Christopher Brown

speaker

1,098 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 20 Jan

Christopher Brown’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.

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80,000 Hours Podcast · #145 Classic episode – Christopher Brown on why slavery abolition wasn't inevitable · 20 Jan 2026 podcast

apology, and even justification for empire, but also because I was resistant to the notion that individuals matter in the ways that those kinds of accounts tend to suggest.

And if you think about the way people talk about movements today, there's a real tension between do we celebrate the person who's the spokesman at the head,

Or is it the community of leaders that support the lone spokesman?

This is especially important in the history of the American civil rights movement.

Or is it the rank and file?

Is it the people?

Is it the foot soldiers?

Is it all of the men and women, and especially women who do all this hidden work to make a movement go?

And what happens when we focus on leaders and don't pay attention to everyone else who is pushing a cause?

So all of these things make writing about the beginning of a movement very complicated.

And there are a number of scholars who did this before I started to work on the subject, who really emphasized the popular dimensions of anti-slavery, that it was the

a kind of a public will.

It was a kind of a upswell of opinion that the leaders were in some ways just kind of catching up to.

And that if we really want to understand the movement, we need to understand its broad public embrace rather than its figureheads.

I guess this is a long answer to the question, Rob, because I really keep saying this is the crux of the matter, that's the crux of the matter.

But I do...

This is in some ways where the rubber hits the road between an issue that's become politically important and a movement that becomes politically powerful.

And in this particular instance, I really came around to the view that you can't just talk about it as a popular movement in which the leaders, the progenitors,

are just a kind of the surface of what is a great upswell of opinion.

To put it crudely, in this instance, movements start somewhere and they start with particular actors doing particular things.

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