Books like Confronting Leviathan by David Runciman

Francis Fukuyama traces how diverse societies have arrived at their present political arrangements, exploring the historical and comparative routes that shape modern states.

Hannah Arendt’s seminal study charts the rise of totalitarianism from 19th‑century anti‑Semitism and European colonialism to the emergence of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, examining propaganda, terror, and mass mobilization.

Moisés Naím explores how today’s leaders wield less absolute power, as micro‑level forces challenge established elites in politics, business, and society.

Francis Fukuyama traces how societies build strong, impersonal, and accountable political institutions from the French Revolution to the Arab Spring, analyzing corruption, colonial legacies, and the future of democracy.

Explains why revolution often leads to war, using case studies of the French, Russian, and Iranian revolutions.

"John Hobson claims that throughout its history most international theory has been embedded within various forms of Eurocentrism. Rather than producing value-free and universalist theories of inter-state relations, international theory instead provides provincial analyses that celebrate and defend Western civilization as the subject of, and ideal normative referent in, world politics. Hobson also provides a sympathetic critique of Edward Said's conceptions of Eurocentrism and Orientalism, revealing how Eurocentrism takes different forms, which can be imperialist or anti-imperialist, and showing how these have played out in international theory since 1760. The book thus speaks to scholars of international relations and also to all those interested in understanding Eurocentrism in the disciplines of political science/political theory, political economy/international political economy, geography, cultural and literary studies, sociology and, not least, anthropology"--