YouSaid · the spoken record

Andrea Wulf

lines on the record: 47
first: 2026-06-30
most recent: 2026-06-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I could talk to you all day at the traveler. I think it's at now, it's out now. I thoroughly recommend it. And, you know, thank you very much. Thank you”
2026-06-30 · Intelligence Squared · Was George Forster the Enlightenment’s Lost Visionary? With Andrea Wulf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Never been, which might be uncomfortable. We don't have to agree with everybody we discuss, for example. I find it exciting to talk to people who think differently to me. And, you know, sometimes it's uncomfortable what they say, but it is an exploration of some kind and an encounter with something alien and strange to how I think, but I can learn something from it. I don't have to agree, but I can learn something and maybe understand another point of view. And that is traveling too. Sure. And well, at this particular moment in time, which seems to be so dominated and characterized by such divisive opinions, maybe taking an approach that starts from a curiosity or an interest, maybe one way we can start moving beyond the catastrophic aspects of division and towards the more creative. Andrew Wolf, this has been absolutely gripped.”
2026-06-30 · Intelligence Squared · Was George Forster the Enlightenment’s Lost Visionary? With Andrea Wulf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because of our diversity, we are like harpstrings. So they're all of different length because they're all of different length, they create a great variety of harmonies and melodies, where they're all of one length, the richness of the music will completely disappear. So the symphony that is humankind is based on our diversity. And I think that is, for me, the kind of important message or inspiration from his life. So if we want to travel like George Forster, then actually what we need to do is be open to the shock of encounter and to let that change us. And I also think travel, you can also travel with your mind. It's not just about traveling physically, but to let your mind roam to places you have.”
2026-06-30 · Intelligence Squared · Was George Forster the Enlightenment’s Lost Visionary? With Andrea Wulf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The glue that holds us together is our common humanity. That's what makes us human. And I think, you know, I mean, he was a human with flaws. I mean, the way I just talked about him is it sounds like if he's on a pedestal, but, you know, he loved to shop. He overspan. He was always broke. I mean, he misjudged situation. I mean, he's very much a human being with all his flaws. But I do find his life inspirational because it is a reminder of the importance of kindness, of love, and of our shared humanity. And that's something we just forget sometimes. At the end of his life, he compared humans with harp strings. And he said that”
2026-06-30 · Intelligence Squared · Was George Forster the Enlightenment’s Lost Visionary? With Andrea Wulf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because he was always in transit, there's no kind of clot of land where he kind of is anchored into, which also means... You can't put all your pride into the place you come from. He puts his pride into being human. And when I think about our kind of current... Climate where discord is fostered, where divisions are emphasized, where we kind of retreat behind national. And we kind of forget that.”
2026-06-30 · Intelligence Squared · Was George Forster the Enlightenment’s Lost Visionary? With Andrea Wulf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think traveling has become a very, very different thing, and I'm not quite sure how open-minded we return from those kinds of travelings. But I think that the kind of traveling that Foster did did did open his mind and not just because he saw different worlds, but also because he was a perpetual outsider. So it's not just the travel on the resolution, but he didn't even know what country he belonged to. By the time he was 17, he had lived in Prussia, in Russia, in England, and then kind of boarded the resolution, and then he came back and he kind of zigzagged him, he lived in England, in France, in several German states. So he, which is the reason why... why he called himself a citizen of the world because he, you know, he didn't have that belief that he belongs to a nation. And I think in a way that is important for me because”
2026-06-30 · Intelligence Squared · Was George Forster the Enlightenment’s Lost Visionary? With Andrea Wulf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exploring something also in yourself, encountering local people, and not just as a kind of photogenic background to wherever you are, but I remember that we used to try to kind of learn a little bit of a language before we went to a country. That doesn't seem to be, you know, now we have Google Translate. We don't have to really bother with that anymore.”
2026-06-30 · Intelligence Squared · Was George Forster the Enlightenment’s Lost Visionary? With Andrea Wulf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Traveling has become something very, very different today. So when you look at, I don't know, the kind of long Q snaking up Mount Everest or when you see kind of like the ones quiet island of Santorini in Greece kind of being completely overrun. You kind of wonder what kind of travelling is that? That is traveling, trying to be on the same spot millions of others have been to take a photograph and to share it on your social media. I would not call that traveling. Full stop. That is not for me traveling. Because traveling is about, I think,”
2026-06-30 · Intelligence Squared · Was George Forster the Enlightenment’s Lost Visionary? With Andrea Wulf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For the indigenous people. So I suppose this is a sort of kind of roundabout way of asking you, Andreas, sort of, do we still want those, you know, do we still need those citizens of the world heroes? Do they still have relevance? Are they more important than ever? And if so, how do we, what can we take from George Forster about how to have this openness to the world without necessarily abusing it as we go? So no pressure there. If you could just solve these huge problems for us in five minutes, that'd be lovely. I'm not quite sure if I can do that. So I think I'm going to tackle this from two sides. One is I think”
2026-06-30 · Intelligence Squared · Was George Forster the Enlightenment’s Lost Visionary? With Andrea Wulf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He crosses emotional borders and thresholds a lot, but he also physically travels and undoubtedly it is this and these physical encounters like on the beach in Tanner in the Pacific Islands where the shooting take place. These are really formative, impactful moments. Now of course traveling has become almost a rise of passage for young people today. It's much more easy to do, but there is an element to which a lot of countries are now finding this an intrusion and pushing back and we've got places like Spain and places like Cambodia and places like Thailand saying we've had enough of you coming and having your formative developmental experiences here actually it's a little bit abusive and I suppose I'm going to tentatively link back and say well there was even a tiny bit of that with Forster on the resolution you know that was an element to which this was a wonderful experience for him as he acknowledged less so”
2026-06-30 · Intelligence Squared · Was George Forster the Enlightenment’s Lost Visionary? With Andrea Wulf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Aware of this and quite unusual for his time. Practicing self-reflexivity before that became a thing. That's very, very impressive. I'm just going to ask one final question, and this is I'd like to sort of move us, bring George Forster into our present moment. And it's a sort of a two-part. So in some senses, George Forster really does embody this, what it would actually mean to think like a citizen of the world, as it were. He's a true cosmopolitan in many senses. And we're at a moment in time where we're struggling to know what that means. And it seems that politics is very much moving away from that direction. One of the ways that George Forster does, not only through his adventures, his travels you say at one point, he travels in his mind.”
2026-06-30 · Intelligence Squared · Was George Forster the Enlightenment’s Lost Visionary? With Andrea Wulf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Influenced by and kind of well read by what is going on in Europe. As they travel, I think what happens is that what he sees falls onto kind of quite rich soil in his mind. It's a very educated mind, although in an unusual way. He is very aware, and that is unusual. He's very aware that he sees stuff through the lens of his own mind. So he writes in the voyage around the world, he says something that much later ethnographers will say, that you have to describe, you have to kind of say who you are. And as you observe another culture, because your own culture will inevitably color the way you see other people. And he writes that in the introduction of his book. So I think he's very much...”
2026-06-30 · Intelligence Squared · Was George Forster the Enlightenment’s Lost Visionary? With Andrea Wulf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Writers like Rousseau, for example. I'm pretty sure he read Montagna because when they witness cannibalism in New Zealand, the whole crew is kind of disgusted and appalled. And again, George Foster tries to kind of step back and says, you know, I am not going to use my European morals as a framework to judge them. Because how can I judge them if I don't understand their culture and their value system? And he tries to understand why might they be cannibals? And then he says something where he goes and says, in any case, we Europeans might think we are too civilized to be cannibals, but don't we send thousands of soldiers into the battlefield just on the whim of a ruler? And that is something very, very similar to what Montagna said. He wrote this very famous essay. On cannibalism. So he's faster is very much.”
2026-06-30 · Intelligence Squared · Was George Forster the Enlightenment’s Lost Visionary? With Andrea Wulf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bound to a particular ideology. It kind of gives him the freedom to roam intellectually, I think. But he's, of course, influenced by what he reads, and he reads a lot, and his father has a huge library. So when he was little, his father has about 2,500 books, which is quite a lot at that time. So his father is very much interested in Enlightenment thinkers. So he has read”
2026-06-30 · Intelligence Squared · Was George Forster the Enlightenment’s Lost Visionary? With Andrea Wulf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You see, is he conscious? I mean, because obviously you're quite clear, he doesn't have a formal schooling, and in some ways that's a great blessing for him because it allows him to be quite open-minded. He's not schooled in sort of any systematic discourse of knowledge or information. He can therefore decide for himself what he thinks is valuable. But was there any awareness of who he thought that he was kind of responding to or who any prior thinkers that he felt were influential for him? I think so. I mean, first of all, I think you are absolutely spot on to say that the lack of his formal education is, although he complained about it, it allows him, as he himself admitted to philosophize in an unphilosophical way. That's how he puts it. So he's not bound by the scientific establishment.”
