Pavel Skigin reviews David Runciman’s, The History of Ideas: Equality, Justice, and Revolution, London: Profile Books, 2024, 320p., 978-1800815902
Pavel Skigin is a PhD candidate in political theory at the European University Institute in Florence, where he works on the ethics of economic sanctions.
David Runciman’s History of Ideas is a ‘foxy’ book, in several senses. First, it is foxy in the Berlinian sense, as it covers a broad selection of intellectual currents. In a 1953 essay, Isaiah Berlin famously addressed the question of monism and pluralism of values by contrasting the fox and the hedgehog from a fable by Archilochus. ‘Foxes’, historical examples of which include Aristotle and Shakespeare, know many things, while ‘hedgehogs’, such as Plato or Dante, know one big thing. Secondly, The History of Ideas is ‘foxy’ in advancing Isaiah Berlin’s core argument about value pluralism.
Like Berlin’s fox, it eschews monolithic truths in favor of moderation in exploring the messy realities of political and social life.
Runciman, who has recently left his politics professorship at Cambridge to focus on his popular podcast Talking Politics, is not only a fox but a charmingly chatty one. He is eager to entertain and inform but often reluctant to stay on any subject long enough to interrogate its complexities. The book’s episodic structure, more a collection of essays than a cohesive philosophical exploration, reinforces this tendency. Its 12 digestible chapters of equal length, each focusing on one book, are originally 45-minute podcast episodes. This is where the book is foxy in the third sense.
Despite the author’s statement in the preface that the book has been “extensively rewritten and adapted” (p.ix), it seems to barely differ from the podcast transcript. The changes are few but telling, such as avoiding the clarification of the word “imbecile.” Apparently, for Runciman, the podcast listeners are more likely to require such an explanation. The conversational “edutainment” tone is engaging but contributes to a fragmented reading experience. Without an introduction or conclusion, readers are left to piece together the larger argument Runciman appears to make but never explicitly states.
The History of Ideas, like Runciman’s podcast of the same name, aims to bridge the gap between the academic ‘ivory tower’ and the broader public. It avoids dense terminology, instead focusing on accessibility and anecdotes from the lives of the authors whom Runciman discusses.
While this makes the book highly accessible, it also limits the author’s ability to engage rigorously with its declared central themes of equality, justice, and revolution.
Each chapter pairs a classic philosophical or literary text with contemporary burning issues, such as AI, global inequality, threats to democracy, and identity politics. Runciman opens with Rousseau’s “Discourse on Inequality”, setting the tone for the book’s recurring exploration of the reasons why societies perpetuate various hierarchies. Rousseau’s notion of inequality stemming from artificial social constructs resonates through later discussions of Douglass, Nietzsche, Luxemburg, De Beauvoir, and Rawls. Reinterpreting the text as a call not to revolution but to introspection, the author argues that Rousseau’s critique of modernity emphasizes internal transformation rather than systemic change: “we shouldn’t give up trying, even under the artificial conditions of modernity, to be more whole, to own the artificiality for ourselves… We shouldn’t give up” (p.22). This interpretation aligns Rousseau with therapy culture rather than Enlightenment political radicalism: “to put it in more contemporary terms, Rousseau was writing about social self-harm” (p 6). According to Runciman, Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men, commonly known as his Second Discourse, has been historically misconstrued as revolutionary. What it actually encourages is not a change of external conditions but of internal perception, with less focus on appearance, fewer comparisons with others, and a “more pared-down life” (p.20). In summary, more mindfulness: “We should know ourselves better” (p.22). Here starts what might be the most consistent leitmotif of the book, Runciman’s acute animosity towards social networks, AI, and their creators in Silicon Valley along the lines of his previous book The Handover: How We Gave Control of Our Lives to Corporations, States and AIs (2023).
The debunking of common misconceptions continues in the second chapter. This challenges the historical image of Jeremy Bentham as a cold mechanistic thinker, calling it “a common caricature”, and speculating that Bentham’s emblematic systematic approach could have stemmed from Aspergers syndrome (pp. 24-25). A reference to Greta Thunberg follows, to elucidate the implications (p.27). Bentham is reimagined as a radical critic of nonsense who applied utilitarianism “as a kind of acid… designed to burn through all the crap by which we are surrounded” (p.28). Runciman chooses to pour this acid on the “digital surveillance society,” for which Bentham’s Panopticon becomes a mere metaphor (p.40). While Runciman lauds Bentham’s rejection of any elitist distinctions between “high” and “low” tastes, he also laments modern society’s descent into shallow digital gratification with “cheap pleasures” from “giant technology companies” (pp. 43-44).
