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The Law & Liberty Podcast

By: James Patterson
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  • Law & Liberty’s James Patterson interviews prominent authors and thinkers. A production of Liberty Fund.
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Episodes
  • Shakespeare's Power

    Shakespeare's Power
    Jan 15 2024
    Eliot A. Cohen joins Rebecca Burgess to discuss his new book on Shakespeare and power politics, The Hollow Crown. Brian Smith: Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal Law and Liberty and is hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org. Thank you for listening. Rebecca Burgess: Oh, for a muse of fire that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention. But today, in fact, we are not left to any arbitrary leniency of a willful goddess of inspiration to get us going for this latest episode of Liberty Law Talk because our theme today is Shakespeare and politics, the stagecraft of statecraft, and even the statecraft of stagecraft when it comes to understanding the halls of power and those who would be in it. My name is Rebecca Burgess, and I'm a contributing editor for Law & Liberty, a senior fellow at the Yorktown Institute, and a visiting Fellow for the Independent Women's Forum. But importantly, for today, I am a partisan, wholly and devotedly, of all things Shakespeare. And joining me today is Eliot Cohen, the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the Robert E. Osgood Professor at Johns Hopkins University. Formerly counselor of the Department of State. His books include The Big Stick and Supreme Command. Thrice welcome, Eliot. What news on the Rialto, as we might say? Eliot Cohen: Well, Rebecca, first and foremost, thanks for having me. It's great to be here. I lead a very odd life in some ways, bouncing between military matters at the moment, which is my professional expertise in one way, and then Shakespeare. It's odd, but it's nice to be back with Shakespeare because the rest of the world's pretty grim right now. Rebecca Burgess: All right. He provides us comfort and also much thought to chew on. So I thought, in this midwinter moment, when everyone is settling down in front of their fires, all sated with holiday cheer, that it is a truth universally acknowledged that all thoughtful people want, or are in need of, a good book and a good conversation. And voila, you have gifted us The Hollow Crown: Shakespeare on How Leaders Rise, Rule, and Fall. Just out recently by Basic Books. And so I thought we could use the next hour or so to talk about what Shakespeare teaches us about politics today or helps us analyze those in the halls of power. The characters within Shakespeare are always of interest, whether it's Henry V, whether it's Richard II, or whether it's Prospero. And I'm going to needle you about some you didn't put in there, including the prince from Much Ado About Nothing and that band of unserious statesmen, not statesmen yet, the princes in Love's Labour's Lost, who have to learn how to become serious statesmen. But I would love to start off by asking you: What has teaching Shakespeare and introducing Shakespeare into your syllabi at Johns Hopkins or others taught you anew about international relations, grand strategy, or politics? Eliot Cohen: Well, that's really a whole range of questions. Let me just start as a teacher. So, I'm about to become emeritus at Hopkins and shift over full-time to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. I've had a 34-year career at Hopkins, which has been wonderful. The last course that I taught was for freshmen, and it was a freshman course on Shakespeare. And I have to say—it was just a wonderful way of rounding out a teaching career because what you see is how young people, who maybe have never really been exposed to this in a really serious way, they may have had an encounter with it in high school, but they're now at a stage where they can begin to appreciate it. You can see how it opens a world for them, and that's a delight. And it's, in a way, at a time when we could all use a bit of optimism—it's a source of optimism that you realize there's always going to be a new generation coming on, and they can respond to the classics very, very powerfully. So that's the Mr. Chips in me, if you will. I began ... I've always loved Shakespeare. I began thinking about teaching it after seeing Henry VIII, which is a play not often put on. There used to be some dispute about whether it was even by Shakespeare. I think most people think it is now a collaboration with another playwright named John Fletcher. And if your listeners will bear with me, I'd like to read the bit of the soliloquy that got it all started. So what's happened is Cardinal Wolsey, who was Henry VIII's chancellor, has just been deposed, and it's sudden, and it is a sudden fall from power. And here is what he says: "Farewell! A long farewell, to all my greatness! This is the state of man: to-day he puts forth The tender leaves of hope, to-morrow blossoms, And bears his blushing honors thick upon him: The third day comes a frost, a killing frost, And,—when he thinks, good easy man, full surely His greatness is a-ripening,—nips his root, And then he falls, as I do. I have ventured,...
