Garry W. Runciman

On his book Great Books, Bad Arguments: Republic, Leviathan, and The Communist Manifesto

Cover Interview of June 20, 2010

The wide angle

That the concerns which Republic, Leviathan, and the Communist Manifesto address are of perennial importance is not in doubt. I first encountered the three books as a student more than fifty years ago, and it never crossed my mind to question why they were there on the reading lists.

But since then, I have pursued an academic career as a comparative and historical sociologist studying the range of political, ideological, and economic institutions which have evolved down the ages and across the world and the reasons for which they have or have not held together under different historical conditions. It is no surprise, therefore, that I should have reacted rather differently when reading the three books for the second time half a century later.

Sociology is not, and never will be, able to resolve Plato’s, Hobbes’s, and Marx’s concerns by laying down a political constitution which will guarantee internal peace. But over the last hundred years, the social sciences have made striking advances in our understanding of the institutional mechanisms and psychological dispositions which hold large societies of unrelated people together—despite the inherent conflicts of interest which always have, and always will, put different individuals and groups within their population into competition with one another for power.

It was that thought, and then a chance conversation with an eminent authority on Greek philosophy, which set me off to re-read first Republic, then Leviathan, and then The Communist Manifesto. This book is the result.

philosophy / government / power / justice / sociology / political science / plato / ostrom elinor / marx karl / hobbes thomas /

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.

Carolyn J. Dean,
Interview of February 01, 2011

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.

Jerome Kagan,
Interview of September 17, 2009