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David Walter Runciman, 4th Viscount Runciman of Doxford, FBA , FRSL (born 1 March 1967), is an English academic and podcaster who until 2024 taught politics and history at the University of Cambridge, where he was Professor of Politics. From October 2014 to October 2018 he was also head of the Department of Politics and International Studies. [1] In April 2024 he decided to resign his position at the university to focus on his podcast full-time. [2]
Runciman was born in St John's Wood, North London, England, and grew up there. His father, Garry Runciman, Viscount Runciman, was a political sociologist and academic and his mother, Ruth Runciman, is former chair of the UK Mental Health Commission, a founder of the Prison Reform Trust and former chair of the National Aids Trust. [3] He was educated at Eton College, an all-boys public school in Berkshire, where he won the Newcastle Scholarship. He went on to study at Trinity College, Cambridge. [4] [ failed verification ]
Runciman is the great-nephew of the historian Sir Steven Runciman. He inherited his family's viscountcy on the death of his father in 2020. [5] From 1997 to 2021 he was married to the food writer Bee Wilson with whom he has three children. [3] [6] Since 2021 he has been married to psychotherapist Helen Runciman (née Lyon-Dalberg-Acton), daughter of Edward Acton.
Runciman began writing for the London Review of Books in 1996 and has written dozens of book reviews and articles on contemporary politics since, for the LRB and other publications. [7]
Runciman has published eight books. An adaptation of his PhD thesis was published in 1997 as Pluralism and the Personality of the State. The Politics of Good Intentions: History, Fear and Hypocrisy in the New World Order (2006) evaluates contemporary and historical crisis in international politics after 9/11 while Political Hypocrisy (2008) explores the political uses of hypocrisy from a historical perspective. [8] The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis from World War I to the Present (2013) lays out his theory of the threat of democratic overconfidence. [9] Profile Books published his books Politics: Ideas in Profile and How Democracy Ends in 2014 and 2018, respectively. In 2021 he published Confronting Leviathan: A History of Ideas, looking at thinkers and ideas in modern politics.
In October 2014, he was appointed head of the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge. Runciman gave his inaugural lecture on 24 February 2015 on Political Theory and Real Politics in the Age of the Internet. [10] He was preceded in this position by Andrew Gamble and Geoffrey Hawthorn.
Runciman's book Politics: Ideas in Profile explores what politics is, why do we need it and where is it heading.
From 2016 to 2022, Runciman hosted a podcast called Talking Politics with professor Helen Thompson. The podcast convened a panel of academics from the University of Cambridge and elsewhere to speak about current affairs and politics. It ended in March 2022 after over 300 episodes and 26 million downloads. [11] [ better source needed ] Tim Abrams, writing in The Guardian , called it "terrific". [12] Oliver Eagleton, writing in the New Statesman , said of it "There [Runciman] reflected on current affairs in his reassuring Eton baritone: parsing the headlines, never taking too strident a position, throwing softball questions to his guests ... and recycling conventional north London wisdom". [13]
In 2020, Runciman co-founded the Cambridge Centre for the Future of Democracy, a research institute dedicated to the exploration of innovative approaches to the study of democratic governance worldwide. [14] At its launch the Centre released its first report, gaining widespread media coverage, and has since released a further three annual reports as well as peer-reviewed articles in academic journals. [15]
On 27 April 2023, Runciman launched "Past Present Future: The History of Ideas Podcast". [16]
In 2018, Runciman was elected Fellow of the British Academy (FBA). [17] In 2021, he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL). [18]
After a negative book review in The Guardian of Antifragility by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Taleb referred to Runciman as the "second most stupid reviewer" of his works, arguing that Runciman had missed the concept of convexity, the theme of his book. "There are 607 references to convexity", Taleb wrote. [19] [20]
Published by Profile Books in 2018, How Democracy Ends looks at the political landscape of the West and whether democracy is at risk. Andrew Rawnsley in The Guardian wrote that the book left him "feeling more positive than I thought I would be" [21]
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: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)Amartya Kumar Sen is an Indian economist and philosopher. Sen has taught and worked in the United Kingdom and the United States since 1972. In 1998, Sen received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to welfare economics. He has also made major scholarly contributions to social choice theory, economic and social justice, economic theories of famines, decision theory, development economics, public health, and the measures of well-being of countries.
