Would the founding fathers have approved of Donald Trump? Probably not, says the panel in episode one of Great Ideas, a new RNZ podcast series in collaboration with Victoria University.

Great Ideas is a series, recorded in collaboration with Victoria University, about the ideas that have changed the world. It looks at what it takes to change our perspective and considers why these ideas still matter.

In this episode, RNZ's Megan Whelan is joined by Dr Xavier Marquez, Professor Simon Keller and Associate Professor Dolores Janiewski.

They discuss revolutionary ideas like liberty, democracy and what a revolution actually is,and whether the United State's founding fathers would have approved of Donald Trump?

"In order to have a revolution, you need to have some moral idea to drive it," Professor Keller says.

"That moral idea might be pretend, it might be that what drives the revolution isn't really liberty or equality or justice or rights, but something else.

"But you do need that kind of moral ideal. So, the thought that somehow there's some better future, waiting for you, if only you could get this government, or this idea or this ideology, or this class out."

However, Professor Janiewski says there's always an element of power too.

"Thomas Jefferson, who wrote 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' was a slave owner, and was in debt.

"So some of his motivations were probably not about those words, but about personal issues, and the fact that they were unhappy having to defer to a power overseas."

Are we currently in a technological revolution? Maybe in some ways, Dr Xavier Marquez says, but the importance of mass communication can be overstated.

"They spoke of the Facebook revolution in Egypt or the Twitter revolution in the Arab uprisings, and that's probably a bit overstated. They did play a role but it wasn't as direct or as clear as perhaps it was originally thought."

But overthrowing an established system rarely comes easily, and what comes next is completely unpredictable, Professor Keller says.

"One of the questions that I think you have to ask, when you're thinking about the morality of beginning or taking part in a revolution, is 'how sure are you that this revolution is throwing over a seriously unjust or otherwise horrible state.

"Are you sure enough to take the risk that what follows the revolution going to be something worse?'"

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Megan Whelan looks at how language shapes - and is shaped by - our understanding of the world, with Dr Sasha Calhoun, Professor Paul Warren and Associate Professor Stephen Epstein.

What does it mean when something is 'lost in translation'? Why isn't there an English word for 'schadenfreude'?

In part two of Great Ideas, Megan Whelan looks at how language shapes - and is shaped by - our understanding of the world.

"Schadenfreude may well have come into the English language because there wasn't a word that expressed that particular concept," Professor Paul Warren says.

"English, of course, is a very avid borrower of words from other languages. There's this strange idea that languages borrow from each other, I think English borrows but never gives back."

Dr Sasha Calhoun says our need to express the things that are most important to us has a big part to play in what words come into being in different languages.

"Then the languages themselves get to work on what is expressed. But you can find all sorts of lovely examples."

She cites an Australian Aboriginal word for the concept of sitting by a fire and rubbing the hands of the person next to you so both share in the warmth of the fire.

So did language evolve from the need to express an idea like that, or simply from the need to warn others of hazards?

"That's the 65-million dollar question," Dr Calhoun says. One theory is that language arrived alongside greater human cooperation.

"Particularly, the need for mothers to pass things along to their children.

"So the need to be able to teach methods and ways of living and ways of being in the world that were increasingly complex became something that mothers needed to pass on to children."

It's also not just words, it's the sounds that make up words. Take, for example, words that are synonyms for 'small' - 'wee' and 'tiny' have similar sounds.

"I think every language studied has some form of onomatopoeia," Stephen Epstein says.

"But some languages, and where things get interesting is Korean, have what we might call 'memetic' words."

"So they don't represent a sound, but they might represent something that you see."

He says that in Korean words like "twinkle, sparkle and glitter" have different vowel sounds depending on the size or intensity.

And then there's the question of what counts as a word - apocryphally, various languages from around the polar region have "50 words for snow"…

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Megan Whelan look at how revolutions shape - and are shaped by - fashion, literature and the visual arts, with Dr David Maskill, Dr Margaret Medlyn and Dr James Meffan.

Does the best creative work emerge in times of strife?

In part three of Great Ideas, Megan Whelan looks at how revolutions shape - and are shaped by - fashion, literature and the visual arts.

Participants: Dr David Maskill, Dr Margaret Medlyn and Dr James Meffan

What is the artist's responsibility in a time of change?

"We all need to be shown what it is to be human," Dr Margaret Medlyn says.

"Equally, for a stand-alone piece of art to break down accepted barriers and conformations of style, is an artist's duty.

"That's why an artist is an artist - to confront society and society's expectations."

Medlyn cites Igor Stravinsky's 'Rite of Spring' - which caused a riot at its first performance - and Richard Wagner's 'Tristan and Isolde', which she describes as hypnotic, charming and timeless, but also unsettling and as portraying intense human emotion.

Dr David Maskill struggles to think of any other artist who has been as embedded with a revolutionary cause as Jacques-Louis David.

Maskill points to Jacques-Louis David's portrait of the assassination of French revolutionary politician Jean-Paul Marat.

"I think what David was trying to depict was the fundamental shift from a God-centred universe to a human one.

"That this political deputy could actually now be treated as a Christian martyr. And of course, at this precise moment, Christianity was outlawed. They changed the calendar so the birth of Christ was no longer the beginning of the calendar."

"It was an attempt to wipe the slate of history clean."

Revolutions happen in both content and form, Dr James Meffan says.

He mentions the Nobel and Booker Prize-winning author JM Coetzee, who was criticised for not being "accessible".

"Coetzee was going to have none of this. He saw the artist's responsibility to the art per se."

"Someone described - in possibly the most backhanded attack on Coetzee's novel - that what he was offering was a coterie of modernist thinkers in South Africa some kind of masturbatory release."

"While Rome was burning, there were these artists off gazing at their navels," Meffan says.

"That kind of tension endures in many situations, and I think the works of art that endure, pretty reliably, seem to be the ones that have been provocative in their manner of representation as much of what they represent."…

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