battle of ideas

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future
by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Published 10 Jun 2012

Some will reap monetary rewards after they leave office, part of the process of revolving doors that is endemic in the United States; for others, the pleasures of power today suffice. Backing up these ideas are armies of “experts” willing to provide testimony, arguments, and stories to show the rightness of these views. This battle of ideas occurs, of course, in many playing fields. The politicians have their surrogates, their minions who are not running for office but who advance variants of these ideas, and challenge those of rivals. Evidence and argumentation on both sides are assembled. This “battle of ideas” has two objectives (like advertising more generally)—to mobilize those who are already true believers and to persuade those who have not yet made up their minds.

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Advertisers are good at distilling a message down to a sixty-second ad that strikes just the right notes—an emotional response seemingly reinforced by “reason.”33 THE WEAPONS OF WAR There is a real battlefield of ideas. But it does not, for the most part, involve a battle of ideas as academics would understand it, where evidence and theory on both sides are carefully weighed. It is a battlefield of “persuasions,” of “framing,” of attempts not necessarily to get to the truth of the matter but to understand better how ordinary citizens’ perceptions are formed and to influence those perceptions. In this battle of ideas, certain weapons play a central role. In the last chapter, we discussed one of these weapons—the media. It should be obvious that imbalances in the media can lead to a battlefield in the war of ideas that is far from level.

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That they had failed miserably was evident: weeks after European financial institutions were given a clean bill of health (from the passage of a stress test, supposedly designed to ensure that the banks could survive a major economic stress), the Irish banks collapsed. A few weeks after they were given a second seal of approval, having supposedly tightened their standards, another major European bank (Dexia) failed.38 MONETARY POLICY AND THE BATTLE OF IDEAS A central theme of this book is that there has been a battle of ideas—over what kinds of society, what kinds of policies, are best for most citizens—and that this battle has seen an attempt to persuade everyone that what’s good for the 1 percent, what the top cares about and wants, is good for everyone: lower tax rates at the top, reduce the deficit, downsize the government.

The Rise of the Outsiders: How Mainstream Politics Lost Its Way
by Steve Richards
Published 14 Jun 2017

Speaking in 1991, when the Labour party was well ahead in the polls, Lawson declared that the Conservatives would win the forthcoming election because it was winning the battle of ideas. Lawson added that the party winning the battle of ideas would always be victorious at elections, even if it faced crises en route. Lawson was right, in relation to the UK. The Conservatives won easily in 1992, albeit under the leadership of the more pragmatic John Major rather than the tonal evangelism of Thatcher. In the US, Bill Clinton was the victor by turning the battle of ideas on its head. He stole from the Republicans the language of economic competence. Above all, he ruthlessly mocked President Bush’s pledge at the previous election not to raise taxes.

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Above all, he ruthlessly mocked President Bush’s pledge at the previous election not to raise taxes. ‘Read my lips… no new taxes,’ Bush had declared, before he sensibly raised taxes during his subsequent four years in office.2 Clinton’s onslaught was counter-intuitive and successful. Instead of trying to win the battle of ideas by putting a centre-left case for tax and higher spending on its own, he attacked his Republican opponent for raising taxes and, in doing so, raised questions about Bush’s integrity, too. This gave Clinton space to be the reassuring candidate – the one who could be trusted, in all senses of the term, to run the economy.

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Constraints on ‘tax and spend’ force radical modernisation of the public sector and reform of public services to achieve better value for money. The public sector must actually serve the citizen: we do not hesitate to promote the concepts of efficiency, competition and high performance.6 As Philip Stephens had noted, Margaret Thatcher would have agreed with every word. Some on the centre left in the 1990s did not seek to win the battle of ideas, but accepted defeat and, in their contrition, hoped to win elections more or less on the same basis as she did. The parties on the centre left that followed this defensive route suffered severe identity crises, and voters became suspicious of their leaderships – leaderships that worked so assiduously hard to win their respect.

The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas
by Janek Wasserman
Published 23 Sep 2019

Seager’s final assessment was an endorsement of the Austrian project: “The value . . . consists in the encouragement it gives to original thinking and in the sharpening effect it has upon the critical faculties of all those who take part in it. It has been to me the most valuable economic course I have had in Germany.” Even if Berlin’s institutional apparatus was superior, he maintained that the Viennese were winning the battle of ideas. Vienna was becoming a magnet, “attracting . . . economic students from all countries.”84 That Austria was a premier destination in 1891 for economics would have been shocking twenty years earlier, when Menger finished his Principles. This chapter has traced this surprising story of the Austrian School’s emergence.

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They defended the liberal state against the threats of conservatism and—more significantly and much more vociferously—against socialism and Bolshevism. In doing so, they reprised the conflicts of the previous decade within their private seminars—with elevated political stakes. The Mises-Schumpeter generation waged a battle of ideas in the overheated intellectual culture of “Red Vienna.” They cultivated their own “Vienna circles” and developed institutions that supported a new generation of scholars, which reestablished the international reputation of the school. They also sought support from allies in business and finance, reinforcing their ties to Austrian elites.

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As the wide array of responses reveals, Mises’s work forced Austrian socialists to rethink their arguments and approaches, a credit to the liberal’s intellectual clout.23 As all participants in the calculation debate recognized, it was not just an intellectual struggle; economic ideas had far-reaching consequences. This was especially true for Mises. He argued that the conflict between capitalism and socialism was primarily a battle of ideas. In an anti-Marxist spirit, he argued, “It is ideas that make history, not the ‘material productive forces,’ those nebulous and mystical schemata of the materialist conception of history. If we could overcome the idea of Socialism . . . then Socialism would have to leave the stage.”24 Mises believed that his ideas had broad implications for politics, society, and culture.

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right
by Jane Mayer
Published 19 Jan 2016

As far back as 1976, Charles Koch, who was trained as an engineer, began planning a movement that could sweep the country. As a former member of the John Birch Society, he had a radical goal. In 1978, he declared, “Our movement must destroy the prevalent statist paradigm.” To this end, the Kochs waged a long and remarkable battle of ideas. They subsidized networks of seemingly unconnected think tanks and academic programs and spawned advocacy groups to make their arguments in the national political debate. They hired lobbyists to push their interests in Congress and operatives to create synthetic grassroots groups to give their movement political momentum on the ground.

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“Some of my friends—most I’d say—feel a sense of guilt about having money. I do not, and never have.” As he describes it, “An inheritance comes to the person but also to his community and country. It can do powerful good.” He notes, “I’ve felt good about being able to put dollars to work in the battle of ideas.” Scaife recalled his childhood as happy. He liked the governess who raised him, admired his father, and adored his mother. But his sister, Cordelia, who was four years older, saw their upbringing differently. She described the family as excelling principally in “making each other totally miserable.”

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They would have to change how politicians thought if they wanted to implement what were then considered outlandish free-market ideas. To do that would require an ambitious and somewhat disingenuous public relations campaign. The best way to do this, Hayek told Fisher, who took notes, was to start “a scholarly institute” that would wage a “battle of ideas.” If Fisher succeeded, Hayek told him, he would change the course of history. To succeed, however, required some deception about the think tank’s true aims. Fisher’s partner in the venture, Oliver Smedley, wrote to Fisher saying that they needed to be “cagey” and disguise their organization as neutral and nonpartisan.

Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason
by Dave Rubin
Published 27 Apr 2020

They’re equally unwelcoming for sane, decent people who happen to be fiscally conservative, classically liberal, libertarian, or—dare I say it—the worst thing of all: straight, white, and male. Rather than being all-inclusive and fair, the left is now authoritarian and puritanical. It has replaced the battle of ideas with a battle of feelings, while trading honesty with outrage. So, instead of retracing why I left the left, what you need is a book about how to leave the left—and where to go next. You need a path forward—a road map of how to get there. And even if you’ve left the left already, or never were part of the left in the first place, this book will help you understand our crazy political climate.

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There’s an old joke that if you have three Jews at a table, then you have four opinions. Now try a family of thirty! That was my home life and I truly loved the endless debate. But our differences never surpassed our respect for one another. By the time dessert was done we’d pressed the reset button and let it all go. It was a playful battle of ideas. It was also the original safe space because there was no punishment for having an “incorrect” view—well, apart from the time my aunt claimed that the Friends sitcom was funnier than Seinfeld, which almost split the family apart. Naively, as I grew up, finished school, and graduated from college, I’d hoped to have the same understanding with my peers in the real world.

Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital
by Kimberly Clausing
Published 4 Mar 2019

Yet, while we have made some incremental progress here and there, policy-makers have too often been more interested in conflict than compromise. At present, there is a large political problem. The very political polarization that has resulted from economic inequality has made it much harder to come up with an effective policy response to the inequality.4 Solving this problem is not easy, but it begins with a battle of ideas. This book argues that economic inequality is indeed the dominant economic problem of our time, but that the policy solutions to this problem should involve both an embrace of globalization, trade agreements, immigration, and international business, and a much more thorough policy framework to make sure that the benefits from these economic forces accrue to all Americans.

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Wind and rain may be kept outside, but so are light and air.” 8. The phrasing of this last line evokes a book that I found inspirational early in my college education: Alan S. Blinder, Hard Heads, Soft Hearts: Tough-Minded Economics for a Just Society (Reading, MA: Basic Books, 1987). Acknowledgments This book contributes to the battle of ideas that surrounds us, hoping to improve the world in some small way. Whether or not it succeeds in this aim, it has been an immense pleasure to bring together knowledge I’ve accumulated in three decades of thinking about international economics. I’m deeply grateful for this opportunity, and for the unwavering support of colleagues, friends, and family.

Uncomfortably Off: Why the Top 10% of Earners Should Care About Inequality
by Marcos González Hernando and Gerry Mitchell
Published 23 May 2023

The Guardian, 30 January. www.theguardian. com/books/2019/jan/30/class-ceiling-sam-friedman-daniellaurison-review-pays-to-be-privileged Harrington, B. (2016) Capital without borders. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Harrop, A. (2022) Faced with Liz Truss, the left can have confidence it will win the battle of ideas. LabourList. https://labourlist.org/2022/09/ faced-with-liz-truss-the-left-can-have-confidence-it-will-winthe-battle-of-ideas Hastings, A., Bailey, N., Bramley, G., Gannon, M. and Watkins, D. (2015) The cost of the cuts: The impact on local government and poorer communities. London: Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Hecht, K. (2017) A relational analysis of top incomes and wealth: Economic evaluation, relative (dis)advantage and the service to capital.

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work
by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams
Published 1 Oct 2015

Our effort therefore differs from any political task in that it must be essentially a long-run effort, concerned not so much with what would be immediately practicable, but with the beliefs which must gain ascendance if the dangers are to be averted which at the moment threaten individual freedom.22 The Society thus made a ‘commitment to a long-run war of position in the “battle of ideas” … Privatized, strategic, elite deliberation was therefore established as the modus operandi.’23 Opening the ten-day event, Hayek diagnosed the problem of the new liberals: a lack of alternatives to the existing (Keynesian) order. There was no ‘consistent philosophy of the opposition groups’ and no ‘real programme’ for change.24 As a result of this diagnosis, Hayek defined the central goal of the MPS as changing elite opinion in order to establish the parameters within which public opinion could then be formed.

