Dan Snow's History Hit - Another History of Ideas with David Runciman

Episode Date: March 18, 2021

Today, I am joined once again by Professor David Runciman to talk about the second series of his brilliant History of Ideas podcast. The series looks at some of the most important political thinkers of all time and tells us about their lives, their theories and why their thinking still matters. We discuss the series and look at the philosophies of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jeremy Bentham, Frederick Douglass, Friedrich Nietzsche and Rosa Luxemburg amongst others. It seems that these giant minds we wrestling with many of the same questions that we have today. How do we get better politics and who allowed these lunatics to run society?

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. What a treat I've got for you now on this podcast. I've got Professor David Runciman back on, a legend. We're talking about his history of ideas, season two. The guy, he just goes on there and he just monologues about the most important political theorists of all time. He tells us about their lives, he tells us about why their thinking matters. And he tells us that these giant minds are wrestling with the same things that we're wrestling with. How do we get a better politics?

And who the hell put these people in charge of us? Why are these lunatics running society? To all the politicians listening to this, and I know there are one or two, I'm not talking about you. I'm talking about the other guys. Always a great pleasure to have Professor David Runciman on. You can hear his podcast on the Talking Politics feed,

wherever you get your pods. If you want to listen to previous episodes in which David Runciman has come on this podcast, you can do so at historyhit.tv. You don't have to listen to the ads either. They're all ad-free over there. So you go to historyhit.tv, sign up for a small subscription, and then you can listen to years worth of podcasts

and watch hundreds of wonderful history documentaries. In the meantime, though, everybody, enjoy this chat in which things get a bit gritty with Professor David Runciman. Hello, Prof. Great to have you back on the podcast. Pleasure. You've got another one of your series out where you just discuss the whole history of political thought through leading practitioners. How did you choose the last set? Like, what was the driving principle? It wasn't just like, here's eight famous political theorists, I'm going to talk about them. So the last one started with Hobbes, Laverth, and the theme was the state, the modern state

that's sometimes called the thing that we still live under, pandemic times, we realise we still live under a coercive political authority that has life and death power over us. And Hobbes, for me, is the preeminent philosopher who tried to make sense of it, to rationalise it. So the theme of that one was, we have this really odd form of politics, we're used to it. We sort of allow people to take decisions for us, over which we have some, but limited control on which our lives depend. And somehow we feel better off for that. And Hobbes is the philosopher who tries to say, look, we can make sense of this. And then the other thinkers in different ways were reacting to that, that kind of rationalisation of this. And it is very modern, it has a lot to do with rationality and science and so on. And in this series, I start

with Rousseau, who's often contrasted with Hobbes, and we can talk about that. I don't think the contrast is as great as people think. But it seems to me this is the other question that people have, which is not how do we make sense of this, but this clearly doesn't make sense. That this is mad. How have we allowed these idiots the right, the power to control us? And in this tradition, it seems to me what people want to do is try and go back and find the point, when did we go wrong? When did we give up our own freedom? When did we lose our ability to do these things for ourselves? How did we get trapped in a form of politics that is clearly madness? And though these two traditions overlap in lots of ways, because it's not as if Hobbes isn't a bit mad, and it's not as if people like Rousseau aren't in their different ways actually trying to rationalise things. But there are lots

of questions you could ask about politics. But if you think about the gut reaction that people have to modern political life, it is both great for us and it's terrible. And sometimes what we want to do is kind of make sense of why it works. But sometimes, and maybe this year particularly, what we want to do is ask ourselves, how did we end up with this as the thing that we call democracy, justice, freedom, when it so obviously isn't? Well, I'm glad you've produced a series because we need to do some therapy because I am in a middle-aged state of angst about this. Because as your kids grow up and you try and explain to them, they go, well, why is this the way it is? You go, well, because we elected... These things are manifestly untrue. And because we live in an era,

in America, there is a full-scale assault on democracy at the moment. In Britain, we've never really had a true democracy. We've got this insane second chamber full of appointed peers. We've got a government that's consistently elected on a minority of the vote. I think we all think that things are terrible at the moment, but there does seem to be, we are in Britain at the moment, there is a discontinuity of the past around ministers resigning when they are found to have lied or broken codes and things. And it's very difficult for me. Why am I obeying this law? I'm beginning to feel this doesn't have legitimacy. Now, am I just a mad middle-aged person flirting with anarchism or libertarianism or something? Or is this something that you're going through? You mentioned you hinted at there, this,

the lockdown, the pandemic responses forced you to think about government as no before. Why now? Yeah, so I think we all have both responses. So during this year, and the last one was also a series produced during lockdown, the early part of lockdown, where it seemed to me we were living in a pretty Hobbesian world in which we were dependent upon people taking decisions, which were life and death decisions. I mean, they still are for us. And somehow there was extraordinary acquiescence in that. And there still is, to a lot of people's surprise, for all the pushback there has been and all the resentment and comings and all of that. And these moments where people go, this is crazy.

Most of us, most of the time have gone along with it. And also saved hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives. So the kind of Hobbesian idea that we can subordinate ourselves to this state and we can benefit from that. And our money still works. There's still food in our supermarkets. Yeah. And state and we can benefit from that. And our money still works. There's still food in our supermarkets. Yeah. And with the risks that come with that, I mean, there is always a huge risk in forms of arbitrary power. But the Hobbesian argument is strip the arbitrary power out and you really are in trouble. But at the same time, we all have that

other impulse, you have it, I have it, which is that feeling that we've got ourselves into a situation in which we are dependent on this way of doing politics. And yet, one, is this the only way? Really, is this the only way? And also, isn't our dependency more evidence of the fact, as you were sort of implying that, that we haven't really thought this through? You know, we can't really rationalise it. So I start this series with not Rousseau's most famous book, The Social Contract, but I think by far his most interesting book, which is called The Discourse and Inequality, which is this kind of history of the whole human race. How did we get from, in his idea, and it's not completely convincing, in a kind of natural state, we were not dependent on each other and we could live without this kind of politics to what he thinks of as the sort of grotesque versions of modern life and modern politics. But it ends with this great set of questions.

I remember reading it as a student and thinking, well, these are the questions. So literally, the last line of the book, Rousseau says, what we've got to explain is how we can live in a world where a child can rule an old person, an idiot can rule a wise person, and the few can tell the many what to do. And something not just pandemic-wise, but kind of Trump-wise, many things said about Trump, but it often felt like America somehow was in the grip of a child, possibly also an idiot. And also, we all are aware that we're living in a world in which power is so concentrated in a few hands, but there are so many more of us. I mean, I hesitate to say us here, but so many more of the many, by definition. Why do we let them get away with it? That's Rousseau's question. And

his answer is kind of brainwashing. You know, his answer is that we have just grown up historically and then in our own lifetimes, with an intellectual framework that doesn't allow us to ask the why question. Why is it like this? And the way to ask the why question is to strip it back, to go back, to tell the story backwards, kind of Benjamin Button style history. How did we get here? And we have to kind of trace the steps and find the points where we had choices, because Roos's argument is otherwise, we don't have choices. We can't see where we had choices. Because Rousseau's argument is otherwise, we don't have choices. We can't see where we lost them. And it's a really powerful argument. It's crazy, a lot of it. And Rousseau was a pretty strange fellow in his way, but it's incredibly powerful and sometimes liberating. David, I always love it when you point out that actually

these political philosophers are best when they're studying history. So in this series, I think the central figure is Nietzsche. And the other way to sort of capture what some of these things have in common is that the great unveilers, they're the ones who are pulling off the veil, the mask, to see what lies beneath. But Nietzsche's word for it is genealogy. It's that kind of history. It's a family tree history. It's kind of how do we move through the stages so this begets this begets this begets this begets this. And there isn't a moment in any of these stories, there's not a kind of big bang moment where we were good and we became bad, we were free and we became enslaved. These stories are

so compelling because I say in the first podcast, it's this line from Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises, where one character says to another, how did you go bankrupt? This famous line. And he says, gradually, then suddenly. And the story of our sort of enslavement to these forms of politics is both gradual and sudden. It's over many generations. Then there are moments where we kind of take the big step in Rousseau's mind into this form of entrapment. You and I have talked a lot about the 90s. People listening to this podcast will be sick of me banging on about the 90s. But it feels more grotesque because it feels like Duterte, Bolsonaro, Trump, Erdogan, Putin, China, Eastern Europe, a world in which these

people are in charge of us, when we all thought that there was a direction of travel in the 1990s that looked like those intolerable people would be consigned to the past, feels even more acceptable. Like it's almost like there was a kind of idea that we had a glimpse of what the future should be. And instead, we're still mired in very 20th century, if not older, mendacious, corrupt, grifting, autocratic strongmen. And we've got nuclear weapons floating around and a massive climate crisis and a denial of truth.