2026-06-30 · Intelligence Squared · Was George Forster the Enlightenment’s Lost Visionary? With Andrea Wulf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So like you mentioned during this point, Rousseau is such a dominant figure and obviously going to be very, albeit interpretively, but influential for the French Revolution. There's Kant as well, who's in the ascendancy, absolutely key dominant figure in philosophy, and later there's going to be sort of Hegel. And actually, for me, George was a sort of keeps alive a sort of a kind of flame or a thread into European Western European kind of intellectual tradition that sort of stems from figures like Montaine, for example, who have that similar kind of very ethnographic, very empirical, very kind of sort of not relativistic, but within those that sort of much more culturally sensitive approach.”
2026-06-30 · Intelligence Squared · Was George Forster the Enlightenment’s Lost Visionary? With Andrea Wulf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are equal. It's trying to describe a process of cultural, literally treating cultures like their bodies and how they develop to varying stages of sophistication or complexity may be more accurate. Exactly. And he looks at, you know, can they read or write or how sophisticated is their language? But it does not come with a judgment. And it does, and that, I think, is the important thing. It does not come with this idea of a racial hierarchy with a white European at the crown of creation.”
2026-06-30 · Intelligence Squared · Was George Forster the Enlightenment’s Lost Visionary? With Andrea Wulf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So he says, the worse a people treat their women, the less civilized they are. So, for example, the Maori, he said, they treat their women as beasts of burden and as drudges, and he does not like that. While the Tahitians seem to treat their women with kind of slightly more respect. So I would say that's the only time when he really when there's a judgment from his side. Otherwise, he's just trying to observe it. It's not like if they're naked or if they're, you know, dressed elegantly. That is not for him where he's seeing kind of different stages. And it's not a hierarchy. And I think that is quite important. So it's not a racial hierarchy ever for him. So for him, all the races and the genders.”
2026-06-30 · Intelligence Squared · Was George Forster the Enlightenment’s Lost Visionary? With Andrea Wulf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It does make for uncomfortable reading this idea, as you said, he compares the development of societies with ages. So there's the baby stage, the adolescent, the adult and the old age. The old age is the most civilized. The interesting thing about this is that he does not equate the most civilized with the best, or in Rousseau's case, it would be the less civilized the best. So it comes without moral judgment. And what I did find fascinating is that one of the markers for him to kind of if a nation Is more civilized or not, is how they treat their women.”
2026-06-30 · Intelligence Squared · Was George Forster the Enlightenment’s Lost Visionary? With Andrea Wulf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know forced to confront the values and the dominant ideas of his times and to gradually develop the confidence and the resources in order to challenge them. That said, I mean, he does still persist with a kind of his own sort of version of a much, obviously much, much milder, much more benign version of the development of humanity than Kant's. I believe he sort of equates it to the different ages. But perhaps what he's, I mean, maybe you could clarify this. I mean, maybe what he's actually describing is not necessarily racial divisions, but merely sort of phases in cultural development, which is actually incredibly kind of anticipating something that all, you know, sort of kind of an approach to culture that we were much more familiar with much later on. It does, you know.”
2026-06-30 · Intelligence Squared · Was George Forster the Enlightenment’s Lost Visionary? With Andrea Wulf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Things through and changing his mind. I mean, normally when we do intellectual history, there's this tendency to sort of have this kind of implicit assumption that the thinker arrives with their thought-ready forms and it's our job to work out how they got there. And actually what's really interesting about this is we watch someone”
2026-06-30 · Intelligence Squared · Was George Forster the Enlightenment’s Lost Visionary? With Andrea Wulf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It would have been much better for the South Seas if the Europeans had never arrived here. So by the end of the voyage, he thinks that this is, you know, it would have been much better for everybody if Europeans had never arrived there because they just basically bring death and disease. So for me his life, and I've worked a lot about the 18th century, for me his life is the proof once again that we tend to think that racism and bigotry were inevitable in the 18th century. You know, this is just the way to see the world. And his life is really a proof that it's a choice. And it was also a choice back then. It was not an unavoidable way of seeing the world. I think that's a really important point, actually. And the other really significant thing about George Forster is we watch him thinking.”
