BBC Radio 4’s 2025 Reith lecturer is historian and best-selling author Rutger Bregman. Titled Moral Revolution, the lectures will delve into the current ‘age of immorality’, explore a growing trend for unseriousness among elites, and ask how we can follow history’s example and assemble small, committed groups to spark positive change.
The four lectures will span:
- A Time of Monsters
- How To Start a Moral Revolution
- A Realist’s Utopia
- Zoom Out
Bregman’s 2025 Reith Lectures will reflect on moments in history, including the likes of the suffragette and abolitionist movements, which have sparked transformative moral revolutions, offering hope for a new wave of progressive change. Across four lectures, he will also consider the explosive technological progress of recent years – placing us at a moment of immense risk and possibility, and will look ahead to how we might shape the future.
Bregman is an author whose works include Humankind (2020) and Utopia for Realists (2017), which were both Sunday Times and New York Times best sellers,as well as Moral Ambition which was released earlier this year and was also a Sunday Times bestseller. His work has been translated into 46 languages and has sold over two million copies. During a discussion at the Davos World Economic Forum in 2019, he also attracted international attention for holding his billionaire fellow panellists to account for not paying their taxes.
The 2025 lectures will be recorded in front of live audiences in London, Liverpool, Edinburgh and the United States. They will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service later this year and will be available to listen to on BBC Sounds.
Mohit Bakaya, Director of Speech and Controller of BBC Radio 4 says “We are delighted to announce Rutger Bregman as the 2025 Reith Lecturer. Bregman has consistently challenged us to reimagine the world as he thinks it could and should be. His Reith lectures are a provocation – arguing that we are in an age of crisis, but offering hope about where we could go from here. They promise to kick off a lively and important conversation about the age we are living through and what should come next”.
Rutger Bregman says “I’m deeply honoured to give this year’s Reith Lectures. Across history, moments of decadence and decay have often been followed by movements of renewal, times when people redefined what it means to live with integrity and ambition. I believe we are at such a crossroads today. These lectures are my attempt to explore how moral ambition can help us face the challenges of our age.”
The lectures and question-and-answer sessions will be chaired by presenter, journalist and author Anita Anand.
Audiences can apply for free tickets to the recordings from late September, via the BBC website.
The Reith Lectures were inaugurated in 1948 by the BBC to mark the historic contribution made to public service broadcasting by Sir John (later Lord) Reith, the corporation’s first director-general.
John Reith maintained that broadcasting should be a public service which enriches the intellectual and cultural life of the nation. It is in this spirit that the BBC each year invites a leading figure to deliver a series of lectures on radio. The aim is to advance public understanding and debate about significant issues of contemporary interest.
The very first Reith lecturer was the philosopher, Bertrand Russell who spoke on ‘Authority and the Individual’. Among his successors were Robert Oppenheimer (Science and the Common Understanding, 1953) and J.K. Galbraith (The New Industrial State, 1966). The Reith Lectures have also been delivered by the Chief Rabbi, Dr Jonathan Sacks (The Persistence of Faith, 1990), Onora O’Neill (A Question of Trust, 2002), Daniel Barenboim (In The Beginning Was Sound, 2006) and Michael Sandel (A New Citizenship, 2009). Most recently the Reith Lecturers have been Stephen Hawking (Black Holes, 2016), Kwame Anthony Appiah (Mistaken Identities, 2016), Hilary Mantel (Resurrection: The Art And Craft, 2017), Margaret MacMillan (The Mark of Cain, 2018), Jonathan Sumption (Law and the Decline of Politics, 2019), Mark Carney (How We Get What We Value 2020) and Stuart Russell (Living With Artificial Intelligence 2021).
RB2