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A hegemonic project therefore implies and responds to society as a complex emergent order, the result of diverse interacting practices.22 Some combinations of social practices will lead to instability, but others will tend towards more stable (if not literally static) outcomes. In this context, hegemonic politics is the work that goes into retaining or navigating towards a new point of relative stability across a variety of societal subsystems, from the national-level politics of the state, to the economic domain, from the battle of ideas and ideologies to different regimes of technology. The order which emerges as a result of the interactions of these different domains is hegemony, which works to constrain certain kinds of action and enable others. In the rest of this chapter, we examine three possible channels through which to undertake this struggle: pluralising economics, creating utopian narratives and repurposing technology.

The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World
by Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro
Published 11 Sep 2017

The battle is an “eternal state, as truth and falsity cannot co-exist on this earth.”58 In Qutb’s view, those who think that the war is not about ideas but instead about imperialism are fools: “This group of thinkers, who are a product of the sorry state of the present Muslim generation . . . have laid down their spiritual and rational arms in defeat.”59 Even worse, Qutb warned, Christendom is attempting to “deceive us by distorting history and saying that the Crusades were a form of imperialism.”60 The medieval Crusades, the European wars against the Ottoman Empire, Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the establishment of the State of Israel, the support of repressive Arab regimes—these events are presented by the West as though they were the ordinary stuff of power politics, the lamentable, but entirely routine, tendency of the strong to dominate the weak. But this “admission,” according to Qutb, is a lie. The Crusades were never about power or territorial control. The war with the West has always been a battle of ideas—between those who recognize that only God possesses sovereignty and those who impute it to man. Qutb’s crusade is not a nationalist one. Seeing the history of the Middle East as a legacy of foreign control, he argued, misleads Arabs into thinking that the solution must be local control. Arab nationalists think that the antidote to imperialism is nationalism—Churchill must be replaced by Nasser.

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“There has been a Ph.D. dissertation about the best way to clean dishes, which seems more important to them than the Bible or religion.” 19 After returning to Egypt, Qutb became a leader of Islamic extremist thought. He wrote his most influential work, Milestones, while imprisoned. In it, he argued that the war with the West has always been a battle of ideas between those who recognize that only God possesses sovereignty and those who impute it to man. 20 Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-declared caliph of the Islamic State, gave his first public address on Ramadan in 2014. Qutb’s worldview permeated his message. Baghdadi called all Muslims to join the Islamic State—a state defined by belief, not ethnicity, nationality, or international law. 21 In 2014, the Islamic State released a video in which a follower declares that his group will eliminate all state borders.

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American Magazine, 249 “American plan” (1924), 117–18 American Revolution, xiv, 27, 82–83, 84, 331 American Society of International Law, 258, 262 Americans with Disabilities Act (1990), 331–32 amici (allies), 90 Amsterdam Admiralty Board, 4–6, 8, 13–14, 16 Andrus, Burton, 278 Anglo-Gorkha War, 312 Anne of Brittany, 38–39, 42–43, 54 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (1972), 372 Anti-George, 85 Antigua, 381–82 anti-Semitism, xxi, 21, 106–7, 216, 222, 229, 230, 231, 233–34, 235, 236, 237, 241, 255, 256, 264–66, 274, 275, 279, 281, 285–86, 291–92, 295, 298, 305, 355–57, 399, 403 see also Holocaust apartheid, 387 Apraksin, Stepan Fyodorovich, 455n Aquinas, Thomas, 10, 438n Arab League, 356 Arabs, xx–xxi, 355–57, 396–411, 401, 410, 411, 412, 414, 416, 417, 549n, 550n Arendt, Hannah, 236, 237 Argentina, 169n Arminian movement, 19 arms embargoes, 171–74 Articles of Confederation, xiv Article 48 (Weimar Constitution), 228–30, 231 Aryans, 235, 240–41 Asia, 133–54, 158, 173, 179–84, 193, 205, 359 see also specific countries Assad, Bashar al-, 369, 417 assassinations, 101–2 “assistance short of war,” 82–92, 246 Astor, John Jacob, Sr., 257–58 “Astor Orphans,” 258 Atlantic Charter (1941), 189–92, 322, 330, 345–46 Atlantic Wall, 250 Attlee, Clement, 283 Augusta, USS, 189 Augustine of Hippo, 10, 438n Australia, 349 Austria, 82, 231, 240, 269, 284–85 Austro-Hungarian Empire, 101–2, 317, 323–24 Axis powers, xvii, 186, 189, 190–93, 214, 248–61, 267, 270–71, 300, 316, 318, 320n, 322, 332, 346, 415 see also specific countries and leaders Ayala, Balthazar, 25, 442n Baal, 74 Ba’ath Party, 407, 412 Baghdadi, Abu Bakr al-, 397, 411–15 Baldwin, Frank, 60–61 Balfour, Arthur James, 356 Balfour Declaration (1917), 356, 399 Baltic states, 318–19, 506n, 532n see also Estonia; Latvia; Lithuania Baltimore Sun, 128 Bangladesh, 328 bankoku kōhō (“international law”), 144–50 Bankoku Kōhō Yakugi (“Elements of International Law”) (Wheaton), 144 Banna, Hassan al-, 403–4 Bansho Shirabesho (Institute for the Investigation of Barbarian Books), 142 Basdevant, Jules, 267 Basic Law (Germany), 214 Bastille, Storming of the (1789), 83 “battle of ideas,” xxi, 110, 142, 288, 293, 342, 408–11, 414, 423 “Battle of Production,” 371 Baudius, Dominicus, 7 Beck, William, 129 Beelzebub, 65 Beer Hall Putsch (1923), 251 Behemoth (Neumann), 229, 295 Beinecke Rare Books Library, 38 Beirut Marine barracks attack (1984), 388 Belarus, 208–9, 318 Belgium, 102, 349, 463n Ben-Gurion, David, 356 Benin, 324, 347, 531n Berlin, 93, 217, 220, 224, 226, 228–30, 235–36, 274, 276, 292, 297n Berlin, University of, 235–36, 297n Bethmann-Hollweg, Theobald von, 463n Bible, 20, 74–75, 96, 375, 404, 455n Biddle, Francis, 261–62, 277, 286 bin Laden, Osama, 408–9, 414–15 Bir Tawil, 355 Bismarck, Otto von, 45–46 Black Coyote, 58 Black Hills, 50–51 Black Sea fleet, Russian, 310 Black Tuesday (1929), 225 Blaine, John J., 129 Blücher, Marshal, 67 “blurry lines,” 355, 357–59 Bodin, Jean, 294 Boehner, John, 393 Boettiger, John, 261, 262–63 Bohlen, Charles E., 207 Boko Haram, xiii, 368 Bolivia, 323, 358 Bolles, Blair, 186 Bonn, University of, 226 Borah, William E., 111–15, 118, 120, 127, 128, 129, 162, 165, 177, 195, 272, 470n, 472n, 474n-76n, 522n Borchard, Edwin, 170, 171 borders and boundaries, xv–xvi, 34, 35–36, 51–52, 53, 102, 105, 116, 148–49, 321–23, 328, 332, 354–58, 363, 368–69, 396–402, 400–401, 401, 419 Bormann, Martin, 290 “botched handoffs,” 355–57, 359 Bowman, Isaiah, 194 Braun, Eva, 264 Braun, Otto, 217 Brazil, 349 Brest-Litovsk, Treaty of (1918), 221 Brewster, Owen, 198 Briand, Aristide, x–xiii, xxii, 120–26, 129, 130, 132, 133, 167, 170, 175, 194, 195, 214, 217, 223–24, 249, 424, 471n, 472n–73n, 502n see also Peace Pact (1928) Briand-Kellogg Pact (1928), 129, 167, 170, 175, 249, 477n, 502n see also Peace Pact (1928) British Antarctic Survey, 386 British East India Company, 22, 68 British Empire, 22, 40, 67–69, 82–92, 102–6, 120, 133, 159–60, 165, 176–82, 184, 189, 191–94, 246, 247, 267–68, 312, 343, 348–49, 396–402, 401, 407, 463n, 500n, 531n Brooks, Mel, 382 Brulé Sioux, 58 Brüning, Heinrich, 245 Brussels Conference (1874), 79 Bryan, William Jennings, 103 Buchanan, James, 445n Buchenwald concentration camp, 264–65 Bullitt, William Christian, Jr., 197–98 Bulwer-Lytton, George Robert, 155–56 Bureau of Indian Affairs, U.S., 57 Burma, 387 Bush, George W., 371–72, 373, 380 Butler, Nicholas Murray, 121–22, 124, 469n Butwal, 312 Byelorussia, 208–9, 318 Bynkershoek, Cornelius van, 72–73 Cadogan, Alexander, 190, 191, 199 Caesar, Julius, 45 Cain, 375 California, xvi, 31, 34, 48, 52–53, 133, 445n caliphate, 411–15 Calvinism, 19 Cambodia, 355 “Cambridge Group,” 248, 249, 253 Cameroon, 328 Camp Bucca, 411 Campo de Cahuenga, Treaty of (1847), 52 Canada, 349 “Can Peace Be Enforced?”

The Euro and the Battle of Ideas
by Markus K. Brunnermeier , Harold James and Jean-Pierre Landau
Published 3 Aug 2016

The Euro and the Battle of Ideas Copyright © 2016 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR press.princeton.edu Jacket design by Faceout Studio, Emily Weigel Jacket images © Shutterstock and Thinkstock All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Brunnermeier, Markus Konrad, author. | James, Harold, 1956- author. | Landau, Jean-Pierre, author. Title: The euro and the battle of ideas / Markus K.

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In good times, tax revenue from banks would thus accrue to a European budget, while in bad times, this taxing power could provide the necessary backstop to guarantee restructuring without adverse spillover and contagion effects. This would be unpopular with small countries with large financial sectors, but also politically impossible for the United Kingdom. PART IV OTHERS’ PERSPECTIVES 12 Italy The battle of ideas in Europe occurs between countries, but it also takes place within countries. Italy—which in many other respects replicates on a national level the problems of the European continent—also reproduces the European contrast in economic philosophies. Every aspect of the recent European tragedy has its equivalent in Italy’s much longer historical experience.

Brexit, No Exit: Why in the End Britain Won't Leave Europe
by Denis MacShane
Published 14 Jul 2017

Just so, but by any definition Europeans, even with all their problems, live a far better life than they did in 1980 and intelligent political choices can help. As the British economic historian Harold James shows in his book written with Markus Brunnermeier and Jean-Pierre Landau, The Euro and the Battle of Ideas (2016), there are no immutable truths about how nations approach economic decision making. There have been times when France was excessively liberal and Germany keen on state intervention and deficit spending, even if more recently the opposite economic theories and practice appear more in evidence.

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In the 800-page award-winning biography of Alan Greenspan by the British financial journalist Sebastian Mallaby there is no index entry for Trichet, let alone his warning at Davos in January 2007 that a financial crash caused by Greenspan’s ideology lay round the corner. In their book The Euro and the Battle of Ideas, Harold James of Princeton University and his co-authors observe that ‘A great deal of the interpretation of the course of the euro crisis was shaped by the British and American press – the Financial Times, the Economist, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal – and that outside vision has filtered through a sort of condescension about Europeans not really getting it.’

Zero-Sum Future: American Power in an Age of Anxiety
by Gideon Rachman
Published 1 Feb 2011

In subsequent years, it has become almost compulsory for political commentators to take a sideswipe at Fukuyama and to dismiss the end-of-history thesis as hubristic nonsense.5 Part of the problem is often a misunderstanding of what Fukuyama was actually saying. He was not predicting the end of events. His argument was rather that the battle of ideas had ended. Communists had stopped believing in their own system, and there was no new ideological challenger to liberal democracy on the horizon. This did not mean that all countries would become liberal democracies immediately, or that conflict would disappear from the world. Instead Fukuyama predicted a “steadily expanding post-historical world”6 of liberal democracies, which would clash intermittently with a “historical” world of countries that had not yet made the transition to liberal democracy.