2026-06-30 · Intelligence Squared · Was George Forster the Enlightenment’s Lost Visionary? With Andrea Wulf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Several things he works out for himself as one is that there's good and evil in all society so we can't idolize, we can't romanticize, but we can also not demonize. And he begins very openly to criticize the kind of British imperial project. And as they travel and as he sees the crew use their firearms, wound and kill islanders, his criticism becomes more and more vocal.”
2026-06-30 · Intelligence Squared · Was George Forster the Enlightenment’s Lost Visionary? With Andrea Wulf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And his writing becomes very, very different. He begins to communicate with the Maoris. And as you said earlier, he's a real linguist, so he picks up languages and very quickly. He's deeply fascinated by their culture. He tries to understand what's going on. He always admits that, you know, he will never truly understand. But he very quickly realizes, well, these are just humans as we are. And he admires their bravery and he admires their carvings. So within a few weeks, his attitude has shifted and throughout this three-year voyage, again and again and again, he tries to approach the indigenous people without prejudice. And he returns with a deep-seated belief in the equality of racism, with an unshaken Belief in humankind”
2026-06-30 · Intelligence Squared · Was George Forster the Enlightenment’s Lost Visionary? With Andrea Wulf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Child of the Enlightenment from the kind of Western perspective who sees himself in the Europeans as superior. So the very fast encounters with the Maoris, for example, when you read them, this is what we are used to reading in the 18th century. So, for example, they stop, they've just been four months in Antarctica, they stop in New Zealand, they replenish their stores, they have to repair the ship, so they set up all these workshops on shore and he describes it and he says, look, what great art and industry we are bringing to these barbarians. I mean, very, very typical European attitude of we are superior. But then within six weeks of being in New Zealand, his attitude shifts completely, I mean completely.”
2026-06-30 · Intelligence Squared · Was George Forster the Enlightenment’s Lost Visionary? With Andrea Wulf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very much so, and you are absolutely right. I mean, being on the resolution is very much part a colonial endeavor. I mean, Captain Cook is sent on the resolution with the expressed goal of finding the fabled southern continent, which scientists back then believed had to exist to counterbalance the landmass in the northern hemisphere. And that is obviously a colonial project. The idea is we'll find a southern continent and it will be full of, you know, it will be full of maybe gold, silver, plants that we can use and exploit. So he's part of that. Although what I would say is that he is 17 when he embarks and he did not really have any choice in this matter. So it is his father who makes him go. Together with him. But when they first arrive in New Zealand, for example, George Foster is still very much”
2026-06-30 · Intelligence Squared · Was George Forster the Enlightenment’s Lost Visionary? With Andrea Wulf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In places like Paris, or when he's mixing with the great intellectuals of the day, there's that sort of unavoidable element of hypocrisy for all the great liberal thinkers at this time, but a lot of what gives them the ability to be these intellectuals is also participating in a wider sort of colonial and increasingly capitalistic type project. So how do you feel, I mean, would you, did you get the sense that Forster was sort of very conscious of this did it prey on his mind? And how did you sort of as a historian kind of grapple with these contradictions? Because nowadays, obviously, it's, you know, we can be a little forgiving in our attitudes towards this. We can say, you know, that's not acceptable. Right at the beginning, you give a short statement saying, well, you know, we need to contextualize this, you know, what was available for him to think with and think about at the time. But nevertheless, it can still be quite a kind of meaty problem to grapple with.”
2026-06-30 · Intelligence Squared · Was George Forster the Enlightenment’s Lost Visionary? With Andrea Wulf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We would certainly call kind of in terms of his career a kind of European life, but obviously he travels widely. And just connecting this back as well, because obviously he's developing these, it's a rich ideas of the links, the commonalities between sort of different kinds of humans despite all the diversity and the difference, that sort of unity within or through diversity, which is a an idea we're more familiar with now, but perhaps wasn't so apparent at the time or much less, much less so. But with all this traveling he's doing, it is sort of taking place within a larger kind of colonial enterprise. And in part, this is what he's responding to. This is part of pushing aback and pushing against this, is what he's responding to. Nevertheless, he is to a degree participating in it. And similarly when he...”
