On 25 June, Nicholas Mulder and Michael Rogers of the King’s Review  sat down with Professor David Runciman of the Department of Politics  and International Studies at Cambridge to discuss his thoughts on Occupy  Wall Street, his upcoming book The Confidence Trap, and the state of political philosophy.

King’s Review:

You’ve written recently in The Guardian that David Graeber’s new book The Democracy Project  – about the Occupy movement – stirred you from what you describe as a  condition of apathy with regard to political action. In your review, you  mentioned some stylistic and conceptual shortcomings of Graeber’s book,  but in the end found that it affected you in a way that more  academically rigorous texts had not. First off, can you elaborate a bit  on how Graeber’s account of the Occupy movement affected your thinking?

David Runciman:

The state of apathy that I was  describing is a kind of crisis fatigue. In the current crisis, over the  past four or five years, a lot of people have reached the point of  thinking that the critical moment is not going to come, that we’ll just  have to find a way through, that the moment of truth is never going to  arrive. And I probably still think that. But one of the things that I  liked about Graeber’s book is his take on 1968. In ‘68 there was this  great feeling, and then everyone had this sense that it all just fizzled  out, and all came to nothing. Like in Occupy, the students were out on  the streets for a few months. For a brief moment, civilisation tottered,  and then… nothing. But his take on it is that in retrospect these  turning points look completely different. The radical reawakening in the  ‘60s did succeed in changing the terms of social and political  discourse. So the big progressive themes of the last 30 or 40 years –  including gay rights, and the emancipation of whole sectors of social  and political life that had been stifled – came out of that, even though  it didn’t produce radical revolutionary change. And I started thinking  about the current crisis, and I decided it’s true that, in retrospect,  Occupy Wall Street is not going to change anything in its own terms, but  it does signal a moment of political opportunity to reconfigure how  people think about what is possible. And I had stopped thinking like  that. I had previously thought that Occupy Wall Street was a complete  waste of time because the aims were unrealistic, the programs were  wishful, there was something bogus about the sense that people were  self-consciously performing a revolutionary act. But when you put it in a  big historical sweep, you see it as a real radical moment.

KR:

So you’re saying that the impact of 1968 was  largely cultural, and that gradually policy began to catch up to the  shift in cultural norms?

DR:

Yes, it was cultural and it was social. It was not  the enactment of socialism as a political program, but it was social in  the sense that it gave politicians a different sense of the sorts of  constituencies that they were going to have to answer to. Not because  all of those constituencies organised and went out on the streets, but  because it changed the way people thought about the range of voices that  were out there. It was a slow and complicated process, but there is no  question that the subsequent 20 or 30 years did see a social and  political revolution in civil rights. A book that I’m currently reading,  called Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century,  is about Thatcher, Khomeini, Pope John-Paul, Deng Xiaoping, this group  of counter-revolutionaries. What he doesn’t say – but you get the sense  from this moment as well – is that at the time people misread the  situation. Perhaps the closest crisis to the current one is the  financial crisis of the early- to mid-70s. That one seemed to fizzle  out, but at the end of the decade it produced this counter-revolution.  The other side of this sort of radical reawakening is that it opens up  the space for a radical counter-revolution.

KR:

Do you see this dynamic playing out differently  in different countries today? For instance, in both Turkey and Brazil  there are massive ongoing protest movements, but while the government in  Turkey has been calling the demonstrators terrorists, in Brazil they  have tried to some extent to co-opt the protestors’ rhetoric.