Despite calling the Panopticon and utilitarianism the two exhibits against Bentham to be debunked (p.26), the chapter never engages with the unsightly logical implications of these ideas. Instead, Runciman seeks to convince the reader that Bentham himself, “a deeply lovable man, is a hero for our times” (p.44). His relevance for our times, however, might be the opposite to what Runciman intended: utilitarianism is often co-opted by the very Silicon Valley technocrats and accelerationists against whom the author turns his stinging criticism. Ironically, Runciman’s ostensibly eulogistic treatment of Bentham appears utilitarian in the attempt to align the philosopher’s life and ideas with the author’s own political agenda.
The book continues with Frederick Douglass, positioned as the ultimate version of Rousseau’s famous take on the human condition in the opening sentence of The Social Contract (1763): “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.” For Douglass, born into the shackles of slavery, it was not a philosophical abstraction. The chapter continues the book’s message of moderation by praising Douglass for the transition from vehement criticism to collaboration with the government and becoming “something of an establishment figure” (p.62) during the Reconstruction era following the American Civil War. For Runciman, revolution is not permanent, but it is inevitably followed by politics in its more mundane forms: “Escape, expose, abolish: one, two, three. What comes next? What’s the fourth stage in that journey? Unlike Rousseau, Douglass believed in political representation” (p.64).
The focus on Samuel Butler’s 1872 dystopia Erewhon stands out as one of the book’s most original choices. Runciman adeptly connects Butler’s satire to themes discussed earlier in the book, notably Rousseau’s skepticism of progress and Bentham’s focus on groundless human beliefs, framing Erewhon as an allegory of the “arbitrariness of social convention” (p.69). The Erewhonians’ rejection and eradication of machinery is applied to the task of criticizing Silicon Valley’s unchecked ambitions and provides an opportunity to argue for caution and moderation in social change. If societal norms are products of chance rather than rational deliberation, then “we should be very careful about being zealots for any of it” (p.82). Since the price of embracing technology, according to Runciman, is “looming apocalypse” (p.66), the resulting call for moderation and value pluralism possesses a somewhat Luddite quality.
Then the author turns to The Russian Revolution by Rosa Luxemburg, a critique of Leninist authoritarianism and a case for a more democratic approach to Marxism. While the previous chapters endeavor to weave the heterogeneous chapters into a single tapestry of ideas through common threads and messages, here Runciman starts anew. Since it is also our first glance at the “revolution” advertised in the book’s subtitle, the reader might infer a certain structure that is never explicitly laid out – even though attempting to discern an overarching framework could be just an over-conceptualization of 12 podcast episodes. The chapter reveals an evident limit to Runciman’s foxiness: he does know many things, but not all. The historical context of Eastern Europe appears to lie outside the primary domains of his expertise. Hence, a laudable aim to broaden the scope of The History of Ideas with less discussed thinkers leads to a rather confused chapter. It includes unfortunate distortions, such as 1914 Poland being partitioned between two empires (p.108).
The chapter on Carl Schmitt’s Concept of the Political is among the book’s most compelling, although its focus on democracy rather than “equality, justice, and revolution” makes it rather disconnected from the rest.
Rather than concentrating on biographical details like Schmitt’s Nazi past, Runciman thoughtfully and charitably engages with his ideas.
He is particularly interested in Schmitt’s critique of humanitarian interventions by liberal democracies, which he describes as the “liberal-democratic overreach” of leaders like Woodrow Wilson and George W. Bush. Consistent with other chapters, Runciman is forthright about his political leanings, concurring with Schmitt’s view that “casual cruelty, the arbitrariness, the inadvertent barbarity” are unintended but natural consequences of liberal moral absolutism (p.140). At the same time, Runciman keenly observes that Schmitt’s argument suffers from the same flaw he attributes to liberalism: both are “too ecumenical”, and their endeavors to limit politics end up totalizing it (p.141).
