Garry W. Runciman

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

Cover Interview of June 20, 2010

Lastly

The significance of the book is proportionate to the significance of its implications for the questions of perennial interest and importance which Republic, Leviathan, and The Communist Manifesto address.

Plato was not wrong in thinking that intellectual reasoning can be applied to the enhancement of human wellbeing. Hobbes was not wrong in thinking that the protection afforded by the state imposes reciprocal obligations on the part of those it protects. Marx was not wrong in thinking that arrangements can be devised which will constrain the inequalities of power which arise from unregulated competition. I am at pains to make this much clear in my book.

I also draw particular attention to the work of Elinor Ostrom, who has been awarded a Nobel Prize since I wrote, as one of the outstanding contributions of recent behavioural science to Hobbes’s central preoccupation with the need, as he saw, for binding agreements to be underwritten by the sanction of force.

If my book can persuade readers both to look back at the three deservedly famous texts in the light of my comments—and thereby be prompted to catch up with the best of the recent sociological research which bears on the issues they raise,—it will have achieved its purpose.

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