In defence of the political essay
For many, AI is a storm brewing; an existential threat to fundamental aspects of our society and our democratic system. In October 2023, Professor David Runciman discussed this topic with Professor Shannon Vallor of the Edinburgh Futures Institute amongst the exquisite high grooved pillars of the Playfair Library, University of Edinburgh. The calm, engaging conversation in the hall contrasted markedly with the wind and lashing rain outside on South Bridge.
As I sat, I was taken back to a previous event in this august hall, and another by a distinguished professor of politics: Sir Bernard Crick’s Mackintosh Memorial Lecture of 2007, ‘The Four Nations: Interrelations’.[1] It was one of Crick’s last public performances. He died in December 2008, having lived with prostate cancer for over two decades.
The conversation between Runciman and Vallor was filled with echoes of Crick. Like Crick, Runciman in his writing has wrestled with the leading questions of the day—with AI being the latest manifestation of that. In many ways, a defence of politics was at the heart of the evening's discussion. Politics and the institutions which manifest it, Runciman asserts, is the only force which can deal with the massive challenge posed by AI. But is our politics up to the challenge?
The idea that our politics has reached the stage of crisis has been widely expressed in the academy and amongst political commentators and journalists. The rise of the populist radical right is seen, variously, as a symptom or cause of this malaise. A vast literature has emerged on these themes to which Runciman himself has contributed—including How Democracy Ends, published in 2018.
Runciman’s and Vallor’s discussion also reflected a Crick-like desire to reach beyond the academy to a wider audience. Notable by their absence were explicit references to the academic literature on the subject. This is also true of Runciman’s podcast series (Talking Politics & Past Present Future), which tend to eschew references to secondary literature, making for an engaging listen even for those who are not that familiar with the ideas, thinkers or essayists being discussed.
In order to reach wider publics, both have promoted a particular mode of political writing: the essay. In addition to his academic writing, Runciman regularly essays in the LRB. Crick’s most famous work is his much cited In Defence of Politics (1962), often seen more of an essay than a substantial treatise. Later editions are only thickened by the numerous ‘footnotes’ that Crick subsequently added, clarifying and fleshing out aspects of the argument. In Defence of Politics has been described by Labour Peer and academic Maurice Glasman as ‘the most enduring and significant essay on politics to come out of England in the past 100 years’.[2]
It’s now over 15 years since the death of Crick. In a recent article[3], I attempt to make sense of Crick’s wider contribution, beyond the two books he is most famous for, and make the case for the continuing significance of his work. Some of Crick’s themes were echoed by Ben Ansell in his 2023 BBC Reith Lectures, Our Democratic Future, for one, that politics is not about reaching absolute consensus on matters of public controversy, but ‘agreeable disagreement’ over ‘disagreeable disagreement’, and that at a fundamental level, compromise is a necessary component of politics — ‘no one gets what they want’.[4]
The rise of national populism in established democracies has made the defence of politics newly urgent. The threat of populism was a recurrent theme in Crick’s writing.[5] Concerns about a backslide towards ‘anocracy’ (regimes that mix democratic with autocratic features) have been expressed by some commentators. An era of divisive ‘culture war’ politics has rendered Crick’s ‘extremism of the centre’ vital. In short, those in the political realm need to retain a faith that creative conciliation of differing interests is possible.[6] His plea was ‘let us cool the debate, not stir it.’ [7] But also significant was the way that Crick communicated his ideas, namely his promotion of the essay as a vehicle for serious political thinking.
