When is a book not a book? When it’s the book of a podcast. David Runciman, professor of politics at Cambridge and formerly co-host of Talking Politics (with the excellent Helen Thompson), now issues a podcast called History of Ideas, and this is the second, after 2022’s Confronting Leviathan, in what is promised or threatened to be a “series” of books based on it. “I have tried to retain the conversational style of the original podcasts, though each chapter has been extensively rewritten and adapted,” the author explains in a preface. The result is not just a transcription of a podcast, but nor is it really a book.
A dozen thinkers get a chapter each: Joseph Schumpeter on democracy, John Rawls on justice, Jeremy Bentham on utilitarianism, Friedrich Nietzsche on the genealogy of morals, Simone de Beauvoir on feminism, and so forth. What will most strike the reader hoping to engage with a real book is the almost complete lack of direct quotation from the thinkers discussed. We are simply expected to take on trust that “Hobbes believes that …” or “[Rosa] Luxemburg thought …” The 19th-century former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass is described as a “miraculously good” writer, but we don’t get a single example. What about another miraculously good writer, Friedrich Nietzsche? “His two catchphrases are ‘God is dead’ and ‘The will to power’.”
This absence of quotation represents a patrician condescension to the reader, as if Runciman’s imagined readership could not handle reading what these people actually wrote and need it relentlessly paraphrased in CliffsNotes form. It also excuses Runciman himself from ever having to demonstrate, with textual evidence, why he claims a certain writer “thinks” this or that.
Unhappily, too, the refusal to cite the works under discussion sands away all the idiosyncrasies and personal brilliances of their authors: everything is translated into the monotonous murmur of a placid 21st-century liberal speaking down to the kids about Donald Trump, smartphones, Greta Thunberg, or the social network formerly known as Twitter. Such subjects pop up periodically as groovy-uncle attempts to make the philosophers seem pertinent to “our” interests, along with cool references to 1990s alt-rock (“there are a lot of jagged little pills to swallow”).
Runciman panders embarrassingly to an imagined audience of anti-intellectuals. We are reassured patronisingly that Bentham and John Rawls are not “ivory tower” thinkers, but Robert Nozick is “probably too clever by half”. In this discussion of 12 philosophers, we ought not to attach much value to philosophy itself. “Rawls was a professional political philosopher, not simply an intellectual or a writer,” Runciman notes, “and sometimes it feels as though the philosophy took priority over the writing.” No examples of the writing are given.
Helping with this ambition to denigrate the merely intellectual is a style of verbose cliche: one book is “an incredibly wide-ranging, sweeping analysis” (rest assured “there are twists and turns along the way”), another idea “feels like a bigger ask”. At one comical point Runciman castigates Simone de Beauvoir for being insufficiently woke: her view on the difference between men’s and women’s novels is, he laments, “the sort of thing a man would say”.
Despite the relentless – and, some might say, flagrantly unhistorical – attempts to make his subjects seem relevant to modern politics, Runciman neglects one obvious parallel. His earnest defence of Bentham’s utilitarianism – he is, apparently, “a hero for our times” – does not mention its modern transmutation into the school of “effective altruism”, an approach that has of late rather careered off the rails following the giant crypto fraud perpetrated by its notorious adherent Sam Bankman-Fried. Not to mention “longtermism”, meaning, according to some followers, that we ought to privilege the future lives of trillions over the mere billions living today. In the world of History of Ideas, though, nothing is quite so troubling: all is at last calm and frictionless, like the soothing tones of a podcast while you are stacking the dishwasher.
• The History of Ideas: Equality, Justice and Revolution by David Runciman is published by Profile (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
