As a theorist, economist, politician, author, and co-founder of two transnational democratic and progressive movements, Yanis Varoufakis is a political Renaissance man who has captured some of the main social, political, and economic movements of our times. He catapulted to fame as Greek finance minister in 2015 where he displayed a strong opposing voice to European powers in a time of turbulent financial crisis. Varoufakis has continued to be a leading voice for change. In 2016, Varoufakis co-founded the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25), and in 2020 he co-founded the international organisation Progressive International. Currently, Varoufakis is a member of the Hellenic Parliament in Greece representing MeRA25, The European Realistic Disobedience Front, an electoral branch of the DiEM25 movement.   In this interview, Varoufakis provides an honest and enlightening account of the shortcomings of today’s politics, the rise of techno-feudalism, and the challenges and achievements that he has encountered while leading and participating in new democratic movements.   CJLPA : Could you perhaps talk a bit about your personal trajectory, and how you got to where you are today?   Yanis Varoufakis : I moved to England when I was 17 to study mathematics and economics. I tried to abandon economics for mathematics, but then eventually ended up doing a PhD in Economics, so I was dragged back into the mire of the dismal science. I taught for decades in Britain, in Australia, in the United States. You would never have heard of me—unless you wanted to read esoteric stuff on game theory and political philosophy—if it wasn’t for the fact that the 2008 global crisis spearheaded the bankruptcy of the Greek state and the sequence of bankruptcies across the Eurozone, because as a commentator, I kept saying that all the European Union was doing was extending the bankruptcy into the future, reproducing it and magnifying it. At some point, my counterproposals were sought out by a young man who was going to become Greece’s Prime Minister [Alexis Tsipras], who then said, ‘You’ve got to put your money where your mouth is and you’ve got to be finance minister’. Thus, I spent six months being the finance minister of the most bankrupt European country, saying no to more loans, the purpose of which was, again, to extend and pretend the crisis.   CJLPA : What would you say is the main motivation behind your work, or has it changed across your career paths?   YV : Curiosity. Not taking epiphenomena for granted. Not accepting that the way things look is how they are. As the Royal Society’s motto has instructed us, not to take anybody’s word for it, to keep searching for deeper causes and to discover that those in power have a vested interest in creating a narrative that obfuscates rather than enlightens us regarding the circumstances in which we live.   CJLPA : Do you think there was a moment when this became clear to you, or is it something you have had since the very beginning?   YV : It was something I had since the very beginning. I was blessed and cursed by a highly political life from a very young age, because I grew up in a tempestuous period for Greece’s history. Mind you, Greece has this capacity of stirring up a lot of tempests. But, I was only six when the secret police broke down our front door to abduct my father. And then I was nine when my mother’s brother was sentenced three times to death by a military court during the military dictatorship. If you have that kind of environment, it doesn’t take too much to start querying power, sources of authority, and what constitutes the difference between democracy and oligarchy. At the same time, it wasn’t that terrible. It was, as a boy—I think it would have been different for a girl because of patriarchy—all very exciting, never a dull moment.   CJLPA : You have commented a lot on the happenings of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. What is the biggest misconception that political commentators, observers, even some of your followers, have of you and your perspectives?   YV : It depends on who you are talking about. The misconception on the right wing of politics is that I am an unreconstructed Marxist-communist who wants to see the transition to a state-run system. I consider myself to be a liberal, even libertarian, who is as scared of the state as I am of Google, Microsoft, and ExxonMobil. The misconception on the left is that I’m a stooge of the establishment who is peddling left-wing ideas only in order to ensure that the status quo is reproduced.   CJLPA : Have you attempted to mediate or address these misconceptions through dialogue, or do you continue to progress and express your views?   YV : I think dialogue is everything. This is constantly what I’ve been doing, and I never say no to an opportunity to have a vigorous debate with my worst critics, whether they come from the right or the left or the centre or wherever. I’m very proud of one thing that I’ve managed to maintain: a very civilised, even friendly exchange with people both from the left and the right. There aren’t that many politicians, economists and so on, who count amongst their friends both Lord Norman Lamont, former finance minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer of the Tory government under [John] Major—he’s a friend of mine and we have wonderful debates about everything—and Julian Assange, and Rafael Correa, the former president of Ecuador, the left-winger. It’s wonderful to be able to have these relationships and not to allow them to fall prey to differences of opinion.   CJLPA : You wrote in your book The Global Minotaur  that politicians can’t be theorists for three reasons: they are rarely thinkers; their frenetic lifestyle does not allow them to give them time to think big ideas; and because theorists have to admit the possibility of being wrong. How have you been able to translate these features of a thinker and a theorist into your role as a politician?   YV : By being a bad politician. I think it’s important to be a bad politician. I take pride in being an awful politician. And what do I mean by this? The beauty of an academic environment is that what you do, whether you’re writing an essay, or presenting a talk in a conference, is you are putting forward a hypothesis and your audience has a job to shoot it down, to find its weak spots. That’s what you do in a lab as a physicist: you have a hypothesis and you allow nature to take shots at it. If nature does not bring it down, it means that there is something to this theory that it is useful. So similarly, whether it is anthropology, literature, or whatever, you put forward a hypothesis, you have the best minds in the audience (you hope), and they try to bring it down. If they don’t completely destroy it, it means that there is some merit to it. But if they bring it down, it’s also very pleasing to say, ‘See I was wrong. My hypothesis was interesting, but it wasn’t up to it.’   In politics, by definition, you’re not allowed to do that. Think of BBC Question Time. I’ve been in that environment or similar environments many, many times, whether it’s in parliament or in a studio. So you’re representing the Labour Party or the Tory Party or the Libs, whoever, and you have the opposite side, and you put forward a hypothesis: your theory, your position, is a hypothesis. Could be right, could be wrong. Now, imagine for a moment that your opponents this week think, ‘Oh my God! They’re right.’ If you say so on air before the programme is over, you’ve been thrown out of the party. You have to resign as minister or shadow cabinet. This is what really suffocates me in politics: that whenever I am sitting around the table with political opponents, I know that even if I convince them, they cannot say so. As Upton Sinclair once said, it’s very hard to convince people whose salary depends on not being convinced. How do I manage that? By admitting it when somebody says, ‘by the way, this is a bad point’ and they can prove it. I constantly struggle not to fall into the trap of defending a position just because it is our party’s position, which means that I’m a terrible politician, because there have been many times when I confessed to the other side having a point.   CJLPA : What can be enforced so that politicians who are perhaps afraid to admit that they are wrong can do so without their livelihood depending on it?   YV : That’s up to you. It’s up to the vote. To vote out anyone who wants to be a minister. This is, of course, highly utopic. What we’re trying to do in DiEM25 and MeRA25, my party here in Greece, we have this saying that if you want the position, you’re disqualified from having it. If somebody really wants to be a Member of Parliament, it means that there’s something wrong with them, because nobody in their right mind should want to be a Member of Parliament. There’s nothing more boring, believe me. It’s mind-crushingly boring. So, anybody who really wants to do it—they have a screw loose. There’s a problem. But of course, it’s a dirty job and somebody has to do it. I keep using the awful analogy of taking the rubbish out at night. If a friend of yours really loves taking the rubbish out, you should ask them to go and see a psychiatrist, a psychologist, to reconsider their ways, because there’s something wrong with them. But of course, they have to do it. So you’ve got to treat politics, electoral politics, as a chore. It’s up to voters to ensure that they do not vote for people who are keenly eager to be politicians. It should be public service. It should be something that you do as a sacrifice.   CJLPA : You mentioned the DiEM25 movement that you founded in 2016. First of all, what is the main motivation behind the movement?   YV : Beginning with the realisation that the crisis we have in Europe is not a crisis of Greece, of Germany, of France, of Italy, but it is a pan-European crisis. It’s got to do with the architecture of the EU. So, if the problem is EU-wide, the solution must be EU-wide. The problem with our governments is that they are all elected on the basis of nation-state-specific parties, who go to the voters with an agenda that is completely pie in the sky because they are all nation-centric agendas that can never be realised by a nation-state government. We don’t have the levers, at the level even for Germany, to do that which German political parties are proposing. So you have fake politics in a sense, you have democracies at the nation-state level that do not have the power to do that which they promise, and you’ve got EU-wide political decision making which is not democratic.   Once we had that analysis, the obvious thing to do was to create a pan-European political movement, a unitary transnational political movement. We’re not talking about an alliance of a Greek party, a Polish party, a Dutch party, and so on, because those alliances really don’t work like confederacies. They don’t have a common programme. They just share jobs in Brussels, and that’s neither here nor there. We’re the first movement that doesn’t have a Greek chapter or a German chapter, and on our Coordinating Committee we don’t have the Greek representative, or the German representative, or the Dutch representative. We are all elected by all of the members, independently of our nationalities. Some of us happen to be Greek, German, and Italian, but we’re not representing Greece, Germany, and Italy on the Committee. We’re representing the whole membership across Europe. To run electorally, for example, we created the Party in Greece. But all the decisions regarding the Party, the manifesto—ie what is our policy regarding refugees in Greece? What is our policy regarding VAT in Greece?— are voted for by everyone, including the Germans and the Dutch, not just the Greek members. That’s never been tried before.   CJLPA : What does it take to create such a political movement? How does one go about it? What are its challenges?   YV : It’s very hard. It’s very hard work, let’s face it, because of the geography as well. Europe is vast, so before COVID-19 we were always in an airplane running around, having meetings and so on. But the way we did it was, when we started the movement in 2016, we booked a very nice theatre in central Berlin, the Volksbühne theatre, and we invited people who come from all over the place. We had the website, and we said: join. From that moment on, we decided the process of policy-making: on the one hand, at a pan-European level, a lot of which was digital of course; the local campaigns; and then the setting up of local committees—we call them DSCs, ‘DiEM25 Spontaneous Collectives’—in Poland, in Greece, and so on and so forth. It’s been hellish trying to organise that and then running the elections. In the European Parliament elections in May 2019, we ran in eight countries, which was hard, especially for a movement that had no money. We had five euros here and five euros there from our members, and that’s why you don’t see us in the European Parliament. We got very close to getting MEPs (Members of the European Parliament) elected in Greece, in Germany, and in Denmark, but we just missed out by very little. But still, we got one and a half million votes across Europe—which is not that much, but at the same time it’s not negligible—and we’ve influenced many other people. It’s a constant struggle. We have not succeeded, but we have not withered. The fact that we are alive and kicking is a great success for us.   CJLPA : What would you say is DiEM25’s biggest achievement? Would you say it was the electoral prominence that it had?   YV : No. The biggest achievement is the Green New Deal for Europe—our policy agenda—which fills us with a great deal of pride, because we all talk about the green transition and green politics, how to combine the social with the environmental, and about green new deals, but we were the first ones to actually come up with one, and one that is comprehensive, radical, and realistic at the same time. And also the way we did it. Back starting in 2016, we had a committee of about 20 economists, environmentalists, and experts who put together a questionnaire, just questions, which we distributed across Europe and beyond Europe, amongst our friends in America and elsewhere, which were very specific. Key questions like: how much should we spend on green energy? Figures, not pie-in-the-sky stuff. Where is this money going to come from? Which part of it will be public finance, which part of it will be taxes? How will it be distributed? What will it be spent on? What about public debt, which is a huge issue especially the European Union and the Eurozone? What about private debt? What are we going to do with the banks? How do we regulate the banks? What about universal basic income? Do we want it? And if we want it, how do we pay for it? I’m just giving some examples. These were all questions, and it was a logistical nightmare because we’ve got, as you can imagine, thousands of answers, and had to sift through all of them. From all of those answers, that committee of 20 people had to put together a draft Green New Deal proposal, which then went out for consultation. More answers came, we fixed it again and we brought it back together, and then we put it up for an all-member vote across Europe. That was voted in. Then we formed the alliance with which we stood in the May 2019 European Parliament elections, so we brought in other parties that had not been party to this European Green New Deal and they had to contribute themselves, so that changed the game. Now we have a document which, if you compare it to what comes out of the European Commission—the Green Deal of Mrs Von der Leyen—I’m very proud of, because what they have is really not worth the paper that it is written on, I think, compared to ours. I mean, of course, there are things that could be improved and will be improved and are being improved because we are constantly adapting it to the post-COVID-19 era.   That’s a major success in the sense that the worst enemy of progressive politics is the belief deep down, even of progressives, that [Margaret] Thatcher was right, that there is no alternative to what is being carried out. Even progressives, even people who demonstrate on the streets, deep down they worry that maybe the adults in the room know what’s best, that maybe we don’t like what we see but maybe we don’t have an alternative to what’s going on. This Green New Deal for Europe is the alternative. You read it and you think, ‘OK, now we could implement this tomorrow.’ It’s not like, ‘In another world, in a better world, we could do this’, no, because part of our blueprint is what you can do this week, in six months’ time, in 12 months’ time, in five years, and ten years. Maybe we’re wrong, but at least we thought, ‘OK, we put this on the table’, and we say to others, ‘Come and tell us where we’re wrong’, in an academic kind of fashion. ‘Come and shoot it down, tell us what your ideas are.’ Whenever we had political parties from Italy, from France, and so on saying, ‘Let’s collaborate’, and we say, ‘OK, let’s collaborate, but look, we have a program here for Europe, tell us where we’re wrong’, at that point we realised that most political parties, if not all, said, ‘No, let’s agree on how we’re going to stand together and who’s going to become a Member of Parliament.’ But we are not interested in that. We want to agree on what needs to be done. If we are in office, then we discuss who will be in office. We are trying to change the direction of movement from talking about who is going to get what position to, say, what needs to be done if we get the position. This is not very appealing to the existing political system. Not even to the left, or even to the Greens.   CJLPA : You mentioned this inevitability that Thatcher was right. You recently said that we’re entering a post-capitalist world—what you termed ‘techno-feudalism’. Could you perhaps elaborate on, firstly, how we finally reached this post-capitalist society, and then on this new concept of ‘techno-feudalism’?   YV : When I was your age or even younger, I remember being schooled into the great schools of thought that were clashing with one another. And the main two at the time—it was, of course, the Cold War back then—were the liberal democratic capitalist school, harking back to Adam Smith, with elements of Friedman and von Hayek, who were representing capitalism as the ideal system, on the basis that you have a minimal state providing security and everything else is left to individuals. These individuals are free, through the market, to pursue their own private interests, with the market operating as if by an invisible hand behind our backs—a kind of divine providence—synthesising our greedy individual self-interests into the good of society. As nobody can know what people want or what people are capable of, certainly not the state, allowing this decentralised decision-making process to progress is the best way of combining private liberty with the public good. That was one view. According to that view: the state is there, it is minimal; investment is private, and comes out of savings; households save; firms borrow and invest; and you let a Darwinian process decide who survives and who dies with a state playing a minimal, safety-net kind of role. That was one view.   The other view, which was the socialist view, the left-wing view, even the communist view—from the side of those who were in favour of central planning Soviet-style—the view was that capitalism and the market fails, it creates inequality and injustice, and you need a state representing the public will to coordinate both incentives and constraints so that you achieve the public good. That was a big clash, and I was very interested in this clash. The pro-capitalist view versus a kind of socialist view. This is irrelevant now, and it has definitely become irrelevant after 2008. In 1991, the socialist tradition collapsed because the Soviet Union collapsedand with it social democracy collapsed as well, even though the Social Democrats were very anti-Soviet. The left lost its mojo, so to speak, in 1991.   In 2008, the Thatcherite School, the liberal, libertarian tradition, had its comeuppance because the private capital combusted and dissolved. Since then, what we have had is the state keeping capitalism alive. So the central bank—the Bank of England, the European Central Bank, the Federal Reserve—keeps on pumping money, giving it to the private bankers who are completely bankrupt otherwise, who are giving it to companies that would be completely bankrupt otherwise. So you have the zombification of the private sector by the states. It’s no longer the clash between the private and the public. The public is keeping the private zombified, in a state of being undead—not alive, but not dead either—because if the Bank of England pulls the plug, the whole thing collapses. If the Fed pulls the plug, it’s all gone. It’s no longer this juxtaposition between the state and the private sector. The state is producing the fuel that keeps corporates alive. At the same time, the old story that households save and corporations borrow to invest has died as well. Now you have a situation where corporations are saving. Apple has $220 billion of savings. Every large corporation is saving. Why do they have savings? Because they are too scared to invest. They are scared to invest because they look at you and say, ‘She will not be able to buy stuff from me at a price that will give me profits, so I’m not going to invest.’ They don’t invest, they don’t create good quality jobs, and they instead create crap jobs. Crap jobs means that people like you then don’t have enough money to buy their stuff, so that confirms their decision not to invest. But how do they keep themselves alive? They get huge loans from the private banks that get the money from the central bank. What do the large corporations do with the huge loans they get from the private banks? They go to the stock exchange and buy their own shares. Share prices are very high, bonuses to the members of the board of directors are very high because they are linked to the share price, so they are doing really very well. Financial markets are booming, but profits are zero. This is a complete disconnect between the financial world and capitalism. That’s not capitalism. The model of capitalism, and the heads of those who supported capitalism when I was growing up, has gone.   