Hello, I'm Catherine Carr, the producer of Talking Politics. This is the first talk in our new series, History of Ideas.

To kick off, David introduces us to the ideas of Thomas Hobbes in his classic book Leviathan.

It's a story of cowardice, encouraged, war and peace, terror and the search for security. It's all here.

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Why start with Thomas Hobbes and Leviathan? Why start in 1651? The history of political ideas goes back much further than that, and many of the ideas that we still use to organise our political life had their origins in the ancient world with the Greeks, Plato, Aristotle, ideas like democracy, injustice 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. The first is just such an amazing book, Leviathan.

There really isn't another book like it about politics. It feels a bit like a jolt in the history of ideas. It has some claims to be the most rational book ever written about politics.

But it's also slightly mad. And Hobbes may have been a little bit mad when he wrote it. He wrote it in very late middle age. He'd been very sick, not that long before he nearly died.

And there is a view that he might still have had what used to be called brain fever. And Leviathan reads like the work of someone who was a bit feverish.

Hobbes was among many other things a mathematician. And the book is inspired in part by a kind of mathematical geometrical understanding of politics.

But it's also a work of art. The language in it is extraordinary. It's metaphorical and allegorical and analogical.

The title of Leviathan, that means a biblical seamonster. This is a book that is both about Euclidean geometry and about biblical imagery.

Like I said, there really isn't anything like it. But another reason to start with this book and with Hobbes is that it is the beginning of one story in the history of ideas.

And you could say it's our story, not us as human beings. That's the older, longer story. That's the one that goes back to the ancient Greeks and much further back than that.

This is the story of us as moderns, modern citizens or modern subjects of modern states.

The modern state, the idea of the modern state is still the organizing principle and institution of our politics and our world.

And it's the idea that I'm going to use to try and structure some themes through this series of talks.

There is a real question now, even now as I record this, I'm recording this at the time of coronavirus.

About whether that period dominated by the idea of the modern state is coming to an end, it may be just now starting.

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