Crick long sought to bridge what he termed the ‘tragic chasm between academic and practical political thinking’.[8] He played a leading role in the Orwell Prize, using monies from the hardback sales of his biography, George Orwell: A Life, to set it up. The prize represents a merging of the literary and even philosophical with the political. It aims to encourage good political writing informed by academic insights but not suffocated by the ‘internalised dialogues of the ivory tower’.[9]
For Crick, Orwell was a model to be emulated, writing seriously about politics in clear language. Crick thought that Orwell should be taken seriously as a political writer and as a ‘political thinker of genuine stature’. Crick, however, was always keen to emphasise that Orwell’s political thinking ought not be judged by the criteria used by political theorists. In short, he believed that ‘if Orwell has genius, it is as an essayist’[10] and ‘not a systematic political thinker’[11] but that the value of the speculative essay was precisely the degree to which it ‘can provoke thought’.[12] Orwell was, according to Crick, 'consistently relevant’ as an essayist, even if as ‘a thinker’ he was ‘not always consistent in his conclusions’.[13]
Crick was a significant advocate of the essay, which he considered ‘a great but under-praised genre of writing in English’.[14] Crick admitted that ‘I enjoy writing essays more than books’[15] and published five volumes of essays during his lifetime. According to Andrew Gamble (another significant figure influenced by Crick), Crick himself ought to be considered ‘one of the great political essayists and reviewers of his generation’.[16]
Runciman’s recent Past Present Future series of podcasts on the great essayists, which includes an excellent episode on Orwell’s The Lion and the Unicorn, has illustrated the richness and variety of the form. Runciman’s series begins with Montaigne, considered by Crick to be the ‘sceptical and discursive father of the essay’. If Montaigne is widely seen as setting the template for the essay, Orwell might be considered as one of the leading modern exponents of the art. Runciman shares Crick’s view that the essay ‘is both profound and popular and of lasting value’. For Runciman, what constitutes a great essay is the way they connect the personal and the particular with a wider story. Using a specific issue or event as a lens, they ‘see the big in the small and the small in the big’.[17] The very best essays pick up on social and political changes in their infancy. For instance, an episode on David Foster Wallace’s essay ‘Up, Simba!’ provided hints of the rise of Trump. Many other analysts of Trumpism and conspiratorial thinking in politics refer back to another classic essay, Richard Hofstadter’s ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’ from 1964. As Runciman puts it, ‘the shortness of the form does not limit its ability to say something bigger’.
In Runciman’s view, the great essays eschew dogmatism and embrace complexity and ambiguity. For example, he argues that the fragmented, unresolved character of Joan Didion’s The White Album reflects the troubled times of late 1960’s America that she explores. Further, Runciman observes, ‘in all the great essays a line of thought is being developed’[18]. This is unusual in the sphere of political writing, where the polemicist with a clear viewpoint dominates, often gliding over the complexity of most political issues and contributing to narrow, siloed, dichotomous thinking.
The novelist and essayist Andrew O’Hagan (who knew Crick via the Orwell Prize) was encouraged by his mentor at the LRB, Mary-Kay Wilmers, to embrace 'not believing too much in what you believe’ and 'allowing ambiguity and ambivalence, two-mindedness'.[19] These qualities are to be found throughout O’Hagan’s non-fiction, including his coverage of the Grenfell Tower fire. O’Hagan wrote a book length essay on the disaster and its aftermath, drawn from interviews with many of those involved. These had revealed a rather complicated story with no single culprit.[20]
O'Hagan’s critique of the media coverage of the Grenfell disaster is instructive; reporting was, O’Hagan felt, marked by pre-existing positions, with different elements in the media wanting to tell the story they expected to tell. In narrowly political writing, square pegs are forced in to fit a predetermined narrative. In contrast, coverage of such events by essayists and others with a more literary sentiment tends to be cooler and more analytical, with judgements that better stand the test of time.
The essay should try to tell a deeper story. Crick felt that the weakest parts of Orwell’s The Lion and the Unicorn were the most polemical. These parts of the essay tended to ‘obscure’ the ‘important, cooler and more analytical judgments about the nature of English society’, that have retained a relevance and resonance.[21] As Crick put it, ‘nothing dates so much as a contemporary polemic’.[22]
Here we might usefully draw a distinction between the essay and the polemical article, the aim of which is to de-contest the contestable, or in Crick’s words, to ‘convert’ by saturating ‘with pontifical fact’. In contrast, the true essayist aims to achieve something different; to ‘arouse, stimulate and provoke’.[23] This is something that remains true of Crick’s essays, many of which retain great relevance to a range of still smouldering debates.
In Runciman’s view, what characterises the essay was an author ‘following a train of thought’, their perspective shifting during the essay. Contrasting again with a newspaper column, expanding on your initial spark forces you to truly grapple with a theme. As we explore a theme in depth, we often find our initial 'hypothesis' to be lacking in some way. We delve deeper. These aspects were very much evident in Crick’s essaying, which often contains a sense of self-exploration; as he remarks on his own practice, ‘I usually can only think in the act of writing’.[24] For Crick, the essay ‘leaves the reader in some uncertainty about what is going to be said next’.[25]
I recently visited Crick’s archive at Birbeck College. One treat was finding some early, unpublished essays written whilst Crick was in the USA in the late 1950s[26]. As a set, they have a flavour of a contemporary blog or Substack. Some have the flavour of a travelogue about them, as he makes his way across the country, experiencing something of the diversity of the US, trying to absorb what he had seen and learnt. These articles display the breadth of his interests, including a piece on the ‘Grand Ole Opry’ in Nashville, and one on ‘Political tradition and the psycho-analytic normal’. These pieces also manifest his belief in thinking by writing, with new themes and inchoate ideas grappled with as he bashed them into his typewriter.