Now what you have is certain companies like Tesla, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and so on, based on remarkable new technologies—and they are remarkable, I love them—that creates huge power for them. Those companies are no longer operating within a capitalist framework: the moment you go into amazon.com, you are outside capitalism, and you are inside a platform that provides everything for you. It’s equivalent of walking down the high street only to discover that every shop is owned by the same man, every product sold is distributed by the same company that owns the shops. The tarmac is owned by the same company, the air you breathe is owned by the same company, and what your eyes see is directed by the same company. This is what happens on Amazon. What you see on Amazon right now is directed by the company. That’s not a competitive market. That’s not a market at all. This reminds me of feudal times, because if you were a peasant and you lived in some estate, in a Downton Abbey-like estate, you lived in a place which belonged to one family. You had a dwelling, you ploughed the land, you went to festivals, but it was all within a fiefdom owned by one person. That’s more or less where we’re moving now, where we already are. If you combine that with the fact that all the money comes from the state, from state printing presses—the Bank of England, or the Federal Reserve—and it’s all technologically kept together and promoted, I think that we can’t talk about capitalism anymore. ‘Techno-feudalism’ is a better term for it.   CJLPA : Seeing as the state essentially funds this techno-feudalism, how can we maintain democracy and accountability when it is already tough to maintain it between the public and the state, let alone the public and the corporations?   YV : Through a series of steps. The first thing we need to do is to cut out the middleman, and I’ll be very specific here. I already described how the central bank prints money, gives it to Barclays, or the Royal Bank of Scotland, or to Deutsche Bank. They then pick up the phone. They don’t call you. If you go and ask for a loan, you won’t get it because they don’t trust you to pay it back. So what they do is they pick up the phone and they call a large company and say, ‘I’ve got these millions here. Zero interest rate. Do you want it?’, and they give it to them for zero interest rate because they themselves pay negative interest rates. In other words, the central bank pays them to take the money, so even if they give it away for free to the large corporations, as long as they take it back, they’re laughing. So the large corporation which is too scared to invest because little people do not have the money to buy stuff, then take this money and goes to the stock exchange and buys back its own shares. Their shares go up. But this is wasted money. It’s not feeding economic activity, especially the green transition, investment in renewables, and so on. So we need to cut out the middleman. Imagine if whenever the Bank of England printed £100 billion, instead of giving it to Barclays and the Royal Bank of Scotland, imagine if they credited every bank account in Britain with £5,000. Then you would go out there and buy stuff, and suddenly there would be economic activity. Businesses would start saying, ‘Hang on a second, she can buy stuff now. I’ll produce things. I will employ people.’ So this is one step. It’s not the only one, but it would be a significant step to cut out the middleman. That’s the summary.   The second step is that we need public investment in the green transition, because the market cannot be relied upon to do that which is necessary in order to save the planet, because the market can never price things that don’t have prices. The air we breathe doesn’t have a price, so it can never be rationed through the market. It has to be done by us, by a political process. For that, we need a public investment bank that soaks up excess liquidity in the financial sector and presses it into the service of the green transition. Britain used to have one when I lived in Britain a long, long time ago. It was called the Post Office Savings Bank. Jeremy Corbyn had this programme in his manifesto in 2019, for creating a national investment bank. Boris Johnson talked about it again recently, but I haven’t seen what they’ve done or whether they’ve done it. The Germans have it: it’s called KFW, and it’s a very good investment bank. Imagine you have a national investment bank. They issue bonds—in other words, they borrow—they soak up liquidity from the financial sector, the Bank of England can guarantee those bonds and say, ‘If their price goes down, I’ll buy them’, so suddenly everybody who has money will want to buy those bonds because the Bank of England is standing behind them, and then you create a kitty from which you pay for the Green Industrial Revolution. I’m using those terms because they were first used by Jeremy Corbyn, but Boris Johnson has taken it now and he talks about the Green Industrial Revolution. So, go spend the money, go and create the green technologies. And what are they? We need to invest in hydrogen, to take over diesel. We need more renewable energy, from windmills and so on in the North Sea. We need batteries, because the Chinese are completely monopolising the battery technology. I’m not against them. Good on them, except Europe is not doing it, and we’re going to increasingly rely on battery technology coming from China. Other technologies are already being experimented with elsewhere, like compressed air, so you use renewable energy to compress air so its decompression can be used during peak times when other renewables are not available. There’s some artificial intelligence. These are some things that you can direct the investment to.   Those two steps, they’re not even that radical, they’re just using existing institutions and existing tools and weapons against the common problem. So you create good quality jobs. People have more money to spend. You’ll be able to end the constant humiliation of needy people who have to go through the wringer of Universal Credit and all those mechanisms that crush their soul to give them a penny. If everybody gets it, the Bank of England credits everybody with £5,000, and then the rich people can be taxed on this money at the end of the year anyway, so their money goes back to the state.   But finally, if you really want to democratise the economy, you have to rethink the whole notion of tradable shares. My view is that that’s a very bad idea. It started in 1599 in London with the British East India Company, where you had the notion that you take the ownership of a company and you break it down into little shares that are anonymous and that can be traded like confetti. We need to rethink that, because in the end what we’re saying is that somebody who has money can effectively own all the power of the large corporations. We would not tolerate that when it comes to politics. We would not have tradable votes in politics. Why do we have them in the general assembly of shareholders? But this is a much longer-term and a more radical rethink that I am proposing.   CJLPA : You mention that these two steps are not that radical. Do people in influence or in power know this? And if they do, why is it so hard for them to implement it?   YV : Of course they know. It’s not hard for them. They don’t want it because they make a lot of money at the moment due to the fact that it’s not being implemented. When I say cut out the middleman, I’m effectively saying cut out the commercial banks. Commercial bankers understand the importance of that, but they would rather die than see it happen. They will do anything. They will kick and scream and threaten us with blue murder if we dare do it. So the question is: who is running the show? Is it the bankers, or society? At the moment, it is the bankers.   CJLPA : I was wondering if we could turn just for a brief moment to your home country, Greece. You are a politician in the electoral branch of DiEM25, MeRA25. What do you think we—as Europeans or just as world citizens—should know about Greece at the moment, and are there any opportunities or challenges that you think Greece will face in the future?   YV : The challenge is never-ending. We are now in the eleventh year of our long winter of discontent, our Great Depression. Greece went bankrupt in 2010 and is more bankrupt today than it ever was. What I think is quite instructive, especially for young students of political economy and politics more generally, is: why don’t you hear about this anymore? Because up until a few years ago, Greece was front-page news. Its bankruptcy was almost on a daily basis on the front page of every newspaper around the world. Everybody considered it to be insolvent and a threat to the global financial system. That is no longer the case. It’s no longer appearing on the front page. Does this mean that it has been mended, as the powers that be claimed the case to be? No. We are even worse now than we were in 2010. You can ascertain this very easily. When we went bankrupt, we had a debt of, say, 300—forget the zeros. Now we have a debt of 380. Our income then was 240, now it’s 165. We are far more bankrupt today than we were in 2010, which proves that politics determines who is considered insolvent and who not, that insolvency is a political issue in the end, especially when it comes to countries. When I was finance minister, we were being discussed left, right and centre every day—on the BBC, everywhere—because I was putting up a struggle against our official lenders, the European Union in particular, who wanted us to take another credit card to pretend that we were repaying the previous credit cards. And I was saying no to that. They shut down our banks in order to force us to do it, and that was big news. It’s like a riot in an awful prison camp: when prisoners have had enough of awful conditions and they stage a riot, that becomes big news. Television vans arrive and you’ve got all the shots of the fracas in the prison. When the riot is put down by riot police, the television cameras leave, but that doesn’t mean that the situation in the prison is good. It means that it is no longer newsworthy. This is the same thing.   The lesson, I think, is that it’s not a technical question, the bankruptcy of a state. It’s a political question, and that has repercussions for Britain, it has implications for the United States. In the 1970s, Britain had to go to the IMF (International Monetary Fund) for a loan, and everybody said Britain was bankrupt. But Britain was not bankrupt. It was a political decision to go to the IMF. Britain had no reason to go to the IMF. There was no obligation to go to the IMF. The government at the time was a Labour government, the James Callaghan government, and they decided that they wanted to keep the exchange rate between the pound and the dollar steady. If you have an outflow of money, you can’t keep it steady unless there is an inflow. If you put, above all else, the maintenance of the exchange rate between the pound and the dollar, then you go to the IMF and you declare yourself bankrupt. But that was a political choice. There were losers and there were winners as a result of that. Those who had reason to be able to convert their pounds into dollars and not to lose money, especially large companies or Brits that had investments in the United States or outside Britain—they benefited from the declaration that Britain was bankrupt. Workers and weaker people suffered immensely without getting any of the benefits of having declared Britain to be bankrupt. These are, I think, especially talking to students in an academic environment, the lessons from Greece. When it comes to a corner store, bankruptcy is more or less a technical problem. If the corner store’s revenues are not up to it, then of course at some point you have to close down. It’s an inevitability. It’s a technical point. But when it comes to the bankruptcy of a nation, and therefore the questions about public debt, and deficits, and austerity, and whether Rishi Sunak is right to say that we will have to start repaying now because otherwise we will be in trouble—none of that is a technical issue. All of it is political. It is a question of which social groups’ interests those in authority are prioritising.   CJLPA : Are we already seeing this sort of politicisation with the pandemic at the moment?   YV : Absolutely, we already see it. You already see that, including the pandemic, as a result of the process of creating money that I described before—where the central bank prints money for the banks and the banks give money to the corporations—you have a gigantic increase in inequality because little people suffering from COVID-19 or COVID-19-related ill effects on their economic circumstances are absolutely desperate. They’ve lost their livelihood. Their revenues have gone down by 80%. They’re worried about furlough: is it going to end? When will it end? But those who are in receipt of wealth injections, as a result of the Bank of England’s money printing, they’ve seen their income and their wealth multiply at ridiculous   levels. The Swiss bank UBS came out with a report that, only in the United States, since the beginning, between March and December of 2020, during the first nine or ten months of the pandemic, the richest Americans increased their income and wealth combined by $1 trillion as a result of doing nothing. Just by sitting there, in their sleep. So yes, we’ve already seen that. Now that Britain, due to a rather decent vaccination process, is facing exit from the pandemic and the opening up of the economy and so on, austerity is coming back as the chosen policy of the Conservative Party. And austerity is just another form of class war, and it is more plundering of the victims of a crisis on behalf of those who benefited from it.   There will be a post-pandemic. Maybe we’ll have another one later on, but this one is going to die. The Spanish flu died after 1918 even though there were no vaccines. Now we have vaccines as well, so it will go. But what will be left behind? If you think about it, we do have some recent evidence. 2008 was a catastrophe for global capitalism, especially Western capitalism, and it got its effects. Those who caused the crisis, the bankers, exited the crisis with more power than what they had before the crisis, and the little people were even weaker than they were before.   CJLPA : I wanted to quickly ask you about Progressive International. I wanted to specifically ask: why does Progressive International believe that the time is now to create a collective, international, progressive front?   YV : I think the time was in 2008. We are late, and the reason why I think that is because, as I mentioned before, 2008 was our generation’s 1929. It ended capitalism as we know it, or as we knew it, and created a new regime which I call techno-feudalism. This is the result of regressive international coming together. This is, if you want, the G20 decision of April 2009 under the chairmanship of Gordon Brown, when all the bankers, central bankers, finance ministers, prime ministers, and presidents got together and decided to save capitalism. The way they did it—I’m not criticising it, just describing it—was to create huge solidarity between bankers. The bankers of the world got together and saved each other by transferring their losses onto the public ledger. That was a clear demonstration that internationalism works for the bankers, and then once this was combined with austerity for everybody else, you had discontent. And discontent breeds populism, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, all those things that come out of humiliation and deep-seated discontent, just like it happened in the 1930s. We saw that with the success of Brexit, of Donald Trump, of Bolsonaro, of Modi, of Le Pen, of Salvini, of the Alternative für Deutschland, and so on. The bankers got together, created their international, and worked. Then the fascists got together and internationalised, and they’re a huge power around the world, even if they lost the White House. Trump is gaining strength, as far as I’m concerned, in America. Fascism is solidifying, if anything, under Biden even more than it did under Trump. The bankers and the fascists internationalised. It’s time for progressives to internationalise. That’s what Bernie Sanders and I thought in November 2018. We met in Vermont and asked, ‘Will anyone join us?’ So we started.   CJLPA : Have there been any challenges or any achievements thus far with Progressive International?   YV : The problem was that we had the American presidential campaign intervene between November 2019 and now, which meant that Bernie could not be part of it for legal reasons. Senators cannot participate in international [organisations], especially candidates for the presidency, so that went into abeyance for a while. Then Bernie’s involvement with Joe Biden—and he was running his economic policy through the Senate—meant that he could not be part of it. So we were delayed by this. Then we launched about a year ago properly, and we did this on the basis of bringing together people. The organisations that are part of the Progressive International have about 200 million members around the world. Our first major campaign was called ‘Make Amazon Pay’. It started on the day of Black Friday last December. It’s a beginning. I’m very proud of what we did. We had a rolling strike in warehouses of Amazon pushing for better wages and conditions for workers around the world, and it started in Bangladesh, it moved to India, shifting time zones, then to Germany, then to New Jersey, then to Seattle, then to Australia. This was the first attempt to do anything like that. It had never been done before, and we’re very heartened by that. Now, we need to bring in consumers with boycotts, not just against Amazon. The philosophy is this: we need local action in support of communities that need it, with a global perspective and global solidarity. This combination is hard and essential at the same time.   And also, we have gone from the model of campaigns and collective actions of the nineteenth century, where you combined maximum private personal sacrifice by participants with minimal personal benefits, [to a system where you have minimal  private personal sacrifice and maximum  personal benefits]. If you think about it, a gold mine going on strike back in the nineteenth century was a maximum sacrifice because it meant no food on the table, no wages. It meant that some of them were victimised, some of them were beaten up, arrested. It is like asking people to sacrifice themselves. What was the benefit to themselves individually? On average, very low. Even if they got a wage rise, everybody got it, including those who didn’t strike and those who broke the strike. This cost-benefit analysis at the private level of early reforms of action has been very detrimental to the common cause. Maybe we need to do things differently. So we have minimal personal sacrifice, especially if it’s a global campaign like, for example, don’t visit amazon.com for a day—it’s a tiny sacrifice for you, I don’t want to say never buy from Amazon, but, for a day or a week—with maximum impact. As well as campaigns, we were represented in Bolivia during the election campaign, now in Ecuador. We are running a campaign in Turkey against the banning of the third-largest party and the torture of Members of Parliament. We are being active everywhere, as far as we can.   CJLPA : In the introduction you wrote for the Communist Manifesto , you poignantly wrote that a dilemma faces young people today, similarly to that faced in the time of Marx and Engels. The question is: conform to an established order that is crumbling and incapable of reproducing itself, or oppose it, at considerable personal cost, in search of new ways of working, playing, and living together? In light of this, what piece of advice would you give to young people today who will likely set foot in positions of influence or who seek change?   YV : Make this choice with a clear understanding that you are making this choice. Don’t allow yourself to drift into a kind of lifestyle by default. I’m not a moralising kind of guy. [George] Bernard Shaw, I believe, put it like this: there are people who try to adapt themselves to the world, and there are other people who try to adapt the world to their view of what the world should be like. The latter, of course, means sacrifice. It means that the world is not going to take kindly to being told by you that it should be different. But you’ve got to make this choice consciously, you’ve got to weigh up the pros and cons and know what kind of deal you are ending up with. If you choose to go against the grain, you are probably not going to make a lot of money, you are probably going to have quite a lot of heartache, maybe threats and so on, if you go against the insiders as I say. But at the same time, you will have the immense satisfaction that you are autonomous, that you are not simply reflecting the terrain around you like a chameleon. On the other hand, I’m not going to be sitting in judgment of somebody who says, ‘There’s only one life, I’m not going to be struggling all the time, I want to get a cushy nice job and I want to have the money and the time to go travelling or go skiing.’ I highly respect that too. But make that choice consciously. Don’t simply drift into the default position. This interview was conducted by Teresa Turkheimer, a final-year undergraduate in Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick, working towards an MSc in European and International Public Policy at the London School of Economics in the 2021-22 academic year. Her interests lie in European politics, European Union foreign and security policy, and political philosophy.

