Dan Snow's History Hit - Political Thinkers in the Modern World

Episode Date: June 7, 2020

I was thrilled to be joined by David Runciman, Professor of Politics at Cambridge University and host of the widely acclaimed 'Talking Politics' podcast. Together we discussed how the great political thinkers of the past 400 years impacted the worlds they lived in, and whether they are still relevant today. David spoke about the the relationship between democracy and technology, the nature of political leadership and the trade-off between liberty and security. We also acknowledged how many ideas come out of moments of crisis - such as the current coronavirus pandemic - and what the future of political thought might look like. You can listen to David's 'Talking Politics' podcast at these links: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/talking-politics-history-of-ideas/id1508992867https://open.spotify.com/show/3gzuLQUZ5kMKBH4VcK5eR0https://play.acast.com/s/history-of-ideasSubscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hello everybody, welcome to Darren Snow's History Hit. We've got David Runciman on the podcast, Professor David Runciman, Professor of Politics at the University of Cambridge. He was head of the Department of Politics there. He is the star of the breakout success, the British political podcast called Talking Politics. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he has also released a spin-off podcast series called Talking Politics, History of Ideas, in which he demonstrates his comprehensive knowledge of political thinkers, going all the way back to Thomas Hobbes, but also talking about Mary Wollstonecraft and people like Mahatma Gandhi as well. I caught up with him to talk about that. In that podcast, he invited me

to go on his Talking Politics podcast with the legendary Helen Hardy, who is almost certainly one of the cleverest people in the world. Aware of the gigantically hubristic nature of that invitation, I went on Talking Politics to talk about pandemic disease, all the things basically that I've learned, I've stolen from the wonderful academics, historians and writers that have been on this podcast. So please go and check out that episode of talking politics if you want to hear us talking about pandemics their effect on the past and some of their ideas about how this current pandemic and its associated dislocation might affect politics society economics moving forward always a total pleasure to have dave run some on the podcast he's one of those rare communicators man of such genius, and yet one capable of communicating in simple senses that people like

me can understand. Only at the end of the conversation do you realise the sophistication and complexity of the ideas that he was getting across, because you never feel out of your depth as the conversation is going on. So please enjoy this podcast with Professor David Runciman. Go and check out Talking Politics, History of Ideas. And also, while you're here, there's so much to do. Sorry, your Google's going to be burning up. Go to History Hit TV, because we are commissioning lots of new shows at the moment. We're making several new programs, and we have got lots of documentaries on there. So if you go to History Hit TV, now, frankly, is the time to do it, because we could just add a big drop of new

documentaries. We've got more in the pipeline. If you go to History Hit TV, if you use the code POD1, P-O-D-1, you get 30 days free, and then you get a month for just one pound, euro, or dollar. So basically, you don't really spend much for the next two months, which, disturbingly enough, effectively takes us through to autumn or fall. That's a bit depressing. Let's not dwell on that, but it's true. So if you want all of your summer streaming needs met then please get a history hit tv in the meantime here is prof david runciman david thank you so much coming back again on the podcast it's a pleasure i love the history of politics i mean it's one of the joys of my life was doing politics a level in these courses

university looking at these wonderful speakers walston craft march hobbs the history of politics. I mean, it's one of the joys of my life was doing politics A-level in these courses at university, looking at these wonderful speakers, Wollstonecraft, Marx, Hobbes, the kind of people you're already talking about. But the first question I want to ask is, when you think about them chronologically, is there a sense of these thinkers moving the ball down the field, like building on what's gone before? Or do you think that the famous, do we not know any more than Socrates, effectively? That's a really good question. So my feeling about it is, it's not a cumulative story of standing on the shoulders of giants. And it's not science, right? Social

science, political science is not what I might call real science. The clue is not in the title. Yeah, I think that's a little bit hubristic on the part of the social scientists. But what you do see is people coming back time and again to the same questions. And they do build on the attempts that people have made to answer them in the past. So this series that I'm doing, there's a kind of question at the heart of it, which is, what is the modern state, this form of politics that we still live under? And there's a puzzle at the heart of it, which is that, you know, states are meant to work for us, and yet they have this extraordinary power over us. And part of the reason I'm doing this now is that we're living through an acute moment of this dilemma, right? We notice every day that these states, these politicians that we elect that work for us,

