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David Walter Runciman, 4th Viscount Runciman of Doxford, FBA , FRSL (born 1 March 1967), is an English academic and podcaster who teaches politics and history at Cambridge University, where he is Professor of Politics. From October 2014 to October 2018 he was also Head of the Department of Politics and International Studies. [1]
Runciman was born in St John's Wood, North London, England, and grew up there. His father, Garry Runciman, Viscount Runciman, was a political sociologist and academic and his mother, Ruth Runciman, is former chair of the UK Mental Health Commission, a founder of the Prison Reform Trust and former chair of the National Aids Trust. His father, mother, and paternal grandfather and great-grandfather, all attended Cambridge. [2] He was educated at Eton College, an all-boys public school in Berkshire, where he won the Newcastle Scholarship. He went on to study at Trinity College, Cambridge. [3]
Runciman is the great-nephew of the historian Sir Steven Runciman. He inherited his family's viscountcy on the death of his father in 2020. [4] From 1997 to 2021 he was married to the food writer Bee Wilson with whom he has three children. [2] [5] Since 2021 he has been married to psychotherapist Helen Runciman (née Lyon-Dalberg-Acton), daughter of Edward Acton.
Runciman began writing for the London Review of Books in 1996 and has written dozens of book reviews and articles on contemporary politics since, for the LRB and a number of other publications. [6]
Runciman has published eight books. An adaptation of his PhD thesis was published in 1997 as Pluralism and the Personality of the State. The Politics of Good Intentions: History, Fear and Hypocrisy in the New World Order (2006) evaluates contemporary and historical crisis in international politics after 9/11 while Political Hypocrisy (2008) explores the political uses of hypocrisy from a historical perspective. [7] The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis from World War I to the Present (2013) lays out his theory of the threat of democratic overconfidence. [8] Profile Books published his books Politics: Ideas in Profile and How Democracy Ends in 2014 and 2018, respectively. In 2021 he published Confronting Leviathan: A History of Ideas, looking at thinkers and ideas in modern politics.
In October 2014, he was appointed head of the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge. Runciman gave his inaugural lecture on 24 February 2015 on Political Theory and Real Politics in the Age of the Internet. [9] He was preceded in this position by Andrew Gamble and Geoffrey Hawthorn.
Runciman's book Politics: Ideas in Profile explores what politics is, why do we need it and where is it heading.
From 2016 to 2022, Runciman hosted a podcast called Talking Politics with professor Helen Thompson. The podcast convened a panel of academics from the University of Cambridge and elsewhere to speak about current affairs and politics. It ended in March 2022 after over 300 episodes and 26 million downloads. [10] Runciman also hosted a spin-off podcast named Talking Politics: History of Ideas. This podcast focused on key thinkers and ideologies from throughout history.
On 27 April 2023, Runciman launched "Past Present Future: a Podcast of Ideas".
In July 2018, Runciman was elected Fellow of the British Academy (FBA). [11]
In July 2021, he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL). [12]
After a negative book review in The Guardian of Antifragility by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Taleb referred to Runciman as the "second most stupid reviewer" of his works, arguing that Runciman had missed the concept of convexity, the theme of his book. "There are 607 references to convexity", Taleb wrote. [13] [14]
Published by Profile Books in 2018, How Democracy Ends takes a look at the political landscape of the West, showing how to spot the signs that democracy may be under threat. Set out in four major sections:
Reviews of the book have been generally positively. Getting a 3.7 out of 5 stars on Goodreads [15] and 4.2 out of 5 stars on Amazon. [16] Andrew Rawnsley in The Guardian wrote that the book left him "feeling more positive than I thought I would be" [17]
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Democracy is a system of government in which state power is vested in the people or the general population of a state. Under a minimalist definition of democracy, rulers are elected through competitive elections while more expansive definitions link democracy to guarantees of civil liberties and human rights in addition to competitive elections.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a Lebanese-American essayist, mathematical statistician, former option trader, risk analyst, and aphorist whose work concerns problems of randomness, probability, and uncertainty.