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Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (London: Allen Lane, 2008), 253. Wilentz makes the same case in Age of Reagan, 177. 10. Wilentz, Age of Reagan, 143. 11. Ibid., 147. 12. Reagan, American Life, 311. 13. Wilentz, Age of Reagan, 275. 14. Ibid. 15. D’Souza, Reagan, 26. 16. Robert Wade, lecture at “The Battle of Ideas,” London, October 31, 2009. 17. Wilentz, Age of Reagan, 207. 18. Reagan, American Life, 204. 19. Peter Jenkins, Mrs. Thatcher’s Revolution: Ending the Socialist Era (London: Jonathan Cape, 1987), 210. 20. Ibid. 21. Alan Greenspan, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (London: Penguin, 2007), 88. 22.

Corbyn
by Richard Seymour

What the election result showed was that, though the weight of received opinion and ingrained assumptions should not be dismissed, they are also no longer decisive. There is an opening. To ensure that Labour is able to keep moving in this direction, it would be useful to think about a division of labour, wherein the grass roots continually sought to push the agenda farther than Corbyn is able to. Indeed, since ideology is not just about a ‘battle of ideas’ staged in the national media, but about where those ideas connect with lived experience, activists in their local communities are best placed to win ideological battles. Ideology in this sense is close to what Raymond Williams meant by ‘culture’, when he argued that ‘culture is ordinary’.19 It is what people take for granted in their everyday practice, the basic axioms they live by and which shape their tastes, their sense of justice and fairness, as well as their sense of the possible.

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Ideology in this sense is close to what Raymond Williams meant by ‘culture’, when he argued that ‘culture is ordinary’.19 It is what people take for granted in their everyday practice, the basic axioms they live by and which shape their tastes, their sense of justice and fairness, as well as their sense of the possible. It is also the beliefs, conscious or otherwise, which they take pleasure in, cherish, and are passionately committed to. One reason why it simply isn’t good enough to ‘win the battle of ideas’ is precisely that people take far too much pleasure in their beliefs to give them up for a well-put policy statement. Put like this, winning ideological space is clearly not something that can be separated from organisation. There is no way of shifting people’s beliefs and assumptions without regularly spending time with them.

Geek Wisdom
by Stephen H. Segal
Published 2 Aug 2011

“I WILL NOT BE PUSHED, FILED, STAMPED, INDEXED, BRIEFED, DEBRIEFED, OR NUMBERED. MY LIFE IS MY OWN.” —NUMBER SIX, THE PRISONER WHEN PATRICK MCGOOHAN’S Number Six angrily defies his captors with this litany in the seminal British secret-agent series’ opening installment, he crystallizes everything we need to know about the battle of ideas, ideology, and identity that spans the show’s all-too brief run. The premise, featuring the dogged, dogmatic Six bedeviled at every turn in his attempts to escape from mysterious captors and reclaim his identity, hinges on the idea that we’re all boxed in by a system—whatever that system is—that controls us at every step, and any notions of breaking free from that box are themselves just one more level of control.

Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right
by Angela Nagle
Published 6 Jun 2017

The problem with the contemporary style of Tumblr-liberalism and a purely identitarian self-oriented progressivism that fomented in online subcultures and moved on to college campuses is that the very idea of winning people over through ideas now seems to anguish, offend and enrage this tragically stupefied shadow of the great movements of the left, like the one that began on campuses like Berkeley in 1964. Milo may be vanquished but not through a battle of ideas. The online culture wars of recent years have become ugly beyond anything we could have possibly imagined and it doesn’t look like there is any easy way out of the mess that has been created. Suddenly, how far away the utopian Internet-centric days of the leaderless digital revolution now seem, when progressives rejoiced that ‘the disgust’ had ‘become a network’ and burst suddenly into real life.

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist
by Kate Raworth
Published 22 Mar 2017

But these citizens of 2050 are being taught an economic mindset that is rooted in the textbooks of 1950, which in turn are rooted in the theories of 1850. Given the fast-changing nature of the twenty-first century, this is shaping up to be a disaster. Of course the twentieth century gave rise to groundbreaking new economic thinking, most influentially in the battle of ideas between Keynes and Hayek. But though those iconic thinkers held opposing perspectives, they inherited flawed assumptions and common blind spots that lay unexamined at the root of their differences. The twenty-first-century context demands that we make those assumptions explicit and those blind spots visible so that we can, once again, rethink economics.

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There may be no perfect frame waiting to be found but, argues the cognitive linguist George Lakoff, it is absolutely essential to have a compelling alternative frame if the old one is ever to be debunked. Simply rebutting the dominant frame will, ironically, only serve to reinforce it. And without an alternative to offer, there is little chance of entering, let alone winning, the battle of ideas. Lakoff has for years drawn attention to the power of verbal framing in shaping political and economic debate. He points, by way of example, to the notion of ‘tax relief’ widely used by US conservatives: in just two words, it frames tax as an affliction, a burden to be lifted by a heroic rescuer.

Philanthrocapitalism
by Matthew Bishop , Michael Green and Bill Clinton
Published 29 Sep 2008

Having financed Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, among other movies with a message, Skoll is now looking to further increase the impact of his philanthropy on policy, particularly towards climate change. Marion and Herbert Sandler, who made their fortune from banking, are trying to influence the battle of ideas by improving the quality of journalism (see “Up to a Point, Mr. and Mrs. Sandler” box). Google.org and Omidyar Network are philanthropic organizations that have deliberately given up tax advantages available to traditional foundations so that they can engage in political campaigning in order to achieve their goals.

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And, as both Richard Branson and Ted Turner have noticed, there may be huge opportunities for philanthropists in the current failings of the institutions of global governance—the solving of which is shockingly low on the agenda of the world’s governments. To encourage them, the public should support formal roles being given to philanthropists in global governance, along the lines of the Gates Foundation seat on the board of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. And, of course, there is the battle of ideas to be won. Philanthropists can provide a vital check and balance to often erroneous or ill-informed conventional wisdom by funding think tanks and even movements for social change, as Soros and Gates did with Bono’s campaigning organization, One. Skoll’s backing of films like Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, and Google’s focus on Darfur, for example, have helped put neglected issues on society’s agenda.

Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities
by Eric Kaufmann
Published 24 Oct 2018

This has produced the highest immigration levels in the OECD and increased the non-European share of the Canadian population from around 2 per cent in 1970 to 22 per cent today. With this in mind, I pay close attention to the scope of the anti-racist taboo across different societies. Evolutionary psychology is not irrelevant, but the battle of ideas and political forces is what’s decisive. Flee or Join? Right-wing populism dominates the news, but white majorities are also responding to ethnic change in quieter ways. The economist Albert Hirschman spoke of the difference between ‘voice’, fighting for change within one’s social group, and ‘exit’, leaving it.38 Likewise, if voting for the populist right is ‘voice’, a way of combating change, white ‘exit’ consists of withdrawal into white residential areas or social networks.

…

The rise of right-wing populism with its anti-immigration agenda doesn’t threaten the integrity of the EU. Instead, the populist right is shifting the ideological compass in Brussels, just as it has altered immigration and integration policy in member states. Indeed, the EU’s popularity rose after the Brexit vote, revealing its resilience in the face of repeated challenges. THE BATTLE OF IDEAS Europe’s encounter with Islamist terrorism and large-scale immigration has also roiled the world of ideas though it is difficult to know how far-reaching these developments will turn out to be. In the 2000s, writers such as Bernard Lewis, George Weigel, Oriana Fallaci, Bruce Bawer and Niall Ferguson warned of the challenge that Europe’s growing Muslim population posed to liberal values.

…

Others instrumentally deploy norms to discredit political opponents. Often the two motives overlap.4 Established powers like the Catholic hierarchy during the Spanish Inquisition, or challengers such as radical Islamists, with their heterodox ideas, understand what evolutionary psychologists have shown – that rational arguments alone rarely win the battle of ideas.5 Therefore both use moralistic politics – which triggers our unconscious disgust mechanism – to gain the upper hand. Established groups accuse those with new ideas of being heretics, stooges of enemy powers, or even agents of the devil. Challengers accuse the establishment of betraying religious principle or selling out the uncorrupted people.

Conscience of a Conservative: A Rejection of Destructive Politics and a Return to Principle
by Jeff Flake
Published 31 Jul 2017

In this era of dysfunction and collapsed principle, our only accomplishment is painstakingly constructing the argument that we’re not to blame and hoping that we’ve gerrymandered ourselves well enough to be safe in the next election. We decided that it was better to build and maintain a majority by using the levers of power rather than the art of persuasion and the battle of ideas. And we have decided that getting nothing done is okay. There are many on both sides who like this outcome so much that they think it’s a good model on which to build a whole career. Far too often, we come to destroy, not to build. As the country burns. And our institutions are undermined. And our values are compromised.

The Wake-Up Call: Why the Pandemic Has Exposed the Weakness of the West, and How to Fix It
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
Published 1 Sep 2020

By then it was safe to say that the free market had been repulsed. Milton Friedman had long before admitted defeat, writing in 2004, a couple of years before he died: “After World War II, opinion was socialist while practice was free market; currently, opinion is free market while practice is heavily socialist. We have largely won the battle of ideas (though no such battle is ever won permanently). We have succeeded in stalling the progress of socialism, but we have not succeeded in reversing its course.”16 At the same time the spell of globalization had begun to fade. Economically, it was still achieving miracles in the emerging world, dragging a billion people out of absolute poverty, but politically it looked tarnished.

Samuelson Friedman: The Battle Over the Free Market
by Nicholas Wapshott
Published 2 Aug 2021

Heller, Kennedy’s and Johnson’s chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, that was so well attended it spilled out of the lecture hall and took on the heightened atmosphere of a show trial.54 All Friedman now needed to prove his monetarist theories were correct was to persuade a government—any government, but the U.S. government was in his sights—to abandon Keynesianism and adopt his monetarist notions. To overturn the ruling order and replace its ideology with your own was a revolutionary ambition. His AEA address appeared to have caught the public imagination, though he had yet to win the battle of ideas. But finding a political leader who would embark citizens upon a risky economic experiment to display the worth of monetarism would prove far harder. Before long, however, Friedman would be heading for Washington, D.C., with the aim of putting his big idea to the ultimate test. Hayek’s persistent warnings to Friedman to avoid becoming too close to politicians went unheeded.

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Johnstone. 21.Friedman’s libertarianism appears to owe little to other libertarian thinkers like von Mises, Ayn Rand, or Murray Rothbard, who are given little or no credit in his writings. Rather, his own libertarianism—which he preferred to call “liberalism”—appears to have stemmed from his own experience, in particular his observations when working for Roosevelt’s New Deal. 22.“Liberty Is Winning the Battle of Ideas,” Register (Santa Ana, Calif.), November 23, 1986. Reprinted in the Mont Pèlerin Society Newsletter, May 1987, pp. 8–9. Excerpted from a speech at a banquet celebrating the move of the Reason Foundation from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles, October 18, 1986. 23.Samuelson, Economics: An Introductory Analysis, 9th ed.

