt that I needed to do my bit to stage an intervention to raise the public profile of these issues as much as I could, while also trying to persuade other political theorists to actually engage too. Over time, I’ve engaged more with speaking to ordinary citizens, people outside academia, NGOs, and so on. That’s come to feel more important.

MP: Of course, there’s not just a missing focus on the ocean in political theory as a discipline. It seems to be something that’s more broadly reflected in politics too. So it makes sense that those two pieces came together. It’d be good if you could tell us a bit more about your book — what are the key claims?

CA: So, what I try to do in the book is to persuade people that we are going through a double-edged crisis. We’re familiar with the idea that the ocean is facing an environmental crisis, including climate change, overfishing, plastic pollution, you name it. But we also face a crisis of inequality in the way that we govern and relate to the ocean. The human impacts on the ocean are not being evenly caused by everybody, and the benefits from human interactions with the ocean are not being accrued evenly. This is a world in which some are benefiting from burgeoning ocean industries and others are not.

To some extent, the environmental piece is reasonably well understood and people in the sciences have made that case. My distinctive contribution was to draw those strands together and say that when we think about the environmental crisis, we should also always be thinking about questions of social and global justice. We have these hierarchies of power and influence that we also need to reckon with. Some people benefit from what gets called the “Blue Acceleration”, a creeping industrialization of the ocean. I argue we can’t really have good solutions to environmental problems that don’t also tackle these gulfs in power and advantage. The book draws those two things together and argues that we need to think a bit more ambitiously about the way that we are governing the ocean.

MP: One of the things I find impressive about the book is the way it draws together different topics: there’s history, ocean science, policy, and ideal theory. But the framing is around this practical proposal of the Blue New Deal. Did you have this idea already when you started writing? How did you come up with this framing given how encompassing the topic is?

CA: The Blue New Deal framing actually came in fairly late. In the beginning there was just a sense that there were three components to the project: (i) what’s wrong with contemporary ocean governance? (ii) How did we get here? And (iii) how can we do better?

I was going to call the book Ocean Justice: Political Theory for a Blue Planet. My editor at Yale quite sensibly pointed out that no one would know what that meant (like me as a kid, the general public don’t know what political theory is). So, she actually came up with the idea of naming it A Blue New Deal. I, as a theorist, flipped one way and the other and then thought, actually, she knows what she’s doing. Editors know much more than authors do about marketing.

But the Blue New Deal framing is ameliorative, not the end-result I endorse. Chapter 9 is titled ‘A Blue New Deal’, and Chapter 10 ‘Beyond the Blue New Deal’. Chapter 9 is asking how far we could get given existing institutions, and the argument is that we can get pretty far. We might do much better in bringing together a focus on socioeconomic injustice and environmental protection, even relying on existing institutions. But that isn’t entirely satisfying because I think existing institutions are deeply flawed. So, in chapter 10 I ask much grander questions about the way we think about and govern the ocean.

© Matt Perry

MP: I’m interested in what the uptake was like after releasing the book. What further public engagement did the book invite and how have people received the ideas you defend?

CA:  It’s all been great and kept me very busy in a way I was unused to. Unlike typical academic books where you wait a couple of years for reviews and citations, the response was immediate, largely thanks to my publisher’s publicity operation. There were reviews in newspapers, and I was invited onto podcasts. I was continually and positively surprised to find out that my book had in fact reached a wider audience and that people wanted to engage with it. There were two different kinds of audience. The first were policymakers and people with power. For instance, I got invited to go and talk to the board of this entity called Crown Estate Scotland, who govern and maintain the Scottish coastline.

But I also engaged with less formal audiences, such as Ocean Rebellion, a spinoff from Extinction Rebellion. They’re a vanguard of people, many of them artists, who are trying to raise the public media profile of ocean issues. Initially, they were pretty much exclusively focused on the environmental protection angle and not really on social and global justice. I’ve tried to encourage them to bring those things together.

In general, I’m much more engaged in speaking to NGOs and ordinary citizens, and getting them thinking about whether blue growth and the blue acceleration are the priorities we ought to have. Going back to the Walzerian idea of the theorist as another citizen arguing with his or her fellow citizens, I feel much more comfortable speaking to civil society actors and campaigning groups. I prefer trying to raise the profile of ocean issues, rather than trying to get the ear of princes, to use the political theory cliché.

MP:  That’s interesting. One thing it would be great to know is what the whole process of publishing for a wider audience has been like? What are some of the key challenges you faced?

