Hello, I'm Catherine Carr, producer of Talking Politics. Today's talk is about a book written more than 60 years ago, but as relevant today as it has ever been.

Hannah Arendes, the human condition, explores how the ways we consume and the ways we work have a profound influence on who we are and how we do politics.

Europe's leading literary magazine. After each episode, continue your exploration of the history of ideas in their unrivaled

archive of essays and reviews, films and podcasts podcasts and find out more about how a subscription to the LRB

can be an indispensable home learning and student resource

by heading over to their website

LRB.r.

me forward slash ideas.

That's L.r.

dot me forward slash ideas.

Quite a few of the authors that I've talked about in this series have been very strong critics of the basic idea of modern politics at least as it manifested itself in their time. They kind of hated the state as they saw it.

Wolsomcraft hated her state for everything that it left out, all the power and corruption that it turned a blind eye to, concealed, ignored.

Marks and Engels hated the state for everything. ignored. of capitalist economic order that the state tried to cover up.

Gandy hated the modern state for what it did to the experience of being human,

the way it mechanized it, rationalized it, distorted it and again ultimately corrupted it.

And so in their way these critics were critics of Hobbsian state for what it left out, for what it tried to freeze in place,

for what it distorted and corrupted by being too mechanical, too rational, too impersonal.

And yet, I think it's fair to say that Walsden Craft, Marks, Engels, Gandhi

weren't thinking about Hobbs at all. Why would they? For them Hobbs, insofar as they were aware, was an

incidental figure in the history of ideas. That's often how he's been treated. People have often thought of Hobbs as a kind of outlier, slightly eccentric because he really was pretty eccentric.

Almost absurd, a kind of example of what happens if a very clever person is allowed to run away with an idea

and take it to its absurd conclusion. That's obviously not how I see Hobbs. I think Hobbs is in many ways the presiding genius of modern politics.

...