DR:

Well, that’s the currently existing regimes  trying to deal with this. But there is something that is to come, which  is people trying to re-conceive what it would be like for these regimes  really to defend themselves. They don’t have a particularly strong line  of defence. There is no question that the current crisis doesn’t seem  likely to produce a revolution. The revolutionary moments have tended to  fizzle out both in the West and in the developing world. So in that way  it does seem to echo the ‘70s. What happened in the ‘70s was that the  financial crisis changed the range of possibilities and opportunities.  In the short run people thought that the Communist regimes were the  winners, but in the long run it was catastrophic for them. It turned out  that they destroyed themselves with debt. In the short run people  didn’t see that. There were economic consequences, but also this kind of  intellectual reconfiguration. Say it’s a 10, 15 or 20 year cycle, and  we’re five years into it, and you think of the comparable ‘70s phase.  The people who were going to be the major counter-revolutionaries were  completely unconsidered at that point. Who is the Margaret Thatcher of  this juncture? Who is the Khomeini? Who is the Pope John-Paul? It’s not  going to be just propping up the neoliberal order. That’s not a  counter-revolution. Now, in addition to the radical moment, there  probably are just reconfigurations of the market-based political  economy, but these can be radical too. It could be a technocratic thing.  It could be that someone working in the Google universe is the person  with the next political idea.

KR:

Tied up with this question is the idea of “big data”, and the extent of government surveillance of data.

DR:

Exactly, these questions too. It’s an amazing  moment in politics. There was a moment about two or three years ago when  it looked as though something was going to happen quickly. And it  didn’t. It’s easy to take a sort of jaundiced view of the whole thing.  But actually, when you take a step back and look at it, this has been an  extraordinary five years, with the combination of economic turmoil,  technological revolution – some of it good, some of it bad, almost all  of it uncontrolled –, and political stagnation in Europe and elsewhere.

KR:

And also massive political upheaval in the Middle East. It’s a kind of 1848 moment.

DR:

That’s another good one as well. 1848 is another  good analogy. It was very, very disappointing. In the 5 to 10 year  phase of the cycle, in the mid-1850s, people were thinking: that didn’t  amount to much, did it? But as the second half of the nineteenth century  played out, that impulse was the signal of the future. Politics was  going to have to change. Not necessarily revolutionary change, but a  democratic transformation was coming. So certainly it’s more like 1848  or 1968 than it is like 1917.

KR:

If we see the current radical moment as formally  similar to these previous ones, and we see history moving in these  phases and cycles in the past, do you believe that we can foresee with  any degree of confidence how things will play out?

DR:

No, because you can’t be sure which crisis it is  closest to. Is this more like 1968, 1979, 1848, or which ever ones that  you want to pluck out of the air? But what you can, I think, take from  those moments is that – if you look at the cycles of history – five  years into the crisis, which is where we are today, is way too soon to  judge which way things will go. That’s what I was trying to say in the Guardian  piece, that occasionally you need to read a book that reminds you. I’m  an academic, but I also write a bit of journalism, and journalism tempts  you to make short-term judgments. And occasionally you need to read a  book that takes that step back. Now, David Graeber has a big,  anthropological, 10,000-year take on these things as well, which I’m not  so sure about. But my sense is that 5 to 10 years down the line, it’s  not as though Occupy Wall Street will turn out to have won, but  it will look like a harbinger of a more radical change, both  intellectually and politically. We’re in a situation in which the Euro  is stuck, America seems fairly stuck, we’re in these squabbles about  data, the Arab Spring is turning into a disappointment. These protest  movements are starting to conform to a pattern. Is anyone really hopeful  about Turkey or Brazil? I’m not saying one should be pessimistic, but  certainly when compared to the height of the Arab Spring moment in  Egypt, there is a sense in which this has been played out.

KR:

Cambridge political philosophy is known for a  particular brand of realism. In your opinion, does this form of realism  tend to reinforce apathy? If we begin with a diagnosis of the possible  and ask how we might ameliorate our condition, rather than starting with  an ideal and asking how to accomplish it, do we fall prey to diminished  horizons in deciding which direction represents amelioration or  progress?