CA: One self-imposed challenge was flip-flopping about what kind of book I wanted to write: public-facing, academic, or somewhere in the middle? I’m happy with where it ended up, but I wasn’t especially clear about that at the beginning. If I wanted to turn that into advice I would say: be really clear from the beginning about the exact audience you want to engage with.

If you’re going to take things seriously, you really need to read mass market books, or books that are in that hybrid academic/commercial space. I ended up in quite a good place, probably in part because I had a really good editor, but it’s obvious in hindsight that if you want to write a book that communicates to a wide audience, you ought to be reading lots of books that already do that, because there is a specific approach and method of addressing the reader. For instance, by working in lots of examples, using historical tidbits, and relying on real world cases — these are things that define the genre. It’s a bit different from the work that we academics are used to producing.

MP: That makes me wonder: has writing for a broader audience influenced your writing style more generally?

CA: That’s a really good question. I found the process of writing for a general audience really liberating. When writing for academics, you’re always thinking about qualifications, and considering the two or three interlocutors who are metaphorically sitting on your shoulders, or worrying about giving deference to various literatures. When you’re not writing for an academic audience, you don’t have that anymore. I found that very freeing. Instead, you’re trying to lay out a case as simply as possible — to cut things to the bone and get to the basics.

If there’s a wider lesson that I’ve learned from doing that, it would be to take some of that freshness and accessibility back into my academic work. I’ve always in my academic work taken accessibility quite seriously. But maybe I take it even more seriously now. You can communicate fairly complex ideas to a wider audience without sacrificing too much. Going forward, I might leave behind some of the formality, and so many gestures towards literatures. There’s a sense in which lots of academic work is quite literature-driven, whereas I suppose the work I’ve done more recently is issue-driven or ideas-driven, first and foremost.

MP: That’s really interesting. How did securing the book contract differ from typical academic publishing?

CA: The way things worked at Yale was quite different to my previous experiences in academic publishing. There was much more editorial input and a clear sense from the beginning that this was a project that the editor really liked. The book did go to academic reviewers, but this seemed to be a more advisory role compared with in mainstream academic publishing. To secure a contract, you need to find out what the editor is interested in, what they published previously, and what gaps there might be in the roster that they are hoping to fill. There’s no guarantee of success. But essentially, you have to tell a story about not just why this is intellectually interesting, but why it has broad appeal now. Timing, I think, is much more important.

MP: That’s helpful. I’ve got two more questions for you. First, I wondered how your public facing work has been received within the discipline of political theory.

CA: I’m not entirely sure. One kind of attitude is that there is primary work at the level of ideals and normative arguments, and secondary, “applied” work that shows the implications of those ideas for particular issues. There can appear to be a hierarchy between these. The thought might be that the work I was doing in A Blue New Deal might not be quite so cutting edge conceptually, that it is essentially a translation of normative ideals for a wider audience. I do think that is absolutely what I’m doing — I’m not claiming to be doing cutting-edge conceptual work and I’m unashamed about that. But I also think that “applied” work is really important and that we should be doing more of it.

Another attitude concerns the mission I had to try and persuade other political theorists to take up the issue of the ocean — which I don’t feel has been massively successful. One explanation for why is the view that “Chris has got this” so others don’t need to address it, which is absolutely not what I wanted to happen. Again, with my subsequent book about the biodiversity crisis, I’m explicitly trying to open up issues to other academics, providing a map of the territory and introducing major debates in the hope others will join me and make their own contributions. I don’t want to do it alone.

MP: Yes, applying normative theory beyond academia and opening up discussions to others are both really key. My last question is: what’s on the horizon next for you? Will you continue with more public-facing work?

CA: I am excited to continue this trajectory and write another book about the ocean that is exclusively for a public audience rather than being a hybrid — but more on that soon!

Climate / Environment / General / Governance / Public Philosophy

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Choose Your Own Philosophical Policy Role

In this interactive “choose-your-own-adventure” post, Kian Mintz-Woo (University College Cork) explores the different roles that philosophers might play in supporting the development of public policies. This is based on his recently published article in the Journal of Applied Philosophy.

[§1]

Congratulations! You have been invited to participate in a government policy-recommendation committee in [insert your research area of expertise]. You look around and see some academics (a political scientist, an economist and a [insert relevant] natural scientist), but also some political bureaucrats and some representatives of civil society. You have been jointly tasked on evaluating and recommending a policy option.