2026-06-30 · Intelligence Squared · Was George Forster the Enlightenment’s Lost Visionary? With Andrea Wulf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's someone who's not been written about very much. And he's such a connective thinker in that sense. So he doesn't discriminate between these different realms and domains of knowledge, whether it's self-knowledge or emotional knowledge or it's the more traditional forms of scientific observation. I mean, that's quite fascinating. That does connect him maybe with an element in kind of European intellectual history, which we might come back to. But just whilst we're in this area, so traveling is obviously the dominant motif of the entire book. George is a traveler. There are passages where you're saying, well, where does he get his sort of big humanitarian notions of common humanity from? Is it because from a young age he's always considered himself something of a nomad that he doesn't have a personally strong sense of a sort of settled rooted national identity and certainly he lives”
2026-06-30 · Intelligence Squared · Was George Forster the Enlightenment’s Lost Visionary? With Andrea Wulf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That more, but he writes to friends about his problems within his marriage, so you get or with his father about his childhood. So there was just a richness of source material, which is very, very rare, especially...”
2026-06-30 · Intelligence Squared · Was George Forster the Enlightenment’s Lost Visionary? With Andrea Wulf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On a tropical island. And for me, that was a, I mean, that's just kind of stepping into another world. I mean, with Humboldt, for example, Alexander von Humboldt, who I've written a book about before, I mean, he left a lot of materials too, but he was much more scientific in a sense that he would not write too much about his own feelings. So there were sometimes long, long letters about kind of very detailed astronomical problems or something like that. And then Fastest case, it is always punctuated with like a little story about someone, you know, a little gossip about someone. You really had the feeling that you get to know him as a person. And in particular with his relationship with his wife, which was complicated, and we might talk about that.”
2026-06-30 · Intelligence Squared · Was George Forster the Enlightenment’s Lost Visionary? With Andrea Wulf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He had really problems to describe South America anything but green. I mean, it's green. The landscape is green. And the indigenous people are naked, naked, which equates not civilized. And then you read Foster, who just conjures up this completely different world and writes it in a way that reads almost novelistic. But the way he describes the indigenous people is incredible because you have, you know, he really approaches them without prejudice. So he describes what he sees. He doesn't judge. He describes hairstyles. He describes food. He describes their clothing, their housing, their animals. And just lets the reader walk into these villages.”
2026-06-30 · Intelligence Squared · Was George Forster the Enlightenment’s Lost Visionary? With Andrea Wulf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Such rich source materials because there's so much personal stuff in there. And there are thousands and thousands of letters, but there are also these diary entries where he's very open with himself, I mean, down to recording that he's masturbating, for example. And because he's such a amazing observer who's interested in everything, so he just kind of notes everything from what people wear, what they eat, what they do, and he's an intuitive ethnographer. So his descriptions of Polynesian Kalchad are to this day regarded as the best description of Polynesian culture before European contact. And it's very interesting if you look at other explorers who came before him. So for example, if you look at Christopher Columbus.”
2026-06-30 · Intelligence Squared · Was George Forster the Enlightenment’s Lost Visionary? With Andrea Wulf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The common traits within humanity from such a close observation of difference and particularity, particularly when he's traveling. So what was it, you know, I mean, just what was it like to be confronted with that huge amount of detail? And obviously also he's really good, as you said, at documenting his emotions, but also his intellectual processes, his thoughts as he's going. So you can really see his mind in action. You can see his theories emerging out of the sources. What was that like? What was that cachet unlike or like to kind of dive into? It is quite, you know, in the beginning it was quite overwhelming because there was so much, but at the same time, it was so exciting because I don't think I've ever had such a rich”
2026-06-30 · Intelligence Squared · Was George Forster the Enlightenment’s Lost Visionary? With Andrea Wulf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About the method of how do you gain knowledge with Kant saying you have to have a theory and then you kind of find your kind of empirical proofs for that. Foster saying exactly the opposite. He says, Well, you first have to observe, and after you have recorded your observations, then you can come up with a theory. So the real clash between the kind of rationalist perspective and the empiricist perspective, and if we come on to that, because that's such a striking element of the book, and you've already mentioned that you had some incredibly rich archives to work from. And reading the book, I mean, you've done this quite, you know, quite brilliant thing where yes, there's a lot of detail when you're discussing his arguments or his articles, but you also weave it just into the thick texture of the book, even down to details like what he bought when he went shopping and how he felt about those things. I mean, it is extraordinary, extraordinary amount of insight. And as I was reading it, it kept sort of reminding me, he kept reminding me of a bit of a kind of 18th century Herodotus type character where he start, as you're saying, he starts to actually conceive his ideas about”
2026-06-30 · Intelligence Squared · Was George Forster the Enlightenment’s Lost Visionary? With Andrea Wulf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Publishes a reply in a newspaper saying basically this is all completely wrong. And he says, you know, Immanuel Akant, who's been famous for never leaving the town of his birth, so he accuses him and says, like, how can you say these things? You have never traveled. And the people I've seen during this travels, they do not fit into these neat categories. And he says everything in nature is connected by nuances and by shades. So with that, he kind of takes the greatest philosopher in Europe and says, you are basically wrong and Kant unsurprisingly is not pleased about this and replies within another article telling foster, you know, you don't have an idea about this because you have to start with a theory. So it ends up being this quite interesting fighter.”
