Runciman, Garry

rorotoko.com

W. G. (Garry) Runciman has been a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge since 1971. He holds honorary degrees from the Universities of Edinburgh, London, Oxford, and York. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Besides Great Books, Bad Arguments, featured in his Rorotoko interview, his other books include A Treatise on Social Theory, The Social Animal, and The Theory of Social and Cultural Selection.

On Rorotoko:

On his book Great Books, Bad Arguments: Republic, Leviathan, and The Communist Manifesto
(Our Cover Feature of June 20, 2010)

[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