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 |
| Part ofa series on |
| Communitarianism |
|---|
Phillip Blond (born 1 March 1966) is an Englishpolitical philosopher,Anglicantheologian, and director of theResPublicathink tank.[1]
Born 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]
Blond 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]
Media related toPhillip Blond at Wikimedia Commons
