David Runciman

The Hon. David Walter Runciman (born 1967) is a British political scientist who teaches political theory 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 worked as a columnist for The Guardian newspaper and written for many other publications. He currently writes about politics for the London Review of Books. His monograph, The Politics of Good Intentions, was adapted in part from his LRB articles. His book, Political Hypocrisy (2008), explores the political uses of hypocrisy from a historical perspective. His latest book, 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.

Runciman is heir to his family's Viscountcy.

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. He specialises in the development of the theory of the modern state and on aspects of contemporary politics.

After a book review in The Guardian of Antifragility by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, that author referred to Runciman as the "second most stupid reviewer" of his works, arguing that Runciman had missed the concept of convexity, the theme of Taleb's book. "There are 607 references to convexity", Taleb wrote.

David Runciman is married to the food writer Bee Wilson.

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