Runciman proceeds with a cogent discussion of Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy that continues the detour from the book’s declared focus but is faithful to the undeclared one – the snares of Big Tech. This time, the context is democracy, namely Schumpeter’s discussion of the vital role of ignorance for the stability of representative democracy. To function, democracy requires “the contrast between the ignorance of the voters and the incentives of the politicians” (p.158). The system works as long as “for the vast majority of the time, about the vast majority of things, we’re comfortable to let the generalists talk generally” (p.153). With this observation, Runciman might elucidate not only the functioning of democracy, but edutainment as well. The minimal account of politics as marketing rekindles Runciman’s concerns with “the age of micro-targeting and trolling” fraught with “nightmare scenarios” of manipulations by “vast tech corporations” (p.155). Another concern of the chapter is capitalism’s adaptability through creative destruction that underscores the tension between innovation and equality. Runciman highlights the irony that capitalism’s own success engenders gauche caviar as a new “bourgeois class, better educated, with more time on their hands… time to read Marx, time to be Marx” (p.147).
One might expect a chapter on Rawls to be the most obvious choice for a discussion on justice. Runciman, for some reason, decided instead to link A Theory of Justice to another theme of his book – revolution. In the spirit of the day, he offers a defense of Rawls’ very right to talk about justice, as if one required a special permission to have a voice based not on the merit of ideas but on identity. In a sort of positionality statement, Runciman portrays Rawls as a war veteran “fully involved in the political upheaval” of the 1960s student protests, not a mere “ivory-tower philosopher” from Harvard. In the same vein, the reader is asked to excuse the “technical” and “academic” style in which “philosophy took priority over the writing” – a rather remarkable approach for a History of Ideas (pp.185-187).
In a stark contrast to the praise of moderation in the first four chapters, it seems equally important to the author to demonstrate that Rawls is indeed revolutionary enough to be relevant, “willing to fight” and not “too polite for the Trump era” (p.201). Runciman stresses that despite the focus on consensus, “Rawls’s modus vivendi still requires that the unreasonable are excluded from politics, by force if necessary” (p.201). Quite logically, what follows is a discussion on the most prominent critic of Rawlsian justice, Robert Nozick. For Runciman, Nozick’s relevance is also enhanced by the fact that “his influence is particularly notable in Silicon Valley, where many of the gurus and the billionaires have read Anarchy, State, and Utopia” (p.224).
Runciman wraps up with his “personal favorite,” Judith Shklar’s Ordinary Vices, returning to the earlier theme of moderation. The author emphatically agrees that “the vice we should be at pains to avoid above all others is cruelty,” and this sole focus requires a more tolerant approach to other vices, above all, hypocrisy (pp.228-9). Having devoted two academic books to hypocrisy (in 2006 and 2008), Runciman presents a compelling argument that hypocrisy in the public sphere, odious as it is, may serve as a bulwark against cruelty. In contrast to the radicalism of the previous chapters, the last one praises Western democracy as “a politics that allowed the space for people to move between the public and the private” (p. 245).
The chapter examines a plethora of ways in which “obsession with not being cruel can lead to cruelty coming in by the back door” (p.232). In an observation that sounds like a commentary on some recent trends in academia, the author notes that “the fanatic for anti-cruelty shares something with all fanatics, which is a deadened sensitivity to the ways in which cruelty can creep up on us” (p.232). The opportunity to criticize Silicon Valley is not missed here either and the reader learns that “X/Twitter is the anti-cruelty device that lets in cruelty by the back door” (p.243). Ultimately, the way to contain cruelty, as it can never be fully abolished, is to value pluralism and moderation in politics. This is, for Runciman, “one of the things that the history of ideas can teach us” (p.247).
Just like its original podcast, Runciman’s book is an ambitious attempt to democratize philosophy, but its execution is uneven. In a foxy spirit, it darts between disparate intellectual currents with agility. However, this very foxiness also means embracing eclecticism over depth. While The History of Ideas offers engaging insights and thought-provoking connections, its fragmented structure and selective interpretations limit its potential as an entry point for those interested in equality, justice, or revolution.
References
Isaiah Berlin (1953) The Hedgehog and The Fox, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Runciman, David (2006) The Politics of Good Intentions: History, Fear and Hypocrisy in the New World Order. Princeton University Press.
David Runciman (2008) Political Hypocrisy: The Mask of Power, from Hobbes to Orwell and Beyond, Princeton University Press
David Runciman (2023) The Handover: How We Gave Control of Our Lives to Corporations, States and AIs, London: Profile Books.