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    1 hr and 18 mins
  • The First Empire

    The First Empire
    Dec 18 2023
    Eckart Frahm joins host Rebecca Burgess to discuss the ancient Middle East and his recent book, Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World's First Empire. Brian Smith: Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal, Law & Liberty, and hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org, and thank you for listening. Rebecca Burgess: “When time was young and world in infancy, man did not strive proudly for sovereignty. But each one thought his petty rule was high if of his house he held the monarchy. This was the golden age. But after came the boisterous son of Chus, grandchild to Ham, that mighty hunter, who in his strong toils, both beasts and men, subjected to his spoils. The strong foundation of proud Babel laid Erech, Accad, and Culneh also made. These were his first, all stood in Shinar land. From thence, he went Assyria to command. And mighty Nineveh, he there begun, not finished till he his race had run.” Those are the opening lines from Anne Bradstreet's lengthy first of four poems on the earliest great empires called The Four Monarchies. She was no respecter for word economy. Her title runs The Assyrian being the first beginning under Nimrod, 131 years after the flood. A mouthful. Bradstreet was the first woman to be recognized as an accomplished New World poet. She emigrated to Salem from England in 1630, one of a group of Puritan pilgrims, just as she arguably introduced Assyria to the New World. So today, we'll be steeped both in novelties and in the ancientness of things, also via Assyria, the world's first empire, being our main topic of conversation. And with that, welcome to a new episode of Liberty Law Talk. My name is Rebecca Burgess. I'm a contributing editor for Law & Liberty, a senior fellow at the Yorktown Institute, and a visiting fellow at the Independent Women's Forum. Joining me today is Eckart Frahm, a professor of Ancient Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Yale University. Previously, Frahm was a research assistant and assistant professor of Assyriology at Heidelberg. He has also worked on cuneiform tablets in the British Museum in London and in the Iraq Museum of Baghdad, among many other museums and other collections. Professor Frahm, so many welcomes. It's truly splendid to have you join us today. Eckart Frahm: Yeah, thank you very much for having me. It's a pleasure and an honor. Rebecca Burgess: This spring you released a new book, Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World's First Empire published by Basic Books. In an instance, I think of the Amazon algorithms getting things right. I chanced upon your book because, for my own research on empire, I'd been ordering probably a library's worth of books on Persia, Greece, and Rome. Also on Egypt by German Egyptologist, Jan Assmann. And thankfully or coincidentally, you begin your account of the rise and fall of Assyria with a very dramatic story of a bloody encounter between Assyria and Egypt during the reign of Esarhaddon that results in the capture of the Egyptian crown prince, much of the royal harem, and with enormous amounts of booty being taken back to Nineveh, then Assyria's capital on the Tigris River in Northeastern Iraq. Before me, cities, behind me, ruins is the inscription that encapsulates this classic imperialist behavior, rather reminds me of the Front Toward the Enemy warning on Claymore mines. But from that story, you weave a very richly textured account of Assyria as the world's first empire whose legacy in fact is the idea and form of empire, however protean you reveal that form historically to be. And it seems to me that in putting archeological artifacts, cuneiform text, and historical scholarship in conversation with Persian, Greek, Roman, and importantly biblical texts and attitudes, you set out to do at least three things with your book. Feel free to tell me where I'm wrong later. The first is to brush away the cobwebs of history from the picture of who and what Assyria was. The second to create an audience for the centuries-long silent voices of Assyrians themselves, who we can now hear in their own words. I thought that was a very lovely image that you opened with of these long silent voices suddenly being able to speak again. And third, to reveal precisely that Assyrian legacy to the world of empire and the surprising modernity, if you will, of what's been called the first half test of the history and the relevance of that age to our own pandemic, great power competition age. As you weave in so much of this cultural history, I hope our conversation can touch on, not just the politics, but the deep cultural echoes that have concealed as much as revealed Assyria throughout history, from Herodotus to Shakespeare, Rossini, and Lord Byron, to perhaps the particular staging of Adolf Hitler's suicide with his wife and dog. And to Saddam's very kitschy, anonymously published 2000 romance novels inspired by Assyrian warriors and queens. And with that, the ...
