Darrin McMahon introduced by Miles Young

Historian Professor Darrin McMahon looks at the history of equality and how we continually reimagine it and asks why it matters.

Inequality is all around us today in wealth, race, identity and nationality. McMahon says that while we have always struggled for equality, we have always been profoundly sceptical about it. How much equality do we want and for whom? He explains how quality has been reimagined through the ages in the great world religions, by the politics of the ancient world, by revolutionaries and socialists, by Nazis and fascists and by post-war reformers and activists.

McMahon is the David W. Little Class of 1944 Professor of History at Dartmouth College in the United States. His previous books include Happiness: A History and Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity. He will be introduced by Miles Young, the Warden of New College and president of the festival.

Presented by the Voltaire Foundation which aims to disseminate world-leading research into the Enlightenment and bring the debates of Voltaire and his contemporaries to the widest possible audience.