Ronald Myles Dworkin was an American legal philosopher, jurist, and scholar of United States constitutional law. At the time of his death, he was Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law and Philosophy at New York University and Professor of Jurisprudence at University College London. Dworkin had taught previously at Yale Law School and the University of Oxford, where he was the Professor of Jurisprudence, successor to philosopher H. L. A. Hart.
Sir James Cochran Stevenson Runciman, known as Steven Runciman, was an English historian best known for his three-volume A History of the Crusades (1951–54). His works had a profound impact on the popular conception of the Crusades.
John Nicholas Gray is an English political philosopher and author with interests in analytic philosophy, the history of ideas, and philosophical pessimism. He retired in 2008 as School Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Gray contributes regularly to The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement and the New Statesman, where he is the lead book reviewer. He is an atheist.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a Lebanese-American essayist, mathematical statistician, former option trader, risk analyst, and aphorist. His work concerns problems of randomness, probability, and uncertainty.
Orlando Guy Figes is a British historian and writer. He was Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London, where he was made Emeritus Professor on his retirement in 2022.
Born in southern Australia, John Keane is Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney. For 25 years he also held a position at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB), which he resigned from in November 2023.
John Naughton is an Irish academic, journalist and author. He is a senior research fellow in the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities at Cambridge University, Director of the Press Fellowship Programme at Wolfson College, Cambridge, Emeritus Professor of the Public Understanding of Technology at the British Open University, adjunct professor at University College, Cork and the Technology columnist of the London Observer newspaper.
Timothy David Snyder is an American historian specializing in the history of Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust. He is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.
Richard David Wolff is an American Marxian economist known for his work on economic methodology and class analysis. He is a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a visiting professor in the graduate program in international affairs of the New School. Wolff has also taught economics at Yale University, City University of New York, University of Utah, University of Paris I (Sorbonne), and The Brecht Forum in New York City.
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable is a 2007 book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who is a former options trader. The book focuses on the extreme impact of rare and unpredictable outlier events—and the human tendency to find simplistic explanations for these events, retrospectively. Taleb calls this the Black Swan theory.
Jonathan Simon Christopher Riley-Smith was a historian of the Crusades, and, between 1994 and 2005, Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge. He was a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
Beatrice Dorothy "Bee" Wilson is a British food writer and journalist. She writes the "Table Talk" column for The Wall Street Journal, and is also a campaigner for food education through the charity TastEd.
Hypocrisy is the practice of feigning to be what one is not or to believe what one does not. The word "hypocrisy" entered the English language c. 1200 with the meaning "the sin of pretending to virtue or goodness". Today, "hypocrisy" often refers to advocating behaviors that one does not practice. However, the term can also refer to other forms of pretense, such as engaging in pious or moral behaviors out of a desire for praise rather than out of genuinely pious or moral motivations.
David Weinberger is an American author, technologist, and speaker. Trained as a philosopher, Weinberger's work focuses on how technology — particularly the internet and machine learning — is changing our ideas, with books about the effect of machine learning’s complex models on business strategy and sense of meaning; order and organization in the digital age; the networking of knowledge; the Net's effect on core concepts of self and place; and the shifts in relationships between businesses and their markets.
Ian Matthew Morris is a British historian, archaeologist, and Willard Professor of Classics at Stanford University.
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined is a 2011 book by Steven Pinker, in which the author argues that violence in the world has declined both in the long run and in the short run and suggests explanations as to why this has occurred. The book uses data documenting declining violence across time and geography. This paints a picture of massive declines in the violence of all forms, from war, to improved treatment of children. He highlights the role of nation-state monopolies on force, of commerce, of increased literacy and communication, as well as a rise in a rational problem-solving orientation as possible causes of this decline in violence. He notes that paradoxically, our impression of violence has not tracked this decline, perhaps because of increased communication, and that further decline is not inevitable, but is contingent on forces harnessing our better motivations such as empathy and increases in reason.
Alex Niven is an English writer, poet, editor, and former musician.
Richard Bourke is a UK-based Irish academic specialising in the history of political ideas. His work spans ancient and modern thought, and is associated with the application of the historical method to political theory. He is Professor of the History of Political Thought at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. He was formerly Professor of the History of Political Thought and Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of the History of Political Thought at Queen Mary, University of London. In July 2018 Bourke was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA).
Political hypocrisy refers to any discrepancy between what a political party claims and the practices the party is trying to hide. Modern political debate is often characterized by accusations and counter-accusations of hypocrisy.