‘This is our justice theorist,’ they say in introduction. Or maybe ‘Please welcome our ethicist!’ You’re a little intimidated. You’ve never done something like this before, but you want to contribute in a way that is useful for the group—but also reflects the appropriate role for a philosopher.

When it comes time for you to contribute, do you:

  • explain, defend, and apply your substantive normative position and how it applies to this policy question (‘the partisan’): Jump to [§2]; or
  • explain what you take to be the relevant societal values and how they bear on this policy question (‘the populist’): Jump to [§3]; or
  • act as a ‘conduit for the discipline’ and explain a variety of positions and the arguments that link them to particular policy options, looking for convergence and divergence between different normative positions (‘the convergent evaluator’): Jump to [§4]?

[§2]

‘I’m a normative theorist who has considered this area extensively,’ you begin. ‘The principles and theories of [insert your normative position] are clearly stronger than the alternatives. Indeed, we can tell that those principles are useful as they show that [your preferred policy option] is highly justifiable.’

Some members of the committee, having never heard the policy options discussed in this kind of theoretical way, find that your position sounds quite plausible. Discussion continues, with the following rebuttal occasionally offered to alternative views: ‘But justice demands [your preferred policy option], according to our justice theorist!’

You find yourself squirming slightly, since you realize that [your normative opponent at a more famous university] could also have been invited instead, and, as they have a different normative position, they would have argued for [your dispreferred policy option]. But you content yourself with the thought that, luckily, you are here instead of them. Jump to [§5].

[§3]

‘We have to remember that we are here to consider and recommend public policies,’ you begin. ‘So it behooves us to consider what the public thinks. Luckily, I have a more than passing familiarity with [news opinions, polling data, historical documents, other potential sources of societal value] and I think the deep values of society are [liberal, conservative, egalitarian, xenophobic, utopian, etc.]. That is very helpful because it shows that [society’s preferred policy option] is highly justifiable.’

The committee is intrigued and begins to debate about whether these are society’s real values. One member points out that it would be somewhat more convincing if a social scientist could inform the committee, muttering something under their breath about ‘empirics’ and ‘armchair philosophers’. Another member asks whether society’s values are reflected by what society does or what society says. Yet another asks whether we should really be thinking about what society did or said.

You find yourself squirming slightly, since the questions the committee keeps asking you sound like ones that maybe a social psychologist or a sociologist or a historian would have an easier time answering. Jump to [§5].

[§4]

‘What do philosophers do?’ you begin. ‘Many of you are wondering that, but you might not really know. Well, part of what we do is we try to make arguments or draw valid inferences based on various normative positions. For instance, in this particular policy context, some influential principles and theories are [you introduce some relevant positions]. While there is significant theoretical disagreement, [some policy option] can be justified from very many normative positions and [some other policy option] can be justified from quite a lot of positions. Here is how those justifications work…’

The committee pays close attention, with some members nodding sagely when certain positions are mentioned and a couple interested murmurs as you draw some subtle inferences. Afterwards, the committee discusses which principles they are drawn to and question some of the arguments you present.

You find yourself squirming slightly, since you wonder if your summary of the arguments is idiosyncratic or whether you were fair to the various interlocutors’ positions. But you comfort yourself by thinking that you gave it your best shot and that at least you didn’t give a wild misrepresentation of the debate. Continue to [§5].

[§5]

After much discussion, multiple meetings, and several reports, the committee ultimately decides to recommend [your preferred policy option]. You are surprised but pleased, although you remain unconvinced about whether your particular recommendation made any difference. You finish your committee work with a mix of inspiration and skepticism about the role of policy committees.

But you also can’t help realizing that you can’t wait to go back and try it over again, maybe a little differently.

[The (very slightly) less interactive version of this blogpost can be found at: Mintz-Woo, Kian. Forthcoming. “Explicit Methodologies for Normative Evaluation in Public Policy, as Applied to Carbon Budgets.” Journal of Applied Philosophy. https://doi.org/10.1111/japp.70047 .]

