The History of Ideas: Equality, Justice and Revolution

David Runciman recently stepped down as professor of politics in Cambridge: he started doing podcasts during the Covid lockdown, and this is the second book of essays for general readers to come out of that process. He looks at specific works by twelve Great Thinkers who were concerned in one way or another to make the world a better place, giving each an approachable but highly-concentrated summary of what they were about: essentially where they were starting from, what they say and how that might look from a present-day perspective. You don’t need to be familiar with the trade vocabulary of political philosophy to make sense of this, but you do need to be fairly agile mentally to keep up with the pace.

Several of the people here are show more well-known giants I’ve read and even written essays about in the past — Rousseau, Bentham, Nietzsche — and I was pleased to see Runciman taking seriously a Victorian writer who was briefly a hero of mine in my teens, Samuel Butler. But there are others in the mix whom I know about but have never got around to looking at in detail, like Frederic Douglass, Rosa Luxemburg and Simone de Beauvoir, as well as others that I’ve only barely heard of.

A good mental workout in any case, and a book that will encourage you to think a bit more seriously about how politics works and what it’s for, and what we mean by words like “democracy“ and “liberalism”. Runciman doesn’t seem to plump for any specific version of politics that will solve all the problems of the world, but he does show us where some of the main hazards with existing models might lie. show less

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