2026-06-30 · Intelligence Squared · Was George Forster the Enlightenment’s Lost Visionary? With Andrea Wulf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of idealization of the noble savage. So that's Rousseau. And then he also picks a very public fight with Emmanuel Kant, who at that time is really the most celebrated philosopher across Europe. And in 1785, Kant writes a treatise about the human race. And in this treatise, Kant says there are four separate human races, all defined by this color of their skin, with of course the Europeans being the pinnacle of creation. And so George Foster”
2026-06-30 · Intelligence Squared · Was George Forster the Enlightenment’s Lost Visionary? With Andrea Wulf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like the peaceful, happy savage. They are humans, like everybody else. Because good and evil, he says, is in all societies. There isn't the better societies because they're civilized or in Rousseau's case because they're not civilized. And he gives a much more rounded portrait of these societies. And he says that the world is not meekly divided into virtuous and immoral or virtuous and evil. Quite the opposite. It is this very complex tapestry woven from the different shades of human life and experience. And again and again, throughout his life, he criticizes Rousseau for this.”
2026-06-30 · Intelligence Squared · Was George Forster the Enlightenment’s Lost Visionary? With Andrea Wulf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Quite astonishingly. But the other interesting thing is it's not just so much that he's the hero we didn't know we needed and wanted, which So he is some Rousseau was very famous in the 18th century for his idea of the happy, peaceful savage who live in kind of untouched by civilization, in their kind of state of nature. And as George Foster travels with Cook's resolution across the South Pacific, they stop at a lot of tropical islands. And there are the indigenous people. And he very quickly realizes that, for example, in Tahiti, he sees a huge war madr, 159 double-hulled canoes and ready to go and fight. So he writes a beautiful travel account about this journey called A Voyage Around the World, where he describes these indigenous people and says, you know, they are not.”
2026-06-30 · Intelligence Squared · Was George Forster the Enlightenment’s Lost Visionary? With Andrea Wulf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Such a fantastic character to write about. I mean, that's a fantastic introduction. I'm going to come back to several of those themes. And I'll just add into there. He was also extraordinarily advanced in his views towards women and the equality between genders as well, the portrait of his marriages is extremely touching and rather beautiful. But just to sort of carry on with this idea of heroes, so you've given a brilliant introduction to him and we're sort of getting a bit of a picture now, but this is a guy who has quite an amazing, I mean, he is the original polymache. He speaks multiple languages. He translates. He's a very gifted draftsman. He's a botanist. He's a naturalist. He's a scientist. He's also a philosopher. So he's one of these really, you know, 18th century sort of all-rounders. There's nothing this guy can't turn his hand to.”
2026-06-30 · Intelligence Squared · Was George Forster the Enlightenment’s Lost Visionary? With Andrea Wulf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Years after what they've done is exciting, then nothing happens anymore. So he was a perfect subject just in terms of that. Then also we have thousands and thousands of his letters. So the material was really rich and he was someone who was very unusually very open about his emotions, his vulnerability. So you get a very personal portrait of him by reading his letters and his diaries. And then on top of all of that, he is someone who at a time in the 18th century when Western societies deeply steeped in racism, he's someone who fights against white supremacy and someone who believes in the equality of the races. He was just”
2026-06-30 · Intelligence Squared · Was George Forster the Enlightenment’s Lost Visionary? With Andrea Wulf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Went with his very tempestuous and narcissistic father as a botanist on a wild exploration through Russia, where just before his 12th birthday, his father takes him to London where he becomes the family's breadwinner. At 16, he attends the learned meetings of the Royal Society. At 17, he joins Captain Cook's second voyage around the world. So, you know, he's only 17 when that happens. So quite a CV for a teenager. And then on his return, he becomes famous across Europe. He becomes this kind of public intellectual. And then he gets pulled into the vortex of the French Revolution. So he has a very short life, but it's incredibly packed, which I think for biographer, it's fantastic because you don't have those endlessly long years when nothing happens. And then the endlessly long years.”