Academia / Beyond the Ivory Tower / General / Public Philosophy

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Beyond the Ivory Tower Interview with Toby Buckle

This is the latest interview in our Beyond the Ivory Tower series, a conversation between Sara van Goozen and Toby Buckle. Toby Buckle runs the popular Political Philosophy Podcast. He has a BA in PPE from Oxford University and an MA in Political Philosophy from the University of York. He spent many years working with political and advocacy groups in the United States, such as Human Rights Campaign, Environment America,  Working Families Party and Amnesty International. He started his podcast around seven years ago, and has interviewed academics including Elizabeth Anderson, Orlando Patterson, Phillip Pettit, and Cecile Fabre, as well as politicians (such as Senator Sherrod Brown, or Civil Rights Commission Chair, Mary Francis Berry), commentators (such as Ian Dunt) and public figures (such as Derek Guy AKA Menswear Guy). He is the editor of What is Freedom? Conversations with Historians, Philosophers, and Activists (Oxford University Press, 2021). He writes regularly for Liberal Currents. In this interview, we discuss running a podcast, the enduring relevance of historical philosophers, and what young academics can do to build a public profile.

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Academia / Children / General / Pedagogy / Public Philosophy / Teaching / Teaching Philosophy

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Teaching students to be good

What’s the point of teaching moral and political philosophy?

Ancient philosophers around the world would have thought the answer to this question was blindingly obvious: the point is to make students better – better as citizens, rulers, or just as human beings.

Yet today I suspect very few academics would defend this position, and most would find the idea of inculcating virtue among their students to be silly at best, dangerous at worst.

I think the ancients were right on this one. We should educate our students to make them better moral and political agents. And I don’t think this has to be scarily illiberal at all – at least, that’s what I’m going to argue here.

The model of ethical discourse my students seem to be learning in secondary school
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Beyond the Ivory Tower / Public Philosophy / Reflections on Ukraine / Teaching Philosophy / War

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Beyond the Ivory Tower Interview with Orysya Bila

Of course, history is important, but it is not decisive. As we are not slaves to the current conditions, we are not slaves to our history. We are not really defined by what was said. We are creators of ourselves. I think it is in the dialogue, in thinking and in the exchange of thoughts that we can decide what we want to be, what is really important to us. And that is the moment where philosophical thinking becomes not just a matter of academia but a matter of public strength.

This is the latest interview in the Beyond the Ivory Tower series and part of our series dedicated to the war in Ukraine. Costanza Porro spoke with Professor Orysya Bila about the value of teaching philosophy and her experience of teaching in wartime Ukraine. Bila is the director of the philosophy department at the Ukrainian Catholic University. She holds degrees from Ukrainian Catholic University and a PhD from the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. Her research interests include the philosophical legacy of Michel Foucault, ethics and global political theory, the ethics of memory, as well as Christian theology in a postmodern context. Together with Joshua Duclos, she wrote an essay on teaching philosophy, originally published in a special issue of Studia Philosophica Estonica dedicated to the war in Ukraine, which we published in an edited form as part of our ongoing series on the Russia-Ukraine War.

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Academia / General / International / Pedagogy / Public Philosophy / Teaching / Teaching Philosophy

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The Difficulty of Doing Non-Western Political Theory

I am currently designing an undergraduate course on ‘contemporary non-western political theory’, a task fraught with difficulties. Ever since I moved to Europe for my postgraduate studies, I have felt a certain discomfort with the ethnocentrism in analytical political theory departments here, that is at once apparent and not-so-apparent. Apparent, because 99% of the authors I read in a ‘global’ justice course or the scholars I meet at ‘international’ conferences turn out to be people who grew up and trained in the ‘west’. Not-so-apparent because the content of the research taught and produced by these scholars is often genuinely universal. Questions such as ‘what justifies democracy’ or ‘is equality inherently valuable’ or ‘what grounds human rights’ can and often do have answers that transcend cultural particularities. That is, in fact, what attracted me to analytical political theory in the first place – it’s concern with some basic, normative issues that presumably affect all human societies. 

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Democracy / Governance / Liberty / Public Philosophy

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Free Speech for Political Campaign Lies?

On Tuesday, November 5, citizens of the United States will vote for who they want to serve as their president for the next four years. They will also vote for federal congressional representatives as well as a host of other state and local government officials.

U.S. political campaigns—especially presidential campaigns—are exhausting. This is in part because they are much longer and more expensive than the political campaigns in many other nations.

Another reason why many seem to have found the last three presidential campaigns exhausting is the sheer volume and brazenness of the lies told by Donald Trump and many other Republicans who have come to mimic his campaign style. Trump’s lies have reinforced partisan epistemology while simultaneously creating epistemic chaos that he seeks to use to his advantage.

