Phillip Blond (born 1 March 1966) is an Englishpolitical philosopher,Anglicantheologian, and director of theResPublicathink tank.[1]
Phillip Blond | |
---|---|
![]() Blond in 2018 | |
Born | (1966-03-01)1 March 1966 (age 59) Liverpool, England |
Scholarly background | |
Alma mater | |
Doctoral advisor | John Milbank |
Influences | |
Scholarly work | |
Discipline | |
Sub-discipline | Political philosophy |
School or tradition | |
Influenced | David Cameron |
Early life
editBorn inLiverpool and educated atPensby High School for Boys,[2] Blond went on to study philosophy and politics at theUniversity of Hull,continental philosophy at theUniversity of Warwick, andtheology atPeterhouse at theUniversity of Cambridge. At Peterhouse, he was a student ofJohn Milbank, founder of theradical orthodoxy theological movement[3] and a noted critic ofliberalism, philosophically understood. Blond's first work,Post-Secular Philosophy: Between Philosophy and Theology, is very much in the radical orthodoxy line of thought and includes essays by many of that group's members. Blond won a prize research fellowship in philosophy at theNew School for Social Research in New York.[citation needed]. Blond is the step-brother of James Bond actor,Daniel Craig.[4]
Career
editBlond was a senior lecturer inChristian theology at the Lancaster campus ofSt Martin's College and after the merger withCumbria Institute of the Arts in August 2007 he worked at the Lancaster campus theUniversity of Cumbria[5] and was a lecturer in the Department of Theology at theUniversity of Exeter.[6]
Blond was the director of the Progressive Conservatism Project at theLondon-basedthink tankDemos, but left due to "political and philosophical differences"[7] to establish his own think tank,ResPublica.
Blond gained prominence from a cover story inProspect magazine in the February 2009 edition with his essay onred Toryism,[8] which proposed a radicalcommunitariantraditionalist conservatism that inveighed against both state and market monopoly.
According to Blond, these two large-scale realities, while usually spoken of as diametrically opposed, are in reality the two sides of the same coin. As he explains it, modern and postmodern individualism and statism have always been connected of the hip, at least since the advent ofJean-Jacques Rousseau's thought, if not well before that in the work ofThomas Hobbes.[9] In a series of articles in bothThe Guardian[10] andThe Independent he has argued for a wider recognition of the merits ofcivic conservatism and an appreciation of the potentially transformative impact of a new Tory settlement.[11]
In 2010,The Daily Telegraph called him "a driving force behindDavid Cameron's 'Big Society' agenda."[12]
Blond is a fellow of theNational Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts.[6]
Writings
edit- Post-Secular Philosophy: Between Philosophy and Theology (editor), London: Routledge, 1998,ISBN 0-415-09778-9
- Red Tory: How Left and Right Have Broken Britain and How We Can Fix It, London: Faber, 2010,ISBN 978-0-571-25167-4[6]
- Radical Republic: How Left and Right Have Broken the System and How We Can Fix It, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012,ISBN 978-0-393-08100-8
See also
editReferences
edit- ^"ResPublica | Independent non-partisan think tank".ResPublica.
- ^Derbyshire, Jonathan (19 February 2009)."The NS Profile: Phillip Blond".The New Statesman. Retrieved 18 June 2010.
- ^Harris, John (8 August 2009)."Phillip Blond: The Man Who Wrote Cameron's Mood Music".The Guardian. Retrieved11 February 2018.
- ^"Cameron backs 'Red Tory' think tank". 26 November 2009. Retrieved5 May 2023.
- ^"MA in Theology, St Martin's College, Lancaster (UK)". Ucsm.ac.uk. 28 September 2006. Archived fromthe original on 26 March 2012. Retrieved27 April 2012.
- ^abcGray, John (2 April 2010)."Red Tory, By Phillip Blond".The Independent.Archived from the original on 26 May 2022. Retrieved24 November 2018.
- ^Harris, John (8 August 2009)."Phillip Blond: The man who wrote Cameron's mood music".The Guardian. Retrieved25 November 2009.
- ^Blond, Phillip (28 February 2009)."Rise of the red Tories".Prospect. Retrieved31 March 2010.
- ^Blond, Phillip (10 April 2010)."Red Tory: The Future of Progressive Conservatism?". Royal Society for the Arts. Retrieved 18 October 2011.
- ^Blond, Phillip (30 May 2008)."The true Tory progressives".The Guardian. Retrieved 24 August 2010.
- ^Blond, Phillip (26 November 2009)."The Future of Conservatism"Archived 6 October 2010 at theWayback Machine. ResPublica. Retrieved 24 August 2010.
- ^Hennessy, Patrick (13 November 2010)."Minister backs plan for massive state sell off of assets".The Daily Telegraph. Archived fromthe original on 15 November 2010. Retrieved11 February 2011.
External links
edit- Media related toPhillip Blond at Wikimedia Commons
- Interview inThe Guardian, 8 August 2009
- Phillip Blond and Adrian Pabst:The roots of Islamic terrorism,International Herald Tribune, 28 July 2005
- Phillip Blond and Adrian Pabst:The problem with secularism,International Herald Tribune, 21 December 2006
- BBC Radio 4 Profile