People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent
by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Published 22 Apr 2019

For many of the billions in the developing world and emerging markets, China, using its distinctive “socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics,” has provided a dynamic alternative vision to that of America—whose standing suffered a major blow with the 2008 crisis, and now, an even greater blow with the rise of Trump. And global awareness that American-style capitalism seems to benefit mainly the top, and is leaving large numbers without adequate health care, hasn’t helped America’s soft power. Those who believe in democracy should find this deeply disturbing. There is a battle of ideas going on over alternative social, political, and economic systems, and we should worry about the fact that large parts of the world are turning away from the virtues of our system. Fortunately, the American style of capitalism is but one of many different forms of democratic market economies, as we saw in the reference to Sweden just above.

…

A misshapen economy creates misshapen individuals and a misshapen society All of this means that this war of interests—cloaked as a war of ideas, about the best way of organizing society—will not go away soon, with corporations, for instance, trying to get more for themselves at the expense of the rest. This battle of ideas is not just a sports contest. The reason we should be looking around for how we can fix our economy’s shortcomings and create one more attuned to our values is not so much because it will enhance the likelihood that our ideas about markets and democracy will prevail globally, but for what it will do to us, both as individuals and our country.

Dirty Work
by Gabriel Weston
Published 5 Jun 2013

After leaving the headmaster’s study, I was sent to an empty classroom where I wrote out the definition of the word pervert two hundred times, lest I ever misunderstand its meaning so grossly again. I look back at my desk, at the remaining mail. There is a council tax bill, which I put into an empty plastic tray marked ‘To do’. The other bits of post relate to my work. There is a thank-you letter from the organiser of the Battle of Ideas, praising me on the recent talk I gave. There is something from the Pro-choice Alliance and an envelope marked with the Catholics for Choice insignia. A technicolour image of a foetus at about twenty weeks’ gestation announces itself immediately to my seasoned eye as anti-abortion propaganda rather than information on advances in ultrasound imaging.

America in the World: A History of U.S. Diplomacy and Foreign Policy
by Robert B. Zoellick
Published 3 Aug 2020

The Soviet Union could not keep up. In contrast to his confidence after Reykjavik, by the end of 1987 Gorbachev told his Politburo colleagues that they needed a new direction because “[w]e have no choice. We are… at the end of our tether.”85 Reagan’s Diplomacy: The Battle of Ideas from a Position of Strength President Reagan waged the Cold War as a battle of ideas. His empathy for Gorbachev and the Russians never diverted him from pursuing his ideological vision to victory. John Gaddis admired Reagan’s “ability to see beyond complexity to simplicity.” The president believed he could break the “psychological stalemate”…“by exploiting Soviet weaknesses and asserting western strength.

…

The actor-president had achieved “more stagecraft than statecraft.” Harsher critics thought the president was “reckless,” “hostile,” and “crude.” TV commentaries ranged from “Vintage Reagan” and “old stuff” to “naïve.” Lou Cannon, the national reporter who knew Reagan best, was the lonely voice who recognized that Reagan “was committed to a battle of ideas, not weapons.” Yet Cannon also thought that “Reagan seemed to be debating with himself,” an intriguing insight that would play out in the years ahead. Many Americans simply did not believe Reagan meant what he said, and a few conservatives feared that he did. The skeptical Cold Warriors worried that Reagan did not appreciate Moscow’s military potency and thought the president was too willing to limit arms.21 Prime Minister Thatcher embraced the “magnificent speech” as “a triumph.”

Rethinking Islamism: The Ideology of the New Terror
by Meghnad Desai
Published 25 Apr 2008

฀A฀magazine,฀Encounter,฀was฀financed฀ covertly฀by฀the฀CIA;฀it฀was฀co-edited฀by฀the฀British฀poet฀Stephen฀ Spender฀and฀received฀contributions฀from฀some฀of฀the฀best฀writers฀ worldwide.฀ It฀ also฀ paid฀ well฀ since฀ it฀ was฀ well฀ financed.43฀ Modern฀ opera฀and฀abstract฀art฀were฀as฀generously฀financed฀as฀intellectual฀ writing฀in฀this฀battle. The฀idea฀was฀that฀it฀is฀the฀literate฀and฀the฀articulate฀elite฀that฀ is฀ crucial฀ to฀ the฀ battle฀ of฀ ideas฀ and฀ it฀ is฀ the฀ elite฀ that฀ has฀ to฀ be฀ moved฀to฀change฀sides฀or฀stick฀to฀the฀side฀they฀are฀already฀on฀and฀ not฀ be฀ seduced฀ by฀ the฀ other฀ side.฀ The฀ elite฀ were฀ enticed฀ not฀ by฀ crude฀transparent฀propaganda,฀but฀by฀high฀art฀and฀good฀argument,฀ where฀they฀could฀view฀the฀benefits฀of฀freedom.

Global Spin: The Corporate Assault on Environmentalism
by Sharon Beder
Published 1 Jan 1997

These materials inevitably give a corporate view of environmental problems, and avoid solutions that would involve reduced consumption, increased regulation or reduced corporate profits (see Chapter Ten). The combination of activist techniques and corporate money is a powerful weapon in the battle of ideas. In the US, opinion polling indicates corporate funded anti-environmental efforts produced a major shift in public opinion within the space of a single year. In 1992, fifty-one per cent of those surveyed agreed that environmentalists had “gone too far”, compared with seventeen per cent the year before.50 Andrew Rowell, in his book Green Backlash, dates the arrival of the anti-environmentalist backlash in Britain as Spring 1995, when the media took up the “anti-green tune” and a number of books were published that attacked environmentalism.

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‘Right wing think tanks go environmental’, Chain Reaction, no. 73-74. Burton, Bob. 1996. ‘Mothers Opposing Pollution (MOP)—all washed up’, Chain Reaction (76):28-31. Burton, Bob. 2001. ‘Environment chair quits over tailings disposal’, Mining Monitor July 2001, 9-10. Burton, Douglas. 1995. ‘To win the battle of ideas, send in the think tanks’, Insight on the News 11 (10):15-17. Butler, Daniel. 1995. ‘Radicals without reins’, Accountancy 116 (1224):36-38. Byrne, Andrew. 1995. ‘Secret fund set up in bid to derail ‘green’ Olympics’, Sydney Morning Herald, 26 August. Byrnes, Nanette. 1994. ‘The Smoke at General Electric’, Financial World, 16 August, 32-34.

Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle
by Jamie Woodcock
Published 17 Jun 2019

While the early developers may have dreamed of the progressive possibilities of videogames, the reality has become much darker. From Gamergate to the alt-right, we can no longer ignore videogames as a field of cultural struggle. This does not call for censoring videogames, but rather for understanding that battles of ideas are won and lost on this terrain. There is much to be celebrated with videogame culture. It is one that I have grown up around and share with many friends. However, as Leigh Alexander has argued, “when you decline to create or to curate a culture in your spaces, you’re responsible for what spawns in the vacuum.

Shadows of Empire: The Anglosphere in British Politics
by Michael Kenny and Nick Pearce
Published 5 Jun 2018

Her view of the Cold War between the totalitarian East and the freedom-loving West had an epic dimension to it. As she put it in a speech delivered after her time in office: The Cold War was not just about military power and the threat of nuclear holocaust. At its deepest level, at its most important level, it was a battle of ideas, a clash of ideologies each rooted in different conceptions of the state and the nature of man … The great intellectual struggle must continue until democracy and freedom triumph.6 Throughout her premiership she invested heavily in her own image as resolute defender of the West against the USSR and its allies, and this undoubtedly helped her become an influential, if also divisive, world leader.

Hunting in the Shadows: The Pursuit of Al Qa'ida Since 9/11: The Pursuit of Al Qa'ida Since 9/11
by Seth G. Jones
Published 29 Apr 2012

And in a January 2010 letter to bin Laden, he and Atiyah abd al-Rahman al-Libi had warned that attempts to attack the United States might “not succeed.”4 For Zawahiri and bin Laden, the more difficult struggle, and perhaps the most important one, was still being waged across the Internet and in social media forums. But even the battle of ideas for the hearts and minds of Muslims was not going well. Al Qa’ida had lost popular support because of its resort to violence, failure to achieve any of its strategic objectives, and promulgation of a fringe ideology. The third wave was coming to an end. For the moment, Zawahiri was safe. His longtime colleague, however, was not.

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These three steps—utilizing a light-footprint strategy, improving the effectiveness of regimes in countries threatened by al Qa’ida, and exploiting al Qa’ida’s tendency to kill civilians—would help ensure that no fourth wave occurs. One of the most important battlefields will be on the Internet, since the struggle against al Qa’ida and its allies remains in part a battle of ideas. Over the past decade, radicalization has become much less formal than it used to be. “Extremists are moving away from mosques to conduct their activities in private homes and premises,” a British intelligence report concluded. “We assess that radicalization increasingly occurs in private meeting places, be they closed prayer groups at mosques, self-defense classes at gyms or training camps in the UK or overseas.”16 The rise of the Internet and social media fundamentally changed terrorist activities.

Revolting!: How the Establishment Are Undermining Democracy and What They're Afraid Of
by Mick Hume
Published 23 Feb 2017

There is a widespread assumption today that divisions are necessarily terrible in liberal societies, as revealed by the Brexit referendum in the UK and the election of Donald Trump in the US, and we should all want to heal them. But in a sense divisions are what democracy is about. Democracy thrives where there is serious debate across a political dividing line, not a cosy conformist consensus. It is about a contest between clashing perspectives, a full-blooded battle of ideas, through which the majority can decide which way it wants to go. As with all battles, there are winners and losers, bitterness and bravado. That’s democratic life. The alternative is to fix elections or perhaps censor one side, to create an illusion of unity, like those polls where the dictator scores 98 per cent.

Inequality and the 1%
by Danny Dorling
Published 6 Oct 2014

I am also grateful for comments arising from talks on inequality given at Kings College London; the Houses of Parliament; One Sheffield Many Cultures; the Edinburgh Book Festival; the Hay Festival; the TUC Congress; the Annual Conference of the Howard Reform League; the Royal Geographical Society; the London Battle of Ideas; the ESRC Festival of Science; Oxford University’s Department of Education; the Equality Trust Annual Supporters and Local Groups meeting, during the Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry Global Health week; the Regional Studies Association ‘Global Urbanisation: Challenges and Prospects’ conference, at Newman University (Birmingham); Nuffield College, Oxford; the World Economic Group Meeting on the World Economic and Social Survey (United Nations); the Institute of Applied Social Studies, University of Birmingham; the Oxford Civic Society; the Centre for Social Relations, University of Coventry; the National Institute for Economic and Social research (London); and during the International Symposium on Homelessness, Health and Inclusion, held in London in March 2014.

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy
by Jonathan Taplin
Published 17 Apr 2017

A review of Rand’s essay collection Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal in the New Republic simply referred to Rand as “Top Bee in the communal bonnet, buzzing the loudest and zaniest throughout this all but incredible book.” But since the election of Ronald Reagan, these libertarian principles have won the Washington, DC, battle of ideas. Since then, notions that the state should regulate the free market have been out of favor in both Republican and Democratic administrations. It may be that the Great Recession of 2008 led many to realize that this philosophy is a dead end for both culture and politics, but we seem to be lacking the political and cultural will to direct society onto a new path.

Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything
by Becky Bond and Zack Exley
Published 9 Nov 2016

Your base contains many talented and experienced people; treating them as peers is the best way to attract them into leadership; working with them as you would with paid colleagues is the best way to keep them in leadership while bringing out the best in them. “Change never takes place from the top down, it comes from the bottom up” was a major applause line in Bernie’s stump speech. Whenever he would say it, people would cheer. We knew that “bottom up” meant all of us. “Bottom up” described our battle of ideas with the establishment, but it didn’t describe how a huge part of the organizing on the campaign actually worked. “Peer to peer” more accurately describes the concept at the heart of our distributed organizing program. Zack and I have led careers at the intersection of technology and organizing.

The Wondering Jew: Israel and the Search for Jewish Identity
by Micah Goodman
Published 10 Nov 2020

There is one debate over the soul of Jewish secularism, and another over the soul of the Jewish religion. And they are both destined to continue. 11 SELF-CONFIDENCE AND FEARS ABOUT IDENTITY The history of ideas is also the history of battles between ideas. And the fallacies described earlier play an important role in our attempt to understand two of these battles of ideas. They help us understand, at least at this point in time, which side has won the intrareligious Jewish battle and which has won the intrasecular Jewish battle. The debate between Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel ended with a victory for the latter. A Divine Voice emerged and declared that halakha would be determined in accordance with the positions of the side that was also attentive to the other side’s positions.

Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America
by Tamara Draut
Published 4 Apr 2016

It’s much easier to go to battle for “Americans who did all the right things” and got the rug pulled out from under them than it is to stick up for the hardworking, hard-luck, drew-the-short-end-of-the-stick population who too easily remind us that the American dream is more ephemera than enduring reality. And with a working class that is now more black, Latino, and female, it’s a battle even harder to wage, let alone win. The Sleeping Giant Will Rise But a battle is taking place—a battle of ideas over the fundamental rules of our economy and society. The moneyed and the connected have won the last few rounds. The social contract born of the New Deal is in tatters. Organized labor is limping, and the large majority of Americans are struggling mightily to make ends meet and build better lives for their children.

The Rebel and the Kingdom: The True Story of the Secret Mission to Overthrow the North Korean Regime
by Bradley Hope
Published 1 Nov 2022

Like Kim Il-sung, the members of the Kapsan Faction were veterans of Korea’s conflict with Japan, but they had become disaffected with his encouragement of leader worshipping. The group sought to change the country’s economic policies, undermine Kim Il-sung, and appoint a new man, Pak Kum-chol, as his successor. The battle of ideas that played out in a series of grandiose speeches before Kim Il-sung and his twenty-six-year-old son, Kim Jong-il, launched a purge against the movement. Some were exiled to the countryside, and others were killed. But more important, it became the moment when Kim Il-sung’s hold on power became unparalleled and the concept of dynastic succession took hold, according to the historical research of the South Korean academic Lim Jae-cheon.

The Trouble With Billionaires
by Linda McQuaig
Published 1 May 2013

Probably most important of all was the network of think-tanks established by British farming entrepreneur Antony Fisher, whom Milton Friedman later credited with being ‘the single most important person ‌in the development of Thatcherism’.23 Inspired by Hayek’s ideas after reading a Reader’s Digest condensation of The Road to Serfdom, Fisher had considered going into politics to promote the free-market cause. But Hayek talked him out of it, explaining, Fisher later recalled, ‘that the decisive influence in the battle of ideas and policy was wielded by intellectuals whom he characterized as the “second-hand dealers in ideas”.’ Hayek urged Fisher instead to form an academic research organization ‘to supply intellectuals in universities, schools, journalism and broadcasting with authoritative studies of the economic theory of markets and ‌its application to practical affairs’.24 Fisher followed Hayek’s advice, establishing the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), which was to become hugely influential in shaping British public attitudes as the years went on.

Stolen: How to Save the World From Financialisation
by Grace Blakeley
Published 9 Sep 2019

The death of capitalist realism has led to the rebirth of ideology, and of history. The political upheaval of the last decade is a response to the re-emergence of fundamental questions about what kind of society we want to live in. Politics is no longer a question of making technocratic tweaks to a stable system; it is once again a great battle of ideas and the movements that champion them. But with the death of capitalist realism, the greatest challenge faced by contemporary capitalist societies is no longer imagining a different kind of future, it is getting from here to there. Building a new politics does not simply mean changing the party of government.

Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success
by Matthew Syed
Published 19 Apr 2010

For understandable reasons, they are fearful that if their methods leak out, their competitive advantage will be diluted just as surely as if a patent had expired. In this context, sport no longer looks like the pure, untainted, objective battle between two individuals or teams; instead it is revealed, at least in part, as a battle of ideas; a battle between the men and women who, behind the scenes, design and construct the training systems. And if, by whatever dint of circumstance, an individual does not have access to the most enlightened system of training, no amount of hard work is likely to get him there. As we saw in the opening chapter, circumstance and opportunity are deeply and inevitably implicated in the success of every high achiever.

The Mind Is Flat: The Illusion of Mental Depth and the Improvised Mind
by Nick Chater
Published 28 Mar 2018

For example, if the intricate mechanism of Nature is like the workings of a watch, as the eighteenth-century clergyman and theologian William Paley famously suggested, then it is easy to leap to the conclusion that it must have a designer, and one far more skilled and intelligent than any watchmaker. Evolutionary biology, of course, tells a very different story. Battles of ideas are often fought over which metaphor is appropriate: is light made up of particles or waves? Are humans ‘risen’ apes or fallen gods? Is nature a harmonious society or a brutal war of all against all? Such metaphors are not marginal to thought, but its very essence. Our continual search for meaning is the struggle to find patterns in our present experience, in the light of the past.

The Post-American World: Release 2.0
by Fareed Zakaria
Published 1 Jan 2008

Other countries, peoples, and groups now have access to their own narratives and networks. They will not quietly accept the version of events handed down to them. Washington will have to make its case, and persuasively. This task has gotten more difficult, but it has also become more vital. In an increasingly empowered and democratized world, in the long run, the battle of ideas is close to everything. The Bush administration never seemed to understand the practical value of legitimacy in the run-up to the Iraq War. American officials would contest the view that they were isolated by pointing to their allies in “new Europe,” Asia, and Africa—many of whom were bribed or cajoled into the coalition.

The Lost Decade: 2010–2020, and What Lies Ahead for Britain
by Polly Toynbee and David Walker
Published 3 Mar 2020

Brexit harms aside, the UK economy has performed indifferently; growth has been meagre in aggregate and barely registered in terms of household income. Its international reputation blackened, internally fissiparous, the UK is beset. Come 2029, will there be another ‘lost decade’ to chart and regret? It’s not that the Right won what passed for the battle of ideas. Labour’s ‘Marxism’ over the renationalisation of utilities grew in popularity: corporate performance in water, energy, railways and urban transport reduced the appeal of privatisation, even among Tory voters. People never stopped demanding and expecting a strong health service, good schools and a robust welfare state.

The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
Published 14 May 2014

The Democrats refuse to countenance cuts in entitlements, the Republicans refuse to raise taxes, and America is caught in a fiscal trap, taxing itself like a small-government country, spending like a big-government one, and borrowing massively from private savers to make up the difference. Where does this leave the state? In 2004, two years before his death, Friedman took a depressing view of his achievement: “After World War II, opinion was socialist while practice was free market; currently, opinion is free market while practice is heavily socialist. We have largely won the battle of ideas (though no such battle is ever won permanently). We have succeeded in stalling the progress of socialism, but we have not succeeded in reversing its course.”38 That verdict would arguably be even more depressing today, especially when you look not just at the size of government, but its power.

The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World
by Linsey McGoey
Published 14 Sep 2019

From his ignorance it’s possible to see the conclusion that I have promised: an illumination of the ways that ignorance can be emancipatory. CONCLUSION: THE GREAT ENLARGEMENT The unknown requires humility. We should be wary of any ideology that pretends to have arrived at the end of history, claiming to have permanently silenced critics, to have won the battle of ideas for once and for all. Only the hubristic think otherwise. ‘To judge from the climate of opinion, we have won the war of ideas,’ Milton and his wife Rose Friedman wrote in a memoir published late in life.1 Friedman died in 2006. Signs of the great financial crisis of the early 21st century were mounting, but he missed it by one year, never forced to confront its devastation: the crescendo of home foreclosures, the unmeasurable number of suicides across the US and the world, unmeasurable because we don’t know for certain how many people took their life directly because of the financial crisis.

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
by Naomi Klein
Published 15 Sep 2014

This is, of course, yet another legacy bequeathed to us by the free market counterrevolution. As recently as the early 1970s, a Republican president—Richard Nixon—was willing to impose wage and price controls to rescue the U.S. economy from crisis, popularizing the notion that “We are all Keynesians now.”8 But by the 1980s, the battle of ideas waged out of the same Washington think tanks that now deny climate change had successfully managed to equate the very idea of industrial planning with Stalin’s five-year plans. Real capitalists don’t plan, these ideological warriors insisted—they unleash the power of the profit motive and let the market, in its infinite wisdom, create the best possible society for all.

…

Progressives can easily do the same: by showing that the real solutions to the climate crisis are also our best hope of building a much more stable and equitable economic system, one that strengthens and transforms the public sphere, generates plentiful, dignified work, and radically reins in corporate greed. But before that can happen, it’s clear that a core battle of ideas must be fought about the right of citizens to democratically determine what kind of economy they need. Policies that simply try to harness the power of the market—by minimally taxing or capping carbon and then getting out of the way—won’t be enough. If we are to rise to a challenge that involves altering the very foundation of our economy, we will need every policy tool in the democratic arsenal.

Unelected Power: The Quest for Legitimacy in Central Banking and the Regulatory State
by Paul Tucker
Published 21 Apr 2018

As will become clear, my own general position is that decisions to bail out insolvent firms are not for central banks. 2 Darling, Back from the Brink, p. 23. 3 A wider discussion of their place in the services state would center on principled limits on their role as architects, engineers, and operators of the core financial-system infrastructure. 4 Lazar, States of Emergency. 5 My version generalizes from Bagehot’s gold-standard context, which blurred the distinction between a country suffering a balance-of-payments crisis and an internal liquidity run on the banking system; and it emphasizes lending to sound firms only, which I believe is implicit in Bagehot (Tucker, “Repertoire”). 6 The costs of contagion are the central theme of Scott, Connectedness and Contagion. 7 Kynaston, City of London, p. 85. 8 For example, Posner, “Legal Authority,” arguing that the Fed stretched the law, saying that was essential, and advocating that it be given more crisis powers, with ex post accountability; and Selgin, “Last-Resort Lending,” arguing the other side. My own concerns are recognized by Posner. 9 Brunnermeier, James, and Landau, Battle of Ideas. 10 In the UK it was clear, under the terms of a published 1997 (refined 2006) memorandum of understanding with the Treasury, that the Bank of England needed executive government approval if it wished to go beyond its published regimes. 11 A more detailed discussion of these and other issues can be found in Tucker, “Lender of Last Resort.” 12 At the time, those published facilities did not cover lending against collateral other than government bonds.

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Report of the Committee with Studies of Administrative Management in the Federal Government. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1937. Broz, J. Lawrence. “Political System Transparency and Monetary-Commitment Regimes.” International Organization 56, no. 4 (2002): 861–87. Brunnermeier, Markus K., Harold James, and Jean-Pierre Landau. The Euro and the Battle of Ideas. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016. Buchanan, Allen. “Political Legitimacy and Democracy.” Ethics 112, no. 4 (2002): 689–719. Buchanan, Allen, and Robert O. Keohane. “The Legitimacy of Global Governance Institutions.” Ethics & International Affairs 20, no. 4 (2006): 405–37. Buchanan, James M.

