Jonathan Sumption on the Challenges of Democracy
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Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Layla Ishmere. Our guest today is British judge and historian Jonathan Sumption. He served as a Justice of the Supreme Court from 2012 to 2018 and has written several books on medieval history, including The Age of Pilgrimage, The Albergensian Crusade, and five books on the Hundred Years War. His latest book, The Challenges of Democracy and the Rule of Law, examines the enduring struggles and conflicts within democratic societies. Joining Sumption to discuss it all is historian of ideas Sophie Scott Brown.
Let's join Sophie now with more. Hello and welcome to Intelligence Squared. I'm Sophie Scott Brown. Welcome to Intelligent Squared, Jonathan. Hello, I'm glad to be here. Well it's wonderful to have you here and congratulations on the book. It's absolutely stuff full with ideas and it's certainly not afraid to be provocative, which is great. Hopefully we'll be digging into some of those provocations in the course of this conversation. So
Before we launch too deep into anything, I thought perhaps we could go back a little bit to first principles, and this idea or ideal of democracy that filters through the book and and sort of reappears in different forms across the essays that make up the book. Now there's a lot of inflamed talk around at the moment. presumably this is partly why you were motivated, inspired to bring these essays together. So a lot of inflamed talk about the future of democracy being in peril, what democracy really means, uh invocations of the people left, right, and centre. But Jonathan, in a nutshell, how do you see democracy? What is
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