David Runciman

Most of us, most of the time, are deeply prejudiced in favour of individual over collective judgments. This is hardly surprising, since we are all biased. First, we are biased in favour of our own opinions, which we tend to prefer to those of anyone else. Second, we are biased in favour of individuals generally, because we are all individuals ourselves, and so are broadly sympathetic to the...

Is Iraq Tony Blair’s Suez? The parallels are certainly hard to avoid, and Blair’s critics have not been slow to point them out. First, there is a strong suspicion that, like Suez, the whole Iraq escapade was the result of a private deal cooked up between the belligerents. The decision to send British and French troops to Egypt in 1956 was sealed during a secret meeting at...

“’This is not a time to err on the side of caution,’ Blair said, ‘not a time to weigh the risks to an infinite balance; not a time for the cynicism of the worldly wise who favour playing it long.’ And yet he also argues exactly the opposite – that what matters is taking precautions against future disaster, seeing the big picture, weighing the overall balance of risks. In the very next paragraph, he remarks: ‘It is monstrously premature to think that the threat has passed. The risk remains in the balance here and abroad.’ This, then, is not a time to err on the side of caution and not a time to err on the side of incaution. Such an argument can be used to justify anything.”

“Two professional baseball franchises are known to be cursed. One is the Chicago Cubs, playing out of beautiful, haunted Wrigley Field. In 1945 a local tavern owner called William Sianis was refused entry to a World Series game at Wrigley because he wanted to bring his goat with him (according to legend, the goat ‘smelt’, though this door policy has not always been consistently applied at baseball stadiums). Sianis chose to slaughter the animal instead, in order to curse the Cubs, whom he decreed would never play in another World Series. They never have.”

Most of the 18th-century political theorists with the biggest reputations come from rather out-of-the-way places, at least in geopolitical terms: Vico from Naples; Hume and Adam Smith from Edinburgh; Rousseau from Geneva; Kant from Königsberg. But because the 18th century was also, in the end, an Age of Revolution, its two most important political thinkers do not really belong in this...