The United Kingdom has experienced two major political crises in the last five years. Brexit and COVID-19 are crises of very different kinds. But they have a significant feature in common whose implications will live with us for a long time. They are milestones in the demise of liberal democracy.   The model which will replace liberal democracy is already emerging. It will be more authoritarian and less dependent on Parliamentary deliberation. It will view our society as a great collective with a single collective notion of the public good, and treat dissent as antisocial, even treasonable. It will be less accepting of the idea that there are islands of human life in which, extremes apart, individuals are entitled to make their own decisions irrespective of the wishes of the state. The defining feature of totalitarian societies is a model of the relations between the state and the citizen in which individuals are first and foremost instruments of collective policy. This once distinguished them from democracies. The distinction will become less important, as formerly liberal societies move closer to the totalitarian model.   The first symptoms of this change were apparent well before anyone had heard of either Brexit or COVID-19. The Pew Research Centre has been tracking attitudes to democracy in different countries for some 30 years. Dissatisfaction with democracy has been rising in advanced democracies for most of that time, especially among the young, and particularly in the oldest democracies: the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. The UK has one of the highest levels of dissatisfaction in the world, at 69%. Only in Bulgaria and Greece is it higher. Dissatisfaction with democracy does not necessarily imply a preference for some other system. But more disturbing findings emerge from the regular surveys of political engagement conducted in the UK by the Hansard Society. In the 2019 survey 54% of respondents agreed that ‘Britain needs a strong leader willing to break the rules’, and only 23% disagreed. As many as 42% thought that the government ‘shouldn’t have to worry so much about votes in Parliament’.   These attitudes are closely correlated to economic performance. People who are dissatisfied with the economy, people who feel economically left behind or pessimistic about the future, are more likely to reject democracy. This is not altogether surprising. Historically, democracies have always been heavily dependent on economic good fortune. Western democracy was born in the nineteenth century, in an age of creative optimism, economic expansion, and European supremacy. Except for two short periods, the United States has enjoyed continuously rising levels of prosperity, both absolutely and relative to other countries, until quite recently. Britain’s economic history has been more chequered, but the trajectory has generally been upward. In the life of any community, the shattering of optimism is a dangerous moment. Disillusionment with the promise of progress was a major factor in the 30-year crisis of Europe which began in 1914 and ended in 1945. That crisis was characterised by a resort to autocracy in much of Europe. Three-quarters of a century have passed since 1945, years marked by rapid economic growth and exponential improvements in standards of living. But today, the outlook is darker. Most Western democracies face problems of faltering growth and relative economic decline, of redundant skills and capricious patterns of inequality, most of them the legacy of past successes. These trends are likely to be aggravated in the UK by Brexit, and nearly everywhere by COVID-19. Climate change is a future challenge the implications of which are only beginning to dawn on people. Most of the measures proposed for dealing with it involve curtailing economic growth. Economic pessimism generates feelings of disempowerment which tend to discredit democratic institutions.   Against an unfavourable background like this, what will Brexit and COVID-19 contribute to these trends?   The Brexit crisis proved to be a watershed moment for British democracy. The first task of any political system is to accommodate differences of interest and opinion among citizens, so that they can live together in community without the systematic application of force. Democracies operate on the basis that although the majority has authorised policies which the minority rejects, these differences are transcended by their common acceptance of the legitimacy of the decision-making process. It is legally and constitutionally possible for a bare majority to take all the political spoils without engaging with the minority. But a democracy which persistently did that would not accommodate differences, but brutalise them. It would cease to be a political community, and could hardly function as a democracy.   For this reason, thoughtful democrats have always recognised that too much democracy is bad for democracy. They have been able to avoid the self-destructive tendency of democracy by spurning the direct decision of contentious issues by the electorate, and opting for representative politics instead. Representative politics are essentially an institutionalised system of compromise. The rigidity of party discipline in the House of Commons means that compromise is rare across the House. But it happens indirectly because political parties have to accommodate a broad spectrum of opinion and interests if they want to be elected. People are naturally averse to compromise about issues on which they feel strongly. They prefer not to engage with the views of those with whom they profoundly disagree. Parliamentary systems force them to do so. Although political parties can exploit a single issue in a moment of national emotion to carry them to power without compromise, in the medium and long term they cannot afford to become ideological sects. If they did, they would move to the margins of politics where they would have limited influence and no prospect of power. This is what nearly happened to the Labour Party in 1983 and again in 2019.   The Brexit referendum of 2016 was adopted as a way of circumventing the Parliamentary process. The theory is that once the answer has been supplied by the majority, it is the answer of the entire community. This notion is both false and profoundly damaging. It is false because the minority still exists and has no reason to alter its opinion simply because it is a minority. It is damaging because it creates a sense of entitlement in the majority, which dispenses them from the need to engage with those who disagree. Referenda have often been used as the tools of tyrants. Napoleons I and III, Hitler, and Putin have all used them as a license to institute authoritarian governments. In Britain, the effect of the Brexit referendum was more subtle. It did not bring a tyrant to power. What it did was to undermine representative politics and prevent it from accommodating differences among our people on one of the most contentious issues of modern times. Since an ability to do that is essential to the long-term survival of a democratic constitution, this has impoverished our politics and destroyed the tolerant conventions by which we had previously been governed.   The natural consequence has been the election of a government with a strong authoritarian streak, characterised by a resentment of opposition and dissent. At what earlier stage in our history would the Attorney General have told the House of Commons, as Geoffrey Cox did in all seriousness in September 2019, that it was ‘unfit to sit’ because it would not allow the government to leave the European Union until it had made satisfactory alternative arrangements? This was not an isolated event, but part of a consistent pattern. Other symptoms of the rejection of our pluralist traditions include: the brutal political purge of the once-dominant Europhile element in the Parliamentary Conservative Party; the threat of revenge against the Supreme Court for its temerity in insisting, in the two Gina Miller cases, on the constitutional authority of Parliament; the overt hostility to the BBC for its alleged failure to share the government’s outlook, coupled with a threat to destroy its financial model; the insistence on filling positions in the government’s gift from the Cabinet to the Trustees of the British Museum with loyalists and placemen regardless of their qualifications for the job, or lack of them; and the contempt for civil servants who dare to give expert but unwelcome advice. These have all been attacks on national institutions which stand for a plurality of opinion. They represent something new and unwelcome in our political culture.   The constitutional baggage carried over from the Brexit debacle proved to be the starting point for the government’s response to the next crisis.   At the root of the problems generated by the pandemic was the public’s attitude to the state and to risk. People have remarkable confidence in the capacity of the state to contain risk and ward off misfortune. An earlier generation regarded natural catastrophes as only marginally amenable to state action. The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918–21 is the event most closely comparable to the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. It is estimated to have killed 200,000 people in the United Kingdom at a time when its population was about two thirds what it is now. The UK government took no special steps to curtail its transmission, apart from isolating the infected and the sick, which had been the classic response to epidemics from time immemorial. No one criticised it for this. COVID-19 is a somewhat more infectious pathogen than Spanish flu, but it is significantly less mortal. It is also easier to deal with because it mainly affects those with underlying vulnerabilities due to age or certain underlying clinical conditions. A high proportion of these people are economically inactive. By comparison, Spanish flu had a particularly devastating impact on healthy people aged under 50. Yet in 2020 Britain, in common with most Western countries, ordered a general lockdown of the whole population, healthy or sick, something which had never been done before in response to any disease anywhere. These measures enjoyed substantial public support.   In the intervening century, something has radically changed in our collective outlook. Two things in particular have changed. One is that we now expect more of the state, and are less inclined to accept that there are limits to what it can do. The other is that we are no longer willing to accept risks that have always been inherent in life itself. Human beings have lived with epidemic disease from the beginning of time. If one can imagine a hypothetical world in which every community had a sterile space into which it could withdraw at the onset of disease, humanity would have become extinct. It would have no natural immunity and would simply be wiped out the next time that a new pathogen struck too quickly or silently for flight.   COVID-19 is a relatively serious epidemic but historically it is well within the range of health risks which are inseparable from ordinary existence. In Britain, bubonic plague, smallpox, cholera and tuberculosis were all worse in their time. Internationally, the list of comparable or worse epidemics is substantially longer, even if they did not happen to strike Europe and North America. The average age at which people die with COVID-19 is 82.4, which is not significantly different from the average age at which they die without COVID-19. The change is in ourselves, not in the nature or scale of the risks that we face.   In the first of my 2019 Reith lectures, I drew attention to the implications of our aversion to risk for our relationship with the state. I referred to what I have called, then and since, the Hobbesian bargain. The seventeenth-century political philosopher Thomas Hobbes argued that human beings surrendered their liberty completely, unconditionally, and irrevocably to an absolute ruler in return for security. Hobbes was an apologist for absolute government. In his model of society, the state could do absolutely anything for the purpose of reducing the risks that threaten our wellbeing, other than deliberately kill us. Hobbes’s state was an unpleasant thing, but he had grasped a profound truth. Most despotisms come into being not because a despot has seized power, but because people willingly surrender their freedoms for security. To resist this tendency requires of us a collective restraint and self-discipline, an appreciation of the complexity and interconnectedness of human affairs, and a willingness to resist the empire of fear. Our culture has always rejected Hobbes’s model of society. Intellectually, it still does. But in recent years it has increasingly tended to act on it. The response to COVID-19 has taken that tendency a long way further. I could not have imagined in 2019 that my concerns would be so dramatically vindicated so quickly.    Until March 2020, it was unthinkable that liberal democracies should confine healthy people in their homes indefinitely, with limited exceptions at the discretion of ministers. It was unthinkable that a whole population should be subject to criminal penalties for associating with other human beings and answerable to the police for the ordinary activities of daily life. In a now-notorious interview in February 2021, Professor Neil Ferguson explained what changed. It was the lockdown in China. ‘It’s a communist one-party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought … And then Italy did it. And we realised we could.’ It is worth pausing to reflect on what this means. It means that because a lockdown of the entire population appeared to work in a country which was notoriously indifferent to individual rights and traditionally treats human beings as mere instruments of state policy, they could ‘get away with’ doing the same thing here. As I write this, the British government has published an ‘Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy’ which identifies China as presenting a ‘systemic challenge to our values’. Liberty and personal autonomy are surely among our most fundamental of those values. They are also essential conditions for human happiness and creativity. Yet we have been willing to jettison them in favour of the Chinese model. Entirely absent from Professor Ferguson’s analysis was any conception of the principled reasons why it had hitherto been unthinkable for Western countries to do such a thing. It was unthinkable because it was based on a conception of the state’s authority over its citizens which was morally repellent even if it worked.   This is not, as many people appear to think, a phase which will pass when COVID-19 disappears (if it ever does). Governments rarely relinquish powers that they have once acquired. Wartime controls were kept in being for years after the end of the war. Some wartime powers continued to be exercised right up to the 1990s. But the problem is more fundamental than that. The government has immense powers, not just in the field of public health, but generally. These powers have existed for many years. Their existence has been tolerable in a liberal democracy only because of a culture of restraint which made it unthinkable that they should be used in the intrusive and abrasive manner in which the government has used its public health powers. Before 2020, it was only culture and convention which prevented us from adopting a totalitarian model. If something is unthinkable until someone in authority thinks of it, the psychological barriers which were once our only protection against despotism have vanished.   In the circumstances, we can hardly be surprised that this fundamental change has been accompanied by a deliberate and persistent attempt on the part of the government to limit Parliamentary scrutiny or any real political accountability. It has issued ‘guidance’ going well beyond its legal powers, and issued ‘orders’ at press conferences which had no legal basis. It has rammed complex legislation through Parliament without serious debate. It has absolved itself from any real Parliamentary control over public expenditure. It has evaded statutory requirements for advance Parliamentary approval on grounds of urgency which are difficult to justify. It has deliberately waited before making supposedly urgent statutory orders until Parliament was not in session. It has taken steps to prevent activities which its own regulations expressly permit, such as visits to doctors and dentists. In many respects, Parliament itself has not been willing to live up to its high constitutional calling.   However, at least as serious as the implications for our relations with the state are the implications for our relations with each other. The pandemic has generated distrust, resentment and mutual hostility. Authoritarian governments fracture the societies in which they operate. The use of political power as an instrument of mass coercion fuelled by public fear, is corrosive. It is corrosive even, perhaps especially, when it enjoys majority support. It tends to be accompanied, as it has been in Britain, by manipulative government propaganda and vociferous intolerance of the minority who disagree. These are the authentic symptoms of totalitarianism.   There is no inevitability about the future course of any historical trend. Social controls can become unpopular. There is an analogy in the fate of food rationing after 1939. It was necessary during the Second World War and enjoyed general public support. Belief in the efficacy of social control was an important part of the appeal of the Labour Party in the general election of 1945 which brought it to power with a huge Parliamentary majority. But people wearied of it over the following years. The insistence of the post-war Labour government on retaining it indefinitely cost it its majority in the general election of 1950 and put the Conservatives in power in 1951. Nevertheless, I am not optimistic about the future of my country. The changes in our political culture seem to me to reflect a profound change in the public mood, which has been many years in the making and may be many years in the unmaking. We are entering a Hobbesian world, the enormity of which has not yet dawned on our people. The Rt Hon Lord Sumption   Jonathan Sumption, The Rt Hon Lord Sumption, is a retired Supreme Court Justice and was the first to be appointed from outside of the judiciary. He is renowned for his lucid and methodical judgments.

