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 lockdown.

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, and pandemics – generated these new ways of political thinking.