2026 Berlin Lecture

Launched in 1990 to celebrate the 80th birthday of the College’s Founding President, Sir Isaiah Berlin, the Berlin Lecture is in his own field of study, the history of ideas. The Berlin Lecture is made possible thanks to an endowment gift from the Rothschild Foundation.

The next Berlin lecture will be delivered by Fintan O’Toole on 21 May 2026, lecture title and abstract below.

From the Ridiculous to the Sublime: Art and Politics in the Age of Trump

Walter Benjamin famously wrote, in Nazi-ruled Berlin, that “The logical outcome of fascism is an aestheticizing of political life.”But we might also put this the other way around: the more political life resembles art, the more fascistic it becomes. We are living through a crisis of democracy in which the public realm has become thoroughly aestheticised. Reactionary politics has become a grotesque form of performance art. Aesthetic ideas like the suspension of disbelief and the imagery of the sublime are now the stuff of political power. Where, asks Fintan O’Toole, does this leave both democratic discourse and artistic practice? Is there a way back to a shared imaginative life in which art and politics are mutually enriching?