The worldly philosophers

David Runciman's timely book examines the views of a dozen philosophers on the subject of state power: On what principles does the state enjoy power over its citizens and what limits its control?

Confronting Leviathan A history of ideas

Author: David Runciman

Publisher: Profile Books/Hatchette India

Pages: viii+280

Price: Rs 599

“Life and personal liberty are inalienable rights….The dignity of the individual, equality between human beings and the quest for liberty are the foundational pillars of the Indian constitution,” wrote Justice D Y Chandrachud (now Chief Justice) in 2017 while delivering the unanimous judgement of the nine-judge constitution bench upholding privacy as a fundamental right.

The learned judge had addressed an existential question: On what principles does the state, whose protection its citizens need, enjoy power and what limits its power over citizens? David Runciman’s timely book examines

 the views of a dozen philosophers and leaders on this subject.

The author uses Thomas Hobbes (1588-1672) and his explorations in the 1651 treatise Leviathan as anchor because he considers “it marks the beginning of [the] story of …modern subjects of modern states.”  That should be acceptable. Hobbes wrote in the England of the Restoration era, after King Charles I’s execution and the end of Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate. He was deferential to the sovereign and his power but not blindly so. The successor, King Charles II, faced enough restraints for his reign to be considered a democratic one, the predecessor of constitutional monar­chies in present-day Europe and Japan.

Professor Runciman’s focus is on what he calls liberalism with a small l.  In a liberal democracy, there is a distance between citizens and the governing establishment. Citizens voluntarily abjure violence and, as Max Weber says, the modern state “successfully claims the monopoly of legitimate coercion” (read violence). But all the while the state is mindful of its citizens’ basic freedoms and rights. Violent revolutions are anathema to liberal democracies.

Professor Runciman advances his account from the pioneer Hobbes through gender-based liberalism (Mary Wollstonecraft in the late 18th century and Catharine MacKinnon of today), its versions in specific countries (Benjamin Constant on post-revolutionary France and Alexis de Tocqueville on post-revolutionary America), its elaborators with regard to institutions (Max Weber) and markets (Friedrich Hayek), its critics on class structures (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels), racism and imperialism (Frantz Fanon), and extreme totalitarianism as represented by the Nazis (Hannah Arendt) to, finally, the harbinger of the final and firm establishment of liberal democracy (Francis Fukuyama). John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, Jeremy Bentham are missing in the list, but we should not question the author’s privilege. The need for better editing while transitioning from the transcript of podcasts to a published book should be seen just as a minor quibble.

Mahatma Gandhi also figures, but he is an outlier in two senses. He was never a part of the European classical political philosophy tradition.  He was also the only one among the book’s subjects who was a true spearhead of national politics, probably the greatest mass movement leader the world has known. But this reviewer maintains that Gandhi does not belong to the galaxy of thinkers in this book. In the ocean of words the Mahatma has left behind, there is little mention of the works of Hobbes et al, nor is evidence of his interest in the philosophical strands featured in the book.

Hobbes believed that the only choice people have is order or chaos.  In politics, this means the state under a sovereign (which could be parliament as it was in the mid-17th century England) with all its limitations or anarchy.  The Frenchman Constant likened the elected or appointed representatives of people to the rich hiring stewards. Wollstonecraft considered the military to be feminine, since it must obey its political masters unquestionably as women do their men, a startling but justifiable parallel.

de Tocqueville spent a long time in the pre-Civil War United States and wrote a two-volume classic Democracy in America. He observed that elect­i­ons in America appear to be changing everything, yet nothing really changes.  When American democracy works well, the stability and volatility complement each other. The recent US midterm elections show that de Tocqueville’s astute observations are valid two centuries later.

Max Weber, an academic who dabbled in politics, was distraught at the prospect of Germany getting into self-destruct mode following its defeat in the First World War.  He argued for treating politics as a profession, a vocation. He died in 1920, and did not live to see his nightmare coming true in the Third Reich. Marx and Engels did not believe in the redemptive power of liberal democracy. As we all well know, they instead gave a clarion call for workers

of the world to unite in their Communist Manifesto. The two great advocates of revolutions led comfortable middle class lives in the 19th-century England and did not live to see the Bolshevik revolution.

The Algerian Frantz Fanon, a great friend of Jean-Paul Sartre, openly advocated violence as means of struggle against racism and imperialism. His two books, Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth became required reading for the radical student movem­ents of the second half of the 20th century.

And with Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, we come to a situation where, as Professor Runciman puts it, “The modern, liberal, democratic state is… the only form of politics that remains.”

In case we consider that Professor Runciman is too anxious to jump to this soothing conclusion, we must remember that the book emerged from his Talking Politics podcasts, started in 2016 but hitting a peak in the sombre mood of the Covid-19 lockdowns. That context enables us to see the true value of the ideas the book presents, for darkness in many forms persists in most countries and ideas are our only means of enlightenment and salvation.