David Runciman

The Hon. David Walter Runciman (born 1967) is a British academic who teaches politics and history at Cambridge University, where he is Head of the Department of Politics and International Studies, Professor of Politics, and a fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He was educated at Eton College, where he won the Newcastle Scholarship, and Trinity College, Cambridge.

Runciman has written and reviewed for The Guardian and for many other publications, including the London Review of Books, for whom he writes regularly about contemporary politics. His monograph, The Politics of Good Intentions, was adapted in part from his LRB articles. Runciman has published six books. An adaptation of his PhD thesis was published in 1997 as Pluralism and the Personality of the State. His book Political Hypocrisy (2008), explores the political uses of hypocrisy from a historical perspective. The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis from World War I to the Present (2013), lays out his theory of the threat of democratic overconfidence. In 2014, Profile Books published his book Politics: Ideas in Profile. Since 2015, Runciman has hosted a politics podcast called Talking Politics.

Family

He is the great nephew of the historian, Sir Steven Runciman, and his father, Viscount Runciman, Garry Runciman, is a noted political scientist and academic, who has also written for the LRB.

Criticism

In 2012, David Runciman published a highly critical review of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book Antifragility in the Guardian. Taleb responded by calling Runciman the 'second most stupid reviewer' that he had ever known, claiming that Runciman had missed the concept of convexity, the theme of his book. "There are 607 references to convexity", Taleb wrote.

Personal life

David Runciman is heir to his family's Viscountcy.. He is married to the food writer Bee Wilson.

External links

• University of Cambridge profile page
• David Runciman at IMDb