The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism

by John Gray

Overview

A bold, provocative reckoning with our current political delusions and dysfunctions.

Ever since its publication in 1651, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan has unsettled and challenged how we understand the world. Condemned and vilified by each new generation, his cold political vision continues to see through any number of human political and ethical vanities.

In his wonderfully stimulating book The New Leviathans, John Gray allows us to understand the world of the 2020s with all its contradictions, moral horrors, and disappointments. The collapse of the USSR ushered in an era of near apoplectic triumphalism in the West: a genuine belief that a rational, liberal, well-managed future now awaited humankind and that tyranny, nationalism, and unreason lay in the past. Since then, so many terrible events have occurred and so many poisonous ideas have flourished, and yet our liberal certainties treat them as aberrations that will somehow dissolve. Hobbes would not be so confident.

Filled with fascinating and challenging observations, The New Leviathans is a powerful meditation on historical and current folly. As a species we always seem to be struggling to face the reality of base and delusive human instincts. Might a more self-aware, realistic, and disabused ethics help us?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374609733
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	11/07/2023
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	54,657
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

John Gray is the author of many critically acclaimed books, including The Silence of Animals, The Immortalization Commission, Black Mass, Straw Dogs, and Feline Philosophy. A regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, he has been a professor of politics at Oxford, a visiting professor at Harvard and Yale, and a professor of European thought at the London School of Economics. He now writes full-time.

Hometown:

San Francisco, California

Date of Birth:

1951

Place of Birth:

Houston, Texas

Education:

B.A., M.A., Maharishi European Research University; Ph.D., Columbia Pacific University, 1982

Website:

http://www.marsvenus.com/

Editorial Reviews

09/18/2023

Political philosopher Gray (Feline Philosophy) proffers an idiosyncratic excoriation of liberalism, authoritarianism, and dogmatism in this wild and wide-ranging treatise. Gray’s departure point is 17th-century Englishman Thomas Hobbes, who argued that only Leviathan—the state, a single entity more powerful than any individual—could provide the stability and safety necessary to extinguish the individualistic free-for-all of every man for himself. Gray contends that today, the liberal Leviathan of Western democracy is little more than a hollow husk riven by internal division, and that illiberal worldviews proposed by Russia and China pose a serious threat as appealing alternatives. “The new Leviathans offer meaning in material progress, the security of belonging in imaginary communities and the pleasures of persecution,” he writes, citing as examples the “intelligent despotism” of Xi Jinping’s China and charismatic oligarchy of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Both of these illiberal orders seem, to Gray, to function better and have more promising futures than the woke “antinomian intelligentsia” of Western societies, “which professes to instruct society by deconstructing its institutions and values.” Drawing on thinkers from H.P. Lovecraft to Nietzsche to Russian mystics and 20th-century psychoanalysts, this florid romp, while entertaining, fails to convince. Gray aims to outrage, but for those who do not already agree with him, his impassioned posturing falls flat. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

2023-07-19
In a challenging book, an esteemed philosopher examines how liberalism yielded to a totalitarianism impulse.

Gray is emeritus professor of European thought at the London School of Economics and a prolific author. In his latest, he gathers a number of the themes he has pursued throughout his life and work. He uses Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan as a starting point, explaining how Hobbes believed that a powerful government was necessary to protect people from one another and from external enemies—and nothing more. In the past century, however, we have seen the rise of the “New Leviathans,” who want to go much further, to “become engineers of souls.” Gray looks at the attempts of the Soviet leaders to mold people and at how that pattern was adopted by Putin. It justifies a totalitarian level of control, all in the name of the greater good. There is a similar pattern in China, with leaders who see themselves as fulfilling a quasi-divine purpose. A related strain of thinking Gray labels as “hyper-liberalism,” which “vulgarizes post-modern philosophy.” Though “enclaves of freedom persist…a liberal civilization based on the practice of tolerance has passed into history,” writes the author. “In schools and universities, education inculcates conformity with the ruling progressive ideology. The arts are judged by whether they serve approved political goals.” Gray questions the obsession with race and slavery, noting that slavery and racism have had many faces throughout history, and he views as arrogant the idea that the American experience represents a universal experience. Gray does not provide an easy solution, but he sees an obligation to fight totalitarianism in whatever way we can. He concludes: “If we go on, it is because we cannot do otherwise. It is life that pulls us on, against the tide, life that steers us into the storm.”

Dense with provocative ideas—a solid choice for budding political philosophers.

Kirkus Reviews

"[Gray's] is a calm, exacting voice, which does not rise above its measured tone even when he is relating the most egregious excesses of the past or delivering the direst predictions for the future. No Cassandra has ever spoken with such studied reserve, which makes his message all the more persuasive . . . Gray displays his accustomed mastery in the examples he adduces in support of his contentions . . . The New Leviathans is a sober and sobering reminder of what we lose when we abandon traditional liberalism in favor of new and exclusive certainties that are based on nothing certain." —John Banville, New York Review of Books

"Dense with provocative ideas—a solid choice for budding political philosophers." —Kirkus Reviews

"Gray is conscientiously illusionless, scrupulously refusing to believe in any of the ideals and comforting dreams that humans use to protect themselves against reality. This, perhaps, explains his popularity with my own much-disillusioned generation . . . Gray’s philosophy is the thread that joins my friends of disparate political inclinations." —James Marriott, The Times

"An elegy for western liberalism . . . a bracing thinker." —Stuart Jeffries, Daily Telegraph

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