Philip Hoffman is Founder and CEO of the Fine Art Group, which focusses on art advisory, investment, and philanthropy. At 33 he became the youngest member of KPMG’s Management Board and later served as its Deputy CEO of Europe. He also worked for Christie’s for 12 years. He regularly comments on the art market in the international press. The Frick Collection is widely regarded as one of New York’s finest galleries. From the interiors of Vermeer to the forests of Fragonard, any enthusiast, collector or museumgoer would envy its collection. Around 300,000 people visit the collection each year, and in 2019 they saw shows on Giambattista Tiepolo’s Milanese frescoes and on French faience masterpieces.[1] It is easy to forget, though, that the Frick has depended on private collectors since its inception. There would be no Frick Museum without Mr and Mrs Frick, just as there would be no Courtauld Gallery without Samuel Courtauld, and no Kettle’s Yard without Jim and Helen Ede. Museums should remember that private collectors will facilitate their survival in times of trial and tribulation.   In conversation with Philip Hoffman, founder and CEO of the Fine Art Group, this article explores the ways in which the private collector supports the public institution.[2] Hoffman recalls how his clients work with public institutions: they send art around the globe, fund exhibitions, and make gifts to their beloved galleries. Although the idea is counterintuitive, public museums must continue to connect, engage, and communicate with private collectors. Loaning and philanthropy have never been more imperative for ensuring the permanency of our institutions. Collectors and museums are not ‘Romulus and Remus’, as the art world has come to believe. There are, it appears, two spaces on the Capitoline Hill. Our culture benefits from the presence of both collector and institution.   The Fine Art Group manages 140 different collections in 28 countries. From ‘Australia to Chile’ and from ‘New York to London’ its collectors invest in, assemble and donate art. Naturally, some motivations and ambitions are unique to the collector. Personal collections are a store of both monetary and social capital. Moreover, for many, buying art is an investment strategy, since art assets generally rise in value. It is tempting to believe that these objectives go against the public interest. The collector’s ambition to own  seems at odds with the institution’s ambition to exhibit, display, and educate . Private collections seem covert rather than overt, isolated  rather than accessible . Private is consistently considered ‘versus’ the public.   The social life of private collections, however, generally extends into the public realm, since their artworks are loaned and exhibited to the public. ‘We have lent major paintings from our own collections or art investments to museums’, Hoffman notes. Recently, they lent a Canaletto and a Cindy Sherman to shows about their respective artists. Collectors furnish exhibitions with artworks that museums could not afford, and the works they loan are integral to retrospective exhibitions. Collectors, then, participate with and enable public intentions—they facilitate in educating and exhibiting .   ‘We’ve had a Francis Bacon work that went to a show at Oxford’ and a Bellotto sent to Germany, Hoffman remarks. ‘If people ask, we facilitate[…]we’ve moved exhibitions to China, Paris, Versailles, the UK’. Though this is often overlooked, collectors mostly want to be ‘as helpful as [they] can’. Hoffman stresses that 90% of The Fine Art Group’s clients remain interested and engaged in working with public galleries.   We discuss the remarkable collections of François Pinault, Leonard Lauder, and Steven Cohen. Hoffman mentions how willing his clients are to develop museum exhibitions. ‘Any show where museums need artworks from these private clients, they get lent, sometimes given ... and museums are using collectors for their own aims to say, “we’re doing a show of Bridget Riley, Frank Auerbach. Would you lend it to me?”’   In 2018, the Fine Art Group facilitated the lending of the Al Thani Collection to the Palace Museum in Beijing’s Forbidden City. Mughal jewels, ancient Egyptian relics, 54 Faberge pieces, and hundreds of other artefacts were displayed to the Chinese public for the first time.[3] Previously, the family’s collection had travelled to institutions in Venice, London and New York. In autumn 2021, the collection will arrive at the Hôtel de la Marine, Paris, where it will remain for 20 years. Collectors’ intentions, then, far from conflicting with public objectives, facilitate, provide and enable institutions and their exhibitions.   Collectors are also making their art accessible to the public by setting up ‘private museums’. Independent institutions let collectors display their collections as they choose. Many of these collections are pivotal for the display and production of contemporary art. They are appearing all over the world, from the pioneering Saatchi Gallery in London’s Chelsea to the Museo Soumaya in Mexico City. Miami remains an influential city in the field of private museums. The ‘Miami model’ sees local collectors exhibit their work permanently to the public. Hoffman draws particular attention to Don and Mera Rubell, who have a museum in Miami. ‘Having built a huge personal collection, and then started museum number one, they’ve moved onto a new museum “number two” […] an incredible collection’. The Rubells have been ‘extremely philanthropic in sharing all their artworks’. They have also consistently supported the development of young contemporary artists. Their foundation displays over 7,200 works by over 1,000 artists. It works with the schools of Miami-Dade County, funds curatorial training internships and sponsors travelling exhibitions.[4] Private museums support their communities and benefit young contemporary artists.   By displaying the collections of living collectors, private museums serve as competition and counterpoint to public museums. They put pressure on public galleries to keep up with trends in collecting, curating and exhibiting. Some would argue that giving wealthy collectors the agency to influence the curation and exhibition of art collections risks shifting the preservation and construction of art history into the hands of an elite. Lovers of art worry that artistic movements, favoured artists, and popular narratives will be determined by private museums and their patrons. However, public museums are subject to these same influences. Public museums have collected a  history, determined by a pre-written museological canon. They are as susceptible to ‘selection’ as are private museums. Judgments of aesthetic value must not be cartelised by public institutions. After all, the Frick Collection presents the taste of Henry Clay Frick and such galleries offer interesting perspectives of the ‘palate of the past’. Public museums should not retain complete authority over art history, and private galleries capture the tastes that exist outside  public institutions. Public display by private collectors provides an alternative space for viewing art, untouched by the strictures of the institutions.   Collectors provide vital financial support to public institutions. The Fine Art Group itself supports the National Portrait Gallery, and recently raised over half a million pounds for it through a charity dinner. Hoffman himself helps oversee the diverse collection of young artists’ work owned by the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, where funds have been raised to support the hospital’s baby intensive care unit. Hoffman suggests that UK institutions could benefit from a change in charitable tax deduction. ‘I would argue that it would be in the interest of museums to introduce an American style philanthropic tax subsidy for wealthy donors to gift to these ailing museums’. In the US, individual giving as a proportion of GDP is 1.45% compared to 0.4% in the UK.[5] The US culture of philanthropy incentivises individuals to donate to museums as they can straightforwardly claim their donations against taxable income. Changing the UK tax deduction system would result in lower tax revenue, but ‘the net gains to culture versus the taxman would be massively weighted towards the helping of public institutions’. Museums are struggling with declining visitors due to the pandemic. Revising the tax system to encourage donations could significantly help UK museums and culture survive. Wealthy collectors are more inclined to give when the agency of philanthropy is in their hands. Nonetheless, collectors have made significant donations for these causes. ‘Wealthy individuals are critical to the success of funding some of these institutions’. Hoffman gives the example of David Ross, chairman of the Royal Opera House (ROH). The ROH suffered when the COVID-19 pandemic forced it to close. The Royal Opera House Covent Garden Foundation auctioned off its David Hockney portrait of Sir David Webster, the late chief executive of the ROH. However, David Ross bought it and returned it on long-term loan to the ROH to ensure its public display.[6] Ultimately, the ROH received £11 million to help it recover, and the painting remained on the wall. Hoffman asks, ‘What better philanthropy could you imagine?’   Private collectors are not necessarily at odds with public institutions and the public interest. Public museums need to engage with private collectors. Suspicion over conflicting aims must be replaced with communication and collaboration. Loaning artworks, setting up private museums, and supplying funds are integral to the survival of museums and culture, especially in times of hardship. The collectors represented by The Fine Art Group are supportive and valuable to institutions. The private collector works with the public, not, as is so often perceived, ‘versus’ it. Ollie Gerlach, the interviewer, is a second-year undergraduate in History of Art at Churchill College, Cambridge, interested in pursuing graduate studies on the social life and semiotic capabilities of decorative art. He has previously been an intern at Christie’s, the Financial Times , and AVM, a virtual gallery firm based in Somerset House. He will work at Evercore in summer 2021. He is proud to be the digital curator of the Queens’ Arts Festival, the Visual Arts Sizar for his college, and a bass in Pembroke College Chapel Choir. [1] The Frick Collection, ‘The Frick Collection: Annual Report July 2018– 2019’ < https://www.frick.org/sites/default/files/2020/2018-2019-frick-annual-report.pdf > accessed 1 March 2021. Mr Henry Clay Frick also left an endowment of £15 million for the preservation of the collection. The collection has continued to receive donations. In the fiscal year July 2018–July 2019, donations surpassed £1 million. [2] I am very grateful to Philip Hoffman for his time and expertise. I also thank The Fine Art Group ( ), along with Sophie Jefford and Cynthia Zabel for their help in setting up the interview. [3] The Al Thani Collection, ‘Exhibitions’ < https://www .   thealthanicollection.com/exhibitions > accessed 3 March 2021. [4] Rubell Museum, ‘Travelling Exhibitions’ < https://rubellmuseum.org/ exhibitions/traveling-exhibitions> accessed 1 March 2021; Mary Rozell, The Art Collector’s Handbook: The Definitive Guide to Acquiring and Owning   Art  (Lund Humphries 2020) 151. [5] Charities Aid Foundation, ‘Charitable Giving in the US vs. the UK’ accessed 1 March 2021. [6] Taylor Dafoe, ‘The Secret Buyer of the Royal Opera House’s £13 Million David Hockney Is Its Own Board Chair—and He’s Lending It Back’ ( Artnet: News , 20 November 2020) < https://news.artnet.com/market/ royal-opera-house-david-hockeny-1925471> accessed 4 March 2021. David Ross bought the painting for £12.8 million with buyer’s fees.

Sharon Ament is the Director of the Museum of London, and inspiring passion in the capital and its museum is her goal. Sharon joined the Museum in September 2012 to steer the world’s leading city museum through to the next phase of its development by inspiring a passion for London and reflecting the capital’s energy and dynamism. Throughout her career Sharon has been driven by the simple aim of ‘turning people onto great ideas and causes’. This started early with her work for a number of social causes in Liverpool. Thereafter she became involved in wildlife conservation and worked with the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust, moving from Lancashire to Slimbridge to oversee a national portfolio of wetland centres. In the 1990s she worked at the Zoological Society of London and from there joined The Natural History Museum.   CJLPA : What role does the Museum of London play in London? How do you want this to develop?   Sharon Ament : Putting it simply, the Museum of London tells the story of what I consider to be the greatest city in the world and its people. It’s also a complex city with a long and rich history containing every positive and negative aspect of urban life and one that lives with a legacy of being at the centre of an empire. Central to our identity as a cultural institution is the idea of openness. London has always been an open city—open to all people, faiths, cultures, perspectives, and conversations—and it’s in that spirit that we tell London’s story. In the next few years, we’re recreating the Museum of London in West Smithfield, an old marketplace that has lain untouched for 30 years and been an important trading place for many centuries. We’re saving this remarkable building for society and breathing a different sort of cultural life into the City of London as a result. We will be London’s shared place: smack bang in the middle of the story, open for all, and created with Londoners who’ve joined us along the way. Post-pandemic our project has more meaning than ever before.   CJLPA : Like all cultural institutions, the Museum has struggled in the COVID-19 pandemic, having only been open for 13 weeks between March 2020 and 2021. Do you see any upsides to COVID-19?   SA : The past year has been a real struggle for the whole culture sector in the UK, but what has been front of my mind is the impact the museum and gallery closures are having on young people. In my opinion, these young people have to be at the heart of our efforts to rebuild cultural institutions. Creating a new museum in the aftermath of the pandemic provides a special opportunity. It’s a time when we can really step back and think about what social history museums should be now and in the future. Who are they for? Who should they represent? What stories should they tell?   In terms of the area of the City that the new museum is located, it’s also a great opportunity for cultural regeneration. The old general market building has been derelict for some time. By transforming this extraordinary heritage space, we’ve been able to save the building from commercial development in the form that is familiar with office buildings and give it to the people of London. I want Londoners to feel that they belong here, that it’s their space. The new museum will be a ‘museum wrapped in a high street’ with space for independent businesses, restaurants, and cafes. The museum itself will be like a marketplace: you’ll be able to walk straight through it on your way to work, you’ll be able to walk your dog through it—or stay and watch performances, see community-curated exhibitions, or delve into the deep history of London. It will truly be a new type of museum, built for the times in which we live. And we have a train running through our Past Time Galleries.   CJLPA : Do you think museums will be important in keeping city centres thriving and lively after COVID-19?   SA : Museums have a huge role to play post-COVID in enlivening city centres as well, of course, as being part of the cultural infrastructure alongside libraries, parks, galleries, and other social spaces. We may find that after the pandemic the pace of change in city centres has increased dramatically. That might be because people choose to work from home more often, or because retail businesses that have struggled during COVID do not survive. Museums don’t just give people a reason to visit their city, but it also gives space to reflect, consider, and explore. Museums are trusted places and the flow back after lockdown to our museums and galleries shows that people want to visit.   The City of London, where we are based, has felt the effect of the pandemic very harshly. Footfall has plummeted and will take some time to recover. That is why the City of London Corporation have put culture front and centre of their COVID recovery plans, announcing a Culture and Commerce Taskforce, as well as investing in major cultural infrastructure including the Barbican and of course the new Museum of London.   CJLPA : You will have opened on 19 May 2021 with the exhibition ‘Dub London: Bassline of a City’. Could you tell us about the exhibition and how it fits into bigger plans for the Museum?   SA : From its roots in Jamaican reggae to how it shaped communities over the last 50 years, our new display explores not only dub music, but also the cultural and social impact it has had on the identity of London and its people.   Dub has had a far-reaching impact across the music industry and the history of the capital. It has influenced multiple genres from drum and bass, garage, and hip-hop to even mainstream pop, and played an important role in the early days of the city’s punk scene with bands such as The Clash and The Slits drawing on its unique sound. The story of dub culture in London is a fascinating one and one that hasn’t been told this widely in a museum setting before. Through getting out into the places and speaking to the people who have been instrumental in the dub scene, we’ve been able to hear stories of how London was central for the emergence of dub in the UK. Even though most of this music originated in the Caribbean and Jamaica, London quickly became important to dub reggae: dub record labels were started in London, and dub music was produced in London and exported to the rest of the world. With London still being home to one of the largest collections of dub reggae record shops outside of Kingston, Jamaica, this display will be a unique and impressive way to tell the story of how dub culture has shaped the identity of the capital and us as Londoners.   The museum is passionate about connecting to Londoners, cutting across multiple scenes, times, and genres. Our past experiences with ‘Punk London’, ‘The Clash: London Calling’, and now ‘Dub London: Bassline of a City’, show us the music runs through London’s veins and is crucial to a Londoner’s identity. It’s a theme we’re exploring for our new Museum of London in West Smithfield.   CJLPA : The Museum recently produced a wide-ranging report on the experiences of Generation Z Londoners. Did this inform your plans for the Museum?   SA : Absolutely. We worked with the Partnership for Young London on the largest survey of Gen Z Londoners of its kind. Over 3,000 young Londoners took part, and told us what mattered to them, about their concerns and hopes for the future. I want young Londoners to play an active role in the creation of the new museum and to see their experiences reflected in its displays and ongoing programming. Young people told us that they didn’t always feel welcome in cultural institutions. I want the new museum to make young Londoners feel comfortable, valued, and inspired. This research will help us place young people front and centre of the new museum and will inform our plans as they develop.   CJLPA : What prompted the move to West Smithfield, away from the current Brutalist site on London Wall?   SA : The current site at London Wall is simply too small for our ambitions to reach every schoolchild in the capital and tell the stories of London and Londoners past, present, and future—no longer a museum fit for twenty-first-century London. It’s also very a tricky location, with access via highwalks and no ground-level entrances. In fact, it would be fair to say we are invisible behind the walls of the roundabout that shields us. The new museum at West Smithfield will be situated at one end of the City’s Culture Mile and is directly opposite the new Crossrail station in Farringdon. We like to say that the new site is two stops from Paris! Situated within beautiful, historic market buildings designed by the inimitable Sir Horace Jones, they’re the perfect new home for a museum for London: not shiny new buildings or a grand old palace, but very special market structures grounded in the working and trading history of the city. We are aiming to attract two million visitors in the first year, compared to our current footfall of around 800,000, and the project will be a key part of London’s post-COVID recovery.   