Confronting Leviathan review – a history of ideas for the modern reader

Confronting Leviathan: A History of Ideas by David Runciman (Profile Books), £20.

The Cambridge-based political scientist David Runciman’s Confronting Leviathan: A History of Ideas is a buzzy “how to think” guide to a pleasing variety of modern political thinkers. First conceived of as a series of lectures broadcast on the LRB’s Talking Politics podcast during the first lockdown, of which Runciman is a long-time host alongside New Statesman contributor and fellow academic Helen Thompson.

Runciman avoids the more traditional “intellectual history” canon – Machiavelli, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Nietzche etc. – to deliver an “underground” history of modern thought – here we have Wollstonecraft alongside Marx, Fukuyama by Fanon. Read together (for many of the essays cover a familiar territory: how does political order emerge, what is the state for, what is special about modern political life); they are a compelling call to action to think more deeply about the underlying structure of contemporary political debates.

The selection of essays in Confronting Leviathan reminded me of Isaiah Berlin’s essays on less-storied philosophers of the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment, which introduced the general public to the deep histories of fascism and communism and the utopian projects of the 20th century. Both writers, unconsciously or not, illuminate for me a central truth of modern politics – there is not a question posed within contemporary debates on race, gender and culture that does not have some sort of answer or critique in the authors of the past. 

Runciman’s expansive choice of authors, including a fascinating essay on the enduring relevance of Mahatma Gandhi politics of self-rule and non-violent protest, brings those debates into focus in elegant style.

Runciman skilfully weaves Covid-19 and the lockdowns of 2020 into essays on authors where those themes have relevance, especially into his thrilling text on Hobbes and the State. 

I’m afraid that so much British journalistic culture has tended to see the pandemic as a series of biomedical crises in light of which “luxuries” of life, like human contact, sociability, travel and right of assembly are totally contingent – how many Number 10 press conferences hosted by scientific advisors and cabinet ministers, were dominated by questions like “when can we go on holiday again?” or, more commonly, “isn’t letting us go on holiday dangerous?”?

By contrast, Runciman, led by Hobbes takes us into more fundamental questions – what does the pandemic reveal about the power of the modern state? Can we confront Leviathan? Do we even want to?

Confronting Leviathan, and indeed Runciman’s efforts via podcast to marry academia and popular debate, also represents a minor riposte to the familiar cliché that Britain has no tradition of public intellectuals or that its culture doesn’t put much value in the currency of ideas.

Perhaps we aren’t as ostentatious as the French, where even popular morning shows are full of philosophical degustation and discussions about what we might call “high culture,” opera, poetry, plays etc. But there is still plenty of demand in this country for academics who can speak comprehensible English and know what it takes to command an audience beyond the lecture hall. The recent runaway success of podcasts like The Rest is History, hosted by historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, shows how wide that audience is.

Runciman’s easy, conversational style is a good template for anyone who wants to write fluently about the world of ideas. Let’s hope Confronting Leviathan is followed by many more monographs on the great issues of the day from a thinker in fine form.