Future Files: A Brief History of the Next 50 Years
by Richard Watson
Published 1 Jan 2008

In other words, while people still crave what they don’t have, it’s the fear of loss that ultimately influences elections. Twenty-five years ago things were very different. There were two opposing worldviews (market capitalism versus state socialism) and this tended to reinforce class divisions and angst, certainly in the UK and Europe. As a result, people were engaged with a battle of ideas. Nowadays there is an increasingly convergent worldview; or at least there is in the West. Am I optimistic about the future? Ultimately, yes. Nuclear war — involving the use of tactical nuclear weapons in a regional conflict, or a terrorist attack on a major city using a dirty bomb — is a serious possibility but still a remote threat.

No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need
by Naomi Klein
Published 12 Jun 2017

It’s also about the injustice of it all, knowing that the wrenching losses of our era are not being shared, that the Davos class were never really looking after those at the bottom of the mountain. Which means that defeating the rising pseudo-populist Right is not just a matter of electoral strategy, not just about finding the right candidates. It’s about being willing to engage in a battle of ideas—during and, more importantly, between elections—that will take on the corrosive, and deeply bipartisan, wealth-worshiping worldview that created the backlash in the first place. Unless progressives learn to speak to the legitimate rage at the grotesque levels of inequality that exist right now, the Right is going to keep winning.

Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi
by Steve Inskeep
Published 12 Oct 2011

Jamaat-e-Islami gained support among Karachi’s dislocated refugees, many of whom were seeking to define their identities in this unfamiliar place, and some of whom turned more deeply to religion. In November 1955 Jamaat-e-Islami held a conference in Karachi attended by two thousand people. The streets of the capital city reflected a battle of ideas. People painted graffiti for and against the mullahs. Secularists painted slogans in English, the language of the elites, while religious parties painted graffiti in Urdu, the leading language of the refugees. Questions about religion’s role in the government affected the interminable debates over Pakistan’s constitution in Karachi, and when the basic law was finally ratified in 1956 the country would be formally named the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West
by Timothy Garton Ash
Published 30 Jun 2004

The end of the Cold War made a difference in this respect, too. During the Cold War, Americans might not have liked the ideas coming out of Paris or Rome or Berlin, but they clearly mattered, since the United States was engaged in a political conflict, centered on Europe, that was also an ideological one—a battle of ideas. Today, who cares what Paris is thinking? Yet five minutes in any Parisian bookshop shows you how passionately Paris still cares what Washington is thinking. The connection between the balance of power and what we might call the balance of fascination is complex and two-sided. Power is fascinating.

New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--And How to Make It Work for You
by Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms
Published 2 Apr 2018

(As one promising response to the problem of extreme content, Google’s think-tank Jigsaw launched something called the “redirect” method, which serves potential recruits video testimonials from credible voices and other content designed to dissuade them when they search for a range of keywords typically used by wannabe ISIS members.) The United States and its allies need a decentralized social media army of credible figures—moderate Muslims and others, who probably aren’t going to be big fans of U.S. foreign policy—who can make a convincing peer-to-peer case for a different path. In a new power world, this battle of ideas is not a standoff between bureaucrats and terrorists. It is a showdown between Scottish teenagers and Pakistani business students. * * * — The future will be won by those who can spread their ideas better, faster, and more durably. In a world of fake news, climate change deniers, Holocaust deniers, anti-vaxers, and all manner of extremists, the stakes are high.

Free Market Missionaries: The Corporate Manipulation of Community Values
by Sharon Beder
Published 30 Sep 2006

The society, which continued to meet regularly, and was presided over by Hayek until 1961, enabled extreme market ideologues who might otherwise have felt isolated or alienated to come together and plot change. It was a long-term project, and Hayek warned the others that they should expect a long-term, but winnable, struggle: ‘What to the contemporary observer appears as a battle of conflicting interests decided by the votes of the masses,’ he said, ‘has usually been decided long before in a battle of ideas confined to narrow circles.’7 The Mont Pèlerin Society was the seed that started a network of some 78 institutions. The society forged links with like-minded think tanks, corporations, governments and university economics departments, becoming the intellectual and ideological inspiration for economic fundamentalists around the world.

How to Run a Government: So That Citizens Benefit and Taxpayers Don't Go Crazy
by Michael Barber
Published 12 Mar 2015

Attachment to their professional ethics, it is believed, means they will do their best for those they serve, while the profession itself will ensure the professional learning and growth of its members. Seen from the point of view of the professions, the approach can be summed up in the phrase: ‘Give us the money and get out of the way.’ It has many attractions for government too: not much action is required, there is no need to engage in a battle of ideas; it assumes the best of the public service workforce and leaves much of the decision-making to them. It assumes that accountability, data and performance management are not necessary. For these reasons, the approach suits public sector professionals too – pay without accountability has its attractions, needless to say.

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution
by Howard Rheingold
Published 24 Dec 2011

What all have in common is that they operate in small, dispersed units that can deploy nimbly—anywhere, anytime. All feature network forms of organization, doctrine, strategy, and technology attuned to the information age. They know how to swarm and disperse, penetrate and disrupt, as well as elude and evade. The tactics they use range from battles of ideas to acts of sabotage—and many tactics involve the Internet.19 The “swarming” strategies noted by Arquilla and Ronfeldt rely on many small units like the affinity groups in the Battle of Seattle. Individual members of each group remained dispersed until mobile communications drew them to converge on a specific location from all directions simultaneously, in coordination with other groups.

Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody
by Helen Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay
Published 14 Jul 2020

When the liberal left explicitly challenged all of this and advocated the view that people should not be evaluated by their race, sex or sexuality, it held a convincing moral highground over right-wing elements who argued that they should. Liberals, spearheaded by the Civil Rights Movement, liberal feminism and Gay Pride, overwhelmingly won this battle of ideas in the second half of the twentieth century and attained legal equality on the grounds of race, gender and sexuality. So successful were they that by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, mainstream conservatives had largely accepted this too. Those socially or religiously conservative elements who still believed that women, black people or gay people should be restricted to certain roles in life or denied equal rights became recognized as holding an extremist, “far-right” position, and could expect reputational damage in a liberal society.

Unfinished Business
by Tamim Bayoumi

Blundell-Wignall and Roulet (2012): Adrian Blundell-Wignall and Caroline Roulet, “Business models of banks, leverage and the distance-to-default”, OECD Journal: Financial Market Trends, Vol. 2012/2., 2012. Brunnermeier, James, and Landau (2016): Markus K. Brunnermeier, Harold James, and Jean-Pierre Landau, The Euro and the Battle of Ideas, Princeton University Press, 2016. Caballero, Farhi, and Gourinchas (2016): Ricardo J. Caballero, Emmanuel Farhi, and Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, “Safe Assets Scarcity and Aggregate Demand”, NBER Working Paper No. 22044 (February 2016). Calomaris (2000): Charles W. Calomaris, “Universal Banking ‘American Style’”, in Charles W.

The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories
by Edward Hollis
Published 10 Nov 2009

Once the temple has disappeared from its original location, its history will terminate in this mausoleum. The prophets of modernism tried to push the future toward a definitive end, seeking a utopian solution to all human strivings. Marx and Engels, for their part, posited history as a dialectic: a battle of ideas in the process of progressive resolution, century by century, iteration by iteration. The Architect’s Dream is the very image of such a process, in which building follows building in a sequence of improvements, from the pharaoh’s authoritarian tomb to the cathedral made by the willing hands of inspired craftsmen.

Among the Mosques: A Journey Across Muslim Britain
by Ed Husain
Published 9 Jun 2021

After all, Shamima Begum and others went to fight for the slave-owning, people-beheading caliphate of ISIS, but when their caliphate collapsed it was telling that they sought to be tried under impartial British justice rather than the sharia-infused laws of the Middle East. What is Britain? The Shipping Forecast, while comforting for an island nation, does not tell us of the storms to come in the battle of ideas. Squeamishness over defining the special qualities of our home and hoping that migrants will learn its political culture by osmosis has not worked so far. And it certainly won’t work now in the screaming, segmented and polarised age of social media. We are not even sure what we call our country.

In Our Own Image: Savior or Destroyer? The History and Future of Artificial Intelligence
by George Zarkadakis
Published 7 Mar 2016

We cannot possibly gain insight into Artificial Intelligence, and its potential to change our world and our civilisation, unless we understand the centrifugal ideas that dominate it. To decide what to trust and what to reject, we must begin with the foundations of Western philosophical thought, and follow them all the way to today’s ferocious battles of ideas about the mind. Time to board our imaginary time machine, turn its clock back around twenty-five centuries, and take a trip to Athens …. 7 A BLUEPRINT FOR A UNIVERSE Plato was twenty-three years old in 404 BC when Athens lost the long war to Sparta. It was the last chapter of a disastrous struggle for supremacy that had lasted for almost three decades.

Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance
by Ian Goldin and Chris Kutarna
Published 23 May 2016

Once the fire of revolt breaks out, starving it of fuel takes political, social and economic actions as much as military ones, to start fulfilling citizens’ legitimate expectations for a greater dose of opportunity and dignity. Unfortunately, as Savonarola’s death suggests, such outcomes are elusive. An Islamic Renaissance? Stamping out revolt also takes new ideas—and on this front, the future looks brighter. The contest between moderate and extremist modernities is ultimately a battle of ideas, and while the Islamic State’s recent military successes have often been decisive, in the campaign for the hearts and minds of the Arab world, their gains are far less certain. Ambiguity reigns, especially among young people (upon whose willingness to break things and upset order, extremist movements from Savonarola to the present day heavily depend).

Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens
by Nicholas Shaxson
Published 11 Apr 2011

No matter that most of these claims were untrue.6 Mitchell began to bombard politicians with emails about the OECD reports, to write scary op-eds in national newspapers with headlines such as “Global Tax Police,” and to insult the OECD publicly. Hostilities had begun in the offshore world’s first big battle of ideas. To understand the intellectual underpinnings of offshore finance, it seems appropriate to start with Mitchell, one of the secrecy jurisdictions’ noisiest and most active defenders. He is a man of striking warmth and great personal charm. In his blog “International Liberty: Restraining Government in America and around the World,” he declares, “I’m a passionate Georgia Bulldog,” in reference to the mascot of the University of Georgia’s gridiron team, “so much so that I would have trouble choosing between a low-rate flat tax for America and a national title for the Dawgs.

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI
by Frank Pasquale
Published 14 May 2020

Had the United States invested a fraction of its military spending in public health capacities, it almost certainly would have avoided tens of thousands of deaths in 2020, as well as economically disastrous lockdowns.95 For this more expansive and humane mindset to prevail, its advocates must win a battle of ideas in their own countries about the proper role of government and the paradoxes of security. They must shift political aims away from domination and toward nurturance. Observing the growth of the US national security state—what he deems the Predator Empire—Ian G. R. Shaw asks, “Do we not see the ascent of control over compassion, security over support, capital over care, and war over welfare?”

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else
by Chrystia Freeland
Published 11 Oct 2012

It was by far the nation’s biggest philanthropy; in 1954 it outspent runner-up Rockefeller fourfold and third-place Carnegie ten times over. Most important, Ford’s letter crystallized a fear that had been growing in the minds of many American businesspeople—that they were losing the national battle of ideas. Ford’s Greatest Generation had won the Second World War, and when they came home they had helped create two decades of unprecedented, and widely shared, national prosperity. But they now feared that the institutions that created the country’s intellectual and ideological weather—its universities, its foundations, and its newsrooms—had turned hostile to business and to capitalism.