He has successfully used lies to undermine public trust in U.S. elections. This is starkly exhibited by the fact that nearly 30% of Americans—including roughly two thirds of Republicans—say they believe that the 2020 U.S. Presidential election was stolen.

At least part of the reason that so many Americans believe this patent falsehood is because Trump and his allies have told this lie repeatedly. However, it seems that Trump and his allies don’t really believe it because they have been unwilling to make these same claims in court or in other contexts in which they could face legal sanctions for lying.

In the United States, freedom of speech protects one’s right to lie on the campaign trail but not in the courtroom. In the latter context, liars can be convicted of perjury.

This helps explain the truth-revealing power of courts. The best explanation for why Trump and his co-conspirators refuse to make these false claims about the 2020 election in court where they realize that lying can have significant legal consequences is that they know they are lying.

If significant legal consequences for lying are enough to stop Trump and his co-conspirators from lying in court, one might naturally conclude that the best course of action might be to create similarly significant legal consequences for lying as part of political campaigning. This is a reasonable thought, but it’s not that simple—at least not in the United States. This is because such a course of action conflicts with contemporary social and legal understandings of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution’s protection of free speech.

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Beyond the Ivory Tower / Public Philosophy / Reflections on Ukraine / War

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Beyond the Ivory Tower Interview with Aaron James Wendland

Soldier with Javelin, Odesa, July 2022. Photograph by Aaron James Wendland

This is the latest interview in our Beyond the Ivory Tower series and the first post of a new series dedicated to the war in Ukraine. For this interview, Diana Popescu-Sarry spoke to Professor Aaron James Wendland. Aaron is currently a Vision Fellow in Public Philosophy at King’s College London and Vice President of International Affairs and Professor of Public Philosophy at the Kyiv School of Economics. Since the start of the war in Ukraine, Aaron has spent considerable time in Kyiv and has published in Ukraine World and The Kyiv Independent, where he is currently the Head of Ideas. In March 2023 Aaron organised a benefit conference for the Ukraine academy, the proceedings of which were published in a special issue of Studia Philosophica Estonica last month – featuring an interview by Aaron with Margaret Atwood as well as essays by Timothy Snyder, Volodymyr Yermolenko, Orysya Bila, Joshua Duclos, Jeff McMahan, and Jo Wolff to name but a few. Over the course of the next few weeks, Justice Everywhere will feature these contributions, as well as an interview with Orysya Bila about the value of teaching philosophy in wartime Ukraine.  

Besides his work in Ukraine, Aaron has also published numerous pieces of public philosophy in The New York Times, The Toronto Star, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, The Moscow Times and The New Statesman, where he edited the popular philosophy column Agora from 2018-2022. Aaron is currently working on editing The Cambridge Critical Guide to Being and Time for Cambridge University Press as well as being an Associate Producer at Ideas on CBC Radio, and the Co-director of the Centre for Philosophy and Art at King’s College, London.

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Academia / Education / General / Pedagogy / Public Philosophy / Teaching Philosophy / Technology

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From the Vault: Universities, Academia and the academic profession

While Justice Everywhere takes a short break over the summer, we recall some of the highlights from our 2023-24 season. 

Trinity College Library, Dublin. antomoro (FAL or FAL), via Wikimedia Commons

Here are a few highlights from this year’s posts relating to academia, the modern university, and the academic profession:

Stay tuned for even more on this topic in our 2024-25 season!

***

Justice Everywhere will return in full swing in September with fresh weekly posts by our cooperative of regular authors (published on Mondays), in addition to our Journal of Applied Philosophy series and other special series (published on Thursdays). If you would like to contribute a guest post on a topical justice-based issue (broadly construed), please feel free to get in touch with us at justice.everywhere.blog@gmail.com.

Academia / Beyond the Ivory Tower / Democracy / Distribution / Economics / General / Public Philosophy / Work

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Beyond the Ivory Tower interview with Martin O’Neill

Not only are there more democratic and egalitarian alternatives theoretically, but also policies being pursued successfully at the city and the regional level, in many places, that do give people a sense of control in the economic sphere. It’s not just wishful and abstract thinking; there is abundant proof of concept. We have to remain hopeful; we have to shine a light on those examples and talk about why they represent elements of a different kind of settlement, a more justifiable and more human political and economic system, that we ought to strive to see realized more widely and more deeply.  

(This interview took place at Alma Café, a beautiful family-owned café in York, England) 

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