Like, I don't know how I'm getting out of the house at the moment in the morning, to be honest with you. When Nietzsche and Rousseau identify in these texts, are they historic? Is it useful to think about a historical narrative here? Or are they talking, as Rousseau does in his more famous book, about our natures? What got us into this position? Is it history? Could it have gone differently? Or is this about us? It is certainly for Rousseau, it's partly about nature, but they have a historical understanding of nature. So it's not like there's a point which is the natural point. All of it is evolving, and these are early

theories of evolution. Nietzsche's case, pre-Darwinian theories of evolution. But it's about how the natural human experience is a constant work in progress, constructed by us, limited by our natural abilities, but we are constantly building on this thing. And it is history. I mean, Nietzsche wrote endlessly about history, but Nietzsche was interested in his phrase in the uses and abuses of history. I mean, history for Nietzsche is a weapon, because everything is a weapon for Nietzsche was interested in his phrase in the uses and abuses of history. I mean, history for Nietzsche is a weapon because everything is a weapon for Nietzsche. You know, everything is a tool. All our intellectual constructs are tools in the hands of people who are, as we all are as human beings, willing power in one way or another. And historians, academics, Nietzsche was pretty clear about this, the idea that academics are somehow above the fray.

We are all using this in order to assert our point of view. It's a very 21st century view in a way. This is all about drawing dividing lines. But yeah, they're historians. It's about time and change. And it's about the ways in which to be human is to understand how we got to here from somewhere else in our own lives, in the lives of our societies, in the lives of the species. But it's not history in an academic sense. I mean, if you read Rousseau and you read Nietzsche, they seem so remote from, so different from what we might think of as historical narrative today. They're so personal. They're so polemical. They're so wild. They're so speculative.

And they are works of genius. Contemporary historians, some of them may be geniuses too. But when you encounter it, the kind of wildness of a human being speculating about the whole thing, it feels very different from sifting the evidence. Why do Nietzsche and Rousseau and some of these other ones, how would they explain why billions of people in the world at the moment are living under Modi and present Xi, you know, China and India, for example, let alone some of those other names I mentioned? What do they identify? How has that been allowed to happen? There are lots of answers to that question. Let me give one possible kind of Nietzschean answer. So Nietzsche has this great line where he says, you know, all human beings will power, The will to power is one of the things that characterizes us,

but most of us are powerless. Tell me about it. Well, and you think you're powerless, you should meet some powerless people. Yeah, no, of course, of course. The human condition is the experience of powerlessness, essentially. And Nietzsche has some blunt terms for this. Most human beings are slaves, not masters. But even the slave, he says, has the will to power. And rather than not willing at all, we would will nothingness, he says. So the story of the weak, as he puts them, so let's call it the powerless, is rather than giving up their will, they will will nothingness. They will sort of will the antithesis of power itself. So there are lots of ways of explaining

how human beings can seemingly give up their power, allow themselves to be dominated, in order to feel that they have a channel and outlet for what Nietzsche would call their resentment. And I think Nietzsche would say that one way to explain this is that all people who are weak will find channels to constrain the strong, even if that means empowering people who will enslave them, who will oppress them, because that impulse is so strong. And it's that impulse that skillful politicians can exploit. So his word for it is resentment. A lot of people have written about this and used Nietzsche to try and explain it. But it can be channeled in all sorts of directions that look counterintuitive,

counterproductive, self-defeating. And Nietzsche's genius is he explains everything through this, including Christianity itself. Christianity, for Nietzsche, is the will to power of the powerless. It's their way of trying to constrain the powerful, their masters, through a turn the other cheek, the meek shall inherit the earth morality. And yet it generates new forms of power and oppression. But at least the powerless can feel it's our philosophy, it's our oppression. I think he would explain 21st century politics through that. Does that make sense? Yes, definitely. Politics of resentment is, we're speaking the week that the US Congress has passed a historic

package and Republicans have spent the entire week talking about Mr and Mrs Potato Head and Dr Seuss books you know trying to fire a kind of core audience with a sense of resentment about progressives labelling them racist and coming for their culture but what about Douglas because he feels interesting in this list because he has experienced powerlessness like nobody else has. He actually was a slave. So when people like Nietzsche talk about slavery, Douglas would say, don't bandy that word around. Don't use it generically. The experience of slavery is categorically different from the experience of being oppressed or weak. So that's partly why he's in here, yeah. And yet, in his later years, everything that he'd worked so hard to achieve looked

