'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.