Phillip Blond

English writer (born 1966)

Edmund Burke
Benjamin Disraeli

Scholarly workDiscipline

Philosophy
theology

Sub-disciplinePolitical philosophySchool or tradition

Anglicanism
communitarianism
radical orthodoxy
red Toryism

InfluencedDavid Cameron

Communitarianism
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Phillip Blond (born 1 March 1966) is an English political philosopher, Anglican theologian, and director of the ResPublica think tank.^[1]

Early life

Born in Liverpool and educated at Pensby High School for Boys,^[2] Blond went on to study philosophy and politics at the University of Hull, continental philosophy at the University of Warwick, and theology at Peterhouse at the University of Cambridge. At Peterhouse, he was a student of John Milbank, founder of the radical orthodoxy theological movement^[3] and a noted critic of liberalism, 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 the New School for Social Research in New York.^{[citation needed]}. Blond is the step-brother of James Bond actor, Daniel Craig.^[4]

Career

Blond was a senior lecturer in Christian theology at the Lancaster campus of St Martin's College and after the merger with Cumbria Institute of the Arts in August 2007 he worked at the Lancaster campus the University of Cumbria^[5] and was a lecturer in the Department of Theology at the University of Exeter.^[6]

Blond was the director of the Progressive Conservatism Project at the London-based think tank Demos, but left due to "political and philosophical differences"^[7] to establish his own think tank, ResPublica.

Blond gained prominence from a cover story in Prospect magazine in the February 2009 edition with his essay on red Toryism,^[8] which proposed a radical communitarian traditionalist 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 of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's thought, if not well before that in the work of Thomas Hobbes.^[9] In a series of articles in both The Guardian^[10] and The Independent he has argued for a wider recognition of the merits of civic 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 behind David Cameron's 'Big Society' agenda."^[12]

Blond is a fellow of the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts.^[6]

Writings

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

References

^ "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. Retrieved 11 February 2018.
^ "Cameron backs 'Red Tory' think tank". 26 November 2009. Retrieved 5 May 2023.
^ "MA in Theology, St Martin's College, Lancaster (UK)". Ucsm.ac.uk. 28 September 2006. Archived from the original on 26 March 2012. Retrieved 27 April 2012.
^ ^a ^b ^c Gray, John (2 April 2010). "Red Tory, By Phillip Blond". The Independent. Archived from the original on 26 May 2022. Retrieved 24 November 2018.
^ Harris, John (8 August 2009). "Phillip Blond: The man who wrote Cameron's mood music". The Guardian. Retrieved 25 November 2009.
^ Blond, Phillip (28 February 2009). "Rise of the red Tories". Prospect. Retrieved 31 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 the Wayback 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 from the original on 15 November 2010. Retrieved 11 February 2011.

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to Phillip Blond.

Media related to Phillip Blond at Wikimedia Commons
Interview in The 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