like it was actually going backwards. And yet he never lost his faith in the project to govern. Or you tell me, I mean, did he, he remained more optimistic than me, an affluent white guy wanting for nothing in the 21st century. Why is that? I didn't know that much about him before I started reading him and researching him for this series. He's a completely fascinating figure, also an amazing writer. I mean, just an amazing writer. But yeah, his life follows an unusual arc in a way. It starts, and I say in the podcast, Rousseau has that question, how can we allow this to happen? And Douglass in his various autobiographies almost always begins with his version of the same question. So how is it that this person can enslave me? And he says, at the age of seven, he realised there

was no answer to that. As an illiterate, uneducated child, when he asked himself the question, how does that person have life and death power over me? He concluded, there is no answer to that question I can ever accept. You don't need to have read a book or to have had a conversation with a philosopher to know the answer. A child knows. And that's the definition of slavery. So the more sophisticated Rousseau and arguments about democracy and social oppression, maybe you do need to sort of read books and be educated. But actual slavery speaks its truth unvarnished by philosophy. And so there's a kind of purity to his understanding very early on. And then he has his profoundly traumatic life,

he has to escape slavery. And I say in the podcast, there are three stages to it. First, once you realise this thing is not it's unjust, justice isn't the language for this. And he sums it up. He says, it's not colour. The only explanation could be colour, and that cannot be the explanation. So it's crime. It's just crime. So the first thing you have to do is escape. It doesn't matter how, it doesn't matter when, doesn't matter where, you just got to get out. There's a moral to this for lots of people who find themselves in situations that cannot be justified. Don't argue about it. And he says, there is no argument to be had with slavery slavery because it's not an arguable situation. That implies there's something to be said on the other side. First thing you do is get out.

Second thing you do is expose it. So he escaped. Then he spent his young life going around America and then Britain and Ireland telling the story of what it's like. Not arguing against it, just telling people the horrors. And then the third thing you have to do is abolish it. And he did that in the first half of his life. He didn't abolish it, but he was part of the abolition movement that did abolish it. Then what do you do? And his second half of his life was extraordinary, because then what he did was Republican politics. He was a Republican, Lincoln's party, his party. He got involved in education projects, he got involved in enfranchisement projects, votes for women, conventional politics. Because having done the first three things, the only thing that's left then is just to fight regular politics. But it sort of seems the wrong way around for us. People are uncomfortable, sort of this heroic struggle then descends into what we just recognise as routine democratic politics, where he thought progress would come from. as routine democratic politics, where he thought progress would come from. But to me, that's what makes him heroic, that he spent the second half of his life doing the mundane thing, but that was

only possible for him because of what he did in the first half of his life, which was escape, expose, abolish. And remained, even though Reconstruction fell apart towards the end of that period. So the second half of his life, in a way, is tragically a failure. But it strikes me that he remained positive about that work and about the state. So talk to me about him, because I need to feel a bit more hopeful. So he did. And in a sense, he wasn't wrong in that. I think he understood, as probably we should all understand, that real, complicated, messy democratic politics is always kind of up and down, back and forth, zig and zag, as Obama said, when Trump was elected. They're going to be good times and bad times.

But you've got to keep the faith, got to keep hope that the hard grind, and Douglass lived a long life, so these were long struggles. But yeah, it's true that the 20 years after the Civil War were better than the 20 years after that for the causes he believed in, the cause of emancipation and civil rights, as we now call it. But he kept going because I think he believed that there's a watershed, which is the abolition, the abolition of slavery. And after that, it's going to be messy, it's going to be complicated. And in many ways, it got worse after his death. You know, it took 100 years, and the fight is nowhere near over. It's a long, long struggle. But I think he believed that the difference between slavery, actually being enslaved, where nothing you do makes any difference. There is no argument to be had. There's no way you can resist. You just have to get out. And politics, where almost

everything you do could make a difference. So for him, it was the difference between having lived a life where he was genuinely powerless to living a life where even if it was frustrating and annoying and depressing, there was hope. It's that story. I mean, it's actually a heroic story. You're listening to me have an existential crisis talking to David Runcciman more after this

