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This political scientist's insights about the real world often take the form of a paradox which baffles before it enlightens
The political science is just as dismal as the economic one. Its models, schemas and game theories can provide any insight – except for those shedding light on the real world. David Runciman stands out as a practitioner who can deploy all these tricks where they're useful and put them back in their box the moment they're superfluous to making sense of politics. He has drawn a telling distinction between "sincere liars", such as Blair and Clinton, and "honest hypocrites", such as Gordon Brown, a condition which he shrewdly predicted would leave Brown ill-suited for life at the top. His London Review of Books essays range from cricket to Dylan to America's death tax, and whatever the subject he produces a paradox which baffles before it enlightens. At a sweeping London lecture on Wednesday, which drew on world history to assess democracy's chances of withstanding everything from China to climate change, his love of seeming contradictions was much in evidence. Democracies only fight wars they can win, he explained, except when the confidence born of this rule tempts them into misadventures that break it. His quirky syllogisms lend themselves to pleasing rhetoric, as when he distinguished the "trick" and the "trap" views of democracy according to whether people power is too good to be true or instead too true to be good, a phrase reversal worthy of Kennedy or Churchill. If he came down from his ivory tower and took to a soap box, the politicians he studies would need to watch out.