DR:

Well, that’s almost what I was thinking when I  said that a book like Graeber’s book wakes you up, because I suspect  that I tend to have that realist bias. I tend to be dismissive of things  that seem to be wishful, like Occupy Wall Street. I was conscious that  I’d written something relatively recently that was pretty scathing about  Occupy Wall Street, and when I picked up the Graeber book I thought I  was going to hate it. I started reading and I thought, well I really  hate this. I thought: this is just crap, with his descriptions of these  little anarchist cells that were going to change the world. But when he  stopped talking about Occupy Wall Street and began talking about the  bigger picture from an anthropologist’s perspective, my impression began  to change. He has a very good, if slightly one-sided, potted history of  modern democracy from the seventeenth century on. And again, in the  Cambridge context, realism is very historical. But historiography can go  in one of two ways. It can get very weighed down by context. But  occasionally you want one of those big-picture, one-sided things, which  we don’t really do in Cambridge. The type of thing that says: I’m going  to tell you the story of modern democracy, and it’s going to have a  moral. We don’t do that here, and that’s what I found in the Graeber  book. So, my bias is towards realism as against moralism. I’m not sure  that analytical moral philosophy is much help in a crisis. But we need  to take the point that political realism is sometimes a bit time-horizon  limited, because when you take the long view, it’s very uncertain, it’s  very hard to be certain what is possible. And you have to be alive to  the possibility that things that look impossible in the short term  aren’t. We are still in the early stages of the current crisis, and we  simply do not know what the range of possibilities will be in five years  time. And definitely this was a real crisis. You don’t pass  through something like that without there being far-reaching  consequences. But given the kind of crisis it was, given the way it had  to be managed, given the lack of revolutionary options, it’s really hard  to know what the range of the possible is. So realism shouldn’t make  you think that the range of the possible is always narrow.

KR:

This ties in well with the theme of your upcoming book, The Confidence Trap,  where you advocate for steering a middle course between excessive  confidence and excessive skepticism about the ability of democracies to  solve the pressing challenges that inevitably arise.

DR:

Well, actually, I don’t advocate anything.  That’s why it’s a “trap”. I say that the space between these extremes is  very narrow, and that democracies tend to swing from one to the other.  But one of the themes of the book is that, while it tells the history of  this series of crises, it also tells this cumulative history which is  of democracies getting through each of these crises. The rationalist  Enlightenment model, of say John Stuart Mill, would be that over time we  must learn from our experiences. But we don’t. If anything, it makes it  harder to learn from these crises because the knowledge that we’ve  accumulated is that each crisis will play itself out. The real  temptation is to think not that we’re stuck but that this will play  itself out. But crises are still crises. I think that over time, a  complacency is built up in the democratic West that democracies are good  at getting over crises. And the European crisis is a good example of  this. There’s a sense that the key challenge is to hold it together long  enough to allow the inherent course-correcting mechanisms to work  things out. One of the main themes of the book is that you actually want  a crisis that is serious enough to get people to reconsider how their  institutions function, but not so serious that it could destroy those  institutions.

KR:

Would you say then that one of the key  challenges for the 21st century is to develop a more modest philosophy  of history? That you need the right amount of confidence to get people  mobilised, but not so much as to lead to complacency?

DR:

Yes, that’s the ideal solution. But my feeling  is that, in itself, that’s kind of wishful. We want it perfectly  calibrated so that we’re committed to ideas that are capable of changing  the world, but not so committed that these ideas are capable of  screwing up the world. That’s the Holy Grail. It’s almost a  psychological or temperamental thing. I think that sometimes it is more  dangerous to shut down the possibility of radical ideas than to be open  to them. In reading history and using history, I think that personally  my bias is to be too pessimistic and too “realistic”. That’s why I think  that books like Graeber’s are, in their own ways, so good. You should  always at least try to consider that the world might be quite different  from the way it looks to you at the present, without buying into some  sort of big philosophy of history that tells you what the future is  going to be. This is a moment when many people seem to have a very  constrained view of the future, but the future is likely to be radically  different from the present. Technology, politics, economics and the  environment are going to interact in ways that are almost inconceivable  now. It’s going to be a big political challenge, and the idea that the  current iteration of democratic political institutions is up to it seems  to me unlikely. There aren’t clear alternatives on the horizon, but you  have to be open to the possibility that they are there.