Berlin Lecture 2026: now streaming

Last week, Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole delivered the 2026 Berlin Lecture, ‘From the Ridiculous to the Sublime: Art and Politics in the Age of Trump’.

You can now watch the lecture on our YouTube channel below or by clicking here.

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.

Abstract
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?

About the speaker
Fintan O’Toole is the Advising Editor at The New York Review and a columnist for The Irish Times. He has written more than 20 books including We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland since 1958 and Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain. He is widely regarded as one of Ireland’s leading public intellectuals. He has written extensively about social justice, political corruption, the Celtic Tiger and the economic crash, the Brexit referendum, US politics – including on the Trump administrations – and on many aspects of Irish history and culture. He is a member of the Royal Irish Academy, and a winner of the European Press Prize and the Orwell Prize.