Head of Department
Professor of Politics
University Teaching Officer
Trinity Hall
Office hours: Fridays 12-1pm
Biography:
Professor Runciman became Head of Department in October 2014. He gave his Inaugural Lecture on "Political Theory and Real Politics in the Age of the Internet" on Tuesday 24th February 2015, which can be viewed online here.
Professor Runciman also leads the team on the ELECTION podcast, the University's weekly politics podcast; asking the questions that no one else is in the run-up to the British General Election with the most interesting people inside and outside the political arena. All the episodes can be listened to online, or downloaded through iTunes.
Research Interests
Late-nineteenth and twentieth century political thought; theories of the state and of political representation; various aspects of contemporary political philosophy and contemporary politics.
Current research projects:
Conspiracy and Democracy: a five-year Leverhulme-funded research program based in CRASSH
Key Publications
Politics: Ideas in Profile (Profile Books, June 2014)
The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis from the First World War to the Present (Princeton University Press, 2013)
'Hobbes's theory of representation: anti-democratic or proto-democratic?', in Representation and Popular Rule ed. Ian Shapiro and Alexander Kirshner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)
Political Hypocrisy: The Mask of Power from Hobbes to Orwell and Beyond (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008)
Representation (with Monica Brito Vieira) (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008)
'The paradox of political representation', Journal of Political Philosophy 15, 1 (2007), pp. 93–114
The Politics of Good Intentions: History, Fear and Hyprocrisy in the New World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
An archive of David Runciman's writing for the London Review of Books is available here: