The New Leviathans
Thoughts After Liberalism
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The New Leviathans
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Narrated by:
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Justin Avoth
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By:
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John Gray
Brought to you by Penguin.
Ever since its publication in 1651, Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan has unsettled and challenged how we understand the World. Condemned and vilified by each new generation, Hobbes' cold political vision continues to see through any number of 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 through a new reading of Hobbes' classic work. 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 flourished, and yet still our liberal certainties treat them as aberrations which will somehow dissolve away. Hobbes would not be so confident.
Filled with fascinating and challenging perceptions, 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 all?
A philosophical diagnosis of current illness
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In this sense, the evolution of liberalism into hyper-liberalism (or “Wokeism”) shares much with the early Soviet revolutionaries. They too sought moral purification, enforced orthodoxy and ultimately a system that could deliver salvation through political means.
Gray’s book overlaps heavily with Lasch’s "The Revolt of the Elites". Both paint a picture of civilisational decay. But while Lasch often reads as an extended lament, Gray offers something darker and more unsettling. Drawing repeatedly on historical experience (particularly the Soviet experiment) he suggests that conflict, irrationality, and the search for transcendence are permanent features of the human condition, not temporary defects to be engineered away.
The golden age of liberalism, Gray suggests, was less a triumph of enlightenment than an artefact of American hegemony.
It is a dark vision, and one presented with considerable historical weight. But as with Lasch, one cannot escape the sense that Gray is constructing a vision from selectively assembled evidence. He sharply critiques the liberal belief that history had converged toward capitalist democracy and perpetual progress. Yet by the end, one is left wondering whether Gray himself has simply replaced one grand narrative with a tragic one of his own.
And as with Lasch, I can’t help but conclude that Gray is falling for the allure of pessimism that so many intellectuals seem to treat as a necessary precondition for depth and gravitas.
A dark & serious vision - but not an analysis
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