History of Ideas: Hobbes on the State
TALKING POLITICS
Catherine Carr
4.7 • 2.5K Ratings
🗓️ 27 April 2020
⏱️ 60 minutes
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Summary
Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) reimagined how we could do politics. It redefined many of the ideas that continue to shape modern politics: representation, sovereignty, the state. But in Leviathan these ideas have a strange and puzzling power. David explores what Hobbes was trying to achieve and how a vision of politics that came out of the English civil war, can still illuminate the world we live in.
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Going Deeper:
- David Runciman, ‘The sovereign’ in The Oxford handbook of Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)
- Richard Tuck, Hobbes a Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)
- (Video) Quentin Skinner, ‘What is the state? The question that will not go away’
- (Video) Sophie Smith, ‘The nature of politics’, the 2017 Quentin Skinner lecture.
- Noel Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)
- David for The Guardian on Hobbes and the coronavirus
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Catherine Carr, the producer of talking politics. |
| 0:11.5 | This is the first talk in our new series, History of Ideas. |
| 0:16.0 | To kick off, David introduces us to the ideas of Thomas Hobbes in his classic book Leviathan. It's a story of cowardice |
| 0:24.1 | and courage, war and peace, terror and the search for security. It's all here. Talking politics, |
| 0:36.1 | history of ideas is brought to you in partnership with the London Review of Books, |
| 0:40.3 | Europe's leading literary magazine. After each episode, continue your exploration of the history of ideas |
| 0:47.1 | in their unrivaled archive of essays and reviews, films and podcasts, and find out more about how a subscription to the |
| 0:55.9 | LRB can be an indispensable home learning and student resource by heading over to their website |
| 1:02.0 | LRB.m.me forward slash ideas. That's LRB.m. me forward slash ideas. |
| 1:19.8 | Why start with Thomas Hobbs and Leviathan? |
| 1:22.4 | Why start in 1651? |
| 1:26.5 | The history of political ideas goes back much further than that and many of the the ideas that we still use to organise our political life have their origins in the ancient world with the Greeks, Plato, Aristotle, ideas like democracy and justice and law. And that, of course, is one place we could start. But I want to start later than that, and I want to start with Hobbes for two reasons. |
| 1:46.9 | The first, it's just such an amazing book, Leviathan. There really isn't another book like it |
| 1:53.1 | about politics. It feels a bit like a jolt in the history of ideas. It has some claims to be the |
| 2:00.6 | most rational book ever written about |
| 2:02.7 | politics, but it's also slightly mad, and Hobbes may have been a little bit mad when he wrote |
| 2:09.9 | it. He wrote it in very late, middle age. He'd been very sick, not that long before he nearly |
| 2:16.8 | died. |
| 2:21.8 | And there is a view that he might still have had what used to be called brain fever. |
| 2:27.3 | And Blavathan reads like the work of someone who was a bit feverish. |
| 2:30.6 | Hobbes was, among many other things, a mathematician. |
| 2:35.1 | And the book is inspired in part by a kind of mathematical, |
... |
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