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where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. it all ends up with that terribly boring and trite democracy the worst system apart from the other i mean do any of your thinkers come up with the answer and go aha well this is actually how we constrain the executive this is i mean i know you don't do mill but bentham obviously worked very close to him and there are kind of the liberal

democratic ideas and restraining the executive voting widening access to voting all the things that we can try and do do any of your thinkers regard those as enough yeah i mean i think so but it's demanding i mean starting, starting with Rousseau, Rousseau thought there was a way of doing, didn't quite call it democracy, but doing popular sovereignty. That was a form of freedom emancipation from this kind of oppression. But as he said, it was austere, it was demanding, it needed a small state, he basically had to abolish commercial. So it really wasn't for the modern world. But there was a way of doing it. And then you have to accept if you're not willing to do that incredibly demanding form of politics, then you have to be much more attuned to all the ways in which you're likely to sort of slip down

the slope to oppression. And I think with many of them, there's a sense that there are answers, but the answers are probably too hard for us. And so that's part of the self-awareness that comes with taking off the veil. It's like you said about the 1990s, we accept stories of progress too easily, too lightly. We believe them because they're comfortable and they're consoling. Actually, to really measure progress in concrete terms that we can hold on to is probably much harder work than we're comfortable with. And so we tend not to want to do it. Same with Bentham. Bentham demanded three things, his kind of democratic reforms. He wanted mass enfranchisement,

you know, he wanted working men and then with male, we get women to be allowed to vote. He wanted secret ballots so people could express their views in private. And he wanted annual parliaments. He thought if you let a parliament run for more than one year, it would become corrupt. It was hopeless. And it's so interesting that we take the first two for granted. Everyone gets a vote, you get to vote in secret. We're perfectly fine to let the parliament run for five years, shot through with corruption, no actual control over what they do. And for Bentham, without really regular, almost constant surveillance by the voters of the people that they've elected, the thing is going to run out of control. But it's way too demanding for us. I mean, Brenda from Bristol didn't want an election two years after the last one.

Imagine if we were basically doing it all the time, which is what Bentham thinks we should do. Because if we don't, if we don't keep our eye on them, they're human beings. And human nature tells us that people feather their nests. But it's too much for us. It's too much for us. So there's something kind of austere and demanding about the people who strip off the veil and say, look, it doesn't make sense. This would make it make sense. But frankly, we now know enough about ourselves that we know it's probably going to be too hard for us. Yeah. And even you, one of the great political observers in Britain, how often do you read draft bills before Parliament?

I don't think you need to preface that with even me. I mean, it's just like, obviously, I haven't got who does. I mean, but how often do the politicians themselves? And in complex modern societies where so much is connected with so much, we all know this. We all know it. Now, Rousseau's pared down down austere democracy, as he called it. Partly it's pared down because as soon as you overlay on it a commercial society, as he called it, you know, a modern economy, there's no way anyone is going to be able to see through it. And yet what he wants is a kind

of transparency, an ability to see the consequences of the choices we make. None of us have the ability to see the collective consequences of the collective choices we make. I mean, maybe someone somewhere in Silicon Valley has now got the technology that they can see how everything connects to everything. But the machines can do it, we can't. I was fascinated that you said you worked on Douglas almost for the first time to do this. What a wonderful thing it must be to discover new writing for you. And it makes me think, writing this series of podcasts, what did you learn? And how are you feeling, man? Like at the end of it, where are you? Yeah, I mean, so like I said, I read Rousseau when I was an undergraduate, the second discourse, it's called Discourse on Inequality at age 19. It really

spoke to me. And I thought, well, in my 50s now, I'm going to be older and wiser and I'm going to think that this is nonsense yeah Russo's a teenage player I mean I just loved a bit of Russo when I was 19 it was the best yeah but I have to say rereading it had exactly the same effect on me it had that kind of bracing effect where someone says to you we all want this someone says to you you don't have to believe what the man says you can can think this through for yourself. So to my surprise, I found Rousseau as, I wouldn't say as liberating, but that's overstating it. But I found it as bracing as ever, same with Nietzsche. But some things I hadn't read.

So I've just read this. I'm ashamed to admit this, but I'm about to talk about it. I've just read all the way through for the first time Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, a 900-page book. Amazing. I mean, just as those books are, that you know what they say and you've kind of read about them, but when you actually encounter them for themselves, they're so much weirder and so much more, in the little sort of asides, these extraordinary stories and the picture it paints of what life was like in France in the

1940s. Not just for women. She's pretty sympathetic about men too. The things that don't make it into the blinkest 15-minute summary. Not really. I mean, The Second Sex is a hard book to summarise. The other book that I read, which I hadn't read before, and I read it because my son, who's a student now,

is very interested in Samuel Butler. And so I read Erewhon, this sort of utopian, dystopian book about, partly about what it would be to live in a society where machines have the ability to tell us what to do. And I'm just grateful for the fact that there are these books out there that you hear about, and we never quite have the time to read them. And then something forces you to read them, in this case, having to do a podcast series. They're almost always more interesting than you think. I mean, almost every book is more interesting than the summary, because all of the interest is in the bits that aren't summarisable. I mean, if anyone hasn't read Erewhon, it's 1872. It could have been written yesterday. Are you surprised, as someone who spent your entire life teaching and thinking about these

subjects, are you surprised the impact that contemporary content is having on you? Putting surprised as someone who spent your entire life teaching and thinking about these subjects are you surprised the impact that contemporary context having on you putting on your mask going to the supermarket not seeing your friends i've changed in my life from being a radical free marketeer a student of daniel hanan to being a to being a keynesian socialist and back in about four times in my life but you probably don't because you think about these things that has what we've been through affected you and your thinking yeah it has it has a bit. And I think it's partly so. I'm a historian, historian of political thought. That's what I do professionally. And in a sort of tradition that tries to teach us that we shouldn't think that these ideas from the

past really speak to us because they weren't written for us. We're different. There's a famous line in some of the arguments that historians have about this, which is that we should learn to do our own thinking for ourselves, and we don't just sort of pick up Plato because he can't decide what to do next. And yet, reading these books, particularly over the last year, I just put that to one side, and I just feel they do speak to us. Sure, they weren't about our world, but they're often about unusual conditions in which people are finding themselves to their surprise, ruled, governed, constrained, but also being offered choices that they don't understand, don't really know what to do with. And we're living through a discombobulating time. And

that tends to be when the most interesting political writing comes out. We think we're living through this unprecedented tech revolution. And somehow it's messing with our heads because we're franchising our choices to machines. There's Samuel Butler in the 1870s having exactly the same thoughts and being thrown in exactly the same ways. Okay, the machines weren't smart by our standards, but they were smart by his standards. And he suspected that we'd lost control to the things that we'd built to serve us, and now we were serving them. And the interest is that our 21st century anxieties resonate back to these texts. And then the whole point of history, I think, is that it allows us to see ourselves, but in a completely different context. And it's in spirit with the history that Rousseau and Nietzsche write, which is to try and get us to see that there's something incredibly contingent about who we are. But we can only understand that if we trace who we are back to people who were like us 50 years ago, 500 years ago, 100,000 years ago, and completely unlike us. And that's the value of history. It doesn't have a value if it's just, God, we're nothing like them. It doesn't really have a value if we think, well, this is just the French Revolution over again. The value We're living through unprecedented times, except they're not unprecedented, because they're very precedented, but they're unprecedented for us. That's the point. tool of comparison. I mean, it's funny me whining at the start saying I had a press time about life. I mean, there's probably a counterpoint in which I'm just a whining twat. And in fact, what we've done is saved millions of lives. We're lucky enough to have invented a form of government

that allows us to print unlimited amounts of money to pay for extraordinary things like developing a vaccine in a quarter of the time that the previous record of any vaccine was produced. We've put it in the arms of everyone. We haven't yet suffered global food shortages. The global economy is creaking a bit, but it's still delivering record levels of food to record numbers of humans. We've got problems. But has your reading encouraged you to think actually that things have turned out a lot better than many of the dystopian takes have suggested they might have done? Yes, I think I'm one of those people who thinks, yeah, there's that line that human beings overestimate what can be achieved in a year and underestimate what can be achieved in 10 years.

And so I know we've achieved a lot this year. But I think I'm one of those people who thinks that people overestimate dystopia in the short term and underestimate it in the long term. Trump is dystopia. No, he's not. The pandemic is dystopia. No, it's not. Climate change is dystopia. Yes, it could be. Genuine tech transformation over a human generation. It's the 20, 30 year trends that matter. And we are inevitably fixated on the shorter term. So I think my feeling is that the last year has been dramatic. And in some ways, it's been worse than expected. You know, if you go back to the projections of how bad this could get in the United States and in Britain, it's worse, but in other ways, better. And God knows where we'd be

without the vaccine. And like you say, there are all sorts of things we've discovered, including that we can keep printing money. You know, money's changed its meaning in the last year. But the danger would be to think, well, we got through that, so we're going to be all right, because the long-term challenges haven't gone away. And this tradition of writers that I'm talking about in this podcast series, if there's something that connects them, particularly around a thinker like Nietzsche, who people find very disturbing because he is quite scary, but he's a writer of liberation. I mean, it's about freeing us from the things that grab hold of our minds and our thinking and, as it were, channel our impulses back on ourselves in a destructive way.

And Nietzsche doesn't really have an answer for anything. But when you read Nietzsche, you do get that sense that at these moments where things are revealed to us, that's not the time to cling to the old certainties. That's the time to think. We have, again, it's a cliche, but we've got an opportunity now maybe to rethink a few things. But the temptation of sort of the war analogy that began and then ended is to neatly package it up and sort of think, you know, return to normal is what we're going for. I would be discouraged if the result of this

is that we return to normal. Yeah, the result of this is we should plant a trillion trees and put solar panels on every roof. It's so obvious. But also I think the result of this is also we should rethink how we do politics. This is an opportunity

because the one thing that hasn't really changed over the last 30 years is how we do democratic politics. Turns out to be the hardest thing to change of all is, you know, we just still do it the same old ways. And at some point, we have to rethink it. At some point, we've either got to find ways to genuinely internationalise it, genuinely democratise it, make it more responsive, or make it more scientific. I mean, God knows what. We can carry on modeling along, but this does seem like an opportunity to ask, you know, is there a way of doing it differently? I don't think we will, but we could. Well, every time you're on the podcast, I ask you for your five-point plan.

And you're always far too clever to give it to me. I don't have a five-point plan. Exactly. That's the problem, Rand don't have a five-point plan. Exactly, that's the problem, Ransomwood. Get a five-point plan. My five-point plan is read Rousseau, Douglas, Butler, Nietzsche and de Beauvoir. You mentioned liberty. I'm so fascinated with watching this course on the American right and elsewhere in the world, parts of India maybe at the moment, Russia.

You touched on this at the beginning, but what do the writers make of how how we acquiesce and even cheer? Because I've now seen this going on in my lifetime, which I didn't think I've ever really seen before. We cheer, or many of us cheer, when our rights and liberties are taken away from us. Why do we cheer for that process? I think at the heart of this is inequality, that the human condition has these different inequalities built into it. And I'll take it all back to Rousseau. But Rousseau, the question is about how we get all of these artificial inequalities. They're not natural, they're human made, but under conditions where it is so unequal how people live under these supposedly equal rights and liberties. And there is so much

privilege, even in a democratic world, there is so much injustice, that that impulse, that sort of Nietzschean impulse to channel the anger into a kind of general reduction is that old thought, if we're all suffering, well, at least the people who have got most to lose are suffering too, that kind of thought. The people with less to lose are more likely, I think, to acquiesce in a general clampdown, because at least it takes away from the people who have been getting away with it for too long. I think that's a big part of it. I think we all have a tendency to feel that we've all got something to lose under these kind of political conditions. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that

inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. There is an equality to injustice. I mean, I know it sounds weird, but I mean, even under pandemic conditions, there's equality to everybody being locked in their homes. And that's why we're so furious when a few people break those rules. If you ask that question, why are people so much angry about Dominic Cummings? And they seem to be about the kind

of pay that people get in the city, which seems like a more serious problem. It's because we've been led to believe for a while that for once the rules apply to everyone, and they didn't. No one believed that the rules apply to everyone before this year, because they clearly don't. Some people benefit, some don't, some get rich, some never do. Some get well educated, some never have a chance. And there's something about a kind of blanket form of oppression that's consoling. And I think we all have it in us because we're all worse off than someone. That's resentment, or as Nietzsche calls it, resontimo.

Well, that's cheerful. Can I ask... You always say that at the end of my content. You always sigh. Oh, God's sake. That I've brought it down. The point about this kind of bracing realism is it's meant to allow everyone

who reads these kind of books to feel, well, you know, we can rethink this. Well, I'm rethinking. Who is the most exciting author? Who's got the five-point plan? If Runciman's not giving the five-point plan, who has? Who's an author that you admire at the moment that is thinking like Bentham and Mill in practical terms about how we do the things you just talked about, which I passionately believe in, internationalize, decarbonize, democratize our society? Again, I'm not going to give you the answer you want, but I think it's probably my sort of prejudice or preference in that the people I like to read, and a lot of people like to

read these people, are so much better at diagnosis than solutions. I've thought for a long time that Yuval Harari is a brilliant writer until he got onto his book about what we should do.val Harari is a brilliant writer until he got onto his book about what we should do. Thomas Piketty is a brilliant writer. I mean, Capital in the 21st Century is a brilliant book until you get to the last bit where he just sort of proposes this slightly utopian and politically unsellable wealth tax. I think Paul Mason is a brilliant writer. His Diagnosis of Post-Capitalism, fantastic book. His Corbynite Politics.

