The circumstances of Leviathan’s publication and its arcane language may seem remote, but Hobbes’s argument, that the sovereign holds unlimited rights in seeking the populace’s safety, feels remarkably timely. On 23 September this year, Melbourne began a world-record 235th day in lockdown. At the time, more than half of Australia’s population was under restrictive stay-at-home orders. In May, the Australian Federal Court upheld the federal government’s ban on returnees from India, citing the Biosecurity Act 2015’s intent ‘to impinge on common law rights’ to protect public health.

Hobbes’s seeming timeliness provides the starting point for David Runciman’s Confronting Leviathan: A history of ideas. Runciman, a professor of politics at the University of Cambridge, has been writing on politics and political thought in academic and public contexts since the mid-1990s. His first essay in the London Review of Books, on the National Lottery, appeared in 1996, a year before Cambridge’s Ideas in Context series published his first monograph, Pluralism and the Personality of the State. These early publications remain indicative of Runciman’s characteristic blend of accessible style and deep scholarship.

Confronting Leviathan is based on the first series of Runciman’s podcast ‘History of Ideas’, a spinoff of the LRB’s ‘Talking Politics’, which he hosts with Helen Thompson. It constitutes an intellectual history from the seventeenth century to the present, relating ‘the history of ideas to the big political themes thrown up by the pandemic’. Its unifying narrative is the modern state, defined in terms of representation and limitless coercive power to secure public safety. Although ‘almost everything about politics over the last four hundred years has changed’, the modern state and its ‘core paradox’ remain: the state’s potential as saviour or destroyer.

Runciman traces the modern state’s history through twelve texts, beginning with Leviathan, as it initiates ‘our story’ as ‘moderns – modern citizens or modern subjects of modern states’. Whereas pre-moderns separated rulers and ruled into rivals, Hobbes conjoined them in a ‘mechanical embrace’. Hobbes claimed that humans – driven by natural law to escape their ‘nasty, brutish, and short’ lives in the state of nature – contract together to create the state and its sovereign representative. The machinery of state and sovereignty is thus constituted of the people, who relinquish their rights to the sovereign, providing it unrestrained ‘power and authority’ over them.

Taking a serial contextualist approach, Runciman situates his remaining texts within their historical moment while exploring how each engaged with Hobbes’s state. So-called ‘great book’ histories of political thought typically venerate Western male writers. Confronting Leviathan diversifies this canon. Gender and nationality are not the only metrics to judge genealogies, but this biographical diversity underpins argumentative variety. Critiques of the Hobbesian state include Mary Wollstonecraft’s insistence that states must provide ‘genuine political equality’, Benjamin Constant regarding freedom’s contingency on ‘political participation’, and Gandhi and Frantz Fanon on colonialism revealing the modern state’s ‘coercive heart’. Alexis de Tocqueville’s and Francis Fukuyama’s concern that democratic representation leads to stagnation, and Max Weber on the necessity that representatives balance ‘conviction and responsibility’, inflect Hobbes’s argument.

Throughout, Runciman emerges as a cautious defender of the state. Against Friedrich Hayek’s critique that over-active states risk ‘tyranny’, he argues that ‘the state could prove decisive’ against climate catastrophe. Catharine A. MacKinnon’s demand that states address gender-based violence is reconfigured as fundamentally Hobbesian: a demand that the state ‘use its violence against other forms of violence’. Responding to Hannah Arendt’s accusation that the state reduces humans to machines of ‘calculation and computation’, Runciman suggests it could be on ‘our side’ against increasingly invasive technologies. He similarly claims that the state may hold the power to break the capitalism-crisis nexus identified by Marx and Engels. Runciman’s conclusion blends optimism and warning. The modern state is ‘contingent’, not ‘inevitable’. But for now, states ‘have life-and-death power over us’ and, as states are constituted by our will, ‘we have power over them’. The representative state possesses terrifying coercive force, but faced with predatory capitalism, climate disaster, health crisis, and technological overreach, we may need ‘the power of the state to save us’.

At a time of declining numbers of history graduates across the Anglosphere, Confronting Leviathan insists on history’s importance. From the English Civil Wars to the Cold War through natural law, democracy, feminist and post-colonial theory, machine learning, and climate change, it demonstrates Quentin Skinner’s assertion that ‘to understand the state, you have no option but to be a historian’. But Runciman’s argumentative ambitiousness brings dangers. Confronting Leviathan hinges on Runciman’s claim that his authors all wrote within a ‘Hobbesian world’. This argument presumes Hobbes initiated an epochal shift in political structures towards a modern statehood that centralised authority in the sovereign representative, conflating political thought and political life.

Rival intellectual traditions have sought to disperse authority, and this is often closer to reality. Dispersed authority is frequently associated with James Madison’s separation of ‘legislative, executive, and judiciary powers’, mentioned in passing by Runciman. Matthew Hale, the most senior common lawyer in England between 1671 and 1675, claimed that Hobbes spoke of ‘absolute Dominion or Sovereignty’, a ‘rare’ condition compared to sovereignty subject to ‘Qualifications’. In England, this meant sovereignty subject to common law. Hale was likely thinking of the 1610 Case of Proclamations, where Edward Coke cited the fifteenth-century judge John Fortescue to rule that sovereign prerogative could not violate ‘the law of the land’: statute, common law, and custom.

In 2019, the UK Supreme Court deemed unlawful Boris Johnson’s attempt to prorogue Parliament, citing Coke’s judgment. Although prorogation was a prerogative power of the Crown as ‘sovereign in person’, it violated ‘Parliamentary sovereignty’. The case entailed a clash between Crown and Parliament’s rival sovereign authorities, subject to common law arbitration. Rather than Hobbes initiating an epochal shift, the modern English state remains reliant on a judicial tradition dispersing authority and stretching back at least two centuries before Leviathan’s publication. Australia’s separation of powers comprises a more divided configuration. Our head of state is the monarch of another state: the queen of England. This structure resulted in our most famous constitutional crisis, the 1975 dismissal of the elected prime minister, Gough Whitlam, by the governor-general, the queen’s representative in Australia.

Our states remain, as Michael Oakeshott put it, ‘various and ramshackle’, constituted by rival authorities holding varied powers. Hobbes did not invent the modern state, but he engaged in a battle over it that we inherit. Histories like Runciman’s are critical to our participation in this battle. A second series of ‘History of Ideas’ is out, and Runciman has acknowledged that the story he has told is one among many. Telling these stories is necessary to comprehend our world’s complexities and to confront its challenges.