Confronting Leviathan: A History of Ideas

Description

Based on the History Of Ideas podcast series by Talking Politics host David Runciman, A History of Ideas 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.

David Runciman is Professor of Politics at Cambridge University and the former Head of the Department of Politics and International Studies. He is the author of six previous books, including Where Power Stops, How Democracy Ends (Profile), Political Hypocrisy, The Confidence Trap and Politics (for the Ideas in Profile series). He writes regularly about politics for the London Review of Books and hosts the widely acclaimed weekly podcast Talking Politics.

'Praise for How Democracy Ends: Presented in pellucid prose free of the jargon of academic political science, How Democracy Ends is a strikingly readable and richly learned contribution to understanding the world today ... surely one of the most luminously intelligent books on politics to have been published for many years.' - John Gray 'Bracingly intelligent ... a wonderful read' - Mark Mazower 'Full of intriguing new lines of thought' - Gideon Rachman 'Clear-headed, compact and timely' - Irish Times 'Refreshingly free of received and rehearsed wisdoms, Runciman doesn't tiptoe around sacred cows and invites us to take part in that most adult way of thinking: to examine contradictory ideas in tandem and ponder what the dissonance amounts to. . . . [H]e argues lucidly, persuasively, even exhilaratingly at times. The nightly news will never appear exactly the same again' - Australian