2026-06-30 · Intelligence Squared · Was George Forster the Enlightenment’s Lost Visionary? With Andrea Wulf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“17th century to the very early 19th century, and in particular the Enlightenment and then later Romanticism. So a lot of my books have looked at this period. And I do also love a forgotten hero. It's much more fun to write about than someone everybody has read about. So I do find them more interesting because when you uncover these letters and diary entries, you kind of know that no one has, not that many people have kind of looked at this. So I find that more interesting. And with Foster, it was really, I mean, he is a naturalist, a revolutionary, a kind of passionate believer in humankind. He led a life that is when you just look at the basic facts of his life, it was pretty adventurous. So he became a traveler at the age of 10 when he...”
2026-06-30 · Intelligence Squared · Was George Forster the Enlightenment’s Lost Visionary? With Andrea Wulf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Better known like Wilhelm Humboldt. And you uncovered him whilst telling their stories and decided, no, this guy needs to have a story of his own. So what as a historian and biographer, what is the value of doing that, even when technically, it's a little bit of a publishing risk, isn't it? I mean, that must have been some cell to a publisher. Well, I do write very long proposals, so I think they can be sure that this is a good story. But I think for me, history has never been this kind of, you know, pile of dusty old ideas which have nothing to do with us. I'm not, you know, I'm interested in history because I think it opens a window into our times because we are shaped by our past. And I think we in the Western world, we are very much shaped what happened in the kind of long 18th century. So, you know, from the late 19th century,”
2026-06-30 · Intelligence Squared · Was George Forster the Enlightenment’s Lost Visionary? With Andrea Wulf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You for having me. I hope we're going to have a really interesting discussion. Firstly, congratulations, fantastic book. And I'm going to start off just so George Forster. He's this, the epitome, the embodiment of the Enlightenment man. He's all about cosmopolitanism. He's the original citizen of the world. Really interesting. And you follow him in incredible detail, pretty much from his very early childhood all the way through to his very untimely death at the age of 39. And this is an incredible, rich layered story. But I'm going to start off with the obvious question. So George Forster's a bit of a hero that we don't know about. Not really. Obviously, hopefully your book's going to change all that. But what do you think is the value of finding these figures, these characters from history? And you mentioned that you'd already stumbled across him when you're covering other people you've written about are much more sort of better familiar.”
2026-06-30 · Intelligence Squared · Was George Forster the Enlightenment’s Lost Visionary? With Andrea Wulf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Empire, his belief in universal human rights and the influence of the French Revolution on his political thought. Let's join our host Sophie Scott Brown now with more. Hello, my name is Sophie Scott Brown, and this is Intelligence Squared, and I'm joined today by best-selling author Andrea Wolf to discuss her new book, The Traveler, the Revolutionary Life of George Forster, and His Search for Humanity. Andrea, welcome. It's such a pleasure to meet you.”
2026-06-30 · Intelligence Squared · Was George Forster the Enlightenment’s Lost Visionary? With Andrea Wulf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Welcome to Intelligence Squad, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Zorrenti. Why does some of history's most radical thinkers disappear from view? And what might we learn from a man who challenged the prejudices of his age through travel, science and a belief in our common humanity? On today's episode historian and writer Andrea Wolfe joins philosopher and historian Sophie Scott Brown to discuss the extraordinary life of George Forster and overlooked Enlightenment thinker whose ideas feel strikingly relevant today. A naturalist, explorer and political radical, Forster travelled around the world with Captain Cook as a teenager before becoming one of the most original and progressive thinkers of his age, drawing on unpublished correspondence and forced his journeys across Europe and the Pacific, Wolf traces how his encounters with different cultures challenged the assumptions of 18th century Europe. The conversation explores his opposition to slavery, racism and”
2026-06-30 · Intelligence Squared · Was George Forster the Enlightenment’s Lost Visionary? With Andrea Wulf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT