ISCC Lecture Series: Religion and Civil Society

Presents

Phillip Blond

"The Broken Society vs. the Big Society"

Monday, October 17, 2011

7:00-9:00 PM

MSU Kellogg Hotel and Conference Center Auditorium

Michigan State University Campus

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Phillip Blond, author of Red Tory, is a key architect of the U.K.’s Big Society project. Blond’s ResPublica think tank has ridden to sudden prominence with radical solutions aimed at restoring civil society, remoralizing the markplace and recapitalizing the poor. Their ideas make up a substantial part of the U.K.’s new Localism Bill, now close to passage. Blond will apply lessons from the recent U.K. riots to our American political scene.

Phillip Blond was a graduate of Peterhouse, Cambridge, a student of John Milbank and a former lecturer in theology at Cumbria. He has been called the "Philosopher King" of the David Cameron government and espouses what might be described as a neo-distributist approach to politics with cooperatives, localized "civic renewal" and other policies that do not fit neatly any of the current political boxes. He offers a critique across the board of the centralized state, big business, banking and the unregulated free market. He has called for a renewal of morality in the market and the institutions of society. British Prime Minister David Cameron's "Big Society" is an attempt to try these ideas in the laboratory of a real country.

This event is possible because of the generous co-sponsorship of:

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In the Department of Political Science | Michigan State University

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