A History of Ideas: A fascinating and accessible introduction

I am a big fan of the Talking Politics podcast series, hosted by David Runciman and Helen Thompson, two academics at the University of Cambridge. Their interviews and discussions manage to cover both pressing stories regarding day-to-day politics and some more thoughtful big-picture topics, and I always find what they have to say very worthwhile.

Given this, I was pretty pleased that they decided to create a short spin-off series, hosted only by David Runciman, where he introduces and give his take on some of the political thinkers who have shaped modern politics. It’s called History of Ideas, and Runciman uses “modern” to mean the last four centuries or so, meaning that the ideas of these individuals have contributed to our current understanding of politics, government and the interactions between states and their citizens.

The list of speakers covered is short: there’s only twelve, and there’s many enormous brains who have been left out. Still, those included are all great choices, spanning from modern feminist ideas proposed by Catherine MacKinnon, to self-rule and non-violence with Mohandas Ghandi and Hannah Arendt’s fears about how labour and technological change might interact.

There were two episodes that truly stood out for me: the summary of Mary Wollstonecraft’s classic book “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”, and the discussion of Max Weber’s famous lecture on “The Profession and Vocation of Politics”.

Wollstonecraft’s book came out just as the French Revolution was truly erupting in 1792, and provides an excoriation of the contemporary beliefs around education of men and women. She argued forcefully for giving access to the same education to young women as young men, countering the belief that only men could think rationally, and that therefore providing women with an education would be wasteful. As a corollary, she pushed back hard against the notion that women were purely emotional and sensitive beings, incapable of logical thought processes. As Runciman notes, the counter-point to this is clearly that those same preconceptions about women and their feelings also led to the idea that men could only be purely rational (or, in certain cases, lustful) – but never sensitive or emotional.

Although the episode on MacKinnon can be seen as much more relevant to current modern takes on the permeating effects of patriarchy and the structural inequalities between men and women, I still found that the discussion of Wollstonecraft was just that bit more compelling. The ideas in both are fascinating and relevant, but I just found myself much more drawn to the way Runciman discussed “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”. (Maybe it’s just the history nerd inside me that liked the link-ups with the French Revolution, who knows…)

Max Weber’s lecture on political leadership came during another revolution, this time the post-war upheaval that wracked Germany in 1919. This is the famous lecture in which he defines the state to be the entity that can claim a ‘legitimate monopoly on the use of force’, but he also spends a lot of it talking about the different types of political leaders, from lawyers and journalists (best suited to leadership in politics) to prophets, demagogues and military leaders (to be avoided). There’s a nice bit in the final Q+A podcast where Runciman talks through different examples of each type, from Keir Starmer as the lawyer, to Boris Johnson as both the journalist and the opportunist populist/demagogue.

Again, it’s not like I didn’t enjoy the other explicitly political episodes in the series, the ones on Frantz Fanon and Francis Fukuyama (lots of Fs!) were both really good, too. As with the discussion of Mary Wollstonecraft, it was the mix of the engaging way that Runciman presented Weber’s ideas, and the fact that both the Weber and Wollstonecraft pieces seemed to have aged quite well when looked at in the context of current politics, which made them stand out for me.

Finally, the episode where Runciman talks to Helen Thompson about what she would have done differently, and the different interpretations that she would have highlighted, is well worth a listen for a different take on many of the subjects covered (especially Hobbes – they bloody love Hobbes…). They also point out a few notable exceptions who were left out, and that might be covered in future episodes. As they note, there was little discussion of the role of religion and its interaction with the state, and also the idea of nationhood – both topics that are always relevant, and there’s some really big brains that have discussed them.

So, on the whole, I would say to just go and try out the series. Pick out an episode, or just go from start to finish. The talks are very good, they’re not too long or overly detailed or obscure, and there’s lots of very interesting topics that I would not have thought about normally. I’m already looking forward to the next series!