The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It
by Owen Jones
Published 3 Sep 2014

Universal suffrage helped open the door for all sorts of concessions, like hiking taxes on the rich and the creation of a welfare state that provided security for all. A democratic revolution – to reclaim by peaceful means the democratic rights and power annexed by the Establishment – is long overdue. Such a revolution will only succeed by learning from the success of the Establishment. Aggressively fighting the battle of ideas has proven key to its triumph. It has never won the hearts and minds of the British people: as polls consistently show, most people are in favour of higher taxes on the rich and against running public services and utilities for profit, for example, and trust in key institutions is at an extremely low ebb.

The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It
by Yascha Mounk
Published 15 Feb 2018

See the first graph in “Spain’s Reforms Point the Way for Southern Europe,” Economist, June 15, 2017, https://www.economist.com/news/europe/21723446-having-tackled-its-problems-earlier-italy-or-greece-spain-now-seeing-results-spains. For unemployment rates, see “Unemployment by Sex and Age—Annual Average,” Eurostat, http://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/show.do?dataset=une_rt_a&lang=en, accessed September 9, 2017. 11. See Markus K. Brunnermeier, Harold James, and Jean-Pierre Landau, The Euro and the Battle of Ideas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016); and Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe (New York: Norton, 2016); see also Thomas Meaney and Yascha Mounk, “What Was Democracy?” Nation, May 13, 2014, https://www.thenation.com/article/what-was-democracy/. 12.

The Case for Space: How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility
by Robert Zubrin
Published 30 Apr 2019

There is immense knowledge to be gained in space, but there are also deadly hazards to be faced, which we need to control if we are to protect ourselves and all other life on Earth. The value of the challenge itself, stimulating the creative forces of society as a whole and our youth in particular, will also be explored. There is also the question of the influence of an open frontier—or the lack thereof—on human freedom and on the battle of ideas that can sustain it or defeat it. Finally, there is the question of the human future itself: Will we be limited to one world, with limited resources and limited prospects? Or will we become something far grander in space, time, diversity, and ultimate potential? Many years ago, the Russian space visionary Nikolai Kardashev outlined a schema for classifying civilizations.1 According to Kardashev, a Type I civilization was one that had achieved full mastery of all the resources of its planet.

Greater: Britain After the Storm
by Penny Mordaunt and Chris Lewis
Published 19 May 2021

You can’t feed people on philosophy, so we’d better find some practicalities. Our values need to be baked into national missions, not just to do and achieve things, but to amplify what we are. To signal what we’re trying to achieve so everyone can lend their help. Because what lies ahead is a battle of ideas every bit as big as we’ve seen in the past, but hopefully without such disastrous consequences. No one ever persuades the other side with force, only with shared values. CONCLUSIONS Great thinking still resides in Britain today, and in the next decade it will be highly visible both at home and abroad as other countries watch what we do with our new freedom.

The Unpersuadables: Adventures With the Enemies of Science
by Will Storr
Published 1 Jan 2013

I meet Wiseman outside Foyle’s bookshop on Charing Cross Road in central London, where he is appearing later as part of his Paranormality publicity tour. After he has baffled my demonstrably faulty brain with a coin trick in a nearby greasy spoon, I tell him that I want to write about his fights with Sheldrake, because they seem to represent a fascinating battle of ideas. He greets this suggestion with a contemptuous laugh. ‘I’ve got a few problems with Rupert. If you look at the mainstream body of parapsychology, he’s not very well represented. He’s rarely even discussed. The reason is that there are often errors in his work.’ Wiseman tells me that a German academic named Stefan Schmidt conducted a meta-analysis of Sheldrake-inspired staring studies.

The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor
by William Easterly
Published 4 Mar 2014

It is doomed to failure.”8 OUT OF CHINA The history of authoritarian development began about a century ago in China with Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek, and the economist H. D. Fong, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1920s and 1930s, and US nation-building efforts in the 1940s, as discussed in Chapter Three. It would be fitting to conclude the story of the battle of ideas in the same place. Chen Guangcheng is a blind, self-taught lawyer from China’s province of Shangdong.9 Shangdong is the same province that the Allies ceded to Japan after World War I, provoking outrage from Sun Yat-sen and the Chinese. In 2006 Chen filed a class-action lawsuit against local officials who had forced women to undergo late-term abortions to comply with China’s one-child policy.

The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe
by Joseph E. Stiglitz and Alex Hyde-White
Published 24 Oct 2016

I have elsewhere described the policies that dominated the development discourse, called the Washington Consensus policies, and shaped the conditions imposed on developing countries.10 This book is about how these same ideas shaped what was viewed as the next step in the tremendously important project of European integration, the sharing of a common currency—and derailed it. Today, the same battle of ideas is being fought in myriad skirmishes. Indeed, in some cases, even the arguments and evidence presented are fundamentally the same. The austerity battle in Europe is akin to that in the United States, where conservatives have attempted to downsize government spending, including for badly needed infrastructure, even while unemployment remains high and resources remain idle.

East West Street: On the Origins of "Genocide" and "Crimes Against Humanity"
by Philippe Sands
Published 14 Jul 2016

“My uncle was very reserved; I could ask any questions, but he expressed no views to me at all. My aunt was the same; she just kept very quiet.” Beigbeder had no recollection of meeting Lauterpacht or Lemkin but knew both by name and repute, even then, and the arguments each was pursuing. Yet he didn’t focus on the battle of ideas that divided the two Lemberg men, the individual and the group. “I was too young and ignorant!” Now, many years later, he recognized its importance and vitality, a starting point for modern international law. Donnedieu and Falco sometimes talked about Lemkin in a lighthearted way. The man had an “obsession” with genocide; that he remembered them saying.

God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
Published 31 Mar 2009

It would be an oversimplification to say that all pious people are standing up to yell, “Stop!” They disagree about what to do; but they all agree that you cannot simply treat cloning or gay adoption as nothing more than technical issues or private preferences. Confronted with growing evidence of a global battle of ideas, they are damned if they are going to let others boss them around—and they are forging alliances with all manner of people to make their case. FIRST THINGS AND LAST RITES Four culture wars stand out. The two most obvious are over “life” and “family”—or abortion and gay marriage. The other two wars, over science and the proper dividing line between church and state, have stirred up great debates of yore: biotechnology is rekindling the great nineteenth century debate about evolution, while Islam’s progress in Europe is renewing Enlightenment arguments about religious authority.

How to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism
by Eric Hobsbawm
Published 5 Sep 2011

With the rarest exceptions, the names most widely associated with intellectual anti-Marxism and anti-communism in the last quarter of the century were not new. Even those who denounced ‘the god that failed’ had broken with their respective communist parties before 1970. The systematic attempt of Western Cold Warriors to counter the Soviets’ ‘battle of ideas’ by Congresses of Cultural Freedom did not effectively survive the revelation of CIA financing in 1967. If anything, the retreat from Marxism was generated within the old radical left itself, not least by the clash inherent in the revolutionary versions of Marxism between automatic historical evolution and the role of revolutionary action.

European Spring: Why Our Economies and Politics Are in a Mess - and How to Put Them Right
by Philippe Legrain
Published 22 Apr 2014

It should also make a point of passing stringent new laws to prevent parliamentarians abusing their expenses, punishing any corruption severely and thus burnishing its reputation for probity. A proper political contest and an open debate about policies would help create a genuinely European politics for the first time. It could generate a battle of ideas and help stimulate new ones. It could encourage joined-up thinking and explicit political trade-offs. It would allow coalitions that span institutions and national borders to form. It would attract media interest and work against the capture of institutions by insider lobbies. It would engage Europeans more both in the European elections and in the EU political process over the next five years, giving them both a say and a stake in what was decided.

The Ape That Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve
by Steve Stewart-Williams
Published 12 Sep 2018

The memes of Islamic fundamentalism and those of Enlightenment liberalism clash with each other in various ways around the world, as do various families of memes within each of these broad traditions. Much of the history of the twentieth century consisted of Marxist memes, fascist memes, and the memes of capitalist democracy slugging it out through our bodies, our voices, and our communication technologies. These historical skirmishes were, in essence, battles of ideas, and the people caught up in them merely vessels through which these ideas fought for supremacy. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, if they’d been born in a different part of the world, or even just a different part of town, they’d have been fighting for the other side. Thus, it’s almost as if the ideas themselves were fighting each other through whichever humans they happened to infest.

How to Be a Liberal: The Story of Liberalism and the Fight for Its Life
by Ian Dunt
Published 15 Oct 2020

In the first decades of the 21st Century, we associate it with warring political tribes, talking over each other on current affairs programmes, neither showing the least interest in ever changing their position, their own behaviour more readily explained by their sense of identity than by any appreciation for argument. But for Mill it was not just about conflict. He despised the ‘blind rage’ with which different schools of philosophical thought went into battle with one another. Opposition was only the opening stage of the battle of ideas. It was also about synthesis. Intellectual progress came from finding that which was true or meaningful in your opponent’s argument and incorporating it into your own. At the heart of that thought was an astonishingly humble realisation: that there could be truth in the words of someone you disagreed with.

A World Beneath the Sands: The Golden Age of Egyptology
by Toby Wilkinson
Published 19 Oct 2020

A desire to record and preserve Egypt’s ancient patrimony before it was lost forever became a key motivation for nineteenth-century Egyptologists, starting with Champollion. In his case, a further spur to action may have been the sense of growing British activity in Egypt, as witnessed by the burgeoning number of travellers’ accounts. France may have lost the Battle of the Nile, but it wasn’t about to lose the battle of ideas or of science – not if Champollion had anything to do with it. Rosellini’s patron, Grand Duke Leopoldo II, supported the idea of a Franco-Tuscan joint expedition from the outset. It would bring glory to his dynasty – then vying with the House of Savoy for pre-eminence in Italy – and promised to enrich his Florentine collection with further treasures.

Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future
by Mervyn King and John Kay
Published 5 Mar 2020

Although notions of personal probability had been implicit for many years, Ramsey was the first to describe ‘subjective probability’ in a more formal way. 9 Ramsey further proposed that the mathematics which had been used for the analysis of probabilities based on frequencies could be applied to these subjective probabilities. Similar analysis was developed independently by Bruno de Finetti, an Italian statistician who bizarrely linked his academic work on probability to his personal support for fascism. 10 Ramsey and de Finetti won, and Keynes and Knight lost, that historic battle of ideas over the nature of uncertainty. The result was that the concept of radical uncertainty virtually disappeared from the mainstream of economics for more than half a century. 11 The use of subjective probabilities, and the associated mathematics, seemed to turn the mysteries of radical uncertainty into puzzles with calculable solutions.

Small Men on the Wrong Side of History: The Decline, Fall and Unlikely Return of Conservatism
by Ed West
Published 19 Mar 2020

Today just under half of ‘Consistent conservatives’ in the US cite Fox as their main source of information about politics.14 Those with consistently liberal views rely on a far wider range of news outlets, including the New York Times, and most trust PBS, NPR and the BBC. But there is a difference between the makers of Fox’s political programmes and the BBC, in that the former believe they are in a battle of ideas while the latter genuinely think they are reporting the truth. Conservative partisans accept the postmodern idea that there is no neutral truth, while the BBC is so keen to respond to criticism of bias, not just because of their public funding, but because they really do believe they are impartial and such a thing as impartiality is achievable.

