The relationship between the state and the people is always problematic. Some see it as a contract that entails insurmountable issues, both within and outside its framework of power. Ultimately, who governs whom?

In this book, the leading British political scientist examines, through 12 works that mark corresponding milestones in the history of ideas from the 17th century to the present day, a series of philosophical views surrounding the relationship between the rulers and the ruled. At the starting point, we find Thomas Hobbes, who in 1651 in Leviathan likens the state to the biblical monster of the same name.

Ransiman thoroughly presents the positive and negative positions articulated about the state by theorists, from Wollstonecraft to MacKinnon and from Marx to Fukuyama, over the four centuries that have passed since the publication of Leviathan. He shows how this particular work influenced cataclysmic events, such as the American Revolution, radical movements like the second wave of feminism, and major texts like the Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels, Gandhi's Hind Swaraj, and Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America.

By analyzing the most significant ideas that shaped political thought over the last 500 years, Ransiman demonstrates how various crises, revolutions, and disasters opened new pathways in political thinking. And how we today can better understand the world we live in by revisiting the history of ideas.

"Every reader who wonders at the inertia, almost paralysis, characterizing democratic governance in many countries will find this particularly interesting."      New York Review of Books

"Ransiman has the intellectual maturity to address the subject without evasion. This book forever changes the way we view the evening news!"      Australian

"Incredibly timely, written with excellent style and clarity."      Irish Times