When I was an undergraduate in the 1990s the most important book on my shelves was Russell's History of Western Philosophy. Even though Russell insisted on reading each great philosopher as if they were submitting their work for his criticism, there was an implicit recognition of the fact that it mattered that Plato wrote centuries before Augustine, who wrote centuries before Aquinas, who wrote centuries before Hobbes, who wrote centuries before Peirce, James and Santayana. Since the time of Russell it has become impossible to ignore the fact that history bedevils philosophy. This is why books such as Geuss's Changing the Subject (reviewed in Philosophy 94 (2019), 177–182) and Runciman's Confronting Leviathan are so interesting, for what we have in them is something increasingly unusual: that is, a particular contemporary intelligence making singular sense of a collection of ancestral works arranged in order of time.

Geuss chose twelve philosophers. He devoted a chapter each to a work representing the thought of Socrates, Plato, Lucretius, Augustine, Montaigne, Hobbes, Hegel, Nietzsche, Lukacs, Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Adorno. Geuss's theme was how the nature of philosophy had changed from one philosopher to another, and so his chapters were reflective, digressive, essayistic. Runciman, whose particular focus is on politics, devotes twelve chapters to the works of thirteen writers: namely, Hobbes, Wollstonecraft, Constant, Tocqueville, Marx and Engels, Gandhi, Weber, Fanon, Hayek, Arendt, MacKinnon and Fukuyama. Thirteen writers for Runciman, since Marx and Engels form a pair, as compared to eleven writers for Geuss since Socrates was represented by Plato's Apology. But twelve chapters in both. Unlike Geuss, however, Runciman has an extremely focused single argument. The entire axis of his book, as the title suggests, is Hobbes, and Hobbes's particular invention, the ‘modern state’. So the effect of reading Runciman is the opposite of reading Geuss. Whereas Geuss's book was splendidly centrifugal, gracefully throwing out ideas, Runciman's is splendidly centripetal, gravely coming back to his original claim.

The claim is not only that Hobbes invented the modern state, but that the modern state is the foundational and ambiguous resolution of all politics, and that, as such, it is the foundation that much subsequent political thought – at every level, from the most philosophical to the most ideological – has had to respond to: whether to restate it (this is Weber and Fukuyama), or in some manner to advance it in complexity (this is Constant, Tocqueville and Hayek), or to correct it in some radical manner by offering us a more adequate recognition of the plight of the marginalised (this is Wollstonecraft, Fanon and MacKinnon), or to reject it as being a corrupt vision of politics (this is Marx and Engels, Gandhi and Arendt).

Let me state the argument so it is entirely clear.

Politics before Hobbes was always about choosing a preferred model of order, or ‘constitution’: famously, for everyone between Aristotle and Montesquieu, ‘monarchy’, ‘aristocracy’ and ‘democracy’ or, for Machiavelli, ‘monarchies’ and ‘republics’.

Hobbes saw politics in a much simpler, and much more existential manner. The choice was not between one constitution and another, but between order and chaos. The name of chaos was ‘the state of nature’; the name of order was ‘the state’.

The resolution offered by politics in the form of the state was that a choice was no longer made between alternatives but alternatives were suspended in a new form of order which contained ambiguities or antitheses within it. The distinctive way it did this was through the mechanism of ‘representation’: the concept which Runciman credits Hobbes with inventing, and which, in the eighteenth century, was to be seized on by Madison, Paine and Sieyes as the resolution of all difficulty. What representation did was it enabled a political order to be covenanted, or, later, constituted, in such a way that it was both an order ruled by ‘some’ and an order ruled by ‘all’.

The state was therefore, for Hobbes, and for everyone who followed from Hobbes's assumptions, the resolution of all politics. The only remaining problem was that, in refusing to eliminate difficulty, in attempting a dialectical resolution of all difficulty, it left us with the problem of whether the state, which was meant to be the source of our deliverance from chaos into ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’, would in fact turn out to be, by a dangerous dialectical irony, the eventual cause of our loss of all of those things.

That is the original claim of the book, and the remarkable thing about the book is that what it offers throughout its chapters is a series of stark reminders, just when we are in danger of being distracted by some particular motif of a particular author, of the significance of the violin discord of Hobbes's original claim. Runciman is convinced, in short, by a static vision of politics, the one Hobbes established in 1651 in Leviathan.

There are many criticisms one could make of this; though Runciman has to some extent forestalled them by allowing his authors, particularly Marx and Engels, Gandhi and Arendt, to make them forcibly. This, I think, is the second achievement of the book. If the first achievement of the book is in asserting the survival of the Hobbesian vision, the second is in illustrating how some of the most passionately held counter-visions of politics have, in fact, been assertions of simple and beautiful singularities against the ambiguous and dialectical scheme of Hobbes. Runciman says nothing about the traditions of thought which lie behind his own argument. It might seem cavilling, but it is certainly necessary, to say that Runciman was anticipated in his argument by R.G. Collingwood in The New Leviathan (1943), a book that it is rarely read nowadays, despite Collingwood's high reputation. What Collingwood attempted in his remarkably titled book was to revive Hobbes by showing that Hobbes had reconciled two visions of politics. On p. 180 of his book, Collingwood wrote:

Runciman has given us the simplest explanation of why Hobbes's point was so important. In simplifying the Collingwood doctrine, in stripping it of its argumentative carapace and obscure terminology, he has reasserted that central and singular philosophical claim, which is that modern politics is a resolved politics: but a resolved politics which is continually in a state of dissolving into something else: whether in the hands of those theorists who prefer a higher, or purer, or more antique vision of politics, or in the hands of the politicians who chafe against the limitations of the Hobbesian compromise and seek a simpler, more brutal, more total, more locked down vision of politics.

The book might have been improved, though of course it would have been complicated, if Runciman had admitted that the recognition of the doubleness of politics has its own history, and that the clarity of the recognition was minimal in 1651, and likely not evident to Hobbes himself; but was a clear possibility to John Stuart Mill when he wrote about Bentham and Coleridge in the early nineteenth century, and was nothing short of a fundamental presupposition when, after Weber, figures like McIlwain, Ullmann, Berlin, MacIntyre and Oakeshott tried to construct all of history or some significant part of it in terms of antitheses of one sort or another. In addition, Runciman ignores the fact that Hobbes was not so much inventing something novel as characterising something which had always been an element in politics, and which had even been explicit in the Roman Empire in the form of the lex regia: the law, or conviction, that rulers received their imperium from the people: a staggering untruth, of course, in every sense, except that it was believed, as we believe it now, and that believing it did, and does, change everything.

Nonetheless, in bringing this to modern consciousness Hobbes was as original as Runciman suggests. Confronting Leviathan should be read by anyone interested in politics. It gets something across that is simple and original. It explains why, despite whatever the ‘political scientists’ and ‘political philosophers’ might say, politics confounds all science and philosophy. It clarifies why politics is one of the most contorted and difficult subjects in the world. It is as good a place to start in thinking about politics as any book I have ever read.