At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails With Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone De Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others
by Sarah Bakewell
Published 1 Mar 2016

In the Germany of the 1920s, with everything thrown into chaos and resentment after the First World War, almost everyone could have recognised something in Heidegger’s vision. By 1929, the Heidegger cult had spread beyond Freiburg and Marburg. That spring, he spoke at a conference in the Alpine resort of Davos — the setting for Thomas Mann’s bestselling 1924 novel The Magic Mountain, which Heidegger had read, and which included a battle of ideas between the old-fashioned, rationalist Italian critic Luigi Settembrini and the mystical ex-Jesuit Leo Naphta. It is tempting to see parallels in the encounter that now occurred between the conference’s two stars, as Heidegger was set against a great humanist scholar of Kantian philosophy and the Enlightenment: Ernst Cassirer.

The World's Banker: A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations
by Sebastian Mallaby
Published 24 Apr 2006

Time and again, Wolfowitz and his neoconservative allies pushed for a more aggressive policy toward dictatorial foes, challenging the realist consensus that had ruled during the 1970s. Time and again, the neoconservatives won out: The United States had more power to confront evil than the realists supposed, and standing up for democracy gave America the high ground in the battle of ideas between dictatorship and freedom. By backing democracy in the Philippines, and later in South Korea and Taiwan, Wolfowitz and his allies put the United States on the right side of history—a contrast with Kissinger’s backing of Iran’s corrupt shah, which had put the United States on the losing side of a revolution.

Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media
by Peter Warren Singer and Emerson T. Brooking
Published 15 Mar 2018

With the help of her new friend in the White House, Pandith joined the U.S. government. Over the next two decades, she served in various roles in both Republican and Democratic administrations, eventually being appointed the first-ever U.S. special representative to Muslim communities. In this position, established to engage in the post-9/11 “battle of ideas,” Pandith traveled to eighty countries and met with thousands of young, disaffected Muslims in places ranging from the slums of Düsseldorf to the mosques of Mali. She foresaw a crisis of identity that would soon sweep the Middle East, culminating in the rise of ISIS. But she also saw something else.

The Economists' Hour: How the False Prophets of Free Markets Fractured Our Society
by Binyamin Appelbaum
Published 4 Sep 2019

“The Line Forms Here for Air Routes,” Business Week, November 6, 1978, 66. 67. Derthick and Quirk, Politics of Deregulation, 129. 68. McKinnon had worked as a page for Rayburn decades earlier; Rayburn died in 1961. This account is based on newspaper reports and on footage of the final meeting included in The Commanding Heights, PBS, “Episode One: The Battle of Ideas.” See Stuart Auerbach, “46-Year-Old CAB Goes out of Existence,” Washington Post, January 1, 1985; and Irvin Molotsky, “C.A.B. Dies After 46 Years,” New York Times, January 1, 1985. 69. Dorothy Robyn, Braking the Special Interests (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 17. 70. Quoted in Michael J.

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind
by Raghuram Rajan
Published 26 Feb 2019

See Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better (New York: Dutton, 2011). 4. See Harold James, Europe Reborn, A History 1914–2000 (New York: Routledge, 2015), 231–33. 5. Markus K. Brunnermeier, Harold James, and Jean-Pierre Landau, The Euro and the Battle of Ideas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018). 6. Judt, Postwar, 338. 7. Computed from Ibid., 340. 8. “Transport > Road > Motor Vehicles per 1000 People: Countries Compared,” NationMaster (website), accessed August 06, 2018, http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Transport/Road/Motor-vehicles-per-1000-people. 9.

The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time
by Yascha Mounk
Published 26 Sep 2023

After her daughters watched Kamala Harris’s inauguration as vice president of the United States, they grew determined to follow in her footsteps. But whatever they might ultimately choose to do, Posey insisted, “they’re going to be at the table. And they need to be able to get along with everybody.” The profound disagreement between Kila Posey and Sharyn Briscoe is just one small skirmish in a much larger battle of ideas. In the place of universalism, parts of the American mainstream are quickly adopting a form of progressive separatism. Schools and universities, foundations and some corporations seem to believe that they should actively encourage people to conceive of themselves as “racial beings.” Increasingly, they are also applying the same framework to other forms of identity, encouraging people to think of their gender, their cultural origin, or their sexual orientation as their defining attribute.

The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to US Empire
by Wikileaks
Published 24 Aug 2015

. … From posts’ perspectives, there are six main areas of action for the USG as it seeks to limit Chavez’s influence: •Know the enemy: We have to better understand how Chavez thinks and what he intends; •Directly engage: We must reassert our presence in the region, and engage broadly, especially with the “non-elites”; •Change the political landscape: We should offer a vision of hope and back it up with adequately-funded programs; •Enhance military relationships: We should continue to strengthen ties to those military leaders in the region who share our concern over Chavez; •Play to our strength: We must emphasize that democracy, and a free trade approach that includes corporate social responsibility, provides lasting solutions; •Get the message out: Public diplomacy is key; this is a battle of ideas and visions. Septel provides detailed suggestions. [07ASUNCION396] A second follow-up cable goes further into the specifics of how to keep Venezuela from deepening its relations with the countries of South America’s southern cone. The cable discusses pressuring governments belonging to the regional trade organization Mercosur in an effort to block Venezuela’s entry into the group: 9.

Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World
by Timothy Garton Ash
Published 23 May 2016

In San Francisco, Sydney, Toronto, Berlin and London we have the opposite need: not to hear, yet again, the classic Western case for free speech, and the familiar disagreements about subjects like hate speech, but to listen, perhaps for the first time, to Confucian, Buddhist, Islamic, Indian, Chinese and Burmese perspectives on the subject. Next to a willingness to listen and not just to preach, there need to be platforms on which the exchange of information and the battle of ideas can take place. We must also provide adequate translation to overcome the linguistic frontiers that persist on the internet, even as it erodes—though it does not demolish—political frontiers. Both of these things freespeechdebate.com attempts to offer, as do websites like TED, with its impressive array of volunteer translators.

The Dreaming Void
by Peter F. Hamilton
Published 1 Jan 2007

The multiple interstices propagated through quantum fields with the tenacity and fragile beauty of a nebula, an edifice forever shifting in tandem with the whims of its creators. It was no longer machine or even artificial life; it had become alive. What it might evolve into was the subject of considerable and obsessive internal debate. The factions were not openly at war over ANA’s ultimate configuration, but it was a vicious battle of ideas. Gore had not been entirely truthful when he had claimed to be a Conservative. He did support the idea of maintaining the status quo, but only because he felt the other, more extreme factions were being far too hasty in offering their solutions. Apart from the Dividers, of course, who wanted ANA to fission into as many parts as there were factions, allowing each to go its own way.

Red Rabbit
by Tom Clancy and Scott Brick
Published 2 Jan 2002

And a dangerous one, more dangerous than this academician realized. How alike they were, the KGB Chairman realized. This one, comfortably sipping his brown Starka, believed absolutely in an ideology that could not be proven. And he desired the death of a man who also believed things that could not be proved. What a curious state of affairs. A battle of ideas, both sets of which feared the other. Feared? What did Karol fear? Not death, certainly. His letter to Warsaw proclaimed that without words. Indeed, he cried aloud for death. He sought martyrship. Why would a man seek that? the Chairman wondered briefly. To use his life or death as a weapon against his enemy.

The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal
by M. Mitchell Waldrop
Published 14 Apr 2001

Licklider ate it all up, with gusto. Indeed, Norbert Wiener's Tuesday-night supper seminar was the high point of his week in those postwar years. Lick and the rest of the Psycho-Acoustics Lab contingent would hang around long after the plates were cleared away, jumping from table to table and happily fighting the battle of ideas with forty or fifty of their contemporaries from all over Cambridge. They would keep it up as they drove back to Harvard, arguing the fine points with one another in the car. And when he finally got back home to Louise, Lick would stilJ be floating high, his blue eyes bright with intellectual intoxication.

Cuba Travel Guide
by Lonely Planet

Museo de Batalla de Ideas MUSEUM (Av 6, btwn Calles 11 12; admission CUC$2, camera CUC$5; 9am-5pm Tue-Sat, 9am-1pm Sun) The newest of Cárdenas’ three museums offers a well-designed and organized overview of the history of US-Cuban relations, replete with sophisticated graphics. Inspired by the case of Elián González, a boy from Cardeńas whose mother, stepfather and 11 others drowned attempting to enter the US by boat in 1999, the museum is the solid form of Castro’s resulting batalla de ideas (battle of ideas) with the US government. The museum’s collection has grown ever since, with the displays’ theme naturally centering round the eight months during which Cuba and the US debated the custody of Elián – but it extends also to displays on the quality of the Cuban education system and a courtyard containing busts of anti-imperialists who died for the revolutionary cause.

A History of Modern Britain
by Andrew Marr
Published 2 Jul 2009

He had been traumatized by watching the death of his brother during the Battle of Britain and rebuilt his life as a Sussex farmer. A staunch individualist, he had been entranced by Hayek’s book and managed to meet his hero after the war. Hayek told Fisher not to try to become a politician but instead to try to win the battle of ideas by forming some kind of institute or organization to fight the rotting influence of the State. It was a message Fisher never forgot. Luckily for him, the State stepped in to help him spread it. In 1952 his herd of cattle contracted foot and mouth disease and had to be destroyed. Fisher used his compensation money to visit the United States.25 There he not only picked up the latest free-market thinking but visited a huge experimental ‘broiler chicken’ farm at Cornell University, where 15,000 birds were being raised under one roof.

Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion
by Gareth Stedman Jones
Published 24 Aug 2016

‘In a true state, there is no landed property, no industry, no material thing, which as a crude element of this kind could make a bargain with the state; in it there are only spiritual forces, and only in their state forms of resurrection in their political rebirth, are these natural forces entitled to a voice in the state … The state’, he went on, ‘pervades the whole of nature with spiritual nerves’, and at every point, what was to be apparent was ‘not matter, but form … not the unfree object’ but the ‘free human being’.92 Young Hegelianism had grown out of the battle of ideas following the publication of David Strauss’s Life of Jesus in 1835. By 1842, Karl’s republicanism was one variant of a common position shared by the Bauer brothers, Ruge and Feuerbach. As the Rheinische Zeitung articles testify, it was a political position remote from the arguments of Hegel himself.

Strategy: A History
by Lawrence Freedman
Published 31 Oct 2013

But Lenin was able to mount an opportunistic campaign to seize power by taking advantage of an organized party, a disorganized state, and a feeble civil society. These, Gramsci believed, were exceptional and peculiarly “eastern” conditions, quite different from the complex civil societies and structures of Western states, where the only course was first to fight the battle of ideas. “The war of position in politics,” he insisted, “is the concept of hegemony.” This was, according to one authority, “a capsule description of his entire strategic argument.”20 Gramsci never got the chance to complete his analysis, let alone put it into practice. Nonetheless, there was a tension at its heart that flowed from his core Marxism.

Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House
by Peter Baker
Published 21 Oct 2013

President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt announced he would allow challengers to run against him, but his government would still control which parties could participate. Bush made personnel moves intended to advance his democracy agenda. He enlisted Karen Hughes to come back from Texas and serve as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, asking her to take over the government’s moribund campaign to promote American values overseas and wage the battle of ideas with Islamic extremists. And he sent Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, to be president of the World Bank, where he could promote democracy along with development. The elevation of Rice and the return of Hughes reflected an effort by Bush to cast off some of the unilateralist cowboy image.