can tell us what to do in ways that we'd forgotten, I think, the power they have over us. That puzzle, that paradox, people keep coming back to it. And they do, I think, build on previous attempts to answer it. But it's not like each person takes a story forward, and eventually you're going to score the goal. And you know, when you've solved it, I've never believed that there's a endpoint to the story of political thinking. And eventually everyone will go, finally, we've got it. We're never going to get there. Is what strikes you about these thinkers that they were brilliant, but ignored? Or were some of them profoundly influential? So it really varies. I think on the whole, they were not particularly influential in the moment.

I mean, there are pieces of political writing that have an immediate impact. But, you know, those tend to be the ones that are overtly political. You know, the Federalist Papers, which I don't talk about in this series, you know, there are pieces of writing that are designed for, but even the ones that we think of as, I'd say, you know, the most influential piece of writing that I talk about in this series is the Communist Manifesto. And the Communist Manifesto, which is 1848, the year of revolution, but it was ignored. It was just another scrap of paper in that year. You know, its story, it has a kind of life history, which is almost like the history of a human being, just longer. It grows up, it goes out into the world, things happen to it. The idea that these pieces of writing have their impact in their immediate

moment. I think that's the exception, have their impact in their immediate moment, I think that's the exception, not the rule. And there's always that famous thought about political thinking that the ideas that are lying around are the ones that are picked up during a crisis. And the history of the most influential thinking, I think, tends to be a pretty inadvertent history. The people who write these books often are long dead by the point at which these ideas suddenly strike people as absolutely essential. Or, you know, Tom Paine is just a kind of guy writing brilliant but slightly undervalued pamphlets and then a giant cataclysm occurs in France or the USA, which he didn't cause, but he's there, all of his stuff is lying around.

That's the argument, I suppose, because Paine was probably quite influential, wasn't he? Paine was influential, in some ways, one of the most influential of all. But the idea that the influence is direct, and that the writer plots the path, I'll have this idea, I will transmit it in this way, this thing will follow, that almost never happens. In fact, I think it's fair to say that never happens. And this is a long story. So my story is the history of modern politics, not the history of all politics. I don't go back to Plato and Aristotle, I start with Hobbes. But we're still talking nearly four centuries. And four centuries is a long time for ideas to mature, different things happen to them. And the author doesn't control them. I mean, that's the other thing,

you can try and work out what the author meant. Now now there's a way of doing the history of ideas which says the primary task is to think of the intention of the author but the intention of the author and the impact of the book are rarely the same yeah see see Darwin for more I mean it's one of the things you learn as a writer right you write but you don't control how people read no No one does that. Now that you're talking about it, I mean, when you look at ideas that are taken up by Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson, or by John Stuart Mill's ideas in 19th century Britain, or Tom Paine, or even Hobbes, does it depend on a literate political class? And I'm not just

trying to slag off politicians, but do you think politicians class? And I'm not just trying to slag off politicians, but do you think politicians today, and I'm not just thinking about Trump, but do you think politicians today are less steeped in contemporary political writing than they might have been? I mean, maybe I'm just, I'm cherry picking, but for example, Shaftesbury in the late 17th century,

his relationship with Locke, are those unusual politicians? Have we moved on beyond the great age of written political philosophy? I don't think we've moved beyond the age of great political writing. I would say there's more great political writing at the moment than ever, and you can find it. It's just there's more writing as well. It's the volume thing. So Locke and Shaftesbury, the age of Hobbes, even into the 19th century Mill and the Gladstonian era. It's a pretty narrow pool of people we're

talking about both as writers and as readers of some of this, not all of it, you know, there's a mass reading public too by the 19th century. But when it comes to political ideas, it's a story of democracy, right? It is the democratization of political writing. And the digital revolution has turbocharged that, you know, there's sometimes sort of hand-wringing feeling that in the age of the internet, all of that is gone and we're now just drowning in noise. You go online and you will find every day brilliant pieces of political writing, insightful, philosophical. It's thriving.