CJLPA : The new site has an interesting plan centred around different types of ‘Time’. Could you tell us about this, and how it came to be?   SA : The ground floor of the General Market, ‘Our Time’, will be a hub for London events. With gatherings ranging from festivals, markets, and performances to talks and discussions about urgent local matters, it will become a new space for Londoners and visitors to the city to come together. Even when no event is on, it will simply be a new, welcoming space to meet friends or just spend time amid displays and activities which explore London’s lived experience—the London of our own living memories.   Beneath the General Market, ‘Past Time’ will be a spectacular underground space, home to the rich historical galleries of the museum. Here we will showcase the unrivalled breadth of our London Collection, made up of some seven million items. Content will range from skeletons to dresses, vehicles to art and photography, and include the exquisite jewellery of the Cheapside Hoard in the Goldsmiths’ Gallery. There will be theatrical, sensory, and interactive displays, full of 10,000 years of human drama.   A live train line runs alongside this space, which was once a huge goods depot for the Great Northern Railway. At the far end, in the old salt store, visitors will be able to watch the trains rumble by as passengers peer in—a visceral reminder of the connectedness of these buildings to the city in which we are rooted.   CJLPA : You have spoken well on how you want the new Museum to tell the stories of a wider range of Londoners. What role do you see for the more traditional elements, like the Tudor and Roman collections?   SA : Before London, there was Londinium. Our Roman story is crucial in telling the story of our city and its people with, as we know, remnants still around today. These iconic London ‘moments’, including the Romans, the Great Fire, and the Suffragettes form the foundation of our museum and city alike. These core pieces of the narrative will be told in full in our new museum galleries, in a space we’re currently calling ‘Past Time’. They’re also key curriculum topics and, with our vision to reach every school child in London, will form vital elements of our learning programmes. In essence we will be illuminating London across time in a way that is both familiar and very, very different. We can’t tell the story of London and miss out the Great Fire, but we can draw out new narratives, new voices, new insights that come from looking at London from the perspective of 2021.   CJLPA : How will you be growing your permanent collections?   SA : We are actively collecting in three ways, adding to our collections through archaeological finds thus building an ever more comprehensive London Archaeological Archive. Secondly, we are adding to our collections through contemporary collecting programmes such as ‘Collecting the Pandemic’. When a compelling reason to record a moment that is happening now becomes apparent, we get collecting. The last time we undertook such a large-scale contemporary collecting programme was during the war, when we collected what people were wearing—particularly clothes that were designated as utility wear. Finally, we continue to collect historic objects in the traditional ways from donations to purchase. Some examples of these would be Daphne Hardy Henrion’s Festival of Britain sculpture and Pierre Prévost’s 1815 Panorama of London  , which came up for sale in 2018. These objects become part of the London Collection, which is more than seven million items strong.   CJLPA : You have plans to use digital technology to get people around the world thinking about important cultural issues. What exactly do these plans entail?   SA : Being truly 24/7, live-streaming data from London, broadcasting from the Museum, just to name a few activities. But it would be fair to say that this, as for every other cultural organisation, has become a more significant focus. Watch this (digital) space!   CJLPA : How important do you consider it to see the Museum’s collections in person versus digitally?   SA : More than ever, the last year has shown us that we cannot be complacent and rely on physical visits alone (although we can’t wait to welcome back our much-missed visitors!). How we’ve developed our digital offer has been nothing short of incredible and we must continue to build on this progress. We have seen the appetite is there. From our Great Fire livestreams beaming directly to thousands of school children in summer last year, through to our digitising former exhibitions such as ‘Disease X’ and turning our blockbuster exhibition ‘The Cheapside Hoard’ into the ‘Tweetside Hoard’—just some of examples of our recent digital work—we have a great foundation to build on. The story of London and Londoners isn’t confined to within the M25; it transcends borders and has national and international appeal as one of the greatest cities in the world, so we have an obligation, as well as a passion, to share our content as far as possible. We’re thinking hard about how to apply this mentality to the new Museum of London where we have the opportunity to shape our digital presence, both physically within the buildings but also online, from the ground up. We’re adding to our collections all the time; most recently we’ve acquired a host of COVID-related objects to make sure this unreal time is captured— we’ve collected people’s experiences of Ramadan in lockdown, the sounds of London’s silent streets during the pandemic, posters, flyers from protests, and much more.   Our role also extends beyond our collections and our ‘stuff’. Museums are increasingly becoming spaces for important debate, relearning, and exploration of hard-hitting subjects that affect us all. Of course, our role will always be rooted in history, but we have a voice and must use it. Joseph Court, the interviewer, is an Archaeology graduate from Trinity College, Cambridge, who placed first each year and specialised in the ancient Near East. He is interested in the very new as well as the very old: tech law and policy, Wikipedia editing, and film.

Rebecca Salter is a painter. She is President of the Royal Academy of Arts, the first woman in the role. She has a strong interest in Japanese woodblock prints.   Past and present leaders of the Royal Academy of Arts come together here to discuss the role and power of art in today’s world, and the difficulties and responsibilities of running an institution seen as the country’s cultural trendsetter. These conversations raise questions of ethics, artistic merit, and political compromise. CJLPA : What do you think about the current state of the world, and art’s part in it?   Rebecca Salter : I think for quite some years the art world has been becoming increasingly global and increasingly aware of its carbon footprint. It is predicated on massive growth and prices going up and up and up. I think what will happen now may change that—it will be more difficult for art sellers, probably for a while. So I think the money circus will slow down slightly. I hope it’s a good time to reassess.   CJLPA : Do you think that the pandemic will increase people’s interest in seeing art in person?   RS : I think so, partly because it will increase people’s interest in actually making, housing the made, and the whole process. Because people have had a huge amount of time on their hands, many have found themselves doing things which they never thought they would—making things. So I think there will be more of an interest in the physical object, and also that we will be so fed up with online by the end of the pandemic that we will just want to see the real thing.   I think we have realised there is a difference in seeing an object online. It’s a substitute for now, but nothing can beat the actual experiences of the object. In the object, you can feel the traces of the artist’s hand and as a result of that you can, to some extent, enter their head. I think we lose a lot of that when we look at things online.   There’s a Japanese term which translates to ‘your eyes sit’. It describes the difference between actively looking, on the one hand, and seeing, on the other. Your eyes relax so much that you almost disappear into the artwork because you’re no longer actively scanning it, you’re just ‘being’ with it.   CJLPA : Arts funding: a public or a private affair?   RS : As President of the Royal Academy—which of course gets no government funding—I think it’s a combination. We’re quite lucky in this country as we have a mixed model, wherein some places get government funding and are topped up with private funding. What’s going to happen after this I don’t know, because the government will be looking to reduce its support in all sorts of areas of life. One worries about the arts, because people always make the argument that they are not important and we don’t need them in the way we need roads and hospitals. I would argue that a country without any kind of cultural sector would be so impoverished it wouldn’t be worth living in.   CJLPA : The arts make life worth living in lots of ways.   RS : Exactly. But when you’ve got very difficult decisions to make, it’s not easy to make the case for arts funding when you’ve got schools, and hospitals, and paying back all this money we’ve borrowed over the pandemic. That’s going to be the crunch. Being more optimistic about it, I think that—again, during lockdown—people have recognised the value of the arts sector. So many arts organisations, including the Royal Academy, put stuff online very, very quickly. You could argue that by doing that—and by doing that for free—all the arts organisations contributed to the mental wellbeing of the country.   Nobody has figured out how to monetise the online offerings, because we’ve been effectively just giving them away for free. Just asking people to donate? But if more of what you do goes online at some point—and this is a question that comes up the whole time— how do you monetise art? I’m not sure anybody’s got the answer yet, but I also think that people who are fairly wealthy and are able to support the arts have, again, realised the importance of the arts during lockdown. One can start to have confident conversations with philanthropists, or potential philanthropists, about how they could support the arts. Because people during lockdown look to values in life and in organisation more closely than they might have done before, they want to support organisations that have values they agree with and they think are important.   CJLPA : In a revolution, statues tumble. Are we witnessing a revolution?   RS : I’m not sure whether I’d call it a revolution, but I think it’s always helpful to look at things again and reassess things. There are some truly egregious examples where statues should be tumbled, but in many cases I think it is much more important to have really good conversation about objects and their interpretation. I think if you’re not careful, the tumbling doesn’t actually achieve very much, except for taking something away. What you really want to do is add to the quality of the debate.   Look at how history has been interpreted. The Artemisia Gentileschi exhibition that has just opened at the National Gallery is incredibly interesting. For a long time, Gentileschi was sidelined almost completely in art history. There were some concerns that she was being exhibited at the National Gallery as a sort of token woman. But there is no way you could go around that exhibition and think she is a token woman. Her painting is unbelievably powerful, and by rights should have been in the canon right from the beginning. The exhibition wasn’t just run because she was a woman. She’s at last taken her rightful place.   CJLPA : How do you feel, being a woman in the art world? I know it’s a lot better recently, but I saw in Tate the posters of the Guerrilla Girls, and I thought about how they were making art not so long ago. I was always into art and drama. They are always labelled as very feminine subjects, whereas men are put towards maths and sciences. Some things have changed, but the art world is still quite male-dominated, for example in terms of salaries.   RS : There still are some very uncomfortable statistics about the art world. All the highest-paid contemporary artists are male. When I was at art school the gender split may have been close to 50–50, but I was never taught by a woman. All the teachers were men, and this applied to my cohort too. Courses with predominantly women are emerging, but there are still fewer women teaching, fewer women as career artists, and the statistics are very odd.   I fear it’s going to get worse. You need to spend some part of your week working for money, and then you need to find time to work on your art. The real pinch point is when you introduce children into that mix. Then, it becomes almost impossible, unless you’ve got an other half who is doing half the work. Quite a few of us older women Academicians don’t have children. Some of the younger ones do but it’s quite a struggle.   CJLPA : Planning your time is quite difficult as an artist, because you have to be immersed in what you’re doing.   RS : Yes, it’s tricky and time consuming. You can’t shortcut it and say, ‘I’ve only got an hour’. But there are more women, and we’ve elected more women at the Royal Academy in the last ten or so years, so the balance is changing.   CJLPA : You were the first female President. Congratulations!   RS: Thank you! It only took 252 years, but we got there in the end. Shockingly, the Royal Academy had two female members when it was founded in 1768, but then the next woman was elected in 1936. That tells you what the nature is of the organisation. Of course, the irony is that—as so often happens— it’s a woman in post when all the sweeping up has to happen, which of course is what’s happening with the pandemic. I get to do all the hard work.   CJLPA : Institutions such as the Royal Academy are the shapers of taste. How did you view this responsibility during your time as President?   RS : I think the Royal Academy might be flattered to think it is a shaper of taste, really! The wonderful thing about the Royal Academy is that it is independent and can do what it wants, money permitting. So even though it has ‘Royal’ over the door, and is in a rather grand place on Piccadilly, there is room to be radical. But I think taste is probably shaped virtually now. I suspect the real world just piggybacks on.   CJLPA : Surely the Royal Academy has a big influence?   RS : Well, it depends on which bit of the Royal Academy. Is it the exhibition we just had on Picasso, or is it the Summer Exhibition? They are very different: one is a scholarly, curated exhibition and the other is really a celebration of creativity. I don’t think the Summer Exhibition shapes taste in any meaningful way now. I think it used to. There’s a hilarious film on YouTube of the Summer Exhibition in 1976—everybody is chain smoking, the women are wearing hats and pearls, and the men are all dressed up in tweeds. But a few hundred yards away you’ve got the Sex Pistols. The Royal Academy really lost touch around this time. But I would argue we’ve moved a long way since then. You can look at the most recent artists we’ve elected, people like Isaac Julien, John Akomfrah, and David Adjaye. It’s a very different place.   CJLPA : So do you think it has become more ‘with the times’?   RS : Yes. One of the tricky bits was that when you’re elected as an academician, you’re elected in a category: painting, sculpture, printmaking, or architecture. For an awfully long time, people were saying, ‘Well, what do we do with photographers?’, or, ‘We can’t have photographers because we don’t know where to put them.’ But now Isaac Julien can get elected as a Painter. It’s just a label.   CJLPA : In 1863, the Paris Salon rejected the works of Courbet, Manet, Pissarro, Jongkind, and Whistler. Today’s great art contests, such as the RA Summer Show, are sometimes viewed not as competitions but as lotteries. Do you think there is a risk of great works falling through the cracks? And might there be scope, as there was in 1863, for a Salon des Refusés?   RS : I think the nature of the Summer Exhibition has changed slightly. Back in the old days, there was a consensus about what should be hanging in the Royal Academy, but now for the last six years, maybe more, there’s been a curator coordinator. We’ve had Michael Craig-Martin and Grayson Perry, and this year it was Jane and Louise Wilson. Every year now the Exhibition has a slightly different vision, because the coordinator and committee are different each year. It’s just a reflection of the particular angle of that year’s committee, so it’s not quite as black and white as ‘in’ or ‘out’ and those ‘out’ are cast into darkness. It just means, ‘Not this year but maybe next year.’ Before I was elected, I submitted to the Royal Academy and never got in once.   CJLPA : Was it the same when you applied—that they were still changing curators?   RS : When I was putting in work, I think it was possibly still with a fixed academy view, but it just goes to show that not getting into the Royal Academy doesn’t mean very much if you end up as the president! So it is very different, it’s not really a shaper of any great   taste as it was in the past. Being refused I think is really just ‘try again   next year’ when it’s a different committee.   In the year that Grayson Perry did it, which was our anniversary year, the fact that he was the coordinator shaped the kind of work that was submitted. A huge number of people painted portraits of him, which of course the next year wouldn’t get in at all. Whereas Grayson took them all in because it was quite entertaining to have a wall full of portraits of Grayson. So it’s a much more complex relationship than it was before, because everybody looks at the committee and thinks, ‘OK, I might get in this year because they like the kind of work I do.’ It’s shaped by the committee that we put together, really. It’s not monolithic as it was before.   CJLPA : How do you view your place in the discourse of contemporary art?   RS : I’m in a slightly odd position. When I left art school, I went and did my postgraduate in Japan. This was considered very eccentric in 1979 because everybody wanted to go to New York. I’ve never regretted going to Japan. It was extraordinarily valuable to look back at your own culture, and European culture, through the eyes of a very different culture. It taught me many lessons about one’s narrow assumptions and interpretation of the world. Western perspective, for example, is just the way we choose in the West to represent the world on a flat surface. In Japan and China, they do it in a completely different way. These different visions of the world have been hugely enriching for me.   I was always fascinated by Japan and just wanted to go, though I’m not quite sure why. I got a scholarship and went. Japanese art was what I was drawn to, but I didn’t know much else about Japan, because in those days you didn’t really. Partly it was that things were economically really bad here in the early eighties, whereas Japan was booming. Also, by then I’d learned the language, and once you’ve done that it seems like a waste not to go back! I spent six years there in the end, two in university, and I go back as often as I can.   CJLPA : Has Japan inspired your art?   RS : Yes. When I was there I thought about my work in Japanese, because I lived with Japanese people and had mostly Japanese friends. This was really powerful, and I still do it sometimes. For much of my stay I hardly spoke English at all. When I came back to England, I couldn’t really talk or think about my work in English because it had been ‘created’ in Japanese. It’s like I’ve got two circuits in my head: every now and again when I’m working, I think about the work in Japanese because it can unlock things. My experience in Japan was very valuable indeed. Lily-Rose Morris-Zumin, the interviewer, is a Fashion and Arts & Culture writer, editor, and stylist interested in exploring the intersection of fashion, performance, and identity. Currently, she serves as the editor for The COLD Magazine  where she works across the art and fashion departments, attending key industry events like London Fashion Week, editing and writing features. She is also the External Arts Relations Officer at CJLPA , focused on cultivating partnerships with arts institutions and supporting editorial projects in both visual and performing arts.

