Confronting Leviathan: A History of Ideas

(Paperback, Main)

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'Bracingly intelligent ... a wonderful read' - Guardian

'Incredibly timely ... presented [with] wonderful elegance and clarity' - Irish Times

Based on the History Of Ideas podcast series by Talking Politics host David Runciman, Confronting Leviathan explores some of the most important thinkers and prominent ideas lying behind modern politics - from Hobbes to Gandhi, from democracy to patriarchy, and from revolution to lock down.

While explaining the most important and often-cited ideas of thinkers such as Constant, De Tocqueville, Marx and Engels, Hayek, MacKinnon and Fukuyama, David Runciman shows how crises - revolutions, wars, depressions, pandemics - generated these new ways of political thinking. This is a history of ideas to help make sense of what's happening today.

Reviews

'Bracingly intelligent ... a wonderful read' - Mark Mazower

'Incredibly timely ... wonderful elegance and clarity through which complex ideas are presented ... That the book helps make thinking about the state enjoyable is just the least of its many exceptional qualities' - Paschal Donohoe

'A brilliant introduction for anyone looking to engage with political debates beyond the headlines ... Excellent' - Joshua Pugh Ginn

'A studiously accessible work' - Times Higher Education

'Praise for How Democracy Ends:
Presented in pellucid prose free of the jargon of academic political science, it is a strikingly readable and richly learned contribution to understanding the world today...one of the most luminously intelligent books on politics to have been published for many years.' - John Gray

Author Bio

David Runciman is Professor of Politics at Cambridge University. He is the author of six previous books, including Where Power Stops, How Democracy Ends, Political Hypocrisy and The Confidence Trap. He writes regularly for the London Review of Books and hosts the widely acclaimed weekly podcast Talking Politics, which has been downloaded 25 million times.