Samuel Alexander Lecture 2019: 'Democracy and its Crisis' with Prof A. C. Grayling CBE

Professor A. C. Grayling CBE presents the 2019 Samuel Alexander Lecture

Democracy and its Crisis

Presented by Professor A. C. Grayling CBE - Master of the New College of the Humanities, London, Professor of Philosophy and Author

Winston Churchill described democracy as 'the least bad of all systems.' So it is, when it works.

But it has been made to fail - notice those words: 'made to fail' - in at least two of its leading examples in today’s world, the US and the UK.

This lecture will discuss how democracy has been made to fail, and how to put it right.

About Professor A. C. Grayling CBE

A. C. Grayling CBE MA DPhil (Oxon) FRSA FRSL is the Master of the New College of the Humanities, London, and its Professor of Philosophy. He is also a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford.

He is the author of over thirty books of philosophy, biography, history of ideas, and essays. He was for a number of years a columnist on the Guardian, the Times, and Prospect magazine. He has contributed to many leading newspapers in the UK, US and Australia, and to BBC radios 4, 3 and the World Service, for which he did the annual 'Exchanges at the Frontier' series; and he has often appeared on television. He has twice been a judge on the Booker Prize, in 2014 serving as the Chair of the judging panel.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Vice President of the British Humanist Association, Patron of the UK Armed Forces Humanist Association, Honorary Associate of the Secular Society, and a Patron of Dignity in Dying.

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About Samuel Alexander

The Samuel Alexander Lecture series honours one of Australia’s greatest scholars and one of Wesley’s most significant alumni. Samuel Alexander was a student at Wesley College in the early 1870s.

After studying at both The University of Melbourne and University of Oxford, he was appointed Professor of Philosophy at Manchester University, England, and subsequently became one of the most significant philosophers in Western Europe in the early 20th century.