Rutger Bregman's Reith Lectures

Our recommended author (Moral Ambition) is this year's distinguished Reith Lecturer in Britain.

BBC Reith Lectures 2025 – Moral Revolution

This year's BBC Radio 4 Reith lecturer has been announced as historian and best-selling author Rutger Bregman.

Titled Moral Revolution, the lectures will delve into the current 'age of immorality', explore a growing trend for unseriousness among elites, and ask how we can follow history’s example and assemble small, committed groups to spark positive change.
The four lectures will span:
• A Time of Monsters
• How To Start a Moral Revolution
• A Realist’s Utopia
• Zoom Out



Bregman's 2025 Reith Lectures will reflect on moments in history, including the likes of the suffragette and abolitionist movements, which have sparked transformative moral revolutions, offering hope for a new wave of progressive change. Across four lectures, he will also consider the explosive technological progress of recent years - placing us at a moment of immense risk and possibility, and will look ahead to how we might shape the future.

Bregman is an author whose works include Humankind (2020) and Utopia for Realists (2017), which were both Sunday Times and New York Times best sellers,as well as Moral Ambition which was released earlier this year and was also a Sunday Times bestseller. His work has been translated into 46 languages and has sold over two million copies. During a discussion at the Davos World Economic Forum in 2019, he also attracted international attention for holding his billionaire fellow panellists to account for not paying their taxes.

The 2025 lectures will be recorded in front of live audiences in London, Liverpool, Edinburgh and the United States. They will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service later this year and will be available to listen to on BBC Sounds.

Rutger Bregman says, "I’m deeply honoured to give this year’s Reith Lectures. Across history, moments of decadence and decay have often been followed by movements of renewal, times when people redefined what it means to live with integrity and ambition. I believe we are at such a crossroads today. These lectures are my attempt to explore how moral ambition can help us face the challenges of our age."

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BBC Radio 4