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Chris Bickerton
posted 14 March 2006

David Runciman's new book has a great title: The Politics of Good Intentions. The blurb on the inside cover is even more promising. It states that '[this book] uses the long history of the modern state to put events of recent years - the war on terror, the war in Iraq, the falling out between Europe and the United States - in their proper perspective'. It goes on to say that Runciman 'identifies what is new about contemporary politics' whilst at the same time viewing contemporary challenges and threats in 'real historical time', not in the impressionistic time of 24 hour news and electoral cycles.

Unfortunately, Runciman's book falls foul of the cliché about not judging a book by its cover. John Gray eulogises it as the book on the post 9/11 world, but this is some way from the truth. This doesn't make it a bad book. Runciman's wide-ranging discussions and historical analogies are crammed full of insightful comments and erudite remarks. However, the work is never able to shake off its origins as a collection of disparate essays, published in the London Review of Books and beyond. Runciman makes a few very wide-ranging claims about the nature of contemporary political life, particularly in Britain, yet these are insufficiently integrated into a conceptual whole. Runciman is theoretical without having any theory, historical without any sense of history. This makes the book both erudite and impressionistic at the same time.

If there is an overriding theme of the book, it is about how contemporary political life, and in particular the war on terror and the 2003 war in Iraq, expresses in an acute yet familiar form the inherent tensions within modern politics. Runciman describes this tension in terms of a few binary oppositions: the personal/impersonal, public/private, government/governance. In essence, modern politics is driven by an attempt to unite the objectively disparate and isolated individuals of the modern polity into a subjective whole that encompasses each and every individual. The only way we have found to achieve this thus far, argues Runciman, has been through the institutions of the modern state. Throughout the book, Runciman returns to the modern state as the solution to today's problems. On the subject of anti-terror legislation, and the problem of granting to politicians the power to make discretionary decisions over the issue of detention, Runciman argues that what we need are 'states that allow for decisive political action on the part of their leaders, combined with juridical oversight of particular decisions, robust and diverse legislatures to debate the alternatives… and a well-informed and politically active public to pass its own judgement' (p101). In other words, what we need is a return to modern constitutional politics.

Runciman's originality lies in his understanding of the ways in which this longstanding dilemma of modern politics expresses itself in the current period. Runciman states clearly that government is the 'rule of men', whilst governance is 'administration over things'. Modern politics has demanded a balance between the two, between the personal and the impersonal, but today, in Blair's Britain, we are facing a peculiar situation. Runciman demonstrates how the 'politics of good intentions' represents the combination of an extreme form of both the personal and the impersonal. Tony Blair's highly personalised approach to politics has reduced parliamentary politics to the personal rule of Blair and his entourage. At the same time, the substance of Blairite politics is pure managerialism: from ever-greater regulation of private, public and economic life, to an emphasis on the importance of international cooperation in a world of 'interdependence'. Runciman usefully points out that this balance between the personal and impersonal, and the exaggerated forms both take today, explode the myth of a profound philosophical difference between Europe and America. In Europe and in the United States, we can see the same tensions, expressed in a variety of ways. French political life embodies the conflict between the rule of men and the administration of things as much as in America.

Runciman adds to this an important insight: that the language of risk, used expertly by Blair, is in fact a perfect vehicle for managing these tensions. Justifying political decisions using the concept of risk can accommodate the exaggerated need for personal leadership invoked by Blair. Yet at the same time it lends itself to cautious, piecemeal policymaking, concerned with stability and steering. The inherent 'riskiness' of social life is the perfect ideological complement to managerial politics.

Runciman thus provides us with an understanding of why risk should be so appealing as a framework for policymaking. He also draws on the work of Cass Sunstein, an American law professor, to explain its inherent contradictions. In a chapter on the precautionary principle and its application to the decision to go to war in Iraq, Runciman makes evident its logical flaws. In short, acting cautiously, as prescribed by the precautionary principle, involves taking big risks. In attacking Iraq in the name of 'precaution', Britain and the United States were taking a gamble on the consequences of their actions. They were assuming it was less risky to attack than not to attack. The precautionary principle therefore recommends that you act both cautiously, and not too cautiously, at the same time (p59). As Runciman points out, Blair captured this contradiction in his Sedgfield speech in March 2004: in the same speech, he argued that it was a time to act carefully and address the 'balance of risks', and it was also 'not a time to err on the side of caution' (p59).

Runciman paints a picture that is interestingly paradoxical: a principle justified in the name of caution and risk-aversion, that is at the same time militaristic and foolhardy. Crudely put, it involves dropping bombs in order to remain safe. Yet the weakness of Runciman's book is that he is unable to develop this insight, and to connect it to the later chapters of the book that are more explicitly engaged with questions of political theory. Runciman comes up with a description of Tony Blair's conduct in international politics that is intriguing and question-begging. He describes his behaviour as 'risk-averse brinkmanship'. Blair is willing to gamble with very high stakes, but he does so only on his own terms as an incredibly risk-averse politician. Runciman's inability to explore this description through the dynamics of international politics, and his inability to integrate it into his material on the nature of the modern state, pushes him into highly speculative musings on the psychology of Tony Blair. In one of the weakest parts of the book, Runciman tries to explain Blair's risk aversion through an account of the impact of the Suez affair on the British establishment, and on Blair in particular as a pupil of the same school that produced Selwyn Lloyd, 'Eden's hapless Foreign Secretary' (p73). Runciman implies that Blair became suffused with the risk aversion of the post-Suez British establishment through his attendance at Fettes school, a school which had burnt on 5 November 1956, at the height of the Suez crisis, an effigy of Hugh Gaitskell, leader of the Labour Party at the time and one who opposed the Suez intervention.

