The History of Ideas: Equality, Justice and Revolution

A History of Ideas, his exploration of the theme of state and power across the ages (P. 1).The author's chief subject this time is how twelve original and insightful thinkers imagined a better-a fairer and freer-world from the middle of the eighteenth century to the end of the twentieth.Rather than revisiting such generative questions in the history of political ideas as "what is justice?" or "what is peace?" this new collection focuses on "why" and "how" questions: why do we have this as our politics?More bluntly: how did we end up like this? (pp.1-2).At the same time, just as in the case of Confronting Leviathan, all the chapters in this collection focus on single key texts.They are all based on their author's popular podcasts and retain much of their conversational style while meeting the standards of written texts as well.The volume begins with a man who posed these questions in a definitive form: Jean-Jacques Rousseau.This first chapter summarizes in a captivating manner Rousseau's theories concerning the origins of inequality and how politics became "the basis of coercion" (p.15).Rousseau's theories also allow Runciman to reflect on our status-driven, even status-anxious society-a society where how things appear can dominate and where even pity often becomes merely performative.The chapter also draws a contrast between Rousseau and Thomas Hobbes (with whose ideas Runciman began his previous volume), underlining that Rousseau opposed Hobbesian ideas of political representation and acceptance of artificiality, and proposed instead that we lead a more pared-down life and establish an austere form of democracy-a proposal with clear and urgent contemporary echoes.The subsequent chapter on Jeremy Bentham offers a substantial rebuttal of various caricatures of utilitarianism; utilitarianism appears here not least as a call for forms of justification that transcend the interests of the person making it.The chapter ends by Runciman declaring Bentham "a hero for our times" (p.44) whose broad