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    1 hr and 16 mins
  • A Sick Joke

    A Sick Joke
    Dec 4 2023
    Comedy writer Graham Linehan joins host Helen Dale to talk about cancel culture, comedy, and his new book Tough Crowd: How I Made and Lost a Career in Comedy. Brian Smith: Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal, Law & Liberty, and hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org, and thank you for listening. Helen Dale: My name is Helen Dale, and I’m Senior Writer at Law & Liberty. With me today is Graham Linehan. Graham is the writer and creator of multiple beloved British sitcoms, most famously Father Ted and The IT Crowd. With so many star-studded successes to his name and multiple BAFTAs—including a coveted lifetime achievement award—one would assume his place in the nation’s comedy firmament would be assured. Well, it was—until it wasn’t. Graham Linehan was one of the first prominent people in the UK to raise concerns about gender identity ideology (in 2018). He did so using the only tool available to him at the time, a Twitter account with 900,000 followers. Over the next five years, Graham’s career was disassembled. Not only was he abandoned in his hour of need by people he’d worked with for decades and known for longer, but current and future projects were also cancelled, including a completed West End musical based on Father Ted. Given his literary gifts, he’s fought back with a book, Tough Crowd: How I Made and Lost a Career in Comedy, released last month in the UK and coming to US shores soon. Tough Crowd is both a wise and amusing guide to writing funny things for television and an account of the madness that has overrun the arts and universities throughout the developed world in the last two decades. Thank you for joining us, Graham. Graham Linehan: Thank you for asking me. Helen Dale: You were—until a Comedy Unleashed show featuring you at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe was also cancelled—probably the most cancelled major figure in the UK. All the 2023 Fringe did was make your cancellation into a national scandal. You talk about the wider cancellation in Tough Crowd, but for obvious reasons, you don’t discuss what happened at this year’s Fringe. What’s it like to be cancelled on this scale? Graham Linehan: Well, it’s a destabilising thing for a comedy writer because when you’re a comedy writer, you want to be an observer of human frailty and confusion and all the other comically negative things about humanity. And so when you’re in my position, I’m now no longer outside things looking in. I am at the centre of a story. I am a figure who is incredibly divisive and scandal-ridden, and it makes even thinking about comedy somewhat difficult. I mean, in terms of coming up with a new idea or a new show—for the last five years, six years, I’ve been basically firefighting trying to protect my reputation, trying to rebuild it—and you can’t really write comedy when you’re in that kind of state. You’re in a kind of constant fight or flight mode. So yeah, it’s a very destabilising and upsetting place to be, but I just have to live with it now. Helen Dale: Has there been any sense since the book came out…It’s only been out for a few weeks now, three weeks now. Has there been any sense of... Are more people starting to talk to you now, apart from the sort of obvious media and publicity around Tough Crowd being released? Graham Linehan: Well, it’s an interesting thing because when you bring out a book—and this was actually part of my plan—I did think of it as a two-stage plan. The first stage was the book, but also the interviews that followed it because there were lots of things I couldn’t put in the book because they didn’t fit thematically to each chapter or it was simply too much information. And I thought I would use the interviews to fill in the rest of it for people. But it’s an interesting thing. I get two types of interviews. The first is what I’m getting here, which is being interviewed by people who know the issue, who understand the points, who understand what’s happened to me. And the second is what you might call the more mainstream interviews on TV and national TV over here—in the national press—which is usually with people who sort of understand the issue, but really are just kind of reporting on my Wikipedia page rather than anything that’s actually true about me. So far, it’s been okay. Just before Edinburgh, I was ambushed on TalkTV by someone who simply did not understand the issue in the slightest and was responding to the portrait that’s been painted of me by others in our profession. But yesterday I had an interesting one. I appeared on Times Radio, and even though the interviewer was taking the usual tack—which is making me apologise for either things that I didn’t do or things that have been misreported—and for once, he actually gave me a chance to respond. So, I was able to put the points as clearly as I could, and I’m hoping that will ...
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    1 hr and 2 mins
Political Science Social Sciences
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