The academic’s page-turning volume of essays – a study of intellectuals who sought to improve the politics and societies of their day – makes you feel a little more learned than you did before
Beginning during the pandemic, David Runciman made a series of discursive podcasts devoted to some of the great political thinkers of the past. His first book of essays based on those podcasts, Confronting Leviathan, was a perfect primer for the examination of the exercise of power, through the eyes and words of De Tocqueville and Marx and Hannah Arendt and others, in a time of state-enforced restriction of liberty.
This second collection is timely in a different way. It is loosely themed around those thinkers whose primary focus was imagining different kinds of improvements to the politics and the societies in which they lived; they each attend, in different ways, to the question, Runciman says, of “wanting to know why we find ourselves in the situation we do and how we could achieve something better”. It would be a useful volume to place at the bedsides of Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves.
