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 Hobbs in his classic book

Leviathan. It's a story of cowardice and courage, war and peace, terror and the

search for security. It's all here.

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forward slash ideas. 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 organize 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 Hobbs 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 Hobbs 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.

...