While David Runciman’s new book The History of Ideas: Equality, Justice and Revolution focuses on western thinkers from the middle of the 18th century to the end of the 20th century, the key question it considers is one that has engaged peoples the world over since prehistory. That question is, how have we come to live in societies characterised by gross inequalities and injustices in which often the worst among us are in charge?
For Rousseau, the answer was that civilisation and progress are not the triumphs of the human spirit that they are made out to be. He argued that so-called civilised society is built upon a template of hierarchy and ownership, first established at the time of the Agricultural Revolution, and that injustice is encoded in laws and politics to maintain the dominance of elites. Rousseau believed that growing up within such a social arrangement makes us blind to how things really are and desensitised to other people’s suffering.
Two thinkers who generally agreed with Rousseau’s diagnosis, Jeremy Bentham and Simone de Beauvoir, both aimed to address the structural violence within society and reduce our blindness towards other people’s misery. Bentham did so by creating the philosophy of utilitarianism; De Beauvoir by asserting the case for women’s equality.
Bentham was concerned with legal and social reform. He argued that any law that does not contribute to greater wellbeing and happiness has no utility and should be abolished. His aim was to get rid of unjust laws and social practices within the late 18th-century English society in which he lived, which included the death penalty for everything from petty theft to homosexuality. Writing over a century and a half later, de Beauvoir too advocated a programme to reduce structural violence in the system, but she went further. Structural violence, she insisted, is the system. A whole world has been built around the implicit inferiority of women to men. It is everywhere: a ubiquitous organising idea. A comprehensive reimagining of the entire basis of hierarchical male dominance of society is necessary to right this foundational civilisational wrong.
Runciman also explores the idea of revolution, that violence is justified as a means of ending an unjust social order. Two of the revolutionary thinkers he considers are Frederick Douglass and Rosa Luxemburg. Like Nelson Mandela, Douglass originally advocated violence as a means of ending slavery, before he eventually embraced politics. Rosa Luxemburg too was an advocate of revolution. An avid supporter of Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution, she argued that violence was necessary, but disagreed with the scale of violence that Lenin unleashed. She warned presciently that Lenin’s total revolution would become oppressive and cruel.
Perhaps the most important chapters in the book, aside from that on Rousseau who diagnoses the problem, are those on John Rawls and Friedrich Nietzsche who set out diametrically opposed answers to that problem. In fact, Nietzsche doesn’t see it as a problem at all.
In A Theory of Justice, Rawls proposes a philosophical basis for redesigning society. Imagine, he wrote, not knowing your situation or where you are placed in the social hierarchy. What principles could we all then agree on as the basis for reorganising society? Rawls contends that there are three basic principles on which we would all agree – that basic liberties should be guaranteed for all; that no one’s opportunities in life should be determined by their race, gender, sexual orientation, caste, or disability; and that in order for these principles to be made a reality, society needs to be organised so that its rules work to the advantage of the least advantaged.
In stark contrast, Nietzsche, in On the Genealogy of Morality, presents the case for the oppressor. For Nietzsche, such talk of fairness and equal opportunity is abhorrent. Such thinking, which he contends swept the world with the rise of Christianity, is a kind of sickness that holds back the “Great Men” among us. For Nietzsche, the question is not how we have come to live in unequal societies dominated by a violent few, but why the worthless majority can’t shut up and recognise their inferiority. True morality is for the strong to have disdain for the weak. Talk of moral codes, justice and equality are simply a “slave revolt in morality” which turns the world upside down and prevents the strong from imposing their unconstrained will on the masses.
In our time of Trump and Putin, the re-emergence of far-right fascism, and the consolidation of global kleptocracy, the ideas that Runciman explores have never been so pertinent. A History of Ideas serves as a timely, if unintended, reminder that Rousseau was right, and that Nietzsche’s version of morality is actually the version that has predominantly underpinned so-called civilisation. Unfortunately, that horrifying reality is becoming starkly visible once again.
Ian Hughes is author of Disordered Minds: How Dangerous Personalities are Destroying Democracy