David W. Harvey is a British Marxist economic geographer, podcaster, and Distinguished Professor of anthropology and geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He received his PhD in geography from the University of Cambridge in 1961. Harvey has authored many books and essays that have been prominent in the development of modern geography as a discipline. He is a proponent of the idea of the right to the city.
Born in southern Australia, John Keane is Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney. For 25 years he also held a position at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB), which he resigned from in November 2023.
John Naughton is an Irish academic, journalist and author. He is a senior research fellow in the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities at Cambridge University, Director of the Press Fellowship Programme at Wolfson College, Cambridge, Emeritus Professor of the Public Understanding of Technology at the British Open University, adjunct professor at University College, Cork and the Technology columnist of the London Observer newspaper.
Timothy David Snyder is an American historian specializing in the history of Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust. He is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.
Richard David Wolff is an American Marxian economist known for his work on economic methodology and class analysis. He is a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a visiting professor in the graduate program in international affairs of the New School. Wolff has also taught economics at Yale University, City University of New York, University of Utah, University of Paris I (Sorbonne), and The Brecht Forum in New York City.
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable is a 2007 book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who is a former options trader. The book focuses on the extreme impact of rare and unpredictable outlier events—and the human tendency to find simplistic explanations for these events, retrospectively. Taleb calls this the Black Swan theory.
James Franklin is an Australian philosopher, mathematician and historian of ideas.
Russell David "Russ" Roberts is an American-Israeli economist. He is currently a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and president of Shalem College in Jerusalem. He is known for communicating economic ideas in understandable terms as host of the EconTalk podcast.
Daniele Archibugi is an Italian economic and political theorist. He works on the economics and policy of innovation and technological change, on the political theory of international relations and on political and technological globalisation.
Hypocrisy is the practice of feigning to be what one is not or to believe what one does not. The word "hypocrisy" entered the English language c. 1200 with the meaning "the sin of pretending to virtue or goodness". Today, "hypocrisy" often refers to advocating behaviors that one does not practice. However, the term can also refer to other forms of pretense, such as engaging in pious or moral behaviors out of a desire for praise rather than out of genuinely pious or moral motivations.
David Weinberger is an American author, technologist, and speaker. Trained as a philosopher, Weinberger's work focuses on how technology — particularly the internet and machine learning — is changing our ideas, with books about the effect of machine learning’s complex models on business strategy and sense of meaning; order and organization in the digital age; the networking of knowledge; the Net's effect on core concepts of self and place; and the shifts in relationships between businesses and their markets.
Ian Matthew Morris is a British historian, archaeologist, and Willard Professor of Classics at Stanford University.
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined is a 2011 book by Steven Pinker, in which the author argues that violence in the world has declined both in the long run and in the short run and suggests explanations as to why this has occurred. The book uses data simply documenting declining violence across time and geography. This paints a picture of massive declines in the violence of all forms, from war, to improved treatment of children. He highlights the role of nation-state monopolies on force, of commerce, of increased literacy and communication, as well as a rise in a rational problem-solving orientation as possible causes of this decline in violence. He notes that paradoxically, our impression of violence has not tracked this decline, perhaps because of increased communication, and that further decline is not inevitable, but is contingent on forces harnessing our better motivations such as empathy and increases in reason.
Alice Crary is an American philosopher who currently holds the positions of University Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Faculty, The New School for Social Research in New York City and Visiting Fellow at Regent's Park College, University of Oxford, U.K..
Richard Bourke is a UK-based Irish academic specialising in the history of political ideas. His work spans ancient and modern thought, and is associated with the application of the historical method to political theory. He is Professor of the History of Political Thought at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. He was formerly Professor of the History of Political Thought and Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of the History of Political Thought at Queen Mary, University of London. In July 2018 Bourke was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA).
Yascha Benjamin Mounk is a German-American political scientist and author. He is Associate Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. In July 2020, he founded Persuasion, an online magazine devoted to defending the values of free societies.
Helen Thompson is an English academic who teaches politics at Cambridge University, where she is a professor of political economy and a fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, where she is also Director of Studies.
Political hypocrisy refers to any discrepancy between what a political party claims and the practices the party is trying to hide. Modern political debate is often characterized by accusations and counter-accusations of hypocrisy.
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