Adam Hochschild on How To Fix Democracy

In our first series of How to Fix Democracy interviews, I spoke to Leon Botstein, not only the President of Bard College, but also a very distinguished musicologist and conductor, orchestra conductor. I asked him what democracy sounded like and it was the one moment in the interview when he didn’t know quite what to say. I’m not talking today to a musicologist or a conductor, but I am talking to a man who is very distinguished in his field, as a write, as a journalist, and as a historian of politics and democracy. Adam Hochschild has written many books, many different kinds of books about Europe, some about Africa, some about the United States. But the one thing that seems to me that unites his work is his interest in freedom or at least in the striving of human beings to be free.

Andrew Keen: So, Adam, maybe I can kick off with a similar question to
Leon Botstein. What are the words as a writer that you like to associate with democracy and freedom?

Adam Hochschild: I like the word justice because it has both a connotation of equal justice before the law that everybody is equal before that law. You know lord and peasant, president and garbage collector, they’re all equal. I like the word freedom in the sense of human rights. Everybody should have the right to speak what they want, to write what they want, to not have that…