post-capitalism. Fantastic book. His Corbynite Politics. So it's weird in that the thing that is so rare is the sort of diagnostician. Rousseau, brilliant diagnostician, I don't think he had the political answers. I'm always with the diagnosis. I think someone else, maybe politicians are the ones who have to do the solving. Yeah, but I did feel Bentham and Mill, they had kind of, you know, didn't they? Practical. Yeah, I mean, did feel Bentham and Mill, they had kind of, you know, didn't they? Practical. Yeah, I mean, I prefer Bentham to Mill, probably because he gets the worst press. And he's, you know, he's meant to be the sort of robotic automaton, pleasure machine guy, and actually had a heart of gold. I mean, for Bentham, the whole project was just about there's too much suffering in the damn world. Now I talk about it in the podcast. Bentham was partly responding to a society

in which people were still being executed for what was called sodomy. I mean, you could be executed for being gay. And Bentham says, well, the great advantage about utilitarianism, whatever else you might think about it, is there is no way on a utilitarian calculus that you can do that.

So who cares what else is wrong with it? My God, we could save people. So there is that, the ability to identify the obvious injustices. And that sometimes gets lost when people want solutions. I don't think Bentham has solutions, actually. I think what Bentham has is a means of saying, this cannot go on any longer. You cannot not let people vote. You can't execute them for these crimes. You can't run a state on the basis of cruelty. And what you should do in place of cruelty? Well, who cares? Just don't be cruel. And actually, the last thinker in this series, I talk about Judith

Schlar, my favourite late 20th century political philosopher. She is the philosopher who says, doesn't really matter what we do. Just don't be cruel. Do you know what I wonder? When you said that politicians need to come up with the answers, I think actually you're absolutely right. It strikes me that strides forward are unglamorous commissions. You know, whether you look at the beverage commission, just get a load of experts in a room. And rather than wonderful but deeply flawed people like Rousseau

coming up with insane solutions, my wife works in women's criminal justice. The answers are all there. The Causton Coalition report is brilliant. She wrote it all down. If we acted on that, we would save the lives and improve the lives of millions and millions of women and girls in this country, and of course, men. But we just need that across all the different silos, presumably, right? We just need good politics. And that's genuine in the spirit of Benthamism. And partly why he's got a bad press is people think he's this kind of guy who wanted

to sort of solve it all and work it all out and lay it all down or whatever it's not that it's if you find a solution and it works in pleasure pain terms you know it makes people better off just do it but also what would i do i would definitely rethink the uk constitution let's have a constitutional convention ordinary people experts whatever just do something hey run some and stop trying to feather your own nest you i mean, of course you want a convention. You'll be like Jefferson and Franklin up in there, you and Helen just dominating the floor. I think, yeah, I'm not even going to respond to that, Helen and Madison. But it sounds so boring. You know, citizens jury, the two most boring words in the English language. Strong disagree, man. We're among friends here. It's the most exciting

thing that's happening in our lifetime at the moment. I'm into it. I know, but it sounds so dull. That's what I'm saying. It's just, as you said, I mean, you said it in the way you said it, commissions. You said that word with, you know, who's going to arm the barricades for the commissions? Well, maybe that is what we need. I definitely think this. So if I had a one word answer to what we should do, we should just experiment more. We should experiment more with our politics. We're ridiculously risk averse. We think if we tinker with the constitution, we tinker with it all the time, but we think if we do something which might actually change things, oh, democracy will fall apart. It won't. I would have much, much more trying stuff out locally, internationally, constitutionally, deliberatively,

just do different things and make them evidence based there you go that's a radical thought thank you that was so fun as ever i'm feeling excited i feel optimistic now i don't feel pessimist don't worry right how can i be happy to perform that how uh how can everyone binge listen to this podcast yeah so we're halfway through so as we speak now we've just done Rosa Luxemburg. It's called Talking Politics, History of Ideas. When you listen to them, we always provide links to free copies of the books online, further reading.

It is meant to be apart from anything else because people are locked down, a resource for people who've been out of school, university and so on. But it's more than that. It's really about some amazingly interesting books. Thanks so much brilliant stuff hi everyone thanks for reaching the end of this podcast most of you probably are probably asleep, so I'm talking to your snoring forms, but anyone who's awake, it would be great if you could do me a quick favour, head over to wherever you get your podcasts and rate it five stars,

and then leave a nice glowing review. It makes a huge difference for some reason to how these podcasts do. Madness, I know, but them's the rules. Then we go further up the charts, more people listen to us, and everything will be awesome. So thank you so much. Now sleep well. you