William Christie is an American-born French conductor and harpsichordist. He read History of Art at Harvard and then Music at Yale, where he specialised in the baroque repertoire. Opposed to the Vietnam war, he moved to France in 1970 and pioneered the renewal of French baroque music by creating his musical ensemble Les Arts Florissants in 1979. Since 1985, he has lived in his seventeenth-century manor in Thiré (Vendée) which hosts a yearly festival of baroque music, Les Jardins de William Christie. A gifted pedagogue, in 2002 he founded the Jardin des Voix, a biennially-run academy for young singers, and he regularly teaches at the Juilliard School and the Conservatoire National Supérieur in Paris.   Claire Roserot de Melin is General Manager of the Théâtre du Capitole de Toulouse in France. She previously worked as an artistic coordination director, at the Opera of Rouen and for various companies and ensembles. She used to be an oboist.   CJLPA : What is the current situation for the music industry? What sorts of scheme exist to protect musicians in these troubled times?   Claire Roserot de Melin : There are two dimensions to the issue of musicians’ social protections in this crisis. Even though some gaps in social protection remain, musicians have been better protected in France than anywhere else. Firstly, the existing system of intermittents du spectacle  has enabled artists to get social benefits as any other employees. Paid for by employers and workers’ contributions, it allows performing artists to claim benefits for the fallow periods between intermittent contracts, as long as they have worked for at least 507 hours in ten and a half months. The second aspect is the introduction of an année blanche  which consists of the extension of the intermittents entitlement to social benefits in line with the 2019 fiscal year. This system is relatively effective but it nonetheless excludes intermittent  new entrants and non-national artists. Trade unions and employers are asking for the prolongation of the année blanche  after 31 August, when they are supposed to come to an end, and for more financial support for entities responsible for artists’ day-to-day lives, such as artists’ health support groups, which have been strongly impacted by the loss in revenue. But our main priority remains to reopen concert halls, and we have been in talks with the Ministry of Culture and the Prime Minister for months. Major public cultural institutions such as the Théâtre du Capitole de Toulouse have a leading role to play in protecting the artistic ecosystem. We have fulfilled every work contract regardless of nationality, and permanent artists have pursued rehearsals and recordings as usual. In contrast, privately funded institutions have been terribly hit, economically, by the closures of concert halls, and some might unfortunately never reopen.   William Christie : I do not think there are such things as schemes but, rather, less ambitious protocols focussing too much on sanitary issues and leaving musicians aside with no prospects. Concert halls, musical venues, and theatres have been closed since March 2020, with the exception of Spain and Monaco in Europe, and musicians have no other option than to play concerts without a public. Since the beginning of the pandemic, I have had more than 100 concerts and six opera productions cancelled, and the future is still very unclear. France has nonetheless been good to us with the system of ‘ chômage partiel ’, but there is a difference between having a normal professional life and one with no prospects. France takes great pride in its culture, l’exception culturelle française , which is used as a political weapon, and its showcase abroad, yet its political significance has eroded domestically since the 2000s, and the time France had visionary culture ministries seems gone.   CJLPA : How would you see the longer-term effects of COVID on the music industry, if any?    WC : Concerts are at the heart of our job as musicians, but even though we have had to adapt in the last year to strict health restrictions, with livestreamed concerts, for example, the form of concert will remain the same. In its classical form, the concert lies on three essential pillars: performers who bring music to life and offer it to the public; an audience to interact with performers and be moved by music; and a place which is designed to make the concert a special moment, with excellent acoustic qualities to enhance artistic performances and make music more beautiful. Technology has allowed us to record pieces of music with people across the globe, yet I do not consider it to be music making: this is ‘tin-can music’. Outdoor concerts are not a good alternative either, for nothing will ever replace a great concert hall in terms of acoustics. During my summer festival in the gardens of Thiré, I have to make concessions both in terms of repertoire and quality, and bad weather is always a significant worry.   Social distancing rules obviously affect opera staging and music making, but they cannot continue for any longer. An orchestra occupying the equivalent of a football stadium is extremely difficult to conduct, both in terms of sound making and logistics. In those conditions, playing together requires even more acute attention and listening from the players and the conductor. I do not believe, though, that downsizing music ensembles would solve the problem. This path might be chosen for financial reasons, which are not new, but it would impoverish the playable repertoire or void it of its substance. Could we imagine listening to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony played by a string quartet?   CRM : I perceive three main positive longer-term effects on the world of culture. First of all, it may have accelerated a philosophical shift, from a society purely based on economic aspirations and greed to a more humanist one, with a refocussing on the core values of emotion, sharing, relationships, and exchanges of ideas. In no more than a year, people have become aware of the importance of culture, which was deemed nonessential for a time but now seems more essential than ever because of the profound isolation we have felt in the successive lockdowns. Then, we can expect a change in the modes of consumption. Whilst people easily organise last-minute movie nights or theatre outings, attending a concert or an opera performance is something planned much earlier on. This may change in the future for more flexible and gluttonous modes of cultural consumption. Finally, this pandemic has incited us to develop online content aimed at various audiences. It has prompted us to adopt an ambitious new digital strategy which can be used to attract the 30-45 age group, relatively difficult to catch, and online content must aim to breed in these people the desire to attend live performances.   On the supply side, big institutions may programme more ‘local’ artists. It is sometimes surprising to see regional artistic productions only made up of foreign artists, while there are many outstanding ones in France! With more than 200 permanent artists and fantastic freelancers living in Occitanie, the Théâtre du Capitole already employs a short-term work system, but it is also essential to hire international musicians, conductors, opera singers, stage directors, and so on, for mobility boosts creativity and brings new energy.   On a day-to-day basis, COVID strongly affects opera staging and music making. Although artists are legally exempt from social distancing rules on stage, we strictly follow guidance to be able to undertake productions until the end. Artists are tested every week, everyone wears a face mask (except woodwind and brass players), the orchestra plays 1-1.5m apart, the floor is dismantled… We are ready to make every possible compromise to play!   CJLPA : How do you adapt your style of management?   CRM : Management in times of COVID is indeed challenging. Opera houses are places filled with emotions, where passionate and very sensitive people work together and give their very best. As managers or directors, we have to deal with a wide variety of requests, and whatever the decision, it always seems the wrong one. If we decide to cancel a concert, technicians and artists feel demotivated by the lack of prospects. On the contrary, if we decide to maintain and live stream a performance, administrative staff have to constantly review and write new contracts, and are on the verge of burnout. Steering an institution such as this one in the best possible way requires humility, kindness, listening to individual cases, and cooperation to find the best way to overcome this crisis.   CJLPA : How do you understand the public service mission of opera houses?   CRM : Opera houses and other musical institutions are too often perceived as elitist and inaccessible to the majority of citizens, and too rich whilst other more urgent causes lack funding. But culture is not something superficial or irrelevant to people in need. As André Malraux beautifully puts it, ‘Culture is what answers man when he asks himself what he is doing on earth’. The accounting logic that would like to take funding away from some and give to others is not tenable, because large institutions like ours are the locomotives that pull the smaller ones along. It is because these institutions do well that artists, ensembles, and companies also do well. On the contrary, if they are weakened, everything collapses. The culture industry is a fragile ecosystem whose balance should be protected, not threatened.   The Théâtre du Capitole has adopted an artistic and cultural policy aimed at all audiences, from kindergartens to care homes, and from neophytes to aficionados and connoisseurs. Reaching such a large and varied audience can only be achieved through emotion. Opera houses are also custodians of unique skills such as the manufacture of show wigs, sets, and costumes, which are transmitted through apprenticeship programmes in our historical workshops.   CJLPA : How do you envision the future of classical music?   WC : To all pessimistic classical musicians who wonder if they will still have an audience to play to in the future: we are basically dealing with something above the rest of the fray, we are dealing with culture, we are appealing to emotions which are universal. Culture can thrive. We will not forget things now that essentially have been part of civilisation for the last 500 years, if not more. History has already made its selection. If these artists and their works were not worthwhile, they would already have been forgotten.   CJLPA : There have been substantial cuts in public funding allocated to the arts in recent years, and these may continue given the economic context. How do you deal with that?   CRM : Public subsidies are decreasing but Toulouse Métropole has always provided a strong financial support to the Théâtre du Capitole. Like any other public institution, we had to adapt, reinvent ourselves, the way we work, and rethink the infrastructure, but we have now reached the bone. We are therefore turning more and more to sponsorship, but the culture of companies in France is quite different from that of the Anglo-Saxon world. Fundraising requires constant work to renew the pool of donors, and although we have two full-time people in charge of sponsorship, private funding is far from being up to the task. The Orchestre du Capitole de Toulouse and its conductor Tugan Sokhiev are internationally renowned, and have therefore been able to attract private funding through the charity Aïda. But otherwise, the overall financial balances will remain the same. In our 2018-19 activity report, 82% of revenues came from public subsidies (73% from Toulouse Métropole, 8% from the State, 1% from the Occitanie region) and our own revenues covered the remaining 18% (12% from ticket sales, 2% from tours, 1% from private fundraising, 3% from other sources of revenue).[1]   CJLPA : Does private funding affect your artistic programming?   CRM : Not really. Companies target their support to projects, mainly educational, innovative, and social ones, for tax reasons, while public funds finance the structure itself and the heart of artistic projects. The artistic director Christophe Ghristi is therefore very free in terms of artistic programming.   CJLPA : The UK is not part of the European Union anymore. How does the EU support the music industry and how much Brexit will affect it?   WC : I have worked in the UK since 1970. I brought my ensemble to the Proms in the 1980s, I played at Glyndebourne for 25 years, I conducted the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment… and I am extraordinarily impressed by British music-making. Before settling in France, I spent an enormous amount of time in London and Amsterdam and I think London was until recently the greatest musical centre in the world. Brexit is a terrible thing for the arts and it is going to be extremely difficult for British musicians to come to Europe, with all the paperwork and visa issues. Mr Johnson and his cronies have dealt a terrible blow to British music-making.   The EU has an indirect but crucial role in the blossoming of the music industry in Europe. Freedom of movement is more efficient than a grand scheme. My co-director Paul Agnew has been living in France for years now and has applied for French citizenship. As a direct result of Brexit, he had to cancel a concert at the Philharmonie de Paris because British singers could not come to France.   CRM : We have not yet fully experienced the effects of Brexit because of COVID, but we hope that it will not cause more administrative complexity for the music industry. Quarantine rules and sanitary restrictions associated with the UK have been incredibly tough to deal with. On Brexit, we do not have enough hindsight yet and this would require data, but at the moment many British musicians are moving to Europe and applying for citizenship on the continent. Gabrielle Desalbres, the interviewer, is a first-year undergraduate in History at Trinity College, Cambridge, interested in politics, the arts, and early modern history. [1] Théâtre du Capitole, ‘Rapport d’activité 2018/2019’ < https://www.theatreducapitole.fr/documents/5561745/5736311/ Rapport+d%27acitivit%C3%A9+2018+2019/b6c789dd-60af-42b2-b40f-de2341fa8353 > accessed 21 February 2021.

Manuel Rabaté is Director of Louvre Abu Dhabi. He has taught Arts & Cultural Management at Paris-Dauphine University and Paris-Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi. He is a Knight of France’s National Order of Merit.   Dr Souraya Noujaim is Scientific, Curatorial & Collections Management Director of Louvre Abu Dhabi. She has studied the British Museum’s Arabic weights and measures, and has been Islamic Art History Chair at the École du Louvre.   Louvre Abu Dhabi sits at a tense but enriching cultural crossroads. The museum brings the name of France’s most treasured cultural institution to the desert of the United Arab Emirates. The museum is innovative but its geopolitical context is difficult: a background of continuous government negotiations, and the cultural friction between East and West. The institution’s Director, Manuel Rabaté, and Curatorial Director, Dr Souraya Noujaim, discussed their creative vision and difficulties with honesty.   Manuel Rabaté, Director   CJLPA : Louvre Abu Dhabi arose in 2017 out of a 2007 agreement between France and the UAE. What was the intention behind the agreement?   Manuel Rabaté : This agreement was extraordinarily visionary. You cannot read it in isolation. It was part of a master plan to make Abu Dhabi an important international centre of knowledge, education, sustainability, and tourism. It was made in tandem with other agreements that led to Sorbonne Abu Dhabu, Berkley Abu Dhabi, New York University Abu Dhabi, Zayed University and National Museum, and Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. Tourism was undoubtedly an important motive. The government of Abu Dhabi was keen to ensure diversification of economic assets, and found that strong investment in its educational and cultural fibre was an excellent way of achieving this. The UAE federation dates only to 1971, but the place has a rich, much older heritage. The UAE wants to preserve this and create a cultural legacy. There is much more there than just the sun.   The community is built on other institutions and ideals too. Many of the buildings in which Abu Dhabi’s cultural institutions sit have been designed by Western architects, and many institutions bear Western names. But they are not necessarily extensions of Western points of view and ways of doing things. A key part of the vision behind Louvre Abu Dhabi, as well as the wider cultural objectives of the Abu Dhabi government, was to promote a universal story. Much like the British Museum in London and the Louvre in Paris are not museums of British art or French art, Louvre Abu Dhabi is place where you invite the world to come and see how you perceive human interconnectedness. We want to tell the story of the world through artworks and objects of beauty, at the same time raising points about Arab identity and the interaction of East and West. This may sound like a cliché, but I mean it truly.   CJLPA : What are your goals as Director?   MR : My mission as Director can be structured around four pillars, which chime with what my view of what a museum is. First, I want to focus on the building itself and its surroundings. We have an incredible, delicate building on the sea. It is a challenge to maintain, but I take pride in being its custodian and improving its health and accessibility.   Second, I want to be accountable for the contents of the building. We are a museum of the twenty-first century. In its most basic form, a museum must be a collection of artwork or artefacts. In our case, you will see the collection of the government of Abu Dhabi, and lent artworks from French museums. This latter part is a growing, moving, semi-permanent collection, through which we seek to tell a unique story of the world. Unlike the universal or encyclopaedic conception of a museum, where eras and cultures are strictly organised and segregated, we tell a story in pure chronological order. As you walk through the rooms, you walk through time. You begin with beauty in its most basic form, when men and women first came to exist and gain consciousness. We can see ourselves in them. As you move to other rooms, you see objects from different   civilisations together, linked by their common chronological connection. You are made to embrace what was happening in all the world at a particular point in time. We have an anthropological, not a scientific, base. Our collection is constantly supplemented also by other regional museums, adding a strong Arab element which other museums sometimes overlook. It is difficult to balance these narratives, but we strive to do it at all times.   Third, I want to ensure a very memorable museum experience. We need to cater to demand by striking a balance between business and hospitality. We want to make the museum an inclusive place for ‘people of determination’ and people of different cultures and languages. Our key performance indicator is still the number of visitors we get, but since the COVID-19 pandemic started our digital footprint has become very important. We are working on shifting the experience from a purely physical one to a meaningful online one.   Fourth, I want to enable staff development. I want to create a new generation of Emirati museum specialists. I do not want this to be a purely French affair. I want to revisit what it means to be, for example, a security guard, or indeed a museum curator.   CJLPA : You operate in a very complicated geopolitical environment. There are scandals where loaned art disappears, for example. How, as a museum, do you separate political and diplomatic considerations from creative and intellectual considerations?   MR : We don’t separate these considerations. Louvre Abu Dhabi is born from an inter-governmental agreement, but it is an Abu Dhabi entity. My chain of command goes to the Chairman of the Department of Culture and Tourism of Abu Dhabi, but this does not entail ‘political games’. Our very name represents what can be framed as a political ambition: the fusion of a major city with a major national institution. We are a new museum. We do not seek to impose old or alien political ideals on our audiences here, unlike some other institutions—though I will not drop names here.   CJLPA : What is the role of art, and the museums that contain it, in a time of crisis?   MR  : Developing a generation of Emirati art lovers and art specialists will build long-term ‘resilience’—and I know this word is used a lot— to societal challenges we will face in the future. But in the short term, with regard to the COVID-19 crisis, there is a clear need for beauty, reconstruction, social places, and aspirational thoughts. These, the museum can provide. We want to create a mindful museum, or as we call it in French, an institution à l’écoute . COVID-19 has assaulted the connections between people. We are told it is dangerous to speak with and be close to people! We offer a way to reconstruct and reimagine being together, as our institution is itself a meeting of cultures and thought. In far more practical terms, we have also held events for front-line workers and vulnerable people. Naturally, we are all vaccinated!   This period has obvious challenges, but they show that we have to revisit the museum experience. How should it feel to look around? Should visitors be guided by a digital usher? How do we ensure that visitors can relax and meditate, should they choose to? It is easy to reject digital solutions to what is clearly a very human experience. However, we should not shy away from what I call ‘digital maturity’, which will bring more answers than one may initially anticipate.   Dr Souraya Noujaim, Scientific, Curatorial & Collections Management Director   CJLPA : Some have said that the effort to make a museum a ‘visitor experience’ can come at the expense of integrity, or ‘dumb it down’. Do you agree?   Dr Souraya Noujaim : In a way I agree, and this is why a museum needs a very careful curatorial and scientific team. We have to avoid becoming an ‘exhibition hall’. This is why, within the curatorial department I lead, we are setting up and developing a research group to explore the question of cultural connection, through different materials. We do work for an audience, but we want to give that audience meaningful, deep content.   CJLPA : The Louvre is originally a French institution. But its manifestation here in Abu Dhabi has a new identity. What emerges from the interaction between an age-old French institution and the surroundings of Abu Dhabi?   SN : Beyond the obvious institutional cooperation required by the inter-governmental agreement that gave rise to Louvre Abu Dhabi, what has emerged is the idea of a ‘semi-permanent collection’, a shared display that rotates regularly with other institutions around the world. This allows us to fine-tune our intuitions and thematic tendencies. The act of collaboration also brings something very new and rich to museum practice. When two parts of the world with so many specialities are put together, the ensuing exploration and development of shared forms and themes are very valuable. Right before COVID-19 struck we had an exhibition on  furūsiyya , the Arab counterpart of the European ideal of chivalry. For this we discussed thoroughly over a scientific council how we could pair the Arab and European concepts. The discussion was probably unprecedented in terms of museum practice. Another example is a recent exhibition we opened in cooperation with Centre Pompidou, focussed on the spiritual cleansing of communities after COVID-19. We sought to trace the root of abstraction in non-Western art, particularly in Arab calligraphy.   CJLPA : How much freedom do you have to explore new ideas in your role? Are you constricted by museum policy, or by the terms of the 2007 France–UAE agreement?   SN : The idea of creating a universal museum here really came from the government of Abu Dhabi. We have built a narrative with as wide a geographical and institutional spectrum as possible. My curatorial objectives are based on the collection we have in this museum and the artefact loans we have from other museums, both in France and nearer the UAE.   CJLPA : Can your institution help society through a crisis like COVID-19?   SN : I want us to have a soothing effect on society. Art has always been a companion of human beings. We have been closed for some time. The fact that we were able to share again the physical experience with the public was very important for us. We want the public to feel they can engage with us at a very profound level, and simply be influenced and made ‘mindful’ by the extraordinary architecture of this institution. We want the building, the surroundings, and the contents to be rooted in a sense of the region’s nature and history. In the COVID-19 situation, our museum has to be a companion to those who want or need one.   CJLPA : For a short period, the museum was online-only. This brings obvious limitations. Has it brought opportunities?   SN : We updated and upgraded our online presence to provide people with as close an experience to the ‘real thing’ as possible. This included virtual guided tours of our exhibitions. This kept the exhibitions alive and reachable to the wider community.   CJLPA : Do you have any special projects planned?   SN : We are in a state of constant motion. That is what I find most fulfilling about this institution. Throughout the pandemic we have been building our collection, especially of contemporary art. Three years since the opening, it is time for contemporary artists to have their faces shown in the institution. I want Louvre Abu Dhabi to display the work of young and old contemporary artists very soon. Contemporary art deserves a place like Louvre Abu Dhabi, and Louvre Abu Dhabi deserves this new kind of dialogue and challenge. I also want to see our scientific lab finalised. Ultimately, I want our academic focus to shift and be developed. Alexander (Sami) Kardos-Nyheim, the interviewer, is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of CJLPA .

John Dewey Distinguished University Professor and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, Elizabeth Anderson is famously redefining egalitarianism in the field of political philosophy. Conventionally, philosophical debate has imagined the two concepts of equality and freedom to be polar opposites. Anderson has sought to challenge this perception by subordinating the popular egalitarian notion of distributive equality to that of democratic equality, which brings the concepts of freedom and equality together. Anderson’s groundbreaking work extends beyond political philosophy and engages in interdisciplinary research across fields and topics such as racial integration, the philosophy of economics, theories of value and rational choice, and the history and philosophy of the work ethic. In this interview, Anderson reveals the importance of empirical analysis within philosophy, what we can learn through an analysis of the history of egalitarianism and the role of social movements within its discourse, and how present inequalities have come about.   CJLPA : Could you perhaps tell us a bit about your trajectory to becoming a philosopher?   Professor Elizabeth Anderson : I started off in college studying economics, but there I noticed issues that I had at a very foundational level. These were questions like: should we assume that preferences are all in the person’s self-interest? We often choose to observe social norms: for example, out of norms of etiquette, you don’t take the last roll in the basket. But if the host offers it to you, you would prefer that to not having it. I thought economics wasn’t sorting out the distinctions well, and that was leading to mistakes in welfare economics. If people are declining to do things just out of social norms, it doesn’t necessarily mean that their welfare is being advanced, even though they’re doing what they want in the sense that they are choosing to do it. Such foundational questions moved me into philosophy, because philosophers want to put pressure on concepts that are used in the social sciences that maybe haven’t been probed adequately, and to think about introducing other ideas that could call into question some of the normative conclusions that people are drawing from their social scientific research. So that moved me into philosophy, but I have always been engaged in the social sciences. I think economics would be enriched if it drew distinctions that better tracked normatively important ideas.   CJLPA : Your current research interest is in the history of egalitarianism. What was your motivation behind this recent research interest?   EA : If you look in contemporary political philosophy, you see that much is written about freedom, and what freedom means, and why it is important. Equality is there, but I found it to be under-theorised. In particular, there’s the dominance of a certain distributive notion of equality that is kind of cosmic, which I think makes no sense. It applies to situations like this: imagine there is a distant world out there with beings just like us, only they have half the welfare levels that we do. Some conclude that there would be this unfairness in the universe because there’s an inequality. I think this notion of inequality has nothing to do with the inequality that people care about in real society. What people care about is not just some abstract difference between what I have and what you have. It’s all about social relations and social processes. How did those rich people get all that money? Did they get it at others’ expense? And are they using that wealth to dominate others? Does society turn wealth disparities into grounds for stigmatising the less advantaged? If it’s just some cosmic inequality with some distant planet, there’s no causal connection between our well-being and their well-being, and there is no injustice in that.   What we care about in real societies—and it’s not just distribution— are things like: the quality of social relations; who’s ordering who around; who gets stigmatised and who is esteemed; who is expected to beg for mercy; and who gets to dish out punishment arbitrarily. Those are things we care about: the structure of social relations, how we interact, and the norms through which we interact. I thought that a lot of discussion in political philosophy about inequality had this very abstract cosmic notion going on that really wasn’t picking up on the concerns of egalitarian social movements, on the concerns of real people who suffer from inequality, and that’s what I wanted to get at. My work has been trying to help people understand what egalitarian social movements are after and ground political philosophy in the experience of inequality and what makes that  so bad.   CJLPA : Was there something perhaps shocking that you found in the history of egalitarian discourse that relates to today’s inequality or equality?   EA : One lesson you learn is that we have seen all this before. It’s a funny thing about human beings, but we do really repeat the past. The way we think today is part of a whole history of thinking and we haven’t been able to get outside those ways of thought to critically examine them. My latest book—which I just submitted to Cambridge University Press—looks at the history of the Protestant work ethic, which was created by Puritan theologians in the seventeenth century. I’m tracing its influence through the history of classical political economy—figures like Locke, Smith, Mill, and Marx—up to the present. I argue that contemporary neoliberalism—an ideology that says that firms should maximise profits, that we should expand the domain of the market to cover most things and shrink the domain of the state, that we should outsource public services to for-profit corporations and shrink the welfare state, a whole collection of policies behind bolstering the power of property—can be traced back to the Protestant work ethic as it developed in the late eighteenth century. We’ve lost this other tradition of developing the seventeenth-century work ethic, which is very progressive and pro-worker. I am recovering this egalitarian tradition of thinking about the work ethic that has been overlooked, even though you can trace it straight through from Locke, Smith, and Mill, to Marx and social democracy.   Why did the work ethic split into two radically different ideas, one pro-worker and one all about empowering the rich? I argue that, from the start, the Puritans who created the work ethic had contradictory attitudes towards work. On the one hand, they saw work as a kind of ascetic discipline: workers have to keep their noses to the grindstone to prevent them from being distracted by temptation. So, that can rationalise consigning workers to all kinds of drudgery to suppress sin. But then there’s this other idea that work is carrying out God’s will for human beings on Earth, which is for us to promote the welfare of our fellow human beings. Work is meaningful because it helps other people. This is a utilitarian ethic. I have wonderful quotes from some of these Puritans which are pure utilitarian doctrine: if you have a choice between doing more good or less good, you have to do more good. Richard Baxter, a very influential Puritan theologian, said that you should sacrifice your children’s beautiful clothing if that is needed so that you can give money to relieve the suffering of the poor. Peter Singer, our most influential contemporary utilitarian, wrote a great essay back in the 1970s saying that if a child was drowning in a pond, you should be willing to ruin your shoes to wade in there and rescue the child. So if a child in Bangladesh is starving, you should also give up spending on your fancy clothes so that you can send money. He is channelling this seventeenth-century Puritan minister! Puritans reasoned that if work is performing God’s will on Earth that means that ordinary labour is sacred activity. This raises the status of workers, because they’re doing sacred and honourable things. Puritans couldn’t stand the monks: all that ritual is not doing anybody any good. Puritans famously had very sparse churches and were not spending a lot of time on art and finery. They were very practical minded. Puritan theologians argued that because workers are doing God’s will, that means you’ve got to respect them, pay them a living wage, give them safe conditions, and not just boss them around tyrannically, but treat them with love and respect. You can trace that tradition, which is very pro-worker, all the way through the history of classical political economy right up to social democracy. Everybody should have a decent life, and everyone should do their part to make that so. It’s a very egalitarian idea. It means that just as Baxter thought that you should give up your fancy clothes to help the poor, the rich don’t need all this fancy stuff. Institutions should be arranged to ensure that everybody’s needs are fulfilled and that everyone can fully participate in society as an equal.   CJLPA : Why do you think the neoliberal work ethic lasted so long? Has it been embedded within society, or are we seeing a change nowadays?   