On February 6 and 7, 2024, the James Madison Program hosted Niall Ferguson for its annual Charles E. Test, M.D. '37 Distinguished Lecture Series. This year's two-lecture series was titled "Liberty in a Cold Climate."
Lecture 1: The Crisis of Liberal Democracy - February 6, 2024
There is widespread agreement that liberal democracy is in crisis at home and abroad. But what is the nature of that crisis and how will it be resolved? The lecture proposes that the era of numerous liberal democracies may be drawing to a close. Most liberal democracies are unprepared for the challenges of a new cold war against illiberal, undemocratic opponents.
Niall Ferguson, MA, DPhil, FRSE, is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a senior faculty fellow of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. He is the author of sixteen books, including The Pity of War, The House of Rothschild, Empire, Civilization and Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist, which won the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Prize. He is an award-winning filmmaker, too, having received an international Emmy for his PBS series The Ascent of Money. His 2018 book, The Square and the Tower, was a New York Times bestseller and was also adapted for television by PBS as Niall Ferguson’s Networld. In 2020 he joined Bloomberg Opinion as a columnist. In addition, he is the founder and managing director of Greenmantle LLC, a New York-based advisory firm, a co-founder of Ualá (a Latin American financial technology company), and a trustee of the New York Historical Society, the London-based Centre for Policy Studies, and the newly founded University of Austin. His latest book, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe, was published in 2021 by Penguin and was shortlisted for the Lionel Gelber Prize. He is currently writing Kissinger, 1969-2023: The Player and serving as a visiting professor at the London School of Economics.
