Annual Sir Douglas Hague Lecture
The Lecture series is made possible by the very generous support of Sir Douglas.
The Sir Douglas Hague Lecture 2011
'Democracy on Trial' will be presented by Michael Portillo on Thursday 17 November at 6pm at the Said Business School.
Michael Portillo will ask why it is that after the democratic experiment in Athens in the fifth century BC, the world put democracy away for two thousand years, and why it was that most thinkers from Plato onwards regarded it as a dangerous thing. Were they right to believe that democracy would lead to the brutality of mob rule?
Portillo will argue that democracy must be regarded even today as unproven, because its modern history is short and it has only recently become a global phenomenon. Do our present discontents suggest that democracies will always make short-term decisions, passing baleful consequences to future generations? Is there an incompatibility between democracy, which is about equality at the ballot box, and capitalism, which necessarily entails inequalities of outcome?
Register online here
Sir Douglas Hague Lecture 2010
by Professor Raymond Dwek, a leading Oxford scientist, who is the Director of the Oxford Glycobiology Institute at the University of Oxford.
Sir Douglas Hague Lecture 2009
by Rt Hon Lord Paul Drayson of Kensington,Minister for Science and Innovation.