David Runciman - Confronting Leviathan

CONFRONTING LEVIATHAN

ALSO BY DAVID RUNCIMAN

Where Power Stops

How Democracy Ends

Political Hypocrisy

The Confidence Trap

Politics

A History of Ideas

DAVID RUNCIMAN

First published in Great Britain in 2021 by

Profile Books Ltd

29 Cloth Fair

London

EC1A 7JQ

www.profilebooks.com

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Copyright David Runciman, 2021

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 78816 782 6

eISBN 978 1 78283 838 8

This book is based on a series of talks I gave in the spring and early summer of 2020. That was the time when the UK, like much of the rest of the world, was under strict lockdown. Schools and universities were shut, most people were confined to their homes and a lot of us had time on our hands. The talks were put out as part of the Talking Politics podcast, which I have been hosting since 2016. I hoped to do two things: first, to offer some fresh thinking for politics students and others who were cut off from their usual places of learning; second, to try to relate the history of ideas to the big political themes thrown up by the pandemic. Being under lockdown is a singular political experience. We were being coerced for our own safety. We were being told to give up our freedoms in order to save lives. Never having been through a pandemic before, the starkness of these choices was a novelty for many of us. But I also felt that they were very familiar from key pieces of writing about politics over the past four centuries. In this book I identify twelve such pieces of writing and try to explain what they meant in their own time and what they might mean for us now.

The central organising theme is the idea of the modern state. I explain in the first chapter what I understand by this idea, where it came from and how its origins connect to many of the dilemmas we are facing today. Each of the chapters that follows can be read as a separate account in its own right, but together they form a single story, which explores what happened to the idea of the modern state from the middle of the seventeenth century to the end of the twentieth. It takes in wars and revolutions, the rise and fall of empires, the spread of democracy and the failure of communism, as well as feminist and post-colonial critiques. Almost everything about politics over the last four hundred years has changed beyond recognition, and yet the central puzzles of power, leadership, accountability and liberty remain. To be a citizen of a modern state in the early twenty-first century is to enjoy extraordinary advantages and to face unprecedented challenges. At the same time, it is to come face to face with the core paradox of modern politics: is the state that we built to keep us safe going to be our saviour or our destroyer? Could it somehow be both?

I have tried to retain the conversational style of the original talks as far as possible. I wanted to avoid getting bogged down in academic debates and have steered clear of technical language. This is a personal take on these classic texts, and it is very much in my own words. I have added a few quotations so we have some of the authors own words too, which was not possible in the talks (when I was trying to speak as far as I could without referring to notes). Each chapter has a short biographical sketch of the author in question and the book ends with suggestions for further reading, listening and watching. There is a wealth of excellent material out there on all of the people and ideas I discuss in this book. Now that schools and universities are re-opening I am sure that some readers will also be getting alternative takes on these themes. This is not intended to be a definitive account. But I hope that, for anyone interested in the big ideas of modern politics that continue to shape how we all live, this book is a good place to start thinking about what is at stake.

Cambridge

May 2021

Thomas Hobbes (15881679) was born near Malmesbury in Wiltshire, the son of a poor clergyman. His uncle paid for him to go to Oxford as an undergraduate, where Hobbes complained about not being allowed to study mathematics. Instead, he learned the classics, and learned to dislike them. He subsequently went to work as a tutor for the wealthy Cavendish family in Derbyshire and he remained with the family for most of the rest of his life. He produced three versions of his political philosophy during the turbulent period of the English Civil War: Elements of Law in 1640 (which was a privately circulated pamphlet), De Cive in 1642 and Leviathan in 1651. His core political thinking remained broadly consistent throughout these three works, but its implications varied with the changing political circumstances. The Elements was strongly Royalist, De Cive and Leviathan somewhat less so. After the restoration of the monarchy he wrote a history of the conflict called Behemoth, which was very critical of the parliamentarians. It was only published posthumously. He also wrote widely on mathematics, optics, physics and the law, and he translated Homers Odyssey and Iliad into English verse. He remained prolific into his old age, despite having the shaking palsy (probably Parkinsons disease). He died a week after suffering a stroke, and there was some controversy, given his reputation for atheism, about whether he took Holy Communion before the end. He never married.

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Why begin with Thomas Hobbes and Leviathan? Why start in 1651? After all, the history of ideas goes back much further than that. Many of the concepts that we still use to organise our political life have their origins in the ancient world, with philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, and with ideas such as democracy, justice and law. That is one place we could begin. But I want to start a lot later, and I want to start with Hobbes for two reasons.

First, because Leviathan is simply such an amazing piece of writing. There really isnt another book like it. It feels like a jolt in the history of ideas. It has some claims to be the most rational book ever written about politics, but it is also slightly mad, and Hobbes may have been a little bit mad when he wrote it. He produced it as a relatively old man by the standards of the time (he was sixty-three when it was published). Hed been dangerously ill just beforehand and had nearly died. He may still have been suffering from the after-effects of what used to be called brain fever during its composition.