There is, however, an alternative explanation, which draws together Runciman's discussion of the dilemmas of the modern state and his observations on the language of risk and Blair's peculiar blend of risk aversion and militarism. Runciman himself comes close to making the link, but the absence of any overarching framework for his ideas prevents him from drawing the disparate themes together. In his critique of Robert Cooper's book, The Breaking of Nations (2004), Runciman insightfully notes that Cooper's vision of postmodern politics is in fact not a vision of politics at all. In Cooper's postmodern world, the state is 'nothing more that the name we give to an indeterminate set of relations between the subjects of rights' (p147). For Runciman, this poses the question, which has animated thinkers from Hobbes to Hegel, of what it is that can hold states together. Commenting on the 'postmodern state', Runciman argues that 'if the state spreads itself too thinly across the disconnected and diffuse networks of personal identity, it will simply dissipate' (p144). Runciman's critique of Cooper is that as well as not providing any coherent answer to the reoccurring question of modern politics - what is the glue that will hold modern states together? - he in fact relies upon those very institutions of modernity that he believes Europe has transcended as the basis for his 'liberal imperialism'. Runciman correctly observes that what Cooper describes as the foreign policy of a 'postmodern polity' is in fact little more than an exercise in building modern states. Such has been the EU's goal in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and even further afield.

What Runciman misses is that the lack of imagination suffered by Cooper - that is, his inability to transcend the framework of the modern state as a means of reconciling the tensions within modern politics - is also what drives Blairite militarism. The postmodern identity, as argued by Philip Cunliffe in his spiked review article Ethical Imperialism, is forged through war and international intervention. What is missing from contemporary British politics is precisely the subjective unity of the nation that has traditionally provided the solution to the dilemmas of modern politics identified by Runciman. This absence is not in any way linked to Tony Blair's psychology. It is, rather, the central feature of the political moment that Blair confronts. And his response to it has been to try to achieve that subjective unity through the language of human rights and ethical interventions. His failure in this regard has driven him to search for the same unity in the language of terrorism, security and risk. Runciman notes that Blair came to embrace the language of risk in the period between interventions in Kosovo and Iraq. He also notes that what changed with 9/11 was a darkening of Blair's rhetoric, and a greater sense of foreboding. What Runciman misses is that this shift was driven by a failure to respond to the structural crisis faced by Blair's government: how to generate a unified sense of purpose that could give life to the institutions of government, in the absence of those forces that had hitherto done the job.

Unable to unite his political theory with his insights into today's 'politics of good intentions', Runciman's final chapter on the Abbé Sieyès falls flat. This is unfortunate, as this figure of the French Revolution provides a perfect opportunity with which to explore the contours and vicissitudes of the current political moment. Sieyès played a crucial role in the Revolution, as the person who sought above all to create the institutions of government best able to accommodate the demands made by the nascent French bourgeoisie, the famous 'third estate' that had hitherto been 'nothing', was 'everything', and wanted to become 'something'*. Sieyès understood the mechanism of representation as the single most important mediation in a modern society of disparate and isolated individuals, yet also saw the necessity in ensuring that such representation was conducive to achieving a unity of the body politic. Sieyès located this unity in the nation, much in the same way that Hobbes had located it in the Leviathan. Runciman takes Sieyès as an example of the possible solutions that exist to the problems of unity and diversity thrown up by political modernity. In his words, Sieyès believed that 'the French people had a clear political identity because they constituted a nation, just as the French nation had a stable political character only when it was constituted by its people' (p173). According to Runciman, in order to answer the current dilemma of whether we can 'transcend national politics while still retaining the coherence of a popularly constituted representative system' (ibid) we need an Abbé Sieyès of the 21st century.

Unfortunately, this is exactly what we do not need today. Sieyès, as his writing makes clear, was attempting to build political institutions that were able to encompass the claims for representation and participation that were bursting forth from French society. He believed in the unity of the nation as a necessary mediation between the public and the exercise of power. The alternative was the Jacobins' 'people', a far more direct form of self-representation. In both cases, the problem was the institutional form to be taken by a public determined that it should be represented. The problem posed by Cooper's 'postmodern state', and expressed in Blairite risk averse militarism, is precisely the opposite. At a time when people are disengaged from politics, and when popular nationalism plays a very weak role in public life, politicians are having to find for themselves meaning and purpose. At the same time, they are no longer able to use the language of representation in order to justify their actions. This is what has pushed Tony Blair into the direction of militarism, and what has brought forth the language of 'good intentions'.

There is everything in Runciman's book from which to drawn these conclusions, but Runciman doesn't have a grasp of the current political moment that he would need to do so. The book on the post 9/11, post-Iraq world remains to be written.

* Sieyès' famous words are '1. What is the Third Estate? - Everything. 2. What, until now, has it been in the existing political order? - Nothing. 3. What does it want to be? - Something.' Sieyès, Political Writings (2003) p94.