A fine example of Crick essaying in this way was his ‘An Englishman Considers his Passport’[27], in which muses engagingly on the existential questions raised every time he was asked to state his nationality. Crick's essay is a classic in terms of relating his own internal discussion to wider debates, placing them in historical context. This was in line with his view that ‘I am a political theorist and political writer who has always believed in the primacy of historical explanation’.[28] It also contains a number of seeds that would grow in importance in relation to the future of the UK, including increasingly nationalistic sentiment in Scotland and England.
As Runciman and Crick remind us, it is this reflective, open-ended character of the essay which makes it such a vital form, with many of the best having a long ‘afterlife’. It’s a form of writing worth vigorously defending and promoting.
Photo of Bernard Crick by Leslie Hills
© Leslie Hills
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[1] B. Crick, ‘The Four Nations: Interrelations’, Scottish Affairs, Volume 71 (First Series) Issue 1 (2010), pp. 1-15.
[2] M. Glasman, ‘Preface to Bernard Crick, In Defence of Politics’, (Unpublished, 2013).
[3] C. Ellis, ‘The Meddling Professor: Bernard Crick's Active Defence of Politics’, Scottish Affairs, Volume 32, Issue 4, pp. 477-497.
[4] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001t2r7
[5] B. Crick, ‘Populism, Politics and Democracy’, Democratization, Vol.12, No.5 (2005), 625–632.
[6] M. Flinders & M. Hinterleitner, ‘Party Politics vs. Grievance Politics’, Society, 59 (2022), pp. 672–681.
[7] B. Crick, ‘The Four Nations: Interrelations’, Scottish Affairs, Volume 71 (First Series) Issue 1 (2010), pp. 1-15.
[8] C. Ellis, ‘Confronting Plausible Simplicities and Bridging the Tragic Chasm: Bernard Crick’s Political Journalism Reconsidered’, Society, 58 (2021), pp. 483–492.
[9] B. Crick, Political Thoughts and Polemics (Edinburgh University Press, 1990), p. viii.
[10] B. Crick, Crossing Borders: Political Essays (Edinburgh University Press, 2001), p. 212.
[11] B. Crick, Essays on Politics and Literature (Edinburgh University Press, 1989), p. 193.
[12] B. Crick, ‘Them and Us’, in W. John Morgan (ed) Politics and Consensus in Modern Britain (London: Macmillan, 1988), p. 60.
[13] B. Crick, ‘Coming up to Orwell’, New Statesman, 8th October 1971.
[14] B. Crick, ‘Angus the Essayist’, Scottish Affairs, Vol. 52 (First Series) Issue 1 (2005), pp. 110-115.
[15] B. Crick, Political Thoughts and Polemics (Edinburgh University Press, 1990), p. vi.
[16] A. Gamble, ‘Bernard Crick 1929-’, in E. Levenson, G. Lodge & G. Rosen (eds) Fabian Thinkers (London: Fabian Society, 2004).
[17] D. Runciman, ‘The Art of the Essay’, https://podcasts.apple.com/mg/podcast/the-art-of-the-essay/id1682047968?i=1000638520914
[18] ibid.
[19] Andrew O’Hagan, Simon Mayo’s Books of The Year, https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/andrew-ohagan-q-a/id1402579687?i=1000659454878
[20] A. O’Hagan, ‘The Tower’, LRB, June 14th 2017.
[21] B. Crick, ‘Introduction’ to G. Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), p. 28.
[22] B. Crick, The Reform of Parliament (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968), p. ix)
[23] B. Crick, Political Thoughts and Polemics (Edinburgh University Press, 1990), p. vi.
[24] B. Crick, Essays on Politics and Literature (Edinburgh University Press, 1989), p. vi.
[25] B. Crick, ‘Angus the Essayist’, Scottish Affairs, no. 52 (2005), pp. 110-115.
[26] Bernard Crick Archive, GB 1832 CRCK5/1/2.
[28] B. Crick, ‘An Englishman Considers His Passport’, The Irish Review, No. 5 (Autumn, 1988), pp. 1-10.
[29] ‘Introduction’ to unfinished manuscript on The Four Nations, Bernard Crick Archive,
GB 1832 CRCK5/1/13.