I first heard Frank Furedi speak about 30 years ago. I was more cynical then than I am now. Furedi talked about'change'. The idea that change was possible and that we as individuals could make a difference.
Furedi strikes me as someone who would not be impressed by flattery, and someone who doesn't stand around waiting for plaudits but is always moving on to the next project.
I guess that Furedi has earned a holiday from optimism. Maybe that's the kind of frivolous thing that I would say.
Furedi's body of work is amazing, highlights for me are his work on the nature of history, his analysis of the therapeutic society and topically today, I've started to re-read his book called The Silent War, this is a survey of the history of racism in the 20th century, particularly the way that that ideas of race moved from being fundamental to the ideology of the Western ruling elites, to something of which they had become ashamed. This puts into context the current moment where anti-racism has become official state ideology.
Today we have a Western ruling elite which likes to see itself as progressive and counter cultural. But Furedi shows that elite anti-racism also has Conservative origins, such as the contradiction of Western nations opposing the racial ideology of Nazism maintaining racial discrimination particularly in the US. Also during the cold war the West feared that the colour-blind ideology (in theory at least) of the Soviet Union could attract anti-colonial movements and the black and brown people throughout the world.
I first heard Frank Furedi speak about 30 years ago. I was more cynical then than I am now. Furedi talked about'change'. The idea that change was possible and that we as individuals could make a difference.
Furedi strikes me as someone who would not be impressed by flattery, and someone who doesn't stand around waiting for plaudits but is always moving on to the next project.
I guess that Furedi has earned a holiday from optimism. Maybe that's the kind of frivolous thing that I would say.
Furedi's body of work is amazing, highlights for me are his work on the nature of history, his analysis of the therapeutic society and topically today, I've started to re-read his book called The Silent War, this is a survey of the history of racism in the 20th century, particularly the way that that ideas of race moved from being fundamental to the ideology of the Western ruling elites, to something of which they had become ashamed. This puts into context the current moment where anti-racism has become official state ideology.
Today we have a Western ruling elite which likes to see itself as progressive and counter cultural. But Furedi shows that elite anti-racism also has Conservative origins, such as the contradiction of Western nations opposing the racial ideology of Nazism maintaining racial discrimination particularly in the US. Also during the cold war the West feared that the colour-blind ideology (in theory at least) of the Soviet Union could attract anti-colonial movements and the black and brown people throughout the world.