EA : I do think workers are rethinking work. The pandemic, to a certain extent, has sparked this. In the United States, the pandemic generated sharply contrasting outcomes for different workers. Privileged workers, white collar workers, could generally take their work home and we’re Zooming: we can fulfil our duties without meeting face to face. But it’s different for working-class people. They have to be at work in person, to deliver personal services, manufacture things, and perform other tasks in contact with other people. They’re exposed to danger as a result. Early in the pandemic, people were saying that grocery workers and other essential workers who have to be face to face should get hazard pay, and a few corporations actually acceded to that demand. But then they started cutting back and they started abusing workers. It’s like, ‘Oh, well, this is an opportunity, given their desperation, to increase profits by making life even worse for them’. So in the United States, workers in the meatpacking plants were crowded closer together so they could speed up the lines. That meant that these places became COVID hotspots, because they’re more crowded together and not provided with personal protective equipment. These workers, and others such as Amazon warehouse workers, are treated as disposable even though they are called essential workers. So, we still have these contradictory attitudes: should workers be given higher pay for risking their lives, or should you just treat them as disposable? ‘Well, we can always replace them; that’s what the market says; the market dictates the wage and it’s low enough they’re willing to take it at this horrible wage with high risk, so go right ahead, exploit them.’ And both ideas are there. But many people are thinking there’s no justification for treating workers so horribly. They’re supporting and supplying the means of life for everyone else! Shouldn’t they  be allowed to live? The National Health Service in the UK, for example: only a one percent raise for nurses?! It’s appalling! They’ve been risking their lives. They’re totally stressed out and exhausted. Especially in the wake of the fact that in the UK nurses’ pay has been declining over time. It’s shocking. The same thing is happening in the United States. We have nurses on strike against inadequate staffing levels. They’re overwhelmed and unable to provide necessary care because staffing has been cut in many hospitals. That means patients can’t get tended to when they need it.   CJLPA : Is this a wake-up call to change the work ethic, or will things go back to normal?   EA : Part of my work is on social movements. Without a social movement, nothing will change. Change doesn’t happen just because people have the idea that something is wrong. People have to be in the streets, they have to make demands and take political action to change the system.   CJLPA : Talking about social movements, I was wondering if we could talk about the recent Black Lives Matter protests— it has been a year since the death of George Floyd. You have heavily researched racial segregation, as well as integration, and I wanted to ask: is there a difference between the Black Lives Matter movement of the last year and the civil rights movement of the 1960s, or even the abolitionist movement?   EA : I think they all are part of the social movement tradition. Movements against racial inequality have been a powerful source of egalitarian thought. Feminism and workers’ movements came out of the abolitionist movement. It’s a very rich tradition. I do think that   there’s something of a difference with Black Lives Matter today. If you look at abolition, there were very precise demands: first, abolish the slave trade; then, abolish slavery. Similarly, the US Civil Rights Movement made specific legislative demands: to stop the segregation of public accommodations like restaurants and public transport like buses and trains, stop the segregation of schools, stop employment and housing discrimination, protect the right to vote. Whereas with Black Lives Matter, ‘defund the police’ is very inchoate. For the vast majority of participants, it doesn’t literally mean abolishing the police immediately. People know you can’t do that immediately without alternatives ready to deal with crime. It’s more of a long-term aspiration to figure out how we could replace the militarised policing that we have with a variety of other institutions, and eventually shrink the police until it’s vestigial. Then if we have creative enough alternatives, maybe we could eventually abolish it. It’s more a call for a very intensive exploration of alternative institutions for dealing with crime or preventing crime, as well as dealing with the many other things we ask police now to do, including helping people with mental health crises, traffic control, loud parties, and wild animals. But it’s not as clear as, ‘Here’s a bill that has to be passed’, the way previous movements demanded.   CJLPA : Has egalitarian discourse been able to capture the inequalities faced in reality, or is it its own discourse? Is the discourse in line with or parallel to the movements that are happening at the same time?   EA : There has long been a very rich interchange between how social movement activists are thinking about equality and what theorists are saying. Indeed, a lot of my work has been to try to bring those back together. However, with the rise of academic philosophy, there is a bit of an ivory tower effect where theorists’ ideas can run independently of what’s happening in society and fail to engage with the problems people face. Here’s another problem with academic philosophy: philosophers tend to speak in the voice of the ‘view from nowhere’, trying to make universal propositions or speak as if making universal propositions that apply everywhere. Yet in fact, if you read the canonical theorists closely, people such as Hobbes, Locke, and other canonical thinkers, you see they are absorbed with the political, economic, and social events of the day, and are addressing those events. They might speak universally, but really, they were focused on contemporary problems. It’s really important to study the political context in which they’re writing and the concerns that they had in order to understand what they’re up to. Then what they say makes sense, whereas before it’s a little mysterious sometimes.   CJLPA : Why do we continue to see a detachment between the kind of people who actually make the decisions and dictate the structure of society, and then the inequalities faced in reality and the social movements who seek to remedy these inequalities?   EA : This is all part of the historical dynamics of the struggle for equality. You can see in history that there has been a very uneven progress toward equality. It tends to leap ahead in bursts due to social movements, democratic participation, and sometimes war - real struggles on the ground. But it’s hard to keep up a movement: how long can you be on the streets? Also, egalitarian movements are very sharp on critique. They have very powerful critiques deeply rooted in human experience and in a precise criticism of actually existing institutions. But once the movement gets rid of what it diagnosed as the source of the problem—for example, the universal franchise— they figure, ‘OK, this is it, we have our equality.’ Time and again, the movement relaxes, and that gives space for people who want to be on top to start clawing back. They’ll figure out ways to game the new rules of the system, to restore their privilege. It’s always two steps forward, one step back. If there’s any progress at all, it’s very halting and partial, and you always have people who want to resist and reverse that.   Now we’re at a local historical peak of inequality. In the twentieth century, you had a huge surge forward, starting around World War One, of more egalitarian institutions getting installed: women get the right to vote, you get a welfare state, progressive taxation, all kinds of egalitarian policies are implemented. That’s carried through after World War Two, another leap forward: you had the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, construction of advanced welfare states and social democracy in Europe, the dismantling of colonial empires. That progress stalls in the mid-1970s. You see massive clawing back. Inequality has been skyrocketing, especially in the United States and the UK. We share that work ethic tradition. All these arguments we see about the work ethic today, go back and read Malthus, it’s all there: the idea that we can’t have generous welfare benefits because you’re just going to turn people into lazy slackers, you have to make the poor work for their benefits. We’ve heard it all before because we said this centuries ago. This is just brushing the dust off these old arguments and erecting them again. Powerful interests think like this. The difference is that in Malthus’ day, the rich were idle. Today, they’re very busy. What they do may look like work in the sense of adding net value to society. But in many cases they are pursuing business models that merely extract wealth from others. Maybe they’re engaged in predatory loans, or they package up some worthless stuff as some fancy asset and everybody goes running after the latest bogus tranches of credit default swaps and mortgage-backed securities that’s all just fancy fraud. This makes a lot of money for some people and leaves a whole bunch of others in ruin.   CJLPA  : What common misconceptions do people have of your work as a philosopher?   EA : I have spent a lot of my career trying to reorient the way philosophers think about political theory so that they get grounded. There’s been at the heart of analytic philosophy an aspiration towards this kind of universal theorising for all time, in all contexts. I think that’s a deep mistake. We’re not capable of figuring out useful normative principles for all time, in all contexts, in all cultures. We just don’t have that, or if we came up with a formula it would be so empty, it wouldn’t help us in any particular day or problem. I want theory to be grounded. That means that you have to engage empirical materials in the social sciences and history. We have to understand ourselves. There’s a reason why we’re thinking the way we do because we’ve inherited ideas that can be pretty dysfunctional. Society has changed, yet we’re still hooked on some Puritan ideas that don’t fit. Societies often have an awful time overcoming their past. In France, they’re still arguing bitterly over the Revolution. And America still hasn’t gotten over slavery: it’s such a deeply scarring historical institution, which has left pathological legacies that are passed down through generations to the present.   CJLPA : And if we’re not making these big universal claims, how wide should our claims be?   EA : They have to be tailored to the problem that we need to solve. We have lots of problems and some of them are huge. Climate change is the biggest problem humanity has ever faced. It involves the whole globe. We have to figure out ways to cooperate on a global scale. That has never been tried before—all pulling together around a solution to a single overwhelming problem that we all face. I don’t know if human societies are up to it. But I do have to say that one product of the work ethic, and it’s very deep in the history of thinking about the work ethic, is the enormous power of the division of labour. You can get far more done with a well-designed division of labour. This is a very complex and sophisticated form of human cooperation that can be scaled. That was always on the forefront of the minds of the classical economists, just how stunning it was in the Industrial Revolution that you could scale up production to levels that were unimaginable before through a sophisticated division of labour. We have to do something similar, because it’s a mistake to think of climate change as just a matter of technology. In fact, we have plenty of amazing technology that’s ready to roll. What we really need to do is solve the political problem of getting our acts together and implementing it: that’s much harder than actually designing the technology. All praise to the engineers who are coming up with this stuff, but the much harder problem is figuring out how to bring everybody around to work together to solve this problem.   CJLPA :   What would you recommend to students of philosophy, law, political science, and the like, who want to kind of keep one eye on the practicalities and the realities of policy-making, and the other on the theory?   EA : This is why I think the history of classical political economy should be studied closely. Read Adam Smith and you will see that he had his eye on both. He was both one of the greatest moral philosophers ever and also an amazingly creative economist who had a deep knowledge of history, studied institutions, and understood human psychology. He put it all together, and that’s what we need. Academic specialisation has its role and the division of labour is important there, but we still need people who are synthesising findings across the disciplines, and we need to work more collaboratively across the disciplines to solve the problems that we face today.   CJLPA : Is this something that you see becoming evident in your work as a professor and across academia?   EA : Oh, absolutely. One place where it’s happening is in PPE (Politics, Philosophy, and Economics) programmes. They are exploding in the United States. I established the program at the University of Michigan and ever since then, there have just been more and more and there’s an appetite for it. The students love it and it’s the place where I think a lot of philosophical theorising needs to be. Teresa Turkheimer, the interviewer, is a final-year undergraduate in Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick, working towards an MSc in European and International Public Policy at the London School of Economics in the 2021-22 academic year. Her interests lie in European politics, European Union foreign and security policy, and political philosophy.

Axel Rü̈ger is Secretary and Chief Executive of the Royal Academy of Arts. He is a former Director of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and the Mesdag Collection in The Hague. He was educated at Cambridge as well as in Germany and Canada, and has written books on Chinese and Japanese art. We live and die by our programme. If we don’t have exhibitions we may as well close. — Axel Rüger Axel Rüger, former Director of the Van Gogh Museum, joined the Royal Academy of Arts (RA) as the CEO in 2019. What should have been a celebratory period for the RA and a glorious time to be the man in charge, just after the RA’s 250th Anniversary in 2018, quickly descended into mayhem as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold early last year. For the cultural sector, the pandemic has been damning. Museums, galleries, theatres, and concert halls alike have had to adapt swiftly to spare themselves from financial collapse. The RA ‘tries to generate money normally with exhibitions that appeal to a broad public’, and yet it is an ‘eternal struggle to make money’, says Rüger. The greatest public health crisis of our lifetimes has greatly worsened matters for museums. National and international travel restrictions have severely curtailed visitor numbers and, as Rüger explains, there is ‘not an exhibition in the world that can really make money with 20 percent of its visitors’. In response, the RA has had to reduce costs of numerous kinds, and it has been forced to limit the ambition of the exhibitions and events that would draw the public back to the halls of Burlington House. Travel restrictions have also prevented some paintings from being borrowed, such as for the Francis Bacon exhibition (May 2021), which has consequently had to be scaled back. Rüger has been forced to make decisions about ‘how long it is viable’ to keep exhibitions open. ‘We are driven by the exhibitions programme’, he says, and the challenge will be to ‘retain integrity’ as the RA begins to ‘grow again’.   Fortunately, Rüger assures me that donations to the RA have not changed much during the pandemic. ‘[M]any loyal supporters have remained loyal and donated’, although some have understandably had to say, ‘not right now’. Indeed, ‘friends have been remarkably loyal’, and the RA is ‘still in a lucky position from donors’. Despite these positive lifelines, Rüger predicts, in our interview in October 2020, that the RA will lose £12 million in 2020. The RA does not have a ‘regular grant or funding agreement with the government’ but ‘has made use of the job retention scheme’. Many staff have been furloughed to cover some of the running costs of the institution while it waits for renewed revenue from exhibitions. Rüger tells me how the RA is ‘proud of its independence’ but had ‘applied to the cultural recovery fund where you could apply for up to £3 million as a one-off grant: help in the short term [to address the current] cash calamity’. The RA’s application has since been successful.   Moving to discuss the exhibitions themselves, Rüger explains that they are ‘always planned several years out’. Nonetheless, current circumstances are prolonging the wait for some exhibitions which have had to be ‘shunted along for next year and so on’, and two have been cancelled entirely. Rüger is still hoping to present seven exhibitions in the next year, ‘but none of them is really new. They have been on the cards for some time’. Regarding whether any upcoming exhibitions will be inspired by the pandemic, Rüger feels strongly that ‘it is too soon […] We need to distil what is good art from the pandemic’, he says, adding that the RA is ‘here to offer a place of aesthetic enjoyment, reflection, and solace. We are too deep into it. We will need a little bit of time and some clear water after the pandemic. What will that world look like? Some people think we need to change fundamentally’. On whether art produced from the pandemic will reflect health, death, and dying, Rüger is optimistic that it will ‘be more about how we live in our world’. ‘One of the worst things’, says Rüger, is that, during the pandemic, ‘we were banned from doing […] what we as a cultural society do best: providing a community, inspiration, and beauty’. So, he has no current plans to devise exhibitions about the pandemic. Until society has had enough time to heal, the RA will focus on its opportunity to provide a space for escapism.   The RA is, however, certainly moving with current societal waves. Rüger asserts that the RA is ‘trying to be more inclusive’ and that it ‘wants to try harder’. He adds that diversity ‘needs to be reflected by who we are’ with a ‘more diverse body of Royal Academicians and amongst our staff. We need to think and get more perspectives’. Taking place in winter for the first time, last year’s Summer Exhibition demonstrated the RA’s active efforts to be inclusive and to showcase artists from a broad range of backgrounds. Rüger highlights the rooms curated by Isaac Julien CBE of his own work. I ask Rüger what he thinks are the most effective ways in which   we can integrate the study and understanding of global art in the Western canon of the history of art. His response is thoughtfully engaged with the Decolonise Art History movement. ‘Northern Europe’, he says, ‘has a great history of museums and galleries. We in Europe and particularly Northern Europe, because of our colonial past, have a certain paternalistic attitude’. Looking forwards, Rüger is keen to increase diversity at the RA. ‘We need young art historians to go into the field who are from different backgrounds, to look at art with different perspectives. As a German, I have a different experience from my British colleagues, but as a middle-aged white man I can only be open-minded, [and] not bring those views’.   Our conversation then turns to discussion of the RA’s relationship with politics more broadly. Rüger has a clear stance on the institution’s position. He asserts that ‘the role of the Academy should be a platform for allowing debate and exchange, rather than taking a firm stance. Different opinions should be expressed through the art on the walls’. In other words, Rüger’s vision for the RA is that the art speaks for itself and encourages viewers to contemplate political ideas and debates. He tells me that it would be futile to try to impose a political stance on the institution, because ‘as a group of artists, [the Academicians] will never agree on anything at the RA. The only area where I can see the Academy taking a firmer stance is art education and art in the curriculum’. Rüger concludes, on this matter, that the role of the museum is multi-purpose, with a responsibility to provide a space where people can disconnect and enjoy the beauty of art, as well as contemplate current affairs. Rüger highlights the power of the museum, especially during the pandemic, and especially of artists, whom he praises for being able to ‘help us express emotions that we may not be able to express ourselves’.   Our interview comes to an end with Rüger revealing his vision for the RA in the coming years. I ask him if he intends to push the RA in a more modern direction, and what genres of exhibition he thinks London audiences will gravitate towards when they open again. He asserts, ‘I think the Academy should definitely be contemporary. We have living artists after all’. Acknowledging his audiences, he continues: ‘[P]eople, as they become older, tend to be more conservative. But we also have the schools’. There is evidently a fine balance to be struck between appealing to both the RA’s younger and older demographics. Rüger is sensitive to this, and he explains that the large-scale exhibitions that the RA produces do not make the institution the place for ‘super cutting-edge art making […] We have a certain status and a certain position. We might want to be a bit more experimental, but that is more for places like the Serpentine’.   During the first ten months of the pandemic, the country’s primary focus was on science, the development of vaccines, and economic survival. However, as we pass the first anniversary since the pandemic began, society is craving a return of culture and a revival of the arts. The RA reopens on 18 May 2021, with an array of exciting new exhibitions featuring David Hockney, Michael Armitage, Tracey Emin, and Edvard Munch. Louisa Stuart-Smith, the interviewer, is a third-year undergraduate in History of Art at Trinity College, Cambridge, interested in Italian medieval and early Renaissance art and architecture. In 2021 she will begin an MPhil in Italian medieval afterlife images.