Meeting of Minds, Volume X

Conceived and developed by Steve Allen, the award-winning PBS-TV series Meeting of the Minds brought together the most provocative figures of history for conversation and conflict.

For the 10th session of intellectual time-travel, Steve Allen summoned three strikingly different thinkers, each certain to provoke outrage in the other. Adam Smith shows up in his bathrobe and opens the proceedings by proclaiming himself not merely an economist but "an everlasting student of life!" Margaret Sanger, introduced as the inventor of birth control, insists that "I was not creative - I was appalled!" Mohandas Gandhi insists that "True civilization itself consists not in the multiplication, but in the voluntary reduction of wants and desires."

As the conversation proceeds, confrontations erupt as the inevitable result of juxtaposing the ascetic purity of Gandhi, the earnest social consciousness of Ms. Sanger, and the almost impishly detached intellectualism of Smith.