And yet it's harder and harder for one piece of writing to stand out. A, it's harder for it to stand out. But B, are our political leaders less inclined to attend salon? By that token, of course, people will point to Thatcher and Hayek and stuff. But I mean, can you think of political writers that are influential in, say, Western political circles? What political thinkers do you think matter, either from the last 100 years or contemporary,

matter to the policymakers today in the West, do you think? We've lived through a couple of decades now where you can divide up some big political contests between the Hayekians and the Keynesians. The 2008 crisis produced that. And I talk about this actually in the series that there would have been a time where to be called a hobbist, a sort of follower of Hobbes was a deeply controversial and political thing. Now, if you call yourself a hobbist, you know, they think it's Tolkien or something. But if you're a Hayekian or a Keynesian, it's a marker, and it matters in politics. Ed Balls, Michael Gove, George Osborne, these are people from slightly a decade ago, but people like Paul Ryan. These people are steeped in these arguments. And the Hayek-Keynes argument about what you do in an

economic crisis was as raw in 2012 as it was in the late 1930s. But that's unusual, I think, that you get those camps. Most political writers don't have that kind of badging cachet. You know, to be really influential, you have to be part of a kind of tribal politics. And there is something a bit tribal about the Hayekians. Margaret Thatcher's story that she took out her copy of Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty, banged it on the table and said to her all-male shadow cabinet, this gentleman is what we believe. You know, this is the flag behind which we will march. there aren't many books that you can think of in contemporary politics that have that kind of cachet but there are some there are some

I'm old enough to remember the 90s all teenagers like me are running around clutching our Will Hutton's The State We're In do you remember that illustrious people like you probably that was slightly under your radar no I remember it well and so I end this history of ideas series with Fukuyama the end of history which again the end of history was not a kind of, well, it was a bit of a tribal book, because certain people picked it up as a kind of triumphalist, we won, they lost, the West won, liberal democracy won. That was an idea that was hugely influential. But the book itself, I suspect was not that widely read. So there are also those ideas, which are influential, because they can be summed up in four words, the end of history. And Hobbes and Rousseau, you know, Rousseau only needs to write that one

line. Well, Hobbes has two catchphrases, nasty, brutish and short, and the war of all against all. But actually, both of them misrepresented. Hobbes is remembered as a guy who had a very bleak view of human nature and thought we were all ghastly creatures who needed the state to keep us in check. Not true. That's not how the argument works. Hobbes thought that human beings had enormous social potential, but that we were hamstrung by the fact that we couldn't quite know whether to trust each other, which is not the same as thinking that we were vicious and mean and cruel and violent and so on. And yet somehow, down the years, he's become the representative of the sort of without the state, we're all at each other's throats. Whereas actually, in some ways,

he was a deeply optimistic thinker, more optimistic than Rousseau in some ways, he thought with a modern state, we could do anything. We are these amazing social creatures. It's just in the absence of politics, we have a tendency for all our schemes to fall apart. That's not the same as being the person who says human beings are inherently bad. We're not. That will chime nicely with my just recent podcast with Rutger Bregman, who is talking a lot about that at the moment. And actually, he was also on, I'm not trying to say that you had the guy who's been on everyone's podcast, but he was on the Reasons to be Cheerful podcast too. And I actually had a discussion with Ed Miliband about this. Because yeah, his book absolutely holds Hobbes up as the kind of bogeyman of this story, the person who thinks that human

beings can't be trusted. I try and tell a story in my series where Hobbes begins this weird paradoxical version of modern political life where if we build a state we can trust each other and in the absence of a state we can't but the downside of building a state is we built this instrument that we may lose control over that seems to me both are more complicated but also a more plausible story than the kind of good bad black, Manichean story? It certainly does. In my teenage years, I read my Hobbes. I was so steeped in written political philosophy. And then I found the last 10 years, you know, I've talked about this before, I found the last 10 years when I look out the world, and this influenza pandemic has not helped that. I look around me at the world, and it seems

to me that the forces that do change and move our society and politics are coming from the world of technology, and that sort of Amazon and Tesla and biochemical advances are more important than political thinkers. Technology and science seem to be shaping our society perhaps more than Fukuyama and Will Hutton of the 90s right. So therefore my question is like chicken egg but when you look at the modern world the character of the world that we live in in the west today, in the global North. Do you see the imprints of these writers that you talk so beautifully about? Or do you see states and societies that evolved, frankly, outwith this strand of political thinking? 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 week. So I think that is the biggest question of all. Okay, well, you've got two minutes to answer. Okay, which is, are we coming to the end of a three, 400 year story where those ideas of how states work, of democracy, of representation, justice, freedom, the classic modern ideas,

how you can be an individual in a collective society, how you can maintain your freedom while giving some of your freedom of choice to politicians. Are we coming to the end of that story? And after all, the most influential book that has been written, and I would suspect the book that has been read by most politicians in the last 10 years is Harari Sapiens. Sapiens and Homo Deus. I suspect most politicians have read it because these are the best selling books. And they imply that the modern story might be coming to an end, that we're moving to the not the postmodern, but the post human bit. And I think that's possible. And we may look back on this pandemic as part of that shift away from, and it would be in a way away from politics, towards other forms of social

control, using machines and technology, dehumanizing in some ways, maybe turbocharged forms of inequality where some human beings lead a different kind of existence, you know, biologically different kind of existence. If we are heading over the next 50 years to that, where you're either this kind of human or that kind of human, not this kind of citizen or that kind of citizen. The Hobbes story is at an end. You know, the Hobbes story is the story of us building the machinery of the state to allow us to lead safer and more prosperous lives. If the machines that control us are not machines built out of us, but built out of a new kind of data processing technology, modernity is over. It's not over yet.

I mean, I'm pretty confident we're not in the post-human world yet, but 50 years from now, and modernity is contingent. It's not the human story. The story I tell in my lectures about the history of modern ideas, I say explicitly,

this is the story of us as modern citizens. It's not the story of us as human beings. That's a story that goes back tens or even hundreds of thousands of years. But there's nothing about modernity that's permanent. I mean, that's the illusion of the end of history. Something comes after this. And we may be the human beings who live through it. If we live 50 years, we may. But it's not over yet. I'm pretty sure it's not over yet that the Amazonification of the world still makes sense in terms of modern politics. The American state is still more powerful than Amazon. The American state has an army. The American state has money. These are still the two

most powerful institutions in the modern world. We're living in that world now. But I'm not confident that my kids will spend their lives in that world. Yeah, lots to talk about. I mean, I was very struck the other day reading about the 19th century, how there was an elite emphasis on health and wealth, actually wealth creation in the proletariat, because A, it meant that they could enjoy their ill-gotten gains in peace without threat of revolution. And B, because their industries industries their armies depended on

healthy vaguely non-starving people to fill the factories and i'm always very struck by how in the modern world and for me this pandemic is accentuating this there are whole sectors that are finding no problem at all that this gigantic surge in unemployment this likely accentuation of economic inequality it doesn't seem to be a huge problem and I think the pandemic is really highlighting that and in a way you're seeing some different responses from some people to the ones you might have expected in the 19th century which was crikey we've got to get everyone well we've got to get fresh water in there because otherwise my gigantic widget business is not going to be able to produce its widgets. Yeah and there is a feel I think in

this pandemic that we're being squeezed both by some things that predate modern forms of political organization you know the quarantine is not a modern device right it's a medieval device and being locked down in your home being told you can't cross the threshold of your house is something that would be recognizable to people in an age of plague long before the invention of modern political institutions. And at the same time, we're going to be tracked and traced by technology that would be unrecognisable even to ourselves in the 1990s. So there's that feeling that the modern form of politics is being squeezed at the moment, both by something that's older, and by something that is brand new. I still think it's just being squeezed. I don't think it's being supplanted or replaced.

But the pressure is on. I agree with you, the 19th century version of this would be a much more coherent response. There is something very fragmenting about what we're going through now. We're not all in it together. People are having vastly different experiences of this pandemic in ways that reflect what might be really fundamentally very unequal now and humanly unequal societies. And we may look back on this at the beginning of something. Perhaps I'm being naive about the 19th century, I'm sure it was more fragmented, but the reluctant

yet gigantic investment in public utilities, in sewerage, in fresh water, it doesn't feel like there's going to be a gigantic, a huge consensus for that after we leave this immediate crisis, that'll be something very different. Anyway, we're going off topic obviously. Can I come back to Hobbes? We talk about us possibly at the end of this modern period. So that makes Hobbes even more interesting. What on earth is going on in the second half of the 17th century? I mean obviously Hobbes didn't spring from nowhere, but is there a discontinuity there? Is that important? And should we be thinking a lot about that alongside these remarkable changes that were going on in science at the same time?

What was happening in this entrepot in Britain, London and Paris, Holland in the mid to late 17th century? I mean, I think Hobbes is the beginning of something, partly because this was the most self-conscious attempt to found politics on a kind of mechanical basis, not to make it mechanical, but to mean that its organising principles were not dependent on God or storytelling or myth, or tradition. You know, this was the modern version of politics, what Weber was going to call a kind of rational legal version of politics, where you say you can build a state according to a set of principles that are internal to the functioning of the state, we do it ourselves. And we do it through this idea, which is representation, the basic idea of modern politics. Democracy is not the basic idea of modern politics. Representation is the idea that, as modern citizens, we get other

people to decide things for us. And we partly do it, and I think Hobbes saw this clearly, because basic human impulse is to want to not do politics. Politics is violence and death and coercion. And politics makes life hard because you want to be doing other things. That's the modern condition. We actually want to be shopping or falling in love or writing books or earning a living or whatever. You know, Hobbes didn't think we wanted to be going around killing each other. So you build this mechanical version of politics, partly to rescue you from politics. you build this mechanical version of politics, partly to rescue you from politics. In Hobbes's mind, it's a mathematical idea. It's a scientific idea. It's trying to emancipate politics from religion. And I do think, though it's not the pure Hobbesian version we have, that's the politics

that we've had for the last 300 plus years. The kind of politics which doesn't depend on God, doesn't depend on a story that comes from some divine text. It's us. We do it. It depends on us. We're the instruments of it. We're the machinery of the modern state. And we partly do it so that we can do other things with our lives. And if you read Hobbes like that, it's a really weird book, Leverth, and it seems like it comes from another world because it does. But there are bits of it which are super contemporary. And that's the bit I think that is. So that's why I think you can start a story of modern politics with Hobbes. When we're studying political theory, and we read these brilliant women and men telling us what they think, and obviously, a lot of their theories are based on empiricism, they've looked

at various different places, and John Stuart Mill, for example, looked at what was happening around him. But is there a challenge posed by social science, effectively? We do actually know what works now. It's not necessarily Hobbes having to sort of sit in his study for a while and think, I think this will be better. When it comes to criminal justice reform, we know that Norwegians have a better criminal, an entirely replicable criminal justice system than most of the rest of the world. Which writers can you point us to? And again, the pandemic and its responses has heightened this for me, which are actually saying, can we escape from the abstract and actually look at this gigantic body of evidence

that we've now amassed over the last 150 years about how we should be doing things, about how we should run a state? Or is it not that simple? So I think the writer that I talk about who comes closest to answering that question is Weber, the great German sociologist. And this is after the First World War. You're a big Weber fan, but I love it. Go on, keep going. There is that thought that the First World War was this great natural experiment in what works in politics and what doesn't. And Weber came out of the First World War with a pretty clear idea that

you want to be governed by professional politicians, not by amateurs. Germany, it was amateurs. It was the Kaiser and the soldiers, the generals, who can't do politics. Britain, France, United States, it was hacks. It was political hacks. People like Lloyd George.

