Book review: Given that this is a book about philosophers, and nothing makes a philosopher happier than a hypothetical question, here’s one to start with: what would 18th-century thinker Jeremy Bentham make of our modern, digitised world, frantically busy with social media, text messages, email and other electronic distractions?
Would he say it was delivering – in Bentham’s famous phrase – “the greatest happiness of the greatest number”? No, he most certainly would not, reckons author David Runciman, professor of politics at the University of Cambridge. “He would be horrified by it … We are being manipulated for the sake of narrow, private interests, something he railed against all his life.”
Runciman says the simple question Bentham would ask is whether all that digital beeping and flashing is making us better off. And if not, “why are we doing it like this”?
Bentham is one of the big names in this collection of a dozen essays on some of history’s deepest thinkers, in which Runciman describes not only their most important ideas, but also how some of them might be applied in the modern world.
The 12 range from the 18th century (starting with Jean-Jacques Rousseau) to the 1980s (Judith Shklar), and in inclination they run the gamut from Mr “God is Dead” himself, Friedrich Nietzsche, to feminist Simone de Beauvoir, and from US anti-slavery campaigner Frederick Douglass to card-carrying Nazi Carl Schmitt.
In 20 pages or so, each is set in his (mostly) or her (three cases) time and place, and their big ideas are explained. The tone is chatty, down to earth and mercifully free of academic jargon.
New Zealand gets a few pages, in the section on the whimsical Samuel Butler, who gave his philosophical ideas an early airing in the Christchurch Press, and went on to offer warnings about the ever-growing power of machines, which today sound a lot like some of the concerns sparked by the growth of artificial intelligence.
In the modern era, Runciman is much taken with the work of the Latvian-Canadian-American Shklar, who spent a lot of time thinking about human vices. One of her conclusions was that we shouldn’t worry too much about some of the not-quite-so-dreadful vices, such as snobbery and hypocrisy, if that means we don’t worry enough about the supreme vice of all, cruelty.
Runciman illustrates that with the example of Donald Trump, for whom casual cruelty appears to be second nature. But, Runciman argues, at least Trump is not a hypocrite – he is just as nasty in public as he is in private. And it was that openness about his own awfulness that allowed Trump to present himself as being different from your run-of-the mill two-faced politician.
Anyone reading this will have their own favourites. For my money, early-20th century Austrian-American political economist Joseph Schumpeter was dead-on with his realistic, verging on cynical, take on modern democracy. He argued that it is a competition among political elites seeking the voters’ endorsement rather than a way of expressing the will of the people. As Schumpeter saw it, the political advertising and image manipulation isn’t a sideshow; it’s the main event.
Runciman says his theme is “about imagining a better world, which is more fitting for the post-Covid era”, but the Covid reference is a bit of an aside, possibly inspired by the fact that the book is based on podcasts made during and after the pandemic. Really, it’s just about various ways of imagining a better world – at any time.
There’s no burning message, unless it’s that there is more than one way of ordering human affairs, that the status quo may not be the best way of maximising freedom and fairness, and that past thinkers may have some ideas worth heeding.
If it’s not exactly the “mind-bending tour through the history of ideas” that the blurb over-promises, it is at least an intriguing journey.
And here’s one more philosophical question: why buy this book, when the original podcasts are still out there (or were, at the time of writing) and free for the listening?
You can find them by going to talkingpoliticspodcast.com and searching for History of Ideas Series 2. There, you can listen to Runciman expounding on all the philosophers in this book, in the same accessible, conversational way, thus saving yourself $40 ($55 for the hardback) and the trouble of turning the pages.
You may prefer the permanence of print, or feel uneasy about taking something for nothing, but that’s one question you’ll have to answer for yourself.
The History of Ideas: Equity, Justice and Revolution, by David Runciman (Profile Books, $39.99), is out now.
