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A spinoff from the podcast of the same name, this potted philosophical primer fails to live up to its titleWhen is a book not a book? When it’s the book of a podcast. David Runciman, professor of politics at Cambridge and formerly co-host of Talking Politics (with the excellent Helen Thompson), now issues a podcast called History of Ideas, and this is the second, after 2022’s Confronting Leviathan, in what is promised or threatened to be a “series” of books based on it. “I have tried to retain the conversational style of the original podcasts, though each chapter has been extensively rewritten and adapted,” the author explains in a preface. The result is not just a transcription of a podcast, but nor is it really a book.A dozen thinkers get a chapter each: Joseph Schumpeter on democracy, John Rawls on justice, Jeremy Bentham on utilitarianism, Friedrich Nietzsche on the genealogy of morals, Simone de Beauvoir on feminism, and so forth. What will most strike the reader hoping to engage with a real book is the almost complete lack of direct quotation from the thinkers discussed. We are simply expected to take on trust that “Hobbes believes that …” or “[Rosa] Luxemburg thought …” The 19th-century former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass is described as a “miraculously good” writer, but we don’t get a single example. What about another miraculously good writer, Friedrich Nietzsche? “His two catchphrases are ‘God is dead’ and ‘The will to power’.” Continue reading...