That's who you want to be governed by. And unlike Hobbes, who was just making it up, Weber said, look, if we look at this idea of modern politics, we can actually now see what works and what doesn't work. And at the same time, Weber said, to be a politician cannot be just to read a social science manual and follow its instructions. Because the other thing that you discover is that what the professional politicians do is they make personal judgments, and then they live with the consequences. And one of the fatal flaws of political life is to look for the guidebook that will tell you what to do in a crisis. So Weber had both of these things going on. Yes, there's so much we can learn. The world is full of these incredible experiments in what works. And politics isn't just

a kind of constructing a car version of organising social life. Politics is about luck, judgment, contingency, unintended consequences, living with yourself when things go wrong. Politics is chaotic. Politics is chaotic. Politics is frightening. Politics is violent. Both those things are true. And then Weber said, the true politician can inhabit both those worlds at the same time, can read the books, and know the books don't have the answer. And I don't think that's changed. So we do want the politicians to read the books. But the idea that there's a book out there that will tell you what to do when from nowhere, a virus spreads through your society and forces what to do when from nowhere a virus spreads

through your society and forces you to take actions that three months ago you would have said were either impossible or ideologically completely inconsistent with the things that you stand for. There is no book that tells you what to do but you have to do it. What does that tell us about us and about society that there are now protocols for everything you can put a man or a woman on the moon you can send instructions on an ipad to a vehicle on mars that's roaming around and yet our politics is still dangerous and anarchic and all those adjectives are used coming back to your first answer like is that inevitable and immutable like why couldn't there be a playbook for a pandemic in a society? So I don't think that's the human condition, because I think it's possible that what it

means to be human has a long way to go. But that is the modern condition. That is what it is to live in modern societies. We live these incredibly prosperous, secure, peaceful lives, even under current conditions. Here are you and I in the middle of a pandemic, sitting here, looking pretty relaxed in our t-shirts. We don't seem in any great danger, right? And we live these incredibly prosperous lives relative to even 100 years ago, never mind 400 years ago. And we also live on the edge of violence and chaos, because the way we've organised these societies is to empower these

political institutions in a way that we depend on them to keep us safe, but we don't fully control them. And that ideal of kind of real control, so we control them like we would control a robot on Mars, we press a button, then they do what we want us to do. That would take us outside of this 300 plus year story of democracy and representation and rights and justice, which has at its heart something that isn't quite controllable. There is not a single answer to the question, how should politics be organised? And when there is a single answer to that question, we're no longer in the modern world, we're in the postmodern post human world. And there could be, I'm not saying that, you know, there could be a machine being devised at the moment,

which is going to come up the kind of Asimov style moment, which is going to come up, the kind of Asimov-style machine. It's going to come up with the answer, but that will be the end of something. And personally, I wouldn't be totally thrilled when that happens, but that may be because I'm living in the prosperous, peaceful bit of modern life. I'm sure our new algorithmical overlords will be very friendly to professors and podcast hosts.

So, you know, I've got nothing to fear. There's nothing to see here, sir. Thank you so much. I've taken up enough of your time. Your brilliant new podcast series is taking the world by storm. Tell everyone what it's called. It's called Talking Politics, History of Ideas. It's 12 talks about the ideas that lie behind modern politics, but also that come out of crises. I mean, that's the other thing to say about it. Really creative political thinking is often the product of a crisis, a civil war, an economic depression, a pandemic. I think it's also possible that the really important books about this time haven't quite been written yet, but someone somewhere is sitting, tapping away at a screen and they are going to come out.

I'll tell you, it'll be someone with better childcare than me. I'll tell you that much for a fact. Thank you so much. It's always such a great pleasure to have you on the podcast and see you soon. It's a pleasure to talk, Dan. Thanks. Hi everyone, it's me, Dan Snow. Just a quick request. It's so annoying and I hate it when other podcasts do this, but now I'm doing it and I hate myself. Please, please go onto iTunes, wherever you get your podcasts and give us a five-star rating and a review. It really helps basically boost up the chart, which is good. And then more people listen, which is nice. So if you could do that, I'd be very grateful. I understand if you don't subscribe to my TV channel, I understand if you don't buy my calendar